We hear _ad nauseam_ of the gains of modern life, of what is called civilisation: does no one count its losses? It might be well to do so. It might act as a corrective to the inane self-worship which is at once the most ill-founded and the most irritating feature of the age. Perhaps other ages have in turn adored themselves in like manner, but there is not in history any record of it. Its prophets, heroes, sages, each age has either admired or execrated; but I do not think any age has so admired itself as the present age, which has its prototype in William of Germany standing between two sand banks and thinking himself greater than Alexander because his engineers have succeeded in cutting for him a ditch longer than usual. The modern world is at this moment ruled by two enemies of all beauty: these are commerce and militarism. What the one does not destroy, the other tramples under foot. In earlier times war, terrible always, was beautiful, like its goddess Bellona, in its savage splendour. Its camps, its troops, its standards, its panoply, were all full of colour and of pomp. Even so late as the Napoleonic wars its awfulness was blended with beauty. Now the passage of an army is like the course of so many dirty luggage trains filled with bales of wool or hampers of fish. Its monstrous maw licks up all loveliness as all life which it finds in its way. Its frightful steel cylinders belch death on every gracious and happy thing. It is unenlivened by pageantry, as it is unredeemed by courtesy. Bellona is no more a goddess, but a hag. Socialism, which has the future of the world in its hands, will probably be unable to abolish war, and will certainly not care for beauty or seek to preserve it. The reconstruction of society which Socialism contemplates will not be a state of things in which the interests of either nature or art will be cherished. Collectivism must of necessity be colourless; equality can afford none of those heights and depths, those lights and shades, which are the essential charm of life as of landscape. When all the arable earth is one huge allotment-ground, a Corot will find no subject for his canvas, not even in his dreams, for his dreams will be dead of inanition. There can be, I think, no hope that this loss of beauty will not be greater and greater with every year. The tendency, continually increasing in the modern character, is to regard beauty and nature with cynical indifference, stirred, when stirred at all, into active insolence; such insolence as was expressed in the joke of the Chicago citizen who called the plank-walks of his city 'the reafforesting of our town.' It is a temper not merely brutal, but with a leer in it which is more offensive than its brutality.