, and returning to the
agriculture of the mediaeval village and the handicrafts of the
mediaeval town.

He knew and I knew that his plea was hopeless. Even under the old
conditions the Greek and Italian and Flemish City-States perished,
because they were too small to protect themselves against larger though
less closely organised communities; and industrial progress is an
invader even more irresistible than the armies of Macedon or Spain. For
a constantly increasing proportion of the inhabitants of modern England
there is now no place where in the old sense they 'live.' Nearly the
whole of the class engaged in the direction of English industry, and a
rapidly increasing proportion of the manual workers, pass daily in tram
or train between sleeping-place and working-place a hundred times more
sights than their eyes can take in or their memory retain. They are, to
use Mr. Wells's phrase, 'delocalised.'[97]

[97] _Mankind in the Making_, p. 406.

But now that we can no longer use the range of our senses as a basis
for calculating the possible area of the civilised State, there might
seem to be no facts at all which can be used for such a calculation. How
can we fix the limits of effective intercommunication by steam or
electricity, or the area which can be covered by such political
expedients as representation and federalism? When Aristotle wished to
illustrate the relation of the size of the State to the powers of its
citizens he compared it to a ship, which, he said, must not be too large
to be handled by the muscles of actual men. 'A ship of two furlongs
length would not be a ship at all.'[98] But the _Lusitania_ is already
not very far from a furlong and a half in length, and no one can even
guess what is the upward limit of size which the ship-builders of a
generation hence will have reached. If once we assume that a State may
be larger than the field of vision of a single man, then the merely
mechanical difficulty of bringing the whole earth under a government as
effective as that of the United States or the British Empire has already
been overcome. If such a government is impossible, its impossibility
must be due to the limits not of our senses and muscles but of our
powers of imagination and sympathy.

[98] Aristotle, _Polit._, Bk. VII. ch. iv.

I have already pointed out[99] that the modern State must exist for the
thoughts and feelings of its citizens, not as a fact of direct
observation but as an entity of