of this attempt to realize the
importance of those Hostels, were in themselves very fascinating
questions for an intelligent person.

Because before you have done with the business of the modern employe,
you must, if you are an intelligent person, have taken a view of the
whole vast process of social reorganization that began with the
development of factory labour and big towns, and which is even now
scarcely advanced enough for us to see its general trend. For a time Mr.
Brumley did not realize the magnitude of the thing he was looking at;
when he did, theories sprouted in his mind like mushrooms and he babbled
with mental excitement. He came in a state of the utmost lucidity to
explain his theories to Lady Harman, and they struck that lady at the
time as being the most illuminating suggestions she had ever
encountered. They threw an appearance of order, of process, over a world
of trade and employment and competition that had hitherto seemed too
complex and mysterious for any understanding.

"You see," said Mr. Brumley--they had met that day in Kensington Gardens
and they were sitting side by side upon green chairs near the frozen
writings of Physical Energy--"You see, if I may lecture a little,
putting the thing as simply as possible, the world has been filling up
new spaces ever since the discovery of America; all the period from then
to about 1870, let us say, was a period of rapid increase of population
in response to new opportunities of living and new fulnesses of life in
every direction. During that time, four hundred years of it roughly,
there was a huge development of family life; to marry and rear a quite
considerable family became the chief business of everybody, celibacy
grew rare, monasteries and nunneries which had abounded vanished like
things dissolving in a flood and even the priests became Protestant
against celibacy and took unto themselves wives and had huge families.
The natural checks upon increase, famine and pestilence, were lifted by
more systematized communication and by scientific discovery; and
altogether and as a consequence the world now has probably three or four
times the human population it ever carried before. Everywhere in that
period the family prevailed again, the prospering multiplying household;
it was a return to the family, to the reproductive social grouping of
early barbaric life, and naturally all the thought of the modern world
which has emerged since the fifteenth century