ng.

But to suppose that the remedy lies in waiting for monographs from the
research of the laboratory is to have lost a sense of the rhythm of
actual affairs. That is not the way things come about: we grow into a new
point of view: only afterwards, in looking back, do we see the landmarks
of our progress. Thus it is customary to say that Adam Smith dates the
change from the old mercantilist economy to the capitalistic economics of
the nineteenth century. But that is a manner of speech. The old
mercantilist policy was giving way to early industrialism: a thousand
unconscious economic and social forces were compelling the change. Adam
Smith expressed the process, named it, idealized it and made it
self-conscious. Then because men were clearer about what they were doing,
they could in a measure direct their destiny.

That is but another way of saying that great revolutionary changes do not
spring full-armed from anybody's brow. A genius usually becomes the
luminous center of a nation's crisis,--men see better by the light of
him. His bias deflects their actions. Unquestionably the doctrine-driven
men who made the economics of the last century had much to do with the
halo which encircled the smutted head of industrialism. They put the
stamp of their genius on certain inhuman practices, and of course it has
been the part of the academic mind to imitate them ever since. The
orthodox economists are in the unenviable position of having taken their
morals from the exploiter and of having translated them into the
grandiloquent language of high public policy. They gave capitalism the
sanction of the intellect. When later, Carlyle and Ruskin battered the
economists into silence with invective and irony they were voicing the
dumb protest of the humane people of England. They helped to organize a
formless resentment by endowing it with intelligence and will.

So it is to-day. If this nation did not show an unmistakable tendency to
put men at the center of politics instead of machinery and things; if
there were not evidence to prove that we are turning from the sterile
taboo to the creation of finer environments; if the impetus for shaping
our destiny were not present in our politics and our life, then essays
like these would be so much baying at the moon, fantastic and unworthy
pleas for some irrelevant paradise. But the gropings are there,--vastly
confused in the tangled strains of the nation's interests. Clogged by the
confusion