community in the early nineteenth century, say George Eliot's 'Milby' in
the _Scenes of Clerical Life_. How far more humane, more enlightened,
and happier is the state of the succeeding community, the Nuneaton or
Coventry of the present day! No question but the novelist would have
welcomed as a convincing proof of her 'meliorist' doctrine the progress
made in her own homeland in the century since her birth. We know by
personal experience the general kindliness and cheerfulness of our
fellow citizens, their tolerance, their readiness to hope, their
prevalent orderliness and self-restraint. We are thinking perhaps of a
certain tendency to slackness, a dangerous falling-off in the output of
work. If that be so, we need only look at the activities of any
playground, or of a class-room in a well-ordered school, to be sure of
the future. The natural man, at least in our temperate climates, and as
exhibited in the behaviour of his natural progenitor, the child, is all
for vigour and experiment. It is we, the adult community, the trustees
of the child, who are to blame if his maturity fails of the eager
questioning and the untiring labours of his unspoilt youth.

But we are dealing in this volume rather with changes of thought than
with the actual life of the times. Theories affecting the organization
of work, the distribution of the product, and the government of society
have had much to do with our present difficulties. They have arisen from
the conditions of the industrial revolution and the doctrines of the
political revolution which began about the same time, and they have
reacted ever since on the work and wages, the life and government of the
mass of Western men. They are discussed in our eighth chapter. It may be
said broadly that in this sphere, as in philosophy, the old and
_simpliste_ doctrines have been criticized almost to the point of
extinction, but that no new all-embracing practical synthesis has taken
their place. The Marxian theory that social evolution has been due