l will of a social
democratic commonwealth and vested in representatives sensitively
accountable to an alert and intelligent public opinion, will appear to
my listeners not as a travesty, but as the very incarnation of that
inward government and order which every individual man must feel to be
the law of his own being unless he has lost his manhood's centrality. A
crushing indictment of Mr. Carpenter's modern movement back to Nature
is to be found in the fact that it has declined instead of advancing
during the twenty-six years since he wrote. Probably fewer persons in
England preach salvation by sandals and sunbaths to-day than did a
quarter of a century ago, while the sandals themselves and sunbaths
have become but items among the general products of industry and
governmental hygiene. The sunbath is only one of the many remedies
prescribed to the poor by doctors impanelled by the British state, and
the sandals are better made by machinery than by the hands of poetic
hermits.

But while the vision of philosophical anarchy has been fading away,
whole nations on a gigantic scale have been subjecting the power of
trusts and monopolies to the general will of the community. In America
you have changed your federal law and many of your state constitutions,
in order that the right of the common will to dictate may be
unquestioned, and that no occasion for lawless violence need ever arise
through any legal barrier to the full assertion of the mind of the
common life.

So in every particular of his cure for civilization Mr. Carpenter's
worship of savagery and barbarism is being rejected as fantastic. We
may return to uncooked fruits and grains. But what a task for the most
highly developed industrial state, to raise and distribute an adequate
supply of grapes, apples, and nuts the year round for the 1,000,000,000
inhabitants of the globe! What a call for many wizards of California to
produce new species of luscious edibles! It would seem to me that the
curse of civilization has lain in the direction of too little of either
cooked or uncooked food, instead of too much. If the common people are
to come into their own, trade in every necessity and luxury must be
more highly integrated. The difference of the new era as regards
foreign commerce will chiefly be that nations as a whole by their
governments will conduct it instead of private traders. In other words,
foreign trade will be nationalized, in the way that social democrats