xii Introduction 



all human food and we know most of the mysteries 

 of its growth and composition, but we cannot so 

 distribute it as to give every child a cup of milk. 

 We can blow a town to pieces with a handful of 

 dust, but we cannot destroy the monstrous pile 

 of misery which every great city connotes. Wher- 

 ever, leaving material things, our management 

 touches human relations, the things of the mind, 

 it fails. 



Our advance during the last century in the 

 material conquest of nature has been blinding in 

 its rapidity, but can any man say that in the 

 understanding of the laws of human relationship 

 we are much beyond the Romans from whom we 

 still take our jurisprudence, or the Greeks from 

 whom we still take our philosophy? In the 

 mechanical reproduction of the written word, for 

 instance, in the mechanism of our modern news- 

 paper, we have material instruments that would 

 have seemed to Socrates and to Aristotle achieve- 

 ments of the gods themselves. But what of the 

 mind revealed in these documents, the mere 

 material substance of which implies such me- 

 chanical marvels ; what of the ideas which find ex- 

 pression in them? It would be rather cruel to push 

 the comparison. But let the reader make for him- 

 self, with some detachment, the comparison of the 

 present-day newspaper discussions in Paris, Berlin, 

 London, or New York, with the general discussions 

 of the Greek capital two thousand years ago. 

 Would it be very unjust to say that the under- 



