But we, on the contrary, waken each morning to the cramped, overtrodden field of our immediate personal consciousness only. The affairs of the world, our world, loom vague and distorted about us, while our own, forced upon us by night and day, are so absurdly magnified by being held too near that they easily shut out the world. Our press, which should give to each mind each day its world-view of current progress, is so perverted in its function by the cramped minds of its egoistic functionaries, that it gives instead a weird kinetoscope of what it thinks will interest us! As if a general, waiting for dispatches from the field, should be entertained by competing orderlies with funny anecdotes! As if those anxiously waiting for bulletins from the sick room should be provided with impressionist pictures of the patient’s relatives! We do not occupy a hundredth part of our mind-space, no, nor a thousandth. And in this darkness, this cramping limitation, with but a partial and restricted education and the false world-views of our misguided press to relieve it, we blunderingly creep about in the great world-functions we _must_ serve, each of us imagining that he is taking care of himself. The difference between our real position and our false and artificially maintained one is like this: If, for instance, certain marked improvements in telegraphy have been invented, raising our social efficiency in that line of distribution to grade G, that is our legitimate condition; but if these improvements are destroyed by misguided workmen, bought up and suppressed by misguided property-owners, keeping our telegraphic efficiency back in grade A, that is an illegitimate social condition. We are _really_ in grade G, but artificially in grade A. If, again, the machinery of democratic government is open to all, our legitimate condition is that of full democracy; if a large proportion of persons fail to exercise their political functions, preferring to remain in a lower grade, or if an entire sex is forcibly prevented from exercising them, that is an illegitimate condition. The economic conditions of society to-day are confessedly paradoxical. The gain in facility and speed of execution is million-fold, and yet men are required to work almost as many hours as before their improvement. The expressed wealth of the world is enormous, and the power to multiply it not nearly used, yet a vast proportion of our members are not fully supplied with the necessaries of life. In ways too commonly known to need enumeration here we may observe this strange difference between our _real_ period of social evolution, with its beneficent results, and the existing state of Society.