The spectacle to his eyes would be
strange indeed. Mankind viewed in the mass would be seen to produce a
certain amount of absolutely necessary things, such as food, and then to
stop. In spite of the fact that there was not food enough to go round,
and that large numbers must die of starvation or perish slowly from
under-nutrition, the production of food would stop at some point a good
deal short of universal satisfaction. So, too, with the production of
clothing, shelter and other necessary things; never enough would seem to
be produced, and this apparently not by accident or miscalculation, but
as if some peculiar social law were at work adjusting production to the
point where there is just not enough, and leaving it there. The
countless millions of workers would be seen to turn their untired
energies and their all-powerful machinery away from the production of
necessary things to the making of mere comforts; and from these, again,
while still stopping short of a general satisfaction, to the making of
luxuries and superfluities. The wheels would never stop. The activity
would never tire. Mankind, mad with the energy of activity, would be
seen to pursue the fleeing phantom of insatiable desire. Thus among the
huge mass of accumulated commodities the simplest wants would go
unsatisfied. Half-fed men would dig for diamonds, and men sheltered by
a crazy roof erect the marble walls of palaces. The observer might well
remain perplexed at the pathetic discord between human work and human
wants. Something, he would feel assured, must be at fault either with
the social instincts of man or with the social order under which he
lives.

And herein lies the supreme problem that faces us in this opening
century. The period of five years of war has shown it to us in a clearer
light than fifty years of peace. War is destruction--the annihilation of
human life, the destruction of things made with generations of labor,
the misdirection of productive power from making what is useful to
making what is useless. In the great war just over, some seven million
lives were sacrificed; eight million tons of shipping were sunk beneath
the sea; some fifty million adult males were drawn from productive labor
to the lines of battle; behind them uncounted millions labored day and
night at making the weapons of destruction. One might well have thought
that such a gigantic misdirection of human energy would have brought
the industrial world to a stand