ancy, find a new meaning in a familiar phrase. It is
the custom to call this the most "Democratic" age the world has ever
seen, and most of us are beguiled by the etymological contrast, and the
memory of certain legislative revolutions, to oppose one form of
stupidity prevailing to another, and to fancy we mean the opposite to an
"Aristocratic" period. But indeed we do not. So far as that political
point goes, the Chinaman has always been infinitely more democratic than
the European. But the world, by a series of gradations into error, has
come to use "Democratic" as a substitute for "Wholesale," and as an
opposite to "Individual," without realizing the shifted application at
all. Thereby old "Aristocracy," the organization of society for the
glory and preservation of the Select Dull, gets to a flavour even of
freedom. When the historian of the future speaks of the past century as
a Democratic century, he will have in mind, more than anything else, the
unprecedented fact that we seemed to do everything in heaps--we read in
epidemics; clothed ourselves, all over the world, in identical fashions;
built and furnished our houses in stereo designs; and travelled--that
naturally most individual proceeding--in bales. To make the railway
train a perfect symbol of our times, it should be presented as
uncomfortably full in the third class--a few passengers standing--and
everybody reading the current number either of the _Daily Mail_,
_Pearson's Weekly_, _Answers_, _Tit Bits_, or whatever Greatest Novel of
the Century happened to be going.... But, as I hope to make clearer in
my later papers, this "Democracy," or Wholesale method of living, like
the railways, is transient--a first makeshift development of a great and
finally (to me at least) quite hopeful social reorganization.

[8] So we begin to see the possibility of laying that phantom horse that
haunts the railways to this day so disastrously.

[9] A correspondent, Mr. Rudolf Cyrian, writes to correct me here, and I
cannot do better, I think, than thank him and quote what he says. "It is
hardly right to state that fifty miles an hour 'is the limit of our
speed for land travel, so far as existing conditions go.' As far as
English traffic is concerned, the statement is approximately correct. In
the United States, however, there are several trains running now which
average over considerable distances more than sixty miles an hour,
stoppages included, nor is there much reason why