r achieve, might be called a Functional
Society, because in such a society the main subject of social emphasis
would be the performance of functions. But such a society does not
exist, even as a remote ideal, in the modern world, though something
like it has hung, an unrealized theory, before men's minds in the past.
Modern societies aim at protecting economic rights, while leaving
economic functions, except in moments of abnormal emergency, to fulfil
themselves. The motive which gives color and quality to their public
institutions, to their policy and political thought, is not the attempt
to secure the fulfilment of tasks undertaken for the public service,
but to increase the opportunities open to individuals of attaining the
objects which they conceive to be advantageous to themselves. If asked
the end or criterion of social organization, they would give an answer
reminiscent of the formula the greatest happiness of the greatest
number. But to say that the end of social institutions is happiness,
is to say that they have no common end at all. For happiness is
individual, and to make happiness the object of society is to resolve
society itself into the ambitions of numberless individuals, each
directed towards the attainment of some personal purpose.

Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole
tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition
of wealth. The {30} appeal of this conception must be powerful, for it
has laid the whole modern world under its spell. Since England first
revealed the possibilities of industrialism, it has gone from strength
to strength, and as industrial civilization invades countries hitherto
remote from it, as Russia and Japan and India and China are drawn into
its orbit, each decade sees a fresh extension of its influence. The
secret of its triumph is obvious. It is an invitation to men to use
the powers with which they have been endowed by nature or society, by
skill or energy or relentless egotism or mere good fortune, without
inquiring whether there is any principle by which their exercise should
be limited. It assumes the social organization which determines the
opportunities which different classes shall in fact possess, and
concentrates attention upon the right of those who possess or can
acquire power to make the fullest use of it for their own
self-advancement. By fixing men's minds, not upon the discharge of
social obligat