ABSTRACT
The dominating consideration in politics is the practical. Scheme after scheme, which it might be admirable to discuss, must be put on one side as of no political relevance and of no significance in any preface to action. In the mills and the factories, in the mines and the holds of ships men toil. They have little leisure to indulge in daydreams and to ask, if life offered them all its goods at a free choice, which they would choose, and what desire. The experience is anaemic and the ideals are precious and etiolated. Personality is such mastery. It is neither self-centredness nor is it taking one's value from the herd opinion. "The machine," writes Trotsky, is not in opposition to the earth. The machine is the instrument of modern man in every field of life. The present-day city is transient. The danger of a peaceful, machine-using, democratic reasonable world is that its reasonableness may become intolerable.
