o contribute to the common end
receive honourable payment for honourable service.

Frate, la nostra volonta quieta
Virtu di carita, che fa volerne
Sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci asseta.
Si disiassimo esse piu superne,
Foran discordi li nostri disiri
Dal voler di colui che qui ne cerne.
* * * * *

{183}

Anzi e formale ad esto beato esse
Tenersi dentro alla divina vogli,
Per ch'una fansi nostre vogli e stesse.
* * * * *
Chiaro mi fu allor com' ogni dove
In Cielo e paradiso, e si la grazia
Del sommo ben d'un modo non vi piove.

The famous lines in which Piccarda explains to Dante the order of
Paradise are a description of a complex and multiform society which is
united by overmastering devotion to a common end. By that end all
stations are assigned and all activities are valued. The parts derive
their quality from their place in the system, and are so permeated by
the unity which they express that they themselves are glad to be
forgotten, as the ribs of an arch carry the eye from the floor from
which they spring to the vault in which they meet and interlace.

Such a combination of unity and diversity is possible only to a society
which subordinates its activities to the principle of purpose. For
what that principle offers is not merely a standard for determining the
relations of different classes and groups of producers, but a scale of
moral values. Above all, it assigns to economic activity itself its
proper place as the servant, not the master, of society. The burden of
our civilization is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of
industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its
operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry
itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among
human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the
provision of the {184} material means of existence, is fit to occupy.
Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own
digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live,
industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is
worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the
means by which riches can be acquired.

That obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is
repulsive and disturbing. To future generations it will appear as
pitiable as the obsession