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 CHAPTER V

THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH

the last sentence of the last chapter I spoke of education, pacification, and industrial organisation as the three monumental tasks of a reformed political system. If the supreme object of a central administration—the sooner we cease to talk of “government” the better—is to make a people healthy, prosperous, and happy, these are surely the three reforms to which it will most resolutely apply itself. I have spoken of the very grave and pressing nature of one of these reforms: the need to abolish militarism and war. Later chapters will deal with education, in the very broad and rich meaning which I assign to the word. Here I would sketch the problem which seems to me to weigh heavily on us in connection with the distribution of wealth and the present disorganisation of industry.

It is useful sometimes to imagine ourselves in the year 3000 or so looking back with critical eye on the twentieth century. One pictures the future historian—some narrowly specialised expert on the social life of the second decade of the twentieth