WAY OF REDEMPTION 329

came to be not "Is it just?" but "Does it pay?" There was only
one check on that rule—the human conscience. With the gradual
concentration of business in the hands of limited liability com-
panies, even that check was removed. A limited liability company
has no conscience, A priesthood of figures cannot consider
daims of morality and justice that conflict with its mathematical
formulas: it must live by its own rules. Man, who had once
tried to model his life on the divine, came to take his orders from
the lender of money and the chartered accountant acting in their
purely professional capacity. That has been the story of the last
century of civilisation. The age of enlightened selfishness begot
plutocracy, and plutocracy begot the monstrous materialistic
and pagan tyrannies we are now fighting to destroy. It was
England that first unconsciously led the world into this morass.
It is England—wisest and gentlest of the nations—that has now
to discover the way out

If, remembering all the kindly and virtuous men who in the
course of their duty and livelihood minister to the modern
economic and financial machine, the reader doubts this, let him
ask himself this question. C*m a bank, in the face of actuarial
fact, grant credit to a man whose failure must cause far greater
human misery and injustice than the imprudent under-writing
of his overdraft could conceivably cause the bank's shareholders?
To a modern mind, brought up in commercial principles, the
very question has come to seem dishonest.

It is not the profit motive that is to blame. Free men have
at all times sought profit from their labour. It is its enthrone-
ment to the exclusion of other motives far more important.
Under* any sane human system the first concern of a factory
should be the production of goods to give the utmost use,
pleasure, .and wear to those who require them, and the satis-
faction of the human needs of their makers. Under the present
system the one is only considered indirectly, being subordinated
to the prior ends of making the tflgmmiiTn profit on the year's
trading or paying the rake-off—frequently an unnecessary one—
of the middleman. The other is scarcely considered at all
Lack of satisfaction of the producer in his work—the supreme
human need of our age—is embittering and sabotaging the
whole industrial system. It is destroying the rhythm and
vitality of life. It is of little avail for scientists to give man
the wonderful tools of modern machinery if a system of