ARE LAWS INEXORABLE OR CONTROLLABLE? 339
domesticated Fauna, the incidence of disease had been diminished, and
the expectation of life had been lengthened, by advances in preventive
medicine which had proved most effective when they had taken the posi-
tive form of improvements in the physical and spiritual conditions of
human life.

When we pass into the realm of laws of Human Nature, we find the
same tale being told by reductions in rates of insurance premium here
likewise. The risk of accidents on the road and in the factory had been
reduced through a moral education in a sense of responsibility still more
effectively than through the imposition of pains and penalties or through
the installation of physical safety-devices. The risk of burglaries—which
was more conspicuously refractory than the risk of accidents was to
reduction either through precautions or through punishments—had
been found to vary in inverse ratio with the general average level of
moral probity, and this, in its turn, was apt to vary in some relation with
the minimum level of material well-being in societies in which there was
no more than an infinitesimally rare leaven of saints capable of rising
wholly superior to their material circumstances.

On the economic plane it had been found that the volume of produc-
tion per man-hour could be increased by the stimulation of the will to
work more notably than by improvements in the skill of the workman or
in the efficiency of his tools; and religious, ideological, and political
motives for working with a will had sometimes proved more potent than
economic incentives.

When we come to consider, for our purpose in this chapter, those
alternating increases and decreases in Western economic activity that
had come to be known as business cycles, we find the professional stu-
dents of them drawing a distinction between the 'controllable5 and the
'uncontrollable' factors,1 and one school—namely, the exponents of the
'pure monetary theory'—going so far as to maintain that these fluctua-
tions were due to a control deliberately exercised by the bankers over the
activities of the traders and the manufacturers. A majority, however, of
the experts in the writer's day evidently held that these deliberate acts,
based on rationally calculated considerations of individual self-interest,
on the part of persons occupying key positions of power in the economic
system, counted for less in the generation of a rhythm of alternating
booms and slumps than the uncontrolled play of imagination and feeling
welling up from the subconscious lower levels of the Psyche.

'In rejecting some and accepting other schemes, the men of money are
taking an important, though not a conspicuous, part in detemiining how
labor shall be employed, what products shall be made, and what localities
built up. Not all lenders, however, are able to make intelligent decisions.
The great mass of small investors, and not a few of the large, lack the
experience or ability or time to discriminate wisely between profitable and
unprofitable schemes. . . . Investors who lack independent judgment are
peculiarly subject to the iiifluence of feeling in the matters where feeling
is a dangerous guide. The alternating waves of confidence and timidity

1 See, for example, Haberler, G.: Prosperity and Depression ford ed., Geneva 1941,
League of Nations), p. 7.