The graver evils of the capitalist system all arise from its uneven distribution of power.  The possessors of capital wield an influence quite out of proportion to their numbers or their services to the community.  They control almost the whole of education and the press; they decide what the average man shall know or not know; the cinema has given them a new method of propaganda, by which they enlist the support of those who are too frivolous even for illustrated papers.  Very little of the intelligence of the world is really free:  most of it is, directly or indirectly, in the pay of business enterprises or wealthy philanthropists.  To satisfy capitalist interests, men are compelled to work much harder and more monotonously than they ought to work, and their education is scamped.  Wherever, as in barbarous or semi-civilized countries, labour is too weak or too disorganized to protect itself, appalling cruelties are practised for private profit.  Economic and political organizations become more and more vast, leaving less and less room for individual development and initiative.  It is this sacrifice of the individual to the machine that is the fundamental evil of the modern world.

To cure this evil is not easy, because efficiency is promoted, at any given moment, though not in the long run, by sacrificing the individual to the smooth working of a vast organization, whether military or industrial.  In war and in commercial competition, it is necessary to control individual impulses, to treat men as so many “bayonets” or “sabres” or “hands,” not as a society of separate people with separate tastes and capacities.  Some sacrifice of individual impulses is, of course, essential to the existence of an ordered community, and this degree of sacrifice is, as a rule, not regretable even from the individual’s point of view.  But what is demanded in a highly militarized or industrialized nation goes far beyond this very moderate degree.  A society which is to allow much freedom to the individual must be strong enough to be not anxious about home defence, moderate enough to refrain from difficult external conquests, and rich enough to value leisure and a civilized existence more than an increase of consumable commodities.

But where the material conditions for such a state of affairs exist, the psychological conditions are not likely to exist unless power is very widely diffused throughout the community.  Where power is concentrated in a few, it will happen, unless those few are very exceptional people, that they will value tangible achievements in the way of increase in trade or empire more than the slow and less obvious improvements that would result from better education combined with more leisure.  The joys of victory are especially great to the holders of power, while the evils of a mechanical organization fall almost exclusively upon the less influential.  For these reasons, I do not believe that any community in which power is much concentrated will long refrain