e new conditions, to make good citizens, to give her spare energies
as far as she can to bringing about a better state of affairs. Like the
private property owner and the official in a privately owned business,
her best method of conduct is to consider herself an unrecognized public
official, irregularly commanded and improperly paid. There is no good
in flagrant rebellion. She has to study her particular circumstances and
make what good she can out of them, keeping her face towards the coming
time. I cannot better the image I have already used for the thinking
and believing modern-minded people of to-day as an advance guard cut
off from proper supplies, ill furnished so that makeshift prevails,
and rather demoralized. We have to be wise as well as loyal; discretion
itself is loyalty to the coming State.

3.10. ASSOCIATIONS.

In the previous section I have dealt with the single individual's duty
in relation to the general community and to law and generally received
institutions. But there is a new set of questions now to be considered.
Let us take up the modifications that arise when it is not one
isolated individual but a group of individuals who find themselves in
disagreement with contemporary rule or usage and disposed to find a
rightness in things not established or not conceded. They too live in
the world as it is and not in the world as it ought to be, but their
association opens up quite new possibilities of anticipating coming
developments of living, and of protecting and guaranteeing one another
from what for a single unprotected individual would be the inevitable
consequences of a particular line of conduct, conduct which happened to
be unorthodox or only, in the face of existing conditions, unwise.

For example, a friend of mine who had read a copy of the preceding
section wrote as follows:--

"I can see no reason why even to-day a number of persons avowedly united
in the same 'Belief' and recognizing each other as the self-constituted
social vanguard should not form a recognized spiritual community
centering round some kind of 'religious' edifice and ritual, and agree
to register and consecrate the union of any couples of the members
according to a contract which the whole community should have voted
acceptable. The community would be the guardian of money deposited or
paid in gradually as insurance for the children. And the fact of
the whole business being regular, open and connected with a comm