metimes wonder if the price we have paid for "democracy" was
not too extortionate.

Above all, we are tempted to this query when we think of our vanishing
standards of right and wrong, of our progressive reversal of values, of
our diminishing stock of social character. We tore down in indignant
revolt the rotten fabric of a bad social system when it had so far
declined from its ideal and its former estate that it could no longer be
endured, and we made a new thing, full as we were with the fire of
desire for a new righteousness and a new system that would compass it.
Perhaps we did well, at least we hardly could have done anything else;
but now we are again in the position of our forefathers who saw things
as they were and acted with force and decision. There are as many counts
against our society of plutocrats, politicians and proletarians, mingled
in complete and ineffective confusion, as there were against the
aristocracies, so called, of the eighteenth century. Perhaps there are
more, at least many of them are different, but the indictment is no less
sweeping.

Our plan, so generous, so liberal, so high-minded in many ways, has
failed to produce the results we desired, while it has worked itself out
to the point of menace. It is for us to see these facts clearly, and so
to act, and so promptly, that we may not have to await the destroying
force of cataclysm for the correction of our errors.

IV

THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM

The solution of the industrial and economic problem that now confronts
the entire world with an insistence that is not to be denied, is
contingent on the restoration, first of all, of the holiness and the joy
of work. Labour is not a curse, it is rather one of the greatest of the
earthly blessings of man, provided its sanctity is recognized and its
performance is accomplished with satisfaction to the labourer. In work
man creates, whether the product is a bushel of potatoes from a space of
once arid ground, or whether it is the Taj Mahal, Westminster Abbey or
the Constitution of the United States, and so working he partakes
something of the divine power of creation.

When work is subject to slavery, all sense of its holiness is lost, both
by master and bondman; when it is subject to the factory system all the
joy in labour is lost. Ingenuity may devise one clever panacea after
another for the salving work and for lifting the working classes from
the intolerable conditions that have prev