of the worker, to his natural selfishness, greed and cruelty?  I do not think so, but rather that the explanation is to be found in the fact that the industrial system of modernism has resulted in a condition where the joy has been altogether cut out of labour, and that until this state of things has been reversed and the sense of the holiness of work and the joy of working have been restored, it is useless to look for workable solutions of the labour problem.  The fact of industrial slavery has been done away with but the sense of the servile condition that attaches to work has been retained, therefore the idea of the dignity and holiness of labour has not come back any more than the old joy and satisfaction.  Failing this recovery, no reorganization of industrial relations, neither profit-sharing nor shop committees, neither nationalization nor state socialism, neither the abolition of capital, nor Soviets nor syndicalism nor the dictatorship of the proletariat will get us anywhere.  It is all a waste of time, and, through its ultimate failure and disappointments, an intensification of an industrial disease.

Why is it that this is so?  For an answer I must probe deep and, it may seem, cut wildly.  I believe it is because we have built up a system that goes far outside the limits of human scale, transcends human capacity, is forbidden by the laws and conditions of life, and must be abrogated if it is not to destroy itself and civilization in the process.

What, precisely has taken place?  Late in the eighteenth century two things happened; the discovery of the potential inherent in coal and its derivative, steam, with electricity yet unexploited but ready to hand, and the application of this to industrial purposes, together with the initiating of a long and astounding series of discoveries and inventions all applicable to industrial purposes.  With a sort of vertiginous rapidity the whole industrial process was transformed from what it had been during the period of recorded history; steam and machinery took the place of brain and hand power directly applied, and a revolution greater than any other was effected.

The new devices were hailed as “labour-saving” but they vastly increased labour both in hours of work and in hands employed.  Bulk production through the factory system was inevitable, the result being an enormous surplus over the normal and local demand.  To organize and conduct these processes of bulk-production required money greater in amount than individuals could furnish; so grew up capitalism, the joint-stock company, credit and cosmopolitan finance.  To produce profits and dividends markets must be found for the huge surplus product.  This was accomplished by stimulating the covetousness of people for things they had not thought of, under normal conditions would not, in many cases, need, and very likely would be happier without, and in “dumping” on supposedly barbarous peoples in remote parts of the world, articles alien to their traditions and their mode of life and generally pestiferous in their influence and results.  So came advertising in all its branches, direct and indirect, from the newspaper and the bill-board to the drummer, the diplomatic representative and the commercial missionary.