their cottages: with learned professors in Rome or New York, and with notorious anarchists in obscure corners of Paris: with working girls in Melbourne, with Maoris in Wellington, with Chinese and Hindus and alert, full-blooded Africans. I have been invited to discuss them with a Polynesian princess and to lecture on them in Fiji, and I have had letters on them from Japanese settlers in British Columbia and negro tailors in British Guiana. The same questions everywhere: religious doctrines and political forms, education and industry, marriage and woman—almost every ideal and institution we have inherited. And the persistent note that resounds from continent to continent is the note of rebellion.
Very different feelings are inspired by this characteristic fact of modern life. To some it seems that this melting of the rigid framework of traditions is a welcome sign of spring and growth: that a long winter, which had slowed the blood of the earth and retarded the development of civilisation, is over at last, and little, shapeless, promising shoots of new ideals are rising from the loosened soil. To others it seems as if the binding fabric of our civilisation were weakened and we were in danger of returning to barbarism. Surely those old traditions did hold together the structure of our civilisation? And surely it is impossible to replace in a few generations the links of a planet-wide human society? The shades of dead Memphis and Babylon and Nineveh, of Athens and Rome
