hnical accomplishment, but this height of
accomplishment cannot be attained on the basis of any penny-wise
economy. Whoever wills the part must also will the whole, but to this
whole belongs not merely the conception of a technique, but of a
civilization, and indeed of a culture. One might as well demand of a
music-hall orchestra which plays ragtime all the year round that once
in the year, and once only, on Good Friday, it should pull itself
together to give an adequate performance of the Passion Music of Bach.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: By this figure the author seems to be referring to the
population of the impoverished Germany of the future if the course of
Socialism proceeds on wrong lines.]

V

For some decades Germany will be one of the poorest of countries. How
poor she will be does not depend on herself alone, but on the power
and the will for mischief of others--who hate us.

However, poverty and wealth are relative terms; Germans are still
richer on the average than their forefathers; richer than the Romans
or Greeks. The standard of well-being is set by the best-off of the
competitors, for he it is who determines the current standard of
technique and industry, the methods of production, the minimum of
labour and skill. We cannot, as we have already seen, keep aloof from
world-competition, for Germany needs cheap goods. We must therefore
try to keep step so far as we can.

Even if we shut our eyes and take no more account of our debt to
foreign lands than we do of the war-tribute, we must admit that the
average standard of well-being in America far surpasses the German.
Goods are not so dear as with us, and the wages of the skilled worker
amounts to between seven and ten dollars a day--more than 100 marks in
our money; and many artisans drive to their workshops in their own
automobiles.

If, now, we ask our Radicals how they envisage the problem of
competition with such a country, which in one generation will be
twenty-or thirty-fold as rich as we are, they will blurt out a few
sentences in which we shall catch the word "Soviet system," "surplus
value,"[6] "world revolution." But in truth the question will never
occur to them--it is not ventilated at public meetings.

Among themselves they talk, albeit without much conviction, about
"surplus value"--which has nothing whatever to do with the present
question, and in regard to which it has been proved to them often
enough that so far as it c