ll it be resolved by lamentations or menaces or
denunciations of leaders whose only significance is that they say
openly what plain men feel privately. For the matter at bottom is one
of psychology. What has happened is that the motives on which the
industrial system relied for several generations to secure efficiency,
secure it no longer. And it is as impossible to restore them, to
revive by mere exhortation the complex of hopes and fears and ignorance
and patient credulity and passive acquiescence, which together made
men, fifty years ago, plastic instruments in the hands of
industrialism, as to restore innocence to any others of those who have
eaten of the tree of knowledge.

The ideal of some intelligent and respectable business men, the
restoration of the golden sixties, when workmen were docile and
confiding, and trade unions were still half illegal, and foreign
competition meant English competition in foreign countries, and prices
were rising a little and not rising too much, is the one Utopia which
can never be realized. The King may walk naked as long as his
courtiers protest that he is clad; but when a child or a fool has
broken the spell a tailor is more important than all their admiration.
If the public, which suffers from the slackening of economic activity,
{146} desires to end its _malaise_, it will not laud as admirable and
all-sufficient the operation of motives which are plainly ceasing to
move. It will seek to liberate new motives and to enlist them in its
service. It will endeavor to find an alternative to incentives which
were always degrading, to those who used them as much as to those upon
whom they were used, and which now are adequate incentives no longer.
And the alternative to the discipline which Capitalism exercised
through its instruments of unemployment and starvation is the
self-discipline of responsibility and professional pride.

So the demand which aims at stronger organization, fuller
responsibility, larger powers for the sake of the producer as a
condition of economic liberty, the demand for freedom, is not
antithetic to the demand for more effective work and increased output
which is being made in the interests of the consumer. It is
complementary to it, as the insistence by a body of professional men,
whether doctors or university teachers, on the maintenance of their
professional independence and dignity against attempts to cheapen the
service is not hostile to an efficie