old masters would decline if millionaires preferred to collect another kind of scalps to decorate their wigwams.  Bookmakers and company-promoters live on the widespread passion for acquiring money without working for it.  It is hardly possible to estimate the increase of real wealth, and the stoppage of waste, which would result from the adoption of a rational, still more of a Christian, valuation of the good things of life.  I have dealt with this subject in the essay on The Indictment against Christianity, and have emphasised the importance of taking into consideration, in all economic questions, the human costs of production, the factors which make work pleasant or irksome, and especially the moral condition of the worker.  Good-will diminishes the toll which labour takes of the labourer; envy and hatred vastly increase it while they diminish its product.  It is, of course, impossible that the worker should not resent having to devote his life to making what is useless or mischievous, and to ministering to the irrational wastefulness of luxury.  Christianity, in condemning the selfish and irresponsible use of money, seeks to remove one of the chief causes of social bitterness.  Senseless extravagance is the best friend of revolution.

The abuse poured upon ‘the old political economy,’ as it is called, is only half deserved.  As compared with the insane doctrines now in favour with the working-man, the old political economy was sound and sensible.  Hard work, thrift, and economy in production are, in truth, as we used to be told, the only ways to increase the national wealth, and the contrary practices can only lead to economic ruin.  There is not much fault to find with the old economists so long as they recognised that their science was an abstract science, which for its own purposes dealt with an unreal abstraction—­the ‘economic man.’  Every science is obliged to isolate one aspect of reality in this way.  But when political economy was treated as a philosophy of life it began to be mischievous.  A book on ‘the science of the stomach,’ without knowledge of physiology or the working of other organs, would not be of much use.  Man has never been a merely acquisitive being; for example, he is also a fighting and a praying being.  If our dominant motives were changed, the whole conditions dealt with by political economy would change with them.  There have been civilisations in which the passion for accumulation was comparatively weak; and notoriously there are many persons in whom it is wholly absent.  Devotion to art, to scientific investigation, and to religion is strong enough, where it exists, to kill ‘the economic man’ in human nature.  A civilised nation honours its idealists, and recognises the immense benefit which they confer on the community by creating or revealing new and inexhaustible values; in an uncivilised country they can hardly live.  Ruskin and William Morris saw, and doubtless exaggerated, the danger