Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world without dreams, especially an economic world.  It is because even bad dreams are better in this world than having no dreams at all that bad people so called are so largely allowed to run it.

In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics to be reckoned with is Desire.

The next move in economics is going to be the statement of a shrewd, dogged, realizable ideal.  It is only ideals that have aroused the wrong passions, and it is only ideals that will arouse the right ones.

It will have to be, I imagine, when it comes, not a mere statement of principles, an analysis, or a criticism, but a moving-picture, a portrait of the human race, that shall reveal man’s heart to himself.  What we want is a vast white canvas, spread, as it were, over the end of the world, before which we shall all sit together, the audience of the nations, of the poor, of the rich, as in some still, thoughtful place—­all of us together; and then we will throw up before us on the vast white screen in the dark the vivid picture of our vast desires, flame up upon it the hopes, the passions of human lives, and the grim, silent wills of men. "What do we want?” “Where are we going?"

In place of the literature of criticism we have come now to the literature of Desire.

This literature will have to come slowly, and I have come to believe that the first book, when it comes, will be perhaps a book that does not prove anything, a book that is a mere cry, a prayer, or challenge; the story of what one man with these streetfuls of the faces of men and the faces of women pouring their dullness and pouring their weariness over him, has desired, and of what, God helping him, he will have.

There is a certain sense in which merely praying to God has gone by.  In the present desperate crisis of a world plunging on in the dark to a catastrophe or a glory that we cannot guess, it is a time for men to pray a prayer, a standing-up prayer, to one another.

I believe that it is going to be this huge gathering-in of public desire, this imperious challenge of what men want, this standing-up prayer of men to one another, which alone shall make men go forth with faith and singing once more into the battle of life.  Sometimes it has seemed to me I have already heard it—­this song of men’s desires about me—­faintly.  But I have seen that the time is at hand when it shall come as a vast chorus of cities, of fields, of men’s voices, filling the dome of the world—­a chorus in the glory and the shame of which no millionaire who merely wants to make money, no artist who is not expressing the souls and freeing the bodies of men, no statesman who is not gathering up the desires of crowds, and going daily through the world hewing out the will of the people, shall dare to live.

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But while this is the vision of my belief, I would not have any one suppose that I am the bearer of easy and gracious tidings.