Unfortunately for our comfort and peace of mind, any real change in our civilization depends upon much more complicated, and much more drastic measures than the old-fashioned reformer, who sought to work a change of heart or to alter the distribution of income, ever recognized; and it will do little good to talk about a “coming renaissance” unless we have a dim idea of the sort of creature that is to be born again. Our difficulty, it seems to me, is due to the fact that the human sciences have lagged behind the physical ones; and up to the present time our good intentions have been frustrated for the lack of the necessary instruments of analysis. It may be helpful and amusing, however, to see what we can do in this department with the instruments that are already at hand. In every community, as Frédéric Le Play first pointed out, there are three elements: the place, the work, and the people; the sociologist’s equivalent of environment, function, and organism. Out of the interaction of the folk and their place, through the work, the simple life of the community develops. At the same time, each of these elements carries with it its specific spiritual heritage. The people have their customs and manners and morals and laws; or as we might say more briefly, their institutions; the work has its technology, its craft-experience, from the simple lore of peasant and breeder to the complicated formulæ of the modern chemists and metallurgists; while the deeper perception of the “place,” through the analysis of the falling stone, the rising sun, the running water, the decomposing vegetation, and the living animal gives rise to the tradition of “learning” and science. With this simple outline in mind, the process that created our present mechanical civilization becomes a little more plain; and we can appreciate, perhaps, the difficulties that stand in the way of any swift and easy transformation. Thus our present order was due to a mingled change in every aspect of the community: morally, it was protestantism; legally, the rise of representative government; socially, the introduction of “democracy”; in custom, the general breakdown of the family unit; industrially, it meant the collapse of the guilds and the growth of the factory-system; scientifically, the spread of physical science, and the increased knowledge of the terrestrial globe--and so on. Each of these facets of the community’s life was the object of separate attention and effort: but it was their totality which produced the modern order. Where--among other reasons--the moral preparation for mechanical civilization was incomplete, as in the Catholic countries, the industrial revolution was also late and incomplete; where the craft-tradition remained strong, as in the beech forests of the Chilterns, the industrial change made fewer inroads into the habits of the community, than, let us say, in Lancashire, where modern industry was untempered and unchallenged.