Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as people say, taken off its frills.... The "New York American" represents a clientèle to be counted by the hundred thousand, manifestly with no other solicitudes, just burning to live and living to burn.
Now that is a very fair picture, not merely of popular America but of the whole contemporary phase of popular civilization, uprooted from the state of instinct, intensive experience and the immemorial immediacies of duty and the soil. To the artist and the moralist it is a cause of hopeless pessimism, as any civilization must be which has lost touch with all its values and been rationalized to the point of anarchy. For this there is only one salvation. If civilization has lost the faculty of commanding itself and pulling itself together in its individual aspect, it must pull itself together collectively. That essentially is the fighting chance of intellectualism, the hope that, inasmuch as the world has already lost touch with experience and committed itself to a regime of ideas, by organizing this regime of ideas and by mechanizing so far as possible the material aspect of things, the values of life can be re-engendered on a fresh basis. From this follows the oft-repeated phrase of Wells that the chief want of the American people is a "sense of the state." For the peril and the hope of American life (granting that, as things are, society must be brought into some kind of coherence before morality, art and religion can once more attain any real meaning) lies in the fact that while at present Americans are aware of themselves only as isolated individuals they are unconsciously engaged in works of an almost appalling significance for the future of society. A Trust is a work of this kind, and whether it is to be a gigantic good or a gigantic evil depends wholly upon whether its controlling minds are more conscious of their individual or their social function. The mechanism of society in America is already developed to a very high point; what is wanting, and without this everything is wanting, is an understanding of the right function of this mechanism. So much does it all depend upon whether the financial mind can subdue itself to the greater mind of the race.