tle property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled by others, an
'independence' as the English used to put it. And what made this desire
for freedom and prosperity so strong, was very evidently the dream of
self-expression, of doing something with it, of playing with it, of
making a personal delightfulness, a distinctiveness. Property was never
more than a means to an end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men
owned in order to do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments
and his own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its
release in a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may
leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row
of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they give
themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomena
as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work that
was once the whole substance of social existence--for most men spent all
their lives in earning a living--is now no more than was the burden upon
one of those old climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their
backs in order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to
the easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have
made their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new
wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities and
enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it may be,
by reception and reverberation, and they hinder nothing. ...

Section 11

Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances
of human life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and as
wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the
barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral and mental changes at
least as unprecedented. It is not as if old things were going out
of life and new things coming in, it is rather that the altered
circumstances of men are making an appeal to elements in his nature
that have hitherto been suppressed, and checking tendencies that have
hitherto been over-stimulated and over-developed. He has not so much
grown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the
light. Such turnings round into a new attitude the world has seen on a
less extensive scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century,
for example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth
their descendants were conspicuou