nts, which I have chosen as my
example, may have exhibited an adumbration of a state of things which,
for the world at large, is still in the future,--still to be remotely
hoped for. The rich complexity of modern social achievement is attained
at the cost of individual many-sidedness. As Tennyson puts it, "The
individual withers and the world is more and more." Yet the individual
does not exist for the sake of society, as the positivists would have us
believe, but society exists for the sake of the individual. And the test
of complete social life is the opportunity which it affords for complete
individual life. Tried by this test, our contemporary civilization
will appear seriously defective,--excellent only as a preparation for
something better.

This is the true light in which to regard it. This incessant turmoil,
this rage for accumulation of wealth, this crowding, jostling, and
trampling upon one another, cannot be regarded as permanent, or
as anything more than the accompaniment of a transitional stage of
civilization. There must be a limit to the extent to which the standard
of comfortable living can be raised. The industrial organization of
society, which is now but beginning, must culminate in a state of things
in which the means of expense will exceed the demand for expense, in
which the human race will have some surplus capital. The incessant
manual labour which the ancients relegated to slaves will in course
of time be more and more largely performed by inanimate machinery.
Unskilled labour will for the most part disappear. Skilled labour will
consist in the guiding of implements contrived with versatile cunning
for the relief of human nerve and muscle. Ultimately there will be
no unsettled land to fill, no frontier life, no savage races to be
assimilated or extirpated, no extensive migration. Thus life will again
become comparatively stationary. The chances for making great fortunes
quickly will be diminished, while the facilities for acquiring a
competence by steady labour will be increased. When every one is able
to reach the normal standard of comfortable living, we must suppose
that the exaggerated appetite for wealth and display will gradually
disappear. We shall be more easily satisfied, and thus enjoy more
leisure. It may be that there will ultimately exist, over the civilized
world, conditions as favourable to the complete fruition of life as
those which formerly existed within the narrow circuit of