to which spiritual values were exposed at the hands of the dominant economism.  Our danger now is that neglect of the simplest economic laws may plunge the nation into such misery that the people will no longer be willing to support art, science, learning, and philosophy.  A large section of the labour party has the same standard of values as the hated ‘capitalist,’ and detests those whom it calls intellectuals and sky-pilots because they depreciate the currency which their class, no less than the capitalist, believes to be the only sound money.

It may be asked whether there is any reason to think that there is now less regard for the higher, the qualitative values of life, than at other periods.  My opinion is that ever since the time of Rousseau and his contemporaries, we have been led astray by a will-of-the-wisp akin to the apocalyptic dreams of the Jews in the last two centuries before Christ, dreams which also filled the minds of the first generation of Christians.  The Greeks never made the mistake of throwing their ideals into the future, a practice which, as Dr. Bosanquet has said, ’is the death of all sane idealism.’  The belief in ‘a good time coming’ is a Jewish delusion.  It nourished the Jews in their amazing obstinacy, and led to the annihilation of their State which, to the very end, they saw in their dreams bruising all other nations with a rod of iron, and breaking them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.  But, as any idealism is better than none, the Hebrew race has won remarkable triumphs, though of a kind which it never desired.

The myth of progress is our form of apocalyptism.  In France it began with sentimentalism, developing normally into homicidal mania.  In England it took the form of a kind of Deuteronomic religion.  As a reward for our national virtues, our population expanded, our exports and imports went up by leaps and bounds, and our empire received additions every decade.  It was plain that when Christ said ’Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,’ He was thinking of the British Empire.  The whole structure of our social order encouraged the measurement of everything by quantitative standards.  Everyone could understand that a generation which travels sixty miles an hour must be five times as civilised as one which only travelled twelve.  Thus the beneficent ‘law of progress’ was exemplified in that nation which had best deserved to be its exponent.  The myth in question is that there is a natural law of improvement, manifested by greater complexity of structure, by increase of wants and the means to satisfy them.  A nation advances in civilisation by increasing in wealth and population, and by multiplying the accessories and paraphernalia of life.

Belief in this alleged law has vitiated our natural science, our political science, our history, our philosophy, and even our religion.  Science declared that ‘the survival of the fittest’ was a law of nature, though nature has condemned to extinction the majestic animals of the saurian era, and has carefully preserved the bug, the louse, and the spirochaeta pallida.