their musty courts and overbearing manners, were indeed only the outward
and visible intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal and
political organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century was
indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong, that
now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.

Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication that in
the field of natural science had been the beginning of the conquest
of nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries preparing the spirit of the new world within the degenerating
body of the old. The idea of a greater subordination of individual
interests and established institutions to the collective future, is
traceable more and more clearly in the literature of those times,
and movement after movement fretted itself away in criticism of and
opposition to first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and
political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley, with
no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established rulers of the
world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas and suggestions that
was known as Socialism, and more particularly its international side,
feeble as it was in creative proposals or any method of transition,
still witnesses to the growth of a conception of a modernised system
of inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of
proprietary legal ideas.

The word 'Sociology' was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular writer
upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the middle of
the nineteenth century, but the idea of a state, planned as an
electric-traction system is planned, without reference to pre-existing
apparatus, upon scientific lines, did not take a very strong hold upon
the popular imagination of the world until the twentieth century. Then,