produce more, if the riches produced do not find consumers? The modern world, in freeing men’s desires from all the ancient limits and restraints, has given a vigorous impulse to human industry. In order to satisfy the increased needs of the masses, man has invented machinery, and has put a premium on the new countries. But precisely because there is no longer limit or restraint to men’s desires, industry, which in the past was the handmaiden of human needs, is now becoming their tyrant. It is creating and multiplying our needs with a view to their subsequent satisfaction. In order that it may never be short of work, it is tempting men in a thousand ways to desire and to consume more. Therefore our civilisation has made of riches not the fitting means of satisfying reasonable and legitimate needs, but an end in themselves. We are obliged to produce them in order to consume them, and to consume them in order to produce them. Every moment which a man does not spend in producing riches, he must spend in consuming the riches produced by others; so that he can never stay still for one instant, but must jump from occupation to amusement, and from amusement back again to occupation. He must try to make the day as long as possible, accustoming himself to do everything at full speed, and cutting down the hours of sleep as much as possible. Everybody knows that we moderns, especially in the great cities, are losing the habit of sleeping. We have not yet mentioned, however, the most serious drawbacks of the present-day lack of any fixed limit to men’s desires. In the past ages, the efforts of religion were directed to educating men to self-introspection; to teaching them to explore their own consciences, to render account to themselves of their own sins and vices, and to try to amend them. One might even go so far as to say that from one point of view Christianity was principally a melancholy meditation on the perversity of human nature, and an effort to purify it through meditation, suffering, and the love of God. One has only to read the letters of Saint Catherine, or the _Divine Comedy_, or Pascal’s _Pensées_ to realise to what an extent the moral refinement which is the fruit of these meditations preoccupied the loftiest minds, and, at second hand, the great ones of the earth in past centuries. A considerable part of the energies of every generation was consumed in this introspective effort, instead of in action; for centuries and centuries, saints, moralists, and preachers abounded in Europe, while men of action, fit to conquer the world and its riches, nature and her secrets, were scarce.