This turn of the satiric road from the hypocritical to the sentimental side of deceit marked a passage not only through traits of character, as already noted, but through the realm of institutions, where it might at first seem to be more out of place. But there is no reason why organizations should not be as sentimental as the individuals of which they are composed. Indeed, so far as crowd psychology is in operation, they would be strengthened in self-deception by their very numbers. Whether this is the case or not, it is true that the tendency increased from Peacock to Butler to see in organized groups the absurdity of a complacent inefficiency. Not because they were failures did English institutions come under the rod, but because they flourished under a mighty delusion of success. Smug incompetence, self-satisfied futility, these were the gaping incongruities between pretense and performance that made tempting targets out of Society, Church, School, and State; and thitherward were trained the big and little guns of the satirists. There is, of course, an underlying cause of this transference of interest from the more simple and patent hypocrite to the more subtle and baffling sentimentalist, individual and collective, and that is found in the spirit of investigation, analysis, probing beneath surfaces,--not new, to be sure, but newly operative on a large scale,--known as Science. Science in the intellectual world, and democracy in the political are the two forces which began in the nineteenth century the Conquest of Canaan that now in the twentieth they are gradually completing. That these two armies are allies is obvious. The end of democracy is an elevation of the whole plane of human life,--a leveling up and not the leveling down so feared by Carlyle and the conservative English opinion of the time. On the emotional and ethical side it is humanitarian, but in itself it is a rational utilitarian principle. For this unquestionably practical end, Pure Science furnishes the justification, indeed, the initial premises, by showing the biology and psychology of all relationships, the respective effects of coöperation and antagonism in the natural world, and kindred factors; while Applied Science supplies the means to that end by discoveries and inventions bearing on the amelioration and enhancement of living conditions. The recognition of such startling innovations would be inevitably slow, and their adoption still slower. But it is precisely in their ultimately successful struggle for admission into the life and thought of the nineteenth century that we trace the evolution of the satire of the period, for the satiric reaction is merely one of the many reflections of that struggle.