equally
great number of non-productive persons living in and by the social
confusion.

All these elements will be mingled confusedly together, passing into one
another by insensible gradations, scattered over the great urban regions
and intervening areas our previous anticipations have sketched out.
Moreover, they are developing, as it were unconsciously, under the
stimulus of mechanical developments, and with the bandages of old
tradition hampering their movements. The laws they obey, the governments
they live under, are for the most part laws made and governments planned
before the coming of steam. The areas of administration are still areas
marked out by conditions of locomotion as obsolete as the quadrupedal
method of the pre-arboreal ancestor. In Great Britain, for example, the
political constitution, the balance of estates and the balance of
parties, preserves the compromise of long-vanished antagonisms. The
House of Lords is a collection of obsolete territorial dignitaries
fitfully reinforced by the bishops and a miscellany (in no sense
representative) of opulent moderns; the House of Commons is the seat of
a party conflict, a faction fight of initiated persons, that has long
ceased to bear any real relation to current social processes. The
members of the lower chamber are selected by obscure party machines
operating upon constituencies almost all of which have long since become
too vast and heterogeneous to possess any collective intelligence or
purpose at all. In theory the House of Commons guards the interests of
classes that are, in fact, rapidly disintegrating into a number of quite
antagonistic and conflicting elements. The new mass of capable men, of
which the engineers are typical, these capable men who must necessarily
be the active principle of the new mechanically equipped social body,
finds no representation save by accident in either assembly. The man who
has concerned himself with the public health, with army organization,
with educational improvement, or with the vital matters of transport and
communication, if he enter the official councils of the kingdom at all,
must enter ostensibly as the guardian of the interests of the free and
independent electors of a specific district that has long ceased to have
any sort of specific interests at all.[29]...

And the same obsolescence that is so conspicuous in the general
institutions of the official kingdom of England, and that even English
people can r