productivity is the one
characteristic achievement of the age before the war, as religion was
of the Middle Ages or art of classical Athens, and that it is precisely
in the century which has seen the greatest increase in {5} productivity
since the fall of the Roman Empire that economic discontent has been
most acute. When they are touched by social compunction, they can
think of nothing more original than the diminution of poverty, because
poverty, being the opposite of the riches which they value most, seems
to them the most terrible of human afflictions. They do not understand
that poverty is a symptom and a consequence of social disorder, while
the disorder itself is something at once more fundamental and more
incorrigible, and that the quality in their social life which causes it
to demoralize a few by excessive riches, is also the quality which
causes it to demoralize many by excessive poverty.

"But increased production is important." Of course it is! That plenty
is good and scarcity evil--it needs no ghost from the graves of the
past five years to tell us that. But plenty depends upon co-operative
effort, and co-operation upon moral principles. And moral principles
are what the prophets of this dispensation despise. So the world
"continues in scarcity," because it is too grasping and too
short-sighted to seek that "which maketh men to be of one mind in a
house." The well-intentioned schemes for social reorganization put
forward by its commercial teachers are abortive, because they endeavor
to combine incompatibles, and, if they disturb everything, settle
nothing. They are like a man who, when he finds that his shoddy boots
wear badly, orders a pair two sizes larger instead of a pair of good
leather, or who makes up for putting a bad sixpence in the plate on
Sunday by putting in a bad shilling the next. And when their fit of
feverish energy {6} has spent itself, and there is nothing to show for
it except disillusionment, they cry that reform is impracticable, and
blame human nature, when what they ought to blame is themselves.

Yet all the time the principles upon which industry should be based are
simple, however difficult it may be to apply them; and if they are
overlooked it is not because they are difficult, but because they are
elementary. They are simple because industry is simple. An industry,
when all is said, is, in its essence, nothing more mysterious than a
body of men associated, in vario