Lastly, the final blow to sport and to our British system of thought built up upon it will come from the industrial field. Industrial psychology will undermine it by eliminating its fundamental function. The forms of sport with which we are most familiar arise chiefly as a reaction against sedentary and ill-planned occupations. Scientifically organized labour of the future will exhibit more variety and give fuller expression to the many-sidedness of man. Excessive specialization of the individual in his work has produced an artificial differentiation in the arrangement of his life, of which the distinction of work and play is the most glaring example.
With the outgrowing of sport, or, more strictly, with the blending of work and play man will apply himself to tasks commensurate with his powers. Dimly we begin to see what these tasks will be. The task of government, complex as it may be, will be less difficult in many respects than it is to-day. The danger of revolution should be only a remote contingency. The stability of a society ultimately depends inversely upon the prevalence of nepotism. A government of the efficient and the talented equipped with scientific knowledge would be impregnable. It matters not that men are mostly irrational so long as the rational have the power to rule. The irrationality of the rest is subject to uniform law, which, understood, can be brought within control. But the temptation to the ruler to hand on the reins of power to the inefficient with whom he has emotional ties of paternity or friendship is almost irresistible. The difficulty, however, is not insuperable. Some form of “Socialism”, which started all at equality and promoted to power according to ability, gauged quasi-mechanically by mental and vocational tests, would be a partial safeguard. Moreover, in a compact ruling class a kind of family moral tradition might emerge. This would be reinforced by the common-sense recognition of the dangers of promoting the inefficient on a large scale over the heads of the competent. The obvious effect of such promotion is, in the long run, revolution; and revolutions will probably be recurrent until the lesson has been learnt.