Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/224

 facilities we may perhaps get rid of that unnatural inertia upon which the demagogue counts.

If we can get a few proper stipulations approved, there is much to be accomplished in the way of fundamental adjustment; but if we aim for simplification it must be done with an eye to prime human motives, and a care that civilization is not severed from its vital tap-root of what is interchangeably termed self-interest, the hope of security or the desire of personal freedom.

If our civilization is severed from this tap-root, both pruning and harvesting will become very profitless community rites; and yet it is largely the lust of pruning and the dream of harvest that have brought forward our new menace bureaucracy with its loose-mouthed ministers.