labourers who cultivate their own allotments with their own hands, and help to better their lives without taking them away from the land or interfering with their freedom.
XIV.
But will people be able to live without obeying some human power? How will they conduct their common business? What will become of the different States? What will happen to Ireland, Poland, Finland, Algeria, India, and to all the Colonies? How will the nations group themselves?
Such questions are put by men who are accustomed to think that the conditions of life of all human societies are decided by the will and direction of a few individuals, and who therefore imagine that the knowledge of how future life will shape itself is accessible to man. Such knowledge, however, never was, nor can be, accessible.
If the most learned and best educated Roman citizen, accustomed to think that the life of the world was guided by the decrees of the Roman Senate and Emperors, had been asked what would become of the Roman Empire in a few centuries: or if he had himself thought of writing such a book as Bellamy's, you may be sure that he never could have foretold even approximately, either the Barbarians, or Feudalism, or the Papacy, or the disintegration of the peoples and their reunion into large States. The same is true of those Utopias, with flying machines, X-rays, electric motors, and Socialist organizations of life in the twenty-first century, which are so daringly drawn by the Bellamys, Morrises, Anatole Frances, and others.
Men cannot know what form social life will take in the future and more than that, harm results from their thinking they can know it. For nothing so interferes with the straight current of their lives as this fancied knowledge of what the future life of humanity ought to be. The life of individuals as well as of communities consists only in this—that men and communities con-
