The best of the wealthy will gravitate to their attracting centres.... Unless some great catastrophe in nature break down all that man has built, these great kindred groups of capable men and educated, adequate women must be, under the operation of the forces we have considered so far, the element finally emergent amidst the vast confusions of the coming time. FOOTNOTES: [30] That interesting book by Mr. George Sutherland, _Twentieth Century Inventions_, is very suggestive on these as on many other matters. [31] I use the word "segregation" here and always as it is used by mineralogists to express the slow conveyance of diffused matter upon centres of aggregation, such a process as, for example, must have occurred in the growth of flints. [32] Already this is becoming apparent enough. The literary "Boom," for example, affected the entire reading public of the early nineteenth century. It was no figure of speech that "everyone" was reading Byron or puzzling about the Waverley mystery, that first and most successful use of the unknown author dodge. The booming of Dickens, too, forced him even into the reluctant hands of Omar's Fitzgerald. But the factory-syren voice of the modern "boomster" touches whole sections of the reading public no more than fog-horns going down Channel. One would as soon think of Skinner's Soap for one's library as So-and-so's Hundred Thousand Copy Success. Instead of "everyone" talking of the Great New Book, quite considerable numbers are shamelessly admitting they don't read that sort of thing. One gets used to literary booms just as one gets used to motor cars, they are no longer marvellous, universally significant things, but merely something that goes by with much unnecessary noise and leaves a faint offence in the air. Distinctly we segregate. And while no one dominates, while for all this bawling there are really no great authors of imperial dimensions, indeed no great successes to compare with the Waverley boom, or the boom of Macaulay's History, many men, too fine, too subtle, too aberrant, too unusually fresh for any but exceptional readers, men who would probably have failed to get a hearing at all in the past, can now subsist quite happily with the little sect they have found, or that has found them. They live safely in their islands; a little while ago they could not have lived at all, or could have lived only on the shameful bread of patronage, and yet it is these very men who are often most covetously bitter against the vulgar preferences of the present day. V THE LIFE-HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY