ere to make accessible to Europe
food and raw products from distant sources. Up to about 1900 a unit of
labor applied to industry yielded year by year a purchasing power over
an increasing quantity of food. It is possible that about the year 1900
this process began to be reversed, and a diminishing yield of Nature to
man's effort was beginning to reassert itself. But the tendency of
cereals to rise in real cost was balanced by other improvements;
and--one of many novelties--the resources of tropical Africa then for
the first time came into large employ, and a great traffic in oil-seeds
began to bring to the table of Europe in a new and cheaper form one of
the essential foodstuffs of mankind. In this economic Eldorado, in this
economic Utopia, as the earlier economists would have deemed it, most of
us were brought up.

That happy age lost sight of a view of the world which filled with
deep-seated melancholy the founders of our Political Economy. Before the
eighteenth century mankind entertained no false hopes. To lay the
illusions which grew popular at that age's latter end, Malthus disclosed
a Devil. For half a century all serious economical writings held that
Devil in clear prospect. For the next half century he was chained up and
out of sight. Now perhaps we have loosed him again.

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age
was which came to an end in August, 1914! The greater part of the
population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of
comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this
lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at
all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom
life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences,
comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most
powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by
telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the
whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect
their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and
by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new
enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or
even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or be could
decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the
townspeople of any substantia