n the making of the civilised
American State.

In any case, it does not seem to me probable that there can be any
national revolutionary movement or any complete arrest in the
development of an aristocratic phase in American history. The area of
the country is too great and the means of communication between the
workers in different parts inadequate for a concerted rising or even for
effective political action in mass. In the worst event--and it is only
in the worst event that a great insurrectionary movement becomes
probable--the newspapers, magazines, telephones and telegraphs, all the
apparatus of discussion and popular appeal, the railways, arsenals,
guns, flying machines, and all the material of warfare, will be in the
hands of the property owners, and the average of betrayal among the
leaders of a class, not racially homogeneous, embittered, suspicious
united only by their discomforts and not by any constructive intentions,
will necessarily be high. So that, though the intensifying trouble
between labour and capital may mean immense social disorganisation and
lawlessness, though it may even supply the popular support in new
attempts at secession, I do not see in it the possibility and force for
that new start which the revolutionary Socialists anticipate; I see it
merely as one of several forces making, on the whole and particularly in
view of the possible mediatory action of the universities, for
construction and reconciliation.

Sec. 10

What changes are likely to occur in the more intimate social life of the
people of the United States? Two influences are at work that may modify
this profoundly. One is that spread of knowledge and that accompanying
change in moral attitude which is more and more sterilising the once
prolific American home, and the second is the rising standard of
feminine education. There has arisen in this age a new consciousness in
women. They are entering into the collective thought to a degree
unprecedented in the world's history, and with portents at once
disquieting and confused.

In Sec. 5 I enumerated what I called the silent factors in the American
synthesis, the immigrant European aliens, the Catholics, the coloured
blood, and so forth. I would now observe that, in the making of the
American tradition, the women also have been to a large extent, and
quite remarkably, a silent factor. That tradition is not only
fundamentally middle-class and English, but it is also fundamentally