led all inclination to
cultural sanity and put it definitively in abeyance. The cultural, or
perhaps the conventional, residue left over in these cases where
civilisation has gone stale through inefficiency of the minimal dose is
not properly to be found fault with; it is of a blameless character,
conventionally; nor is there any intention here to cast aspersion on the
desolate. The like effects of the like causes are to be seen in the
American colleges and universities, where business principles have
supplanted the pursuit of learning, and where the commercialisation of
aims, ideals, tastes, occupations and personnel is following much the
same lines that have led so many of the country towns effectually
outside the cultural pale. The American university or college is coming
to be an outlier of the price-system, in point of aims, standards and
personnel; hitherto the tradition of learning as a trait of
civilisation, as distinct from business, has not been fully displaced,
although it is now coming to face the passage of the minimal dose. The
like, in a degree, is apparently true latterly for many English, and
still more evidently for many German schools.

In these various instances of what may be called dry-rot or local blight
on the civilised world's culture the decline appears to be due not to a
positive infection of a malignant sort, so much as to a failure of the
active cultural ferment, which has fallen below the critical point of
efficacy; perhaps through an unintended refusal of a livelihood to
persons given over to cultivating the elements of civilisation; perhaps
through the conventional disallowance of the pursuit of any other ends
than competitive gain and competitive spending. Evidently it is
something much more comprehensive in this nature that is reasonably to
be looked for under the prospective regime of peace, in case the
price-system gains that farther impetus and warrant which it should come
in for if the rights of ownership and investment stand over intact, and
so come to enjoy the benefit of a further improved state of the
industrial arts and a further enlarged scale of operation and enhanced
rate of turnover.

* * * * *

To turn back to the point from which this excursion branched off. It has
been presumed all the while that the technological equipment, or the
state of the industrial arts, must continue to advance under the
conditions offered by this regime of peace