Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/271

Rh active workers? All specialisation contains the seeds of death; the most daring army must, at times, wait for the supply columns to come up. In the growth of brains and contentment something far more subtle is involved than any technical education or healthy housing. Is it quite certain that at the end of a century of refusal to get rich as quickly as possible, we should not have been far richer than we are?

I know that in this War you have set your controllers, and your international committees of controllers, to manage vast trades as single concerns, and that they have not let us starve. But in the crisis you have very rightly been using your capital of intellect and experience. Those men are the men that they are because they have built up private businesses with the fear of bankruptcy ever before them: they have grown up with their business lives always in their hands. Great organisations, whether of combines or Government services, in that they afford a sheltered life, will not give you unlimited crops of such men.

You urge that credit and insurance must have broad bases, and I agree: their function is to average away local deficiencies due to the varying seasons and the varying success of undertakings. But let us none the less