premium is offered to mere cupidity; that the fraternal social life which Christianity enjoins is often literally impossible, except at the cost of economic suicide; and that in a competitive system a business man is, by the very force of circumstances, a warrior, though war is an enemy of love and destructive of Christian society.  When the object of bargaining is to give as little and gain as much as possible, the Christian standard of values has been rejected as completely as it was by Machiavelli himself.  The competition between two parties to a bargain is often a competition in unserviceableness.  Money is very frequently made by creating a local and temporary monopoly, which enables the vendor to squeeze the purchaser.  In all such transactions one man’s gain is another man’s loss.  This state of things, the evils of which are almost universally recognised and deplored, marks the end of the glorification of productive industry which was one result of the Reformation.

Hardly anything distinguishes modern from medieval ethics more sharply than the emphasis laid by Protestant morality on the duty of making and producing something tangible.  Theoretically the Protestant may hold that ‘doing ends in death,’ and he may sing these words on Sunday; but his whole life on week days is occupied in strenuous ‘doing.’  We find in Calvinism and Quakerism the genuinely religious basis of the modern business life, which, however, has degenerated sadly, now that the largest fortunes are made by dealing in money rather than in commodities.  In the books of Samuel Smiles, and in Clough’s poem beginning ‘Hope ever more and believe, O Man,’ we find the Gospel of productive work preached with fervour.  It is out of favour now in England; but in America we still see quaint attempts to make business a religion, as in the Middle Ages religion was a business.  In these circles, it is productive activity as such to which value is attached, without much enquiry as to the utility of the product.  The result has been an immense accumulation of the apparatus of life, without any corresponding elevation in moral standards.  The mischiefs wrought by modern commercialism are largely the fruit of the purely irrational production which it encourages.  There are, says Professor Santayana, Nibelungen who toil underground over a gold which they will never use, and in their obsession with production begrudge themselves all inclinations to recreation, to merriment, to fancy.  Visible signs of such unreason appear in the relentless and hideous aspect which life puts on; for those instruments which emancipate themselves from their uses soon become hateful.  ’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.’  We cannot, indeed, be surprised that this ideal of productive work as a means of grace, precious for its own sake, has no attraction for the masses, and that independent thinkers like Edward Carpenter should write books on ‘Civilisation, its Cause and Cure.’