Introduction 



bureaucratic rule may have become many times 

 harsher than all these. But this is only to say 

 that Napoleon was before Palmerston, Gladstone, 

 or Chamberlain; Joseph II. before Napoleon; Peter 

 the Great before all. Is not the essential weak- 

 ness, the strength doubtless also of governments 

 everywhere, that they present, not any really vital 

 social structure, but in ministry after ministry, 

 each but a mass of scaffoldings, which come to 

 impede life instead of supporting it. In fact, at 

 best and at worst also do they not date from 

 the eighteenth century period of social recon- 

 struction on abstract and philosophical grounds ? 

 And were not these substantially apart from the 

 scientific and industrial progress of the later 

 eighteenth century, from the developments of 

 these in the nineteenth, from their ideals and 

 potentialities in the twentieth ? Here, then, is 

 the reason why men are breaking away from the 

 orthodoxies of Liberal and Conservative alike ; 

 hence, too, the unsparing criticism, the still un- 

 certain reconstruction of the dreaded "intellec- 

 tuals" of France or Russia. 



Despite the education of physical health and 

 courage, upon which we congratulate ourselves 

 (and not indeed without some justice), are we 

 not too prone to lack intellectual courage, and, 

 before questions of this sort, to stick our heads 

 in the sand ; " Science " evidently something 

 unsettling ! Our grandfathers got on very well 

 without it was not the battle of Waterloo won 

 on the playing-fields of Eton ? We may grant 



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