n of any
considerable reconstruction of society, because social institutions are
the visible expression of the scale of moral values which rules the
minds of individuals, and it is impossible to alter institutions
without altering that moral valuation. Parliament, industrial
organizations, the whole complex machinery through which society
expresses itself, is a mill which grinds only what is put into it, and
when nothing is put into it grinds air. There are many, of course, who
desire no alteration, and who, when it is attempted, will oppose it.
They have found the existing economic order profitable in the past.
They desire only such changes as will insure that it is equally
profitable in the future. _Quand le Roi avait bu, la Pologne etait
ivre_. They are genuinely unable to understand why their countrymen
cannot bask happily by the fire which warms themselves, and ask, like
the French farmer-general:--"When everything goes so happily, why
trouble to change it?" Such persons are to be pitied, for they lack
the social quality which is {4} proper to man. But they do not need
argument; for Heaven has denied them one of the faculties required to
apprehend it.

There are others, however, who are conscious of the desire for a new
social order, but who yet do not grasp the implications of their own
desire. Men may genuinely sympathize with the demand for a radical
change. They may be conscious of social evils and sincerely anxious to
remove them. They may set up a new department, and appoint new
officials, and invent a new name to express their resolution to effect
something more drastic than reform, and less disturbing than
revolution. But unless they will take the pains, not only to act, but
to reflect, they end by effecting nothing. For they deliver themselves
bound to those who think they are practical, because they take their
philosophy so much for granted as to be unconscious of its
implications, and directly they try to act, that philosophy re-asserts
itself, and serves as an overruling force which presses their action
more deeply into the old channels. "Unhappy man that I am; who shall
deliver me from the body of this death?" When they desire to place
their economic life on a better foundation, they repeat, like parrots,
the word "Productivity," because that is the word that rises first in
their minds; regardless of the fact that productivity is the foundation
on which it is based already, that increased