The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are
being done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the
former. When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical
science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I
measure the increase in general education and average efficiency,
the power now available for human service, the merely physical
increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's
disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling,
incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors,
experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this
development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the
disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate
resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with
dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised
state may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the
heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.

But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches
at thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is the
old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of
confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a
flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen
fellowship about him. The last written dedication of all those I
burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the socially
constructive passion--in any man. . . .

There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my
world and Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if
they had come across a vast interval since his time, into the very
chamber of the statesman.