"Consider that simple sentence, and you will see what is the matter with the modern mind. I do not mean the growth of immorality; I mean the genesis of gibbering idiocy. There are ten little boys whom you wish to provide with ten top-hats; and you find there are only eight top-hats. To a simple mind it would seem not impossible to make two more hats; to find out whose business it is to make hats, and induce him to make hats; to agitate against an absurd delay in delivering hats; to punish anybody who has promised hats and failed to provide hats. The modern mind is that which says that if we only cut off the heads of two of the little boys, they will not want hats; and then the hats will exactly go round. The suggestion that heads are rather more important than hats is dismissed as a piece of mystical metaphysics. The assertion that hats were made for heads, and not heads for hats savours of antiquated dogma. The musty text which says that the body is more than raiment; the popular prejudice which would prefer the lives of boys to the mathematical arrangement of hats,--all these things are alike to be ignored. The logic of enlightenment is merciless; and we duly summon the headsman to disguise the deficiencies of the hatter. For it makes very little difference to the logic of the thing, that we are talking of houses and not of hats.... The fundamental fallacy remains the same; that we are beginning at the wrong end, because we have never troubled to consider at what end to begin." [24] Section 5. POVERTY AND CIVILISATION A modern writer is burdened by many words that carry an erroneous meaning, and one of these is the word "civilisation." Intended to mean "The Art of Living," this word, by wrong usage, now implies that our method of combining mental culture and bodily comfort is the highest, noblest, and best way to live. Yet this implication is by no means certain. On the contrary, the spectacle of our social life would bring tears to eyes undimmed by the industrial traditions of the past hundred years. This I know to be true, having once travelled to London in the company of a young girl who came from the Thirteenth Century. She had lived some twelve years on the Low Sierra of Andalusia, where in a small sunlit village she may have vainly imagined our capital to be a city with walls of amethyst and streets of gold, for when the train passed through that district which lies to the south of Waterloo, the child wept. "Look at these houses," she sobbed; "_Dios mio_, they have no view." [Footnote 15: Memorandum issued by the Dominions Royal Commission, December 3, 1915 (p. 2).] [Footnote 16: Prince Kropotkin, _Fields, Factories, and Workshops_, 1899, chapter iii.] [Footnote 17: Vide _The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine_, by S. O'Brien (Longmans, 1921).]