Beyond these incorrect standards of value there is a noticeable absence of vision. Suburban life has often little conception of social services, no tradition of disinterested public duty, but a limited outlook beyond a personal ambition. Here the individualism of the national character exercises its full influence: unchecked by the horizontal links of the industrial peoples, organising themselves into unions, or by the vertical links of the older aristocracy with a conception of family service which once passed from parent to child. Religion--if that were vital and compelling--would provide in part a vista of larger horizons. When and where religion existed--even in its rigid conception of heaven and hell and a straight way of salvation--it offered some universes for contemplation beyond the orderly suburban road and the well-trimmed suburban garden. It is to be feared, however, that in the prevailing cloudiness about ultimate things which is developing in the modern world, religion has been tending more and more to resolve itself into social institutions, “Pleasant Sunday Afternoons,” or exercise of the less adventurous forces of suburban philanthropy. What remains? A public spirit in local affairs which is deplorably low, which sends a minute percentage of voters to Council or Guardian Elections, and accompanies a perpetual contempt for present municipal mismanagement with a refusal of the personal effort required to make that management clean and efficient. An outlook upon Imperial affairs which is less a conception of politics than the acceptance of a social tradition: which leaves suburban seats securely Conservative not because the Conservative creed is there definitely embraced, but because Conservatism is supposed to be the party favoured by Court, society, and the wealthy and fashionable classes. And too often an essential ignorance supplemented by an arrogance which refuses advice and despises opposition. The result is a not too reputable product of modern civilisation: that dense and complacent “Imperial citizen” who despises “the foreigner,” and could set right or improve upon generals in the field or admirals on the ocean, and is satisfied with its universe and its limitations because it has resolutely closed all doors and windows through which there might appear the vision of larger other worlds. It is this particular suburban figure--with custom dominant, accepted and inherited students of judgment, contempt for the classes below it, envy of the classes above, and no desire for adventure or devotion to a cause or an ideal--which has become too representative a figure of a laborious and praiseworthy race of men. Against this type of “honest man” have warred the anarchists, the artists, the advocates of new moralities, the opponents of the accepted way. In revolt against the dominion of so questionable a citizen, we are perhaps inclined to forget the mitigating features: the good nature and ready generosity,