WAT    OF    REDEMPTION	317
men of money and of those to whom their money, seeking
multiplication by usury, was advanced.
The success of the great British capitalists of the nineteenth
century had blinded civilisation to the essential difference between
profits and real wealth. A rare combination of native character,
vigour and inventiveness, geographical good fortune and
historical opportunity had caused their experiment to succeed
in its early stages beyond their wildest expectations. Britain
became richer than any other nation had ever been before. But
she also became poorer. Her soaring exports and accumulating
investments were the products of the new economic indi-
vidualism. So were the conditions of the early factory towns.
It was the paradox of the nineteenth century—an epoch in
which Britain led the world—that the practice of a sturdy and
often heroic individualism, which increased the potentialities of
human  wealth  out  of measure,  unwittingly created social
injustice and inhumanity on a scale formerly unknown to
Christians.     The   economists   were   proved   right   in   their
contention that enlightened self-interest, unfettered by State
-control, could enrich men more quickly than any other means.
Yet the human misery caused by its pursuit justified the prophets
of a more ordered society who warned unheeding generations
that profits created at the price of social health and content-
ment were illusory. In the long run they were not profits at all.
For they had still to be paid for in the cumulative loss of
working power   sustained   through   inhuman   conditions   of
life and labour and inferior breeding capacity.   The flaw in
laissez-faire, and in the entire system of accountancy to which it
gave birth, was that it regarded man as a self-sufficient unit
like a machine.   It forgot that he grew.   It failed to recognise
that the human economic unit was the continuing society—
nation, group or family—from which the individual derived his
habits-and instincts. It failed to perceive that the effect of under-
nourishment, bad housing, unemployment and social injustice
was not confined to the immediate victims but was transmitted
to his descendants.  A business that only operated in one genera-
tion might profit from overworking and underpaying human
beings.   A nation could not.   Yet there was no nation of any
importance that did not follow Britain's example.
Those who set out so gaily along that glittering road of
accumulation failed to see to what it led.   They did not grasp