what a change that would make in the world! I tell you I
feel dazed at the thought of the immensity of the work which is
undergone for the making of useless things. It would be an
instructive day's work, for any one of us who is strong enough,
to walk through two or three of the principal streets of London
on a weekday, and take accurate note of everything in the shop
windows which is embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life
of a serious man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious
or unserious, wants at all; only a foolish habit makes even the
lightest-minded of us suppose that he wants them; and to many
people, even of those who buy them, they are obvious
encumbrances to real work, thought, and pleasure.

At the time most people said that this waste of labour was all a matter
of demand and supply, and thought no more about it; some said that it
was good for trade. Very few saw, with Morris, that demand for such
things is something willed and something that ought not to be willed.

But then it was generally believed that we could afford this waste of
labour; and so it went on until, after a year or two of war, we found
that we could not afford it. Then even the most ignorant and thoughtless
learned, from facts, not from books, certain lessons of political
economy. They learned that, in war-time at least, a nation that wastes
its labour will be overcome by one that does not. At once the common
will was set against the waste of labour; and, what would have seemed
strangest of all forty years ago, the Government, with the consent of
the people, set to work to stop the waste of labour, and did to a great
extent succeed in stopping it. When people thought in terms of
munitions, instead of in terms of general well-being, they saw that the
waste of labour must be, and could be, stopped. They talked no longer
about the laws of supply and demand, but about munitions. Those who had
made trash must be set to make munitions, or to fight, or in some way to
second the Army. Those who still were ready to waste labour on trash for
themselves were no longer obeying the laws of supply and demand; they
were diverting labour from its proper task; they were unpatriotic, they
were helping the Germans. Money, in fact, had no longer the right to an
absolute command over labour. A man, before he spent a sovereign, must
ask himself whether he was spending it for the good of the n