On the other hand—­which is where the trouble will begin—­railways and steamers make it possible nowadays to bring in persons who need never lose touch of hot and cold water-taps, spread tables, and crockery till they are turned out, much surprised, into the wilderness.  They clean miss the long weeks of salt-water and the slow passage across the plains which pickled and tanned the early emigrants.  They arrive with soft bodies and unaired souls.  I had this vividly brought home to me by a man on a train among the Selkirks.  He stood on the safely railed rear-platform, looked at the gigantic pine-furred shoulder round which men at their lives’ risk had led every yard of the track, and chirruped:  ’I say, why can’t all this be nationalised?’ There was nothing under heaven except the snows and the steep to prevent him from dropping off the cars and hunting a mine for himself.  Instead of which he went into the dining-car.  That is one type.

A man told me the old tale of a crowd of Russian immigrants who at a big fire in a city ’verted to the ancestral type, and blocked the streets yelling, ‘Down with the Czar!’ That is another type.  A few days later I was shown a wire stating that a community of Doukhobors—­Russians again—­had, not for the first time, undressed themselves, and were fleeing up the track to meet the Messiah before the snow fell.  Police were pursuing them with warm underclothing, and trains would please take care not to run over them.

So there you have three sort of steam-borne unfitness—­soft, savage, and mad.  There is a fourth brand, which may be either home-grown or imported, but democracies do not recognise it, of downright bad folk—­grown, healthy men and women who honestly rejoice in doing evil.  These four classes acting together might conceivably produce a rather pernicious democracy; alien hysteria, blood-craze, and the like, reinforcing local ignorance, sloth, and arrogance.  For example, I read a letter in a paper sympathising with these same Doukhobors.  The writer knew a community of excellent people in England (you see where the rot starts!) who lived barefoot, paid no taxes, ate nuts, and were above marriage.  They were a soulful folk, living pure lives.  The Doukhobors were also pure and soulful, entitled in a free country to live their own lives, and not to be oppressed, etc. etc. (Imported soft, observe, playing up to Imported mad.) Meantime, disgusted police were chasing the Doukhobors into flannels that they might live to produce children fit to consort with the sons of the man who wrote that letter and the daughters of the crowd that lost their heads at the fire.