irst as a hunter and a fisherman, then as a shepherd, then as a tiller
of the soil, and then work upwards to the complicated industrial system
of to-day. We are asked to accept the life of Abraham or David among the
sheepfolds as the bottom of the ladder, and the life of a modern
wage-earner under the smoky sky of a manufacturing area as the top; and
when we complain and say, as men like William Morris and Stephen Graham
are always saying, that we would far prefer to live in David's world, in
spite of all its discomforts, we are told that we have no right to
quarrel with the sacred principle of Evolution.

To interpret human history in this way is, of course, to deny its
spiritual meaning, to deny that it is a record of the progress of the
human _spirit_ at all. It is to read it as a tale of the improvement, or
rather the increasing complication, of _things_, rather than of the
advance of man. It is to view the world as a Domain of Matter, not as
the Kingdom of Man--still less, as the Kingdom of God. It is to tie us
helplessly to the chariot wheels of an industrial Juggernaut which knows
nothing of moral values. Let the progress of industry make life noisy
and ugly and anxious and unhappy: let it engross the great mass of
mankind in tedious and uncongenial tasks and the remainder in the
foolish and unsatisfying activities of luxurious living; let it defile
the green earth with pits and factories and slag-heaps and the mean
streets of those who toil at them, and dim the daylight with exhalations
of monstrous vapour. It is not for us to complain or to resist: for we
are in the grip of a Power which is greater than ourselves, a Power to
which mankind in all five continents has learnt to yield--that Economic
Process which is, in truth, the God, or the Devil, of the modern world.

No thinking man dare acquiesce in such a conclusion or consent to bow
the head before such fancied necessities. The function of industry, he
will reply, is to serve human life not to master it: to beautify human
life not to degrade it: to set life free not to enslave it. Economics is
not the whole of life: and when it transgresses its bounds and exceeds
its functions it must be controlled and thrust back into its place by
the combined activities of men. The soul is higher than the body, and
life is more than housekeeping. Liberty is higher than Riches, and the
welfare of the community more important than its economic and material
progress. These gr