Men come together, says Aristotle, to live; they remain together in order to live the good life. This determination of the good life is the only check and balance that we can have upon Coketown; and it is perhaps because we have been so little concerned with it that the practical effect of the Coketown idolum has been so devastating. “Invention and organization,” as Mr. George Santayana admirably points out, “which ought to have increased leisure by producing the necessaries of life with little labor, have only increased the population, degraded labor, and diffused luxury.” William Morris conceived that men in the future might discard many complicated machines because they could live more happily, aye, work more happily without them. Whether indeed a good part of modern organization and machinery could be scrapt is perhaps a debatable question: but the possibility of scrapping it is at least conceivable once we become more interested in the actual result of industrialism upon the life and happiness of the people who are part of the organization than we are in the profits which pile up upon paper, and are finally realized in an ever-growing rubbish heap. 10 By what means can the Country House keep Coketown working for it? The idolum of the Country House, which was built up during the Renascence, and the idolum of Coketown, which was formed in the early part of the nineteenth century, are obviously two separate worlds; and in order that each might be realized in our daily life, it was necessary that some connecting tissue be manufactured to keep them together. This tissue was the social myth, the collective utopia, of the National State. There is a sense in which we may look upon the National State as a fact; but that great philosopher of the National State, Mazzini, realized that the National State had continually to be willed; and its existence lies plainly, therefore, on a different plane from the existence of a bit of territory, a building, or a city. In fact, it is only by the persistent projection of this utopia for the last three or four hundred years that its existence has become credible; for all the minute descriptions which the political historian gives to the National State, its origins and its institutions and its people, read a good deal like that fine story which Hans Andersen told about the king who walked the streets naked because two rascally tailors had persuaded him that they had woven and cut up for him a beautiful outfit of clothes. It will help us to appreciate this beautiful fabrication of the National State if we turn aside for a moment and glance at the actual world as it is known to the geographer and the anthropologist. Here are the physical facts in defiance of which the utopia of nationalism has been clapped together. 11