The aim of human polity is human happiness. For those holding certain beliefs it is conditioned by the hope of a larger happiness, which it must not imperil. But happiness, the making glad of the heart of man, is the secular test and the only realistic test.
Like all questions of this sort, it cannot be answered by statistics. Statistics are artificial even when they are not fictitious, for they always assume the very fact which a moral estimate must always deny; they assume that every man is one man. They are based on the sort of atomic theory that the individual is really individual, in the sense of indivisible.
Education really meant the teaching of town things to country people who did not want to learn them. I suggest that education should now mean the teaching of country things to town people who do not want to learn them.
Now the capitalist system, good or bad, right or wrong, rests upon two ideas: that the rich will always be rich enough to hire the poor; and the poor will always be poor enough to want to be hired.
If we cannot go back, it hardly seems worthwhile to go forward. There is nothing in front but a flat wilderness of standardization either by Bolshevism or Big Business. But it is strange that some of us should have seen sanity, if only in a vision, while the rest go forward chained eternally to enlargement without liberty and progress without hope.
When there is once established a widely scattered ownership, there is a public opinion that is stronger than any law; and very often (what in modern times is even more remarkable) a law that is really an expression of public opinion. It may be very difficult for modern people to imagine a world in which men are not generally admired for covetousness and crushing their neighbours; but I assure them that such strange patches of an earthly paradise do really remain on earth.
It is true that I believe in fairy tales — in the sense that I marvel so much at what does exist that I am the readier to admit what might.
It is perfectly feasible to imagine an Industrialism that is not capitalist; machinery and its ownership could easily be decentralized — and never more so than in our day when the direction of technological development in itself points to decentralization. If that tendency does not make its mark, it is only because men of power have so decided, and the mass of men have acquiesced.
Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the necessities.
Two points were always put by those suspicious of the Aristotelianism of Aquinas; and they sound to us now very quaint and comic, taken together. One was the view that the stars are personal beings, governing our lives; the other the great general theory that men have one mind between them a view obviously opposed to immortality; that is, to individuality. Both linger, among the Moderns; so string is still the tyranny of the Ancients. Astrology sprawls over the Sunday papers, and the other doctrine has its hundredth form in what is called Communism; or the Soul of the Hive.
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