ook like
war-memorials, waiting-rooms, newspaper-kiosks and drinking-saloons.
It was not always so? No; but even in the most penurious times it was
kings who were the patrons.

But if culture is such a poison-flower, if it flourishes only in the
swamp of poverty and under the sun of riches, it must and ought to be
destroyed. Our sentiment will no longer endure the happiness and
brilliance of the few growing out of the misery of the many; the days
of the senses are over, and the day of conscience is beginning to
dawn.

And now a timid and troubled puritanism makes itself heard: Is there
no middle way? Will not half-measures suffice? No, it will not do; let
this be said once for all as plainly as possible, you champions of the
supply of "bare necessities" who talk about "daily bread" and want to
butter it with the "noblest pleasures of art." It will not do!

No, half-measures will not do, nor quarter-measures. They might, if
the whole world, the sick, the healthy and the bloated all together
were of the same mind as ourselves. In Moscow it is said that people
are expecting the world-revolution every hour, but the world declines
to oblige. Therefore, if culture and civilization are to remain what
they were, is there nothing for it but with one wrench to tear the
poisoned garment from our body? Or--is there then an "or"? Let us see.
We have a long way before us. First of all we must know how rich or
how poor we and the world are going to be, on the day when there will
be no income without working for it and no rich people any more.

If our economic system made us self-supporting we might arrange
matters on the model of the Boer Republic which had all it needed, and
now and then traded a load of ostrich feathers for coffee and hymn
books. But we, alas! in order to find nourishment for twenty
millions[5] have to export blood and brains. And if, in order to buy
phosphates, we offer cotton stockings and night-caps as the highest
products of our artistic energies, and declare that they are all the
soundest hand-work--for in our "daily bread" economy we shall have
long forgotten how to work such devil's tools as the modern
knitting-machine--then people will reply to us: in the first place we
don't want night-caps, and if we did we can supply them for one-tenth
of the cost; and our cotton goods will be sent back to us as
unsaleable.

A world-trade, even of modest dimensions, can only be carried on upon
the basis of high tec