to isolate one aspect of reality in this way. But when political economy
was treated as a philosophy of life it began to be mischievous. A book
on 'the science of the stomach,' without knowledge of physiology or the
working of other organs, would not be of much use. Man has never been a
merely acquisitive being; for example, he is also a fighting and a
praying being. If our dominant motives were changed, the whole
conditions dealt with by political economy would change with them. There
have been civilisations in which the passion for accumulation was
comparatively weak; and notoriously there are many persons in whom it is
wholly absent. Devotion to art, to scientific investigation, and to
religion is strong enough, where it exists, to kill 'the economic man'
in human nature. A civilised nation honours its idealists, and
recognises the immense benefit which they confer on the community by
creating or revealing new and inexhaustible values; in an uncivilised
country they can hardly live. Ruskin and William Morris saw, and
doubtless exaggerated, the danger 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