preaching the duty of production to miners and
dock laborers desire that more wealth, not more waste, should be
produced, the simplest way in which they can achieve their aim is to
transfer to the public their whole incomes over (say) $5,000 a year, in
order that it may {39} be spent in setting to work, not gardeners,
chauffeurs, domestic servants and shopkeepers in the West End of
London, but builders, mechanics and teachers.

So to those who clamor, as many now do, "Produce! Produce!" one simple
question may be addressed:--"Produce what?" Food, clothing,
house-room, art, knowledge? By all means! But if the nation is
scantily furnished with these things had it not better stop producing a
good many others which fill shop windows in Regent Street? If it
desires to re-equip its industries with machinery and its railways with
wagons, had it not better refrain from holding exhibitions designed to
encourage rich men to re-equip themselves with motor-cars? What can be
more childish than to urge the necessity that productive power should
be increased, if part of the productive power which exists already is
misapplied? Is not _less_ production of futilities as important as,
indeed a condition of, _more_ production of things of moment? Would
not "Spend less on private luxuries" be as wise a cry as "produce
more"? Yet this result of inequality, again, is a phenomenon which
cannot be prevented, or checked, or even recognized by a society which
excludes the idea of purpose from its social arrangements and
industrial activity. For to recognize it is to admit that there is a
principle superior to the mechanical play of economic forces, which
ought to determine the relative importance of different occupations,
and thus to abandon the view that all riches, however composed, are an
end, and that all economic activity is equally justifiable.

{40}

The rejection of the idea of purpose involves another consequence which
every one laments, but which no one can prevent, except by abandoning
the belief that the free exercise of rights is the main interest of
society and the discharge of obligations a secondary and incidental
consequence which may be left to take care of itself. It is that
social life is turned into a scene of fierce antagonisms and that a
considerable part of industry is carried on in the intervals of a
disguised social war. The idea that industrial peace can be secured
merely by the exercise of tact and forbe