ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century was brought to its disastrous end by a conflict between industrial technique and political theory. Machine production, railways, telegraphs, and advances in the art of war, all promoted organization, and increased the power of those who held economic and political command. Pierpont Morgan and William II could direct human energy more rapidly and more massively than Xerxes or Napoleon or any of the great men of past times. But effective political thought had not kept pace with the increasing concentration of authority: theory, in so far as it had succeeded in moulding institutions, was still divided between monarchy and competitive democracy, the first essentially preindustrial, and the second appropriate only to the earliest stages of industrialism. Plutocracy, the actual form of government in Western countries, was unacknowledged and as far as possible concealed from the public eye.
