the rapidly increasing gathering of human creatures into vast cities, where
not merely thousands but millions of individuals are collected together
under physical and mental conditions of life which invert every social
condition of the past; the increasingly rapid means of locomotion; the
increasing intercourse between distant races and lands, brought about by
rapid means of intercommunication, widening and changing in every direction
the human horizon--all these produce a society, so complex and so rapidly
altering, that social co-ordination between all its parts is impossible;
and social unrest, and the strife of ideals of faiths, of institutions, and
consequent human suffering is inevitable.

If the ancient guns and agricultural implements which our fathers taught us
to use are valueless in the hands of their descendants, if the samplers our
mothers worked and the stockings they knitted are become superfluous
through the action of the modern loom, yet more are their social
institutions, faiths, and manners of life become daily and increasingly
unfitted to our use; and friction and suffering inevitable, especially for
the most advanced and modified individuals in our societies. This
suffering, if we analyse it closely, rises from three causes.

Firstly, it is caused by the fact that mere excessive rapidity of change
tends always easily to become painful, by rupturing violently already
hardened habits and modes of thought, as a very rapidly growing tree
ruptures its bark and exudes its internal juices.

Secondly, it arises from the fact that individuals of the same human
society, not adapting themselves at the same rate to the new conditions, or
being exposed to them in different degrees, a wide and almost unparalleled
dissimilarity has today arisen between the different individuals composing
our societies; where, side by side with men and women who have rapidly