V

differentiation manifests itself here as in other ways. Already people following different pursuits find it almost impossible to converse, at least with anything approaching mutual understanding. And this process of specialization which education and increasing knowledge forces upon us points to another obstacle in the way of the Esperantists and other propagandists for a universal language. By the time this language is adopted, we shall have lost all common interests for the discussion of which it might have been employed. Perhaps our newer universities will inaugurate professorships in small-talk to keep alive an obsolescent art and to correct this serious menace of specialism.

More rapid than changes in the intellectual life will be those of character and of temperament. There are two significant facts in the trend of man’s emotional development, one of special and the other of general interest.

Firstly, there is the curious decay of cruelty and the increased desire to avoid inflicting pain. No one, surely, would deny an enormous change in this respect even in recent centuries. And we are beginning to discover the lengths to which development may go. Even now it often causes a moral man to attribute base motives to himself in doing a kindly act to spare his friend the subtle pain or sense of obligation which occurs in the feeling of gratitude. Modest forms of generosity often have this motive in their modesty.

There is not much further to go before we reach the social life of Henry James’s novels—where the principal characters have exquisite consciences, where good souls are tortured by the regret that they had not expressed their reproaches a shade or so less directly so as more to convey the impression that they had really said nothing at all.

Now-a-days you are afraid to forgive your enemies, lest the pain of remorse you thrust upon them should exceed the discomfort inflicted by