still within a year. So people did think.
So thought a great number, perhaps the greater number, of the financiers
and economists and industrial leaders trained in the world in which we
used to live. The expectation was unfounded. Great as is the destruction
of war, not even five years of it have broken the productive machine.
And the reason is now plain enough. Peace, also--or peace under the old
conditions of industry--is infinitely wasteful of human energy. Not more
than one adult worker in ten--so at least it might with confidence be
estimated--is employed on necessary things. The other nine perform
superfluous services. War turns them from making the glittering
superfluities of peace to making its grim engines of destruction. But
while the tenth man still labors, the machine, though creaking with its
dislocation, can still go on. The economics of war, therefore, has
thrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace.

These I propose in the succeeding chapters to examine. But it might be
well before doing so to lay stress upon the fact that while admitting
all the shortcomings and the injustices of the regime under which we
have lived, I am not one of those who are able to see a short and single
remedy. Many people when presented with the argument above, would settle
it at once with the word "socialism." Here, they say, is the immediate
and natural remedy. I confess at the outset, and shall develop later,
that I cannot view it so. Socialism is a mere beautiful dream, possible
only for the angels. The attempt to establish it would hurl us over the
abyss. Our present lot is sad, but the frying pan is at least better
than the fire.

_II.--Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness_

"ALL men," wrote Thomas Jefferson in framing the Declaration of
Independence, "have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness." The words are more than a felicitous phrase. They
express even more than the creed of a nation. They embody in themselves
the uppermost thought of the era that was dawning when they were
written. They stand for the same view of society which, in that very
year of 1776, Adam Smith put before the world in his immortal "Wealth of
Nations" as the "System of Natural Liberty." In this system mankind
placed its hopes for over half a century and under it the industrial
civilization of the age of machinery rose to the plenitude of its
power.

In the preceding chapter an examination has