has been enormously reinforced by the spreading material successes of modern science, successes due always to the substitution of analysis and reasoned planning for trial and the rule of thumb.  But it has never yet been so believed in and understood as to render any real endeavour to reconstruct possible.  The experiment has always been altogether too gigantic for the available faith behind it, and there have been against it the fear of presumption, the interests of all advantaged people, and the natural sloth of humanity.  We do but emerge now from a period of deliberate happy-go-lucky and the influence of Herbert Spencer, who came near raising public shiftlessness to the dignity of a national philosophy.  Everything would adjust itself—­if only it was left alone.

Yet some things there are that cannot be done by small adjustments, such as leaping chasms or killing an ox or escaping from the roof of a burning house.  You have to decide upon a certain course on such occasions and maintain a continuous movement.  If you wait on the burning house until you scorch and then turn round a bit or move away a yard or so, or if on the verge of a chasm you move a little in the way in which you wish to go, disaster will punish your moderation.  And it seems to me that the establishment of the world’s work upon a new basis—­and that and no less is what this Labour Unrest demands for its pacification—­is just one of those large alterations which will never be made by the collectively unconscious activities of men, by competitions and survival and the higgling of the market.  Humanity is rebelling against the continuing existence of a labour class as such, and I can see no way by which our present method of weekly wages employment can change by imperceptible increments into a method of salary and pension—­for it is quite evident that only by reaching that shall we reach the end of these present discontents.  The change has to be made on a comprehensive scale or not at all.  We need nothing less than a national plan of social development if the thing is to be achieved.

Now that, I admit, is, as the Americans say, a large proposition.  But we are living in a time of more and more comprehensive plans, and the mere fact that no scheme so extensive has ever been tried before is no reason at all why we should not consider one.  We think nowadays quite serenely of schemes for the treatment of the nation’s health as one whole, where our fathers considered illness as a blend of accident with special providences; we have systematised the community’s water supply, education, and all sorts of once chaotic services, and Germany and our own infinite higgledy-piggledy discomfort and ugliness have brought home to us at last even the possibility of planning the extension of our towns and cities.  It is only another step upward in scale to plan out new, more tolerable conditions of employment for every sort of worker and to organise the transition from our present disorder.