This tyranny of the present upon the imagination, is perhaps the greatest of all obstacles to reform. It is not only that the inhabitants of London cannot picture what London was when the Abbey of Westminster stood up white from green gardens, and over the river where now dwell two millions of persons the roads ran on causeways through sullen marshes lit by will-o’-the-wisps and fever fires. It is that they are unable even to imagine a time when Cadogan Square was a huddle of slum tenements, and Islington an expanse of meadow land, and the places they now occupy, quiet fields. Lacking such imagination, they find it impossible to stand up and face the domination of the present with the naked vision of the future. Mr. Wells, at the end of his voyage into Utopia, has described the traveller returning, standing, after so adventurous a journey, at the familiar spot where the Strand debouches into Trafalgar Square. Everything is the same--the railway stations, the tall buildings with winking sky signs, the column and the lions of the Square, the long, low, brooding ugliness of the National Gallery. Amongst them move the busy people, hurrying, to-day as yesterday, to and from their sedentary occupations and their comfortable suburban homes. It all appears “so fast” that “it cannot be moved at any time.” Utopia, before this intrusive reality--to be seen, touched, handled--rises from the earth and joins all other cloud cities “built in heaven.” An ironical touch may be given by the sight of a squalid, tiny crowd gathered round one of these pillars, with banners demanding the speedy coming of “the Social Revolution”; mocked at alike by the solid architecture, the indulgent policemen, the indifferent multitude that passes by. Mr. Lowes Dickinson, in a dialogue recently published, confronted a banker, of enlightened views, with the protest of an idealist and reformer against present social injustices. The reformer--from a University common room--has much the best of the argument. Looking out from those pleasant paths and gardens, not only over the injustices of the present, but also over all time and all existence, he can reveal to the man of business the impossibility of these injustices continuing, the urgent necessity for change. The banker has but one argument, but with that he can overwhelm his antagonist. That argument is the actual existence of the present, in solid, appreciable reality. He can counter the reformer’s acute and ready phrases with steamships and factories, Lombard Street, Pimlico, Manchester; against which the random Socialist, academic or anarchical, can make no more impression than a rat attempting to gnaw through the granite stones of the Bank of England. Here in part is the insistence of things against ideas, the dominance of the material; “the things” which, according to Emerson, are “in the saddle and ride mankind.” Samuel Butler once pictured the revolt of the machine