But the more vital individuality, the cultivation by special groups of peculiar phases of knowledge, art or conduct, of anything under the heavens in fact that a few people may agree to pursue, will apparently be increased. Since uniformity is cheap and convenient, we may expect it in all matters wherein men do not specially care to assert themselves. We have it in dress and domestic architecture, for instance, just so far as we are willing to take these things ready-made; but when we begin to put ourselves into them we produce something distinctive. Even languages and national characteristics, if the people really care about them, can be, and in fact are, preserved in spite of political absorption and the assimilating power of communication. There is nothing more notable in recent history than the persistence of nationality, even when, as in Poland, it has lost its political expression; and, as to languages, it is said that many, such as Roumanian, Bulgarian, Servian, Finnish, Norsk and Flemish, have revived and come into literary and popular use during the nineteenth century. Mr. Lecky, in his “Democracy and Liberty”[37] declared that “there has been in many forms a marked tendency to accentuate distinct national and local types.” To assume that a free concourse of ideas will produce uniformity is to beg the whole question. If it be true that men have a natural diversity of gifts, free intercourse should favor its development, especially when we consider that strong instinct which causes man to take pleasure in distinguishing himself, and to abhor to be lost in the crowd. And, as regards the actual tendency of modern life, only an obstinate _a priori_ reasoner will maintain with any confidence the decline of individuality. Those who charge that we possess it in extravagant excess have at least an equal show of reason. Nor, from the standpoint of sentiment, does the modern expansion of feeling and larger sense of unity tend necessarily to a loss of individuality. There is no prospect that self-feeling and ambition will be “lost in love’s great unity.”[38] On the contrary these sentiments are fostered by freedom, and are rather guided than repressed by sympathy. In a truly organic life the individual is self-conscious and devoted to his own work, but feels himself and that work as part of a large and joyous whole. He is self-assertive, just because he is conscious of being a thread in the great web of events, of serving effectually as a member of a family, a state, of humanity, and of whatever greater whole his faith may picture. If we have not yet an organic society in this sense, we have at least the mechanical conditions that must underly it. FOOTNOTES: [34] Introduction to Social Philosophy, 110. [35] Nature’s Way, Harper’s Magazine, July, 1904. [36] A New England Hill Town. The Atlantic Monthly, April, 1899. [37] I, 501. [38] The concluding line of E. W. Sill’s poem, Dare You? CHAPTER X