THE SOCIAL REFORMER 17 



narrow stations, thinking little of society. But they have 

 constructed society all the same : the complex modern state 

 stands to-day as their accumulated wisdom, made incarnate 

 in its manifestly stable customs and institutions. 



Like a vast primaeval forest, the civilised modern state, 

 which is the highest form so far achieved by human 

 society, is a thing self-sown, renewing its immortality 

 from age to age. No one has planned and no one has 

 planted it. But it has its laws of growth all the same, 

 and its own grave grandeur. Every individual within it, 

 struggling for his own life, and reaching up towards the 

 sunlight, contributes not only to the variety but to the 

 vast unity of the whole. The statesman, the philosopher, 

 the artist, the preacher, the legislator, the judge, the 

 soldier, the maker of tools, the tiller of the soil ; the wise 

 and good in every degree, nay, the foolish and wicked, 

 by their negative experiments, have for successive genera- 

 tions shed their lives like forest leaves to make the black 

 soil on which our social institutions grow. 



But society differs from the native forest. Its structure 

 is spiritual. It is the product, in every part, of the 

 rational nature of man, and by far the most glorious 

 exhibition of his powers. We call the reason that has 

 compacted it "unconscious" when we wish to indicate 

 that, taken as a whole, the construction of society was 

 never the deliberate ideal of a single human mind, or that 

 in bringing it about men built better than they knew. 

 But, in strictness of speech, the reason that built society 

 was never unconscious. Not one step was taken, large or 

 small, in the advance or retreat of its history, which was 

 not guided by the conception of some good to be attained, 

 and which did not rest on the presupposition that conse- 



