cheapen, render alluring a simpler, more spacious type of house for the
clerk, fill it with labour-saving conveniences, and leave no excuse and
no spare corners for the "slavey," and the slavey--and all that she
means in mental and moral consequence--will vanish out of being. You
will beat tradition. Make it easy for Trade Unions to press for shorter
hours of work, but make it difficult for them to obstruct the arrival
of labour-saving appliances, put the means of education easily within
the reach of every workman, make promotion from the ranks, in the Army,
in the Navy, in all business concerns, practicable and natural, and the
lingering discolouration of the serf taint will vanish from the
workman's mind. The days of mystic individualism have passed, few
people nowadays will agree to that strange creed that we must deal with
economic conditions as though they were inflexible laws. Economic
conditions are made and compact of the human will, and by tariffs, by
trade regulation and organization, fresh strands of will may be woven
into the complex. The thing may be extraordinarily intricate and
difficult, abounding in unknown possibilities and unsuspected dangers,
but that is a plea for science and not for despair.

Controllable, too, is the influx of modifying suggestions into our
homes, however vast and subtle the enterprise may seem. But here we
touch for the first time a question that we shall now continue to touch
upon at other points, until at last we shall clear it and display it as
the necessarily central question of the whole matter of man-making so
far as the human will is concerned, and that is the preservation and
expansion of the body of human thought and imagination, of which all
conscious human will and act is but the imperfect expression and
realization, of which all human institutions and contrivances, from the
steam-engine to the ploughed field, and from the blue pill to the
printing press, are no more than the imperfect symbols, the rude