for our lack of all really vital, deep-seated, widely spread and
happiness-giving art; but merely the feature in this latter-day
badness which, after all, is our chief reason for hope: the fact that
the social mal-adjustments of this century are, to an extent hitherto
unparalleled, the mal-adjustments incident to a state of over-rapid
and therefore insufficiently deep-reaching change, of superficial
legal and material improvements extending in reality only to a very
small number of persons and things, and unaccompanied by any real
renovation in the thought, feeling or mode of living of the majority;
the mal-adjustment of transition, of disorder, and perfunctoriness, by
the side of which the regularly recurring disorders of the past--civil
wars, barbarian invasions, plagues, etc., are incidents leaving the
foundation of life unchanged, transitional disorders, which we fail to
remark only because we are ourselves a part of the hurry, the scuffle,
and the general wastefulness. How soon and how this transition period
of ours will come to an end, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to
foretell; but that it _must_ soon end is certain, if only for one
reason: namely, that the changes accumulated during our times must
inevitably work their way below the surface; the new material and
intellectual methods must become absorbed and organised, and thereby
produce some kind of interdependent and less easily disturbed new
conditions; briefly, that the amount of alteration we have witnessed
will occasion a corresponding integration. And with this period of
integration and increasing organisation and comparative stability
there will come new alleviations and adjustments in life, and with
these, the reappearance in life of art.

XV.

In what manner it is absurd, merely foolishly impatient or foolishly
cavilling, to ask. Not certainly by a return to the past and its
methods, but by the coming of the future with new methods having the
same result: the maintenance and tolerable quality of human life, of
body and soul. Hence probably by a further development of democratic
institutions and machine industry, but democratic institutions neither
authoritative nor _laissez faire_; machinery of which the hand and
mind of men will be the guide, not the slave.

One or two guesses may perhaps be warranted. First, that the
distribution of wealth, or more properly of work and idleness, will
gradually be improved, and the exploitation of individ