his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many
exertions. An experimental materialism, spontaneous and divorced from
reason and from everything useful, is also confused in some minds with
traditional duties; and a school of popular hierophants is not lacking
that turns it into a sort of religion and perhaps calls it idealism.
Impulse is more visible in all this than purpose, imagination more than
judgment; but it is pleasant for the moment to abound in invention and
effort and to let the future cash the account.

[Sidenote: Its tyranny.]

Wealth is excessive when it reduces a man to a middleman and a jobber,
when it prevents him, in his preoccupation with material things, from
making his spirit the measure of them. There are Nibelungen who toil
underground over a gold they will never use, and in their obsession with
production begrudge themselves all holidays, all concessions to
inclination, to merriment, to fancy; nay, they would even curtail as
much as possible the free years of their youth, when they might see the
blue, before rendering up their souls to the Leviathan. Visible signs of
such unreason soon appear in the relentless and hideous aspect which
life puts on; for those instruments which somehow emancipate themselves
from their uses soon become hateful. In nature irresponsible wildness
can be turned to beauty, because every product can be recomposed into
some abstract manifestation of force or form; but the monstrous in man
himself and in his works immediately offends, for here everything is
expected to symbolise its moral relations. The irrational in the human
has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in
the maniac, the miser, the drunkard, or the ape. A barbaric
civilisation, built on blind impulse and ambition, should fear to awaken
a deeper detestation than could ever be aroused by those more beautiful
tyrannies, chivalrous or religious, against which past revolutions have
been directed.

[Sidenote: An impossible remedy.]

Both the sordidness and the luxury which industrialism may involve,
could be remedied, however, by a better distribution of the product. The
riches now created by labour would probably not seriously debauch
mankind if each man had only his share; and such a proportionate return
would enable him to perceive directly how far his interests required him
to employ himself in material production and how far he could allow
himself leisure for spontaneo