ble use of money, seeks to remove one of the chief
causes of social bitterness. Senseless extravagance is the best friend
of revolution.

The abuse poured upon 'the old political economy,' as it is called, is
only half deserved. As compared with the insane doctrines now in favour
with the working-man, the old political economy was sound and sensible.
Hard work, thrift, and economy in production are, in truth, as we used
to be told, the only ways to increase the national wealth, and the
contrary practices can only lead to economic ruin. There is not much
fault to find with the old economists so long as they recognised that
their science was an abstract science, which for its own purposes dealt
with an unreal abstraction--the 'economic man.' Every science is obliged
to isolate one aspect of reality in this way. But when political economy
was treated as a philosophy of life it began to be mischievous. A book
on 'the science of the stomach,' without knowledge of physiology or the
working of other organs, would not be of much use. Man has never been a
merely acquisitive being; for example, he is also a fighting and a
praying being. If our dominant motives were changed, the whole
conditions dealt with by political economy would change with them. There
have been civilisations in which the passion for accumulation was
comparatively weak; and notoriously there are many persons in whom it is
wholly absent. Devotion to art, to scientific investigation, and to
religion is strong enough, where it exists, to kill 'the economic man'
in human nature. A civilised nation honours its idealists, and
recognises the immense benefit which they confer on the community by
creating or revealing new and inexhaustible values; in an uncivilised
country they can hardly live. Ruskin and William Morris saw, and
doubtless exaggerated, the danger to which spiritual values were exposed
at the hands of the dominant economism. Our danger now is that neglect
of the simplest economic laws may plunge the nation into such misery
that the people will no longer be willing to support art, science,
learning, and philosophy. A large section of the labour party has the
same standard of values as the hated 'capitalist,' and detests those
whom it calls intellectuals and sky-pilots because they depreciate the
currency which their class, no less than the capitalist, believes to be
the only sound money.

It may be asked whether there is any reason to think that there is