Society is no longer to be dealt with as an unit, nor even as a congeries of units; it is a chaos, both as a whole and in each moiety thereof. The evolutionary process, if it ever existed, is now inoperative, and something more nearly approaching devolution has taken its place. As under the earlier assault of the everlasting barbarian the great, imperial unity of Rome broke up into minute family fragments, and as the pseudo-unity of the Holy Roman Empire broke up into a myriad of heterogeneous states, so our own world, both political and social, is deliquescing into its elements, and no ingenious mechanism, however cleverly devised, can arrest the process for more than the briefest of periods. When the mechanism breaks down, whether it is a year or ten years hence, the interrupted process of disintegration will continue to its appointed end. Man has always nursed the dream of corporate regeneration, of the finding or devising of some method or mechanism whereby society as a whole could be redeemed _en bloc_. The dream has engendered many revolutions but the results have been other than those anticipated, and even these unexpected happenings have proved evanescent, with a constant return to the old evils and abuses. Persistently the world as a whole refuses regeneration. Latterly the ingenious device has somewhat superseded the violent changing of things, and democracy with its miscellaneous spawn of doctrinaire inventions, industrialism with its facile subterfuges of political economy; evolution, education, socialism, each in turn has offered itself as the sovereign elixir. The war has quashed the major part, the following “peace” is dealing with the remainder. The last device of all, socialism, whether of the Marxian variety or of the Fabian sort, is now the most discredited of all, for Bolshevism on the one hand, state ownership, control, or management of industry on the other, have both proved, the one intolerable, the other a bloody synonym for social extinction. Yet the way out must be found by those for whom the present scheme of existence is not good enough; for those who refuse to go back to the pre-war _régime_ or on to the predicted era of anarchy. The way may be found, but it will reveal itself not through wide and democratic social processes but through group action in which the units are few in number. The process will be one of withdrawal, of segregation, at first even of isolation; but if this really proves to be the right way, the end may be, as so often in the past, a centrifugal action developing from one originally centripetal, with an ultimate leavening of the whole lump.