against its master, a kind of universal Frankenstein monster come to life and striking blindly in the dark, like the furious rebellion of some slave race which in the past has occasionally wiped out a civilisation in hideous ruin. But apart from the possibility of such revolt, no first visitor to the newer industrial centres but is aware of a certain shrivelling up of man’s importance before the aggregate of material construction. The sense of proportion is dwarfed by the mere divergence in size and stability, as the weak, unprotected human body is contrasted with vast levers and furnaces which at any moment could crack him like an eggshell, or shrivel him up like sawdust. Human life and mechanical life come to be pictured in permanence like those gaunt and sullen streets of East London, where tiny cottages crouch beneath tall encompassing walls so high that between them men scarce can see the sun. And behind the weight laid upon the imagination by mass and matter is the perhaps more oppressive weight of custom and convention. “Every body”--so commences Newton’s famous law--“continues in its state of rest or motion in a straight line.” More than of any projectiles careering through space is this true of the mind of man--continuing always, unless forcibly and sometimes brutally wrested away by impacting forces, in its motion in a straight line. Bagehot tells a story of the “very conservative” people of Fiji. “A chief was one day going over a mountain path, followed by a long string of his people, when he happened to stumble and fall; all the rest of the people immediately did the same except one man, who was set upon by the rest to know whether he considered himself better than the chief.” Fiji is too remote a dwelling-place for such a leader. He resides to-day in Dulwich, in Poplar, in Eaton Square.