hundreds of artists
and thinkers that are making the thought of our times. There is a kind of
"professional reconciler" of opposites who likes to lump all the
prominent rebels together and refer to them affectionately as "us
radicals." Yet that there is a common impulse in modern thought which
strives towards autonomy is true and worth remarking. In some men it is
half-conscious, in others a minor influence, but almost no one of weight
escapes the contagion of it entirely. It is a new culture that is being
prepared. Without it there would to-day be no demand for a creative
statesmanship which turns its back upon the routine and the taboo, kings
and idols, and non-human purposes. It does more. It is making the
atmosphere in which a humanly centered politics can flourish. The fact
that this culture is multiform and often contradictory is a sign that
more and more of the interests of life are finding expression. We should
rejoice at that, for profusion means fertility; where a dead uniformity
ceases, invention and ingenuity flourish.

Perhaps the insistence on the need of a culture in statecraft will seem
to many people an old-fashioned delusion. Among the more rigid socialists
and reformers it is not customary to spend much time discussing mental
habits. That, they think, was made unnecessary by the discovery of an
economic basis of civilization. The destinies of society are felt to be
too solidly set in industrial conditions to allow any cultural direction.
Where there is no choice, of what importance is opinion?

All propaganda is, of course, a practical tribute to the value of
culture. However inevitable the process may seem, all socialists agree
that its inevitability should be fully realized. They teach at one time
that men act from class interests: but they devote an enormous amount of
energy to making men conscious of their class. It evidently matters to
that supposedly inevitable progress whether men are aware of it. In
short, the most hardened socialist admits choice and deliberation,
culture and ideals into his working faith. He may talk as if there were
an iron determinism, but his practice is better than his preachment.

Yet there are necessities in social life. To all the purposes of politics
it is settled, for instance, that the trust will never be "unscrambled"
into small competing businesses. We say in our argument that a return to
the days of the stage-coach is impossible or that "you cannot turn back