“Very likely,” said Mr. Cardan, who had been engaged in lighting a cigar, “very likely they’ll find the road to their salvation more easily than you will find the road to yours. Being simpler, they’ll have within them fewer causes for disharmony. Many of them are still practically in the tribal state, blindly obeying the social code that has been suggested into them from childhood. That’s the prelapsarian state; they’ve not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—or rather it’s the whole tribe, not the individual, that has eaten. And the individual is so much a part of the tribe that it doesn’t occur to him to act against its ordinances, any more than it occurs to my teeth to begin violently biting my tongue of their own accord. Those simple souls—and there are still a lot of them left, even among the motor buses—will find their way to salvation very easily. The difficulty begins when the individuals begin to get thoroughly conscious of themselves apart from the tribe. There’s an immense number of people who ought to be tribal savages, but who have been made conscious of their individuality. They can’t obey tribal morality blindly and they’re too feeble to think for themselves. I should say that the majority of people in a modern educated democratic state are at that stage—too conscious of themselves to obey blindly, too inept to be able to behave in a reasonable manner on their own account. Hence that delightful contemporary state of affairs which so rejoices the heart of our friend Chelifer. We fall most horribly between two stools—the tribe and the society of conscious intelligent beings.” “It’s comforting to think,” said Chelifer, “that modern civilisation is doing its best to re-establish the tribal régime, but on an enormous, national and even international scale. Cheap printing, wireless telephones, trains, motor cars, gramophones and all the rest are making it possible to consolidate tribes, not of a few thousands, but of millions. To judge from the Middle Western novelists, the process seems already to have gone a long way in America. In a few generations it may be that the whole planet will be covered by one vast American-speaking tribe, composed of innumerable individuals, all thinking and acting in exactly the same way, like the characters in a novel by Sinclair Lewis. It’s a most pleasing speculation—though, of course,” Chelifer added guardedly, “the future is no concern of ours.”