It appears in a crude form in his first avowedly sociological work, _Anticipations_. He there attempts to show that the chaos of society is of itself beginning to generate a constructive class, into whose hands it must ultimately fall. The advance of mechanism, he predicts, will produce four clearly defined classes: an immense shareholding class with all the potentialities of great property and a complete lack of function with regard to that property; a non-producing class of middle-men dependent on these, and composed of agents, managers, lawyers, clerks, brokers, speculators, typists, and organizers; the expropriated class of propertyless and functionless poor, whose present livelihood is dependent on the fact that machinery is not yet so cheap as their labor. And amid this generally disorganized mass a fourth element will define itself. This in rudiment is the element of mechanics and engineers, whose work makes it necessary for them to understand the machines they are making and to be continually on the lookout for new methods. These men, he holds, will inevitably develop a common character based on a self-wrought scientific education and view of life. About them as a nucleus all the other skilled and constructive minds--doctors, teachers, investigators, writers, and the like--will tend to group themselves; and as the other classes in their very nature will tend to social disintegration, these will inevitably grow more and more conscious of a purpose, a reason, a function in common, and will disentangle themselves from the aimless and functionless masses about them. Democracy, as we know it, will meanwhile pass away. For democratic government unavoidably reduces itself to government by party machines and party machines depend for their existence on alarms, quarrelsome patriotisms, and international exasperations whose almost inevitable outcome is war.