Civilizations rest fundamentally upon ideas. These ideas to be effective must be those of the dominant classes in the[Pg 31] civilization. In making the business men the dominant and sole class in America, that country is making the experiment of resting her civilization on the ideas of business men. The other classes, dominated by the business one, are rapidly conforming in their philosophy of life to it. The business man, in so far as he is more than a business type, in so far as he is a fully rounded personality (as, I repeat, many of them now are), owes that development of himself outside his work to the work of other classes in the past or present. If those classes become merged in his own, whither can even he himself look for his extra-occupational development? If the leaders are not humanely rounded personalities, civilized rather than barbarian, what shall be expected of the mass which patterns itself upon them? In a word, can a great civilization be built up or maintained upon the philosophy of the counting-house and the sole basic idea of a profit? [Pg 33] CHAPTER II THE COST OF PROSPERITY [Pg 35] THE COST OF PROSPERITY I Not long ago a despatch from Washington announced that “the highest standard of living ever attained in the history of the world was reached last year [1926] by the American people,” and gave as basis for the statement the government’s figure for the income of our population, which income was set at ninety billion dollars. The “high standard” thus indicated is unhesitatingly accepted by almost everyone; but even if we do accept as a fact, though it is far from being a universal one, the ability of all persons to spend more and to buy more things than ever before, it may be worth while to consider what some of the by-products of the processes involved have been. Overwhelmed by the material advance made in the past five decades or so and by the vast amount of Pollyanna literature with which we are flooded by politicians and business executives with axes to grind, we are apt to lose sight of the law of compensation and to think of all change as unalloyed improvement. Change may or may not be “progress,” but whether it is or not it is bound to involve compensatory losses. Man may have advanced far from his ancestor which lived in the primeval slime, but that lowly progenitor could breathe either in air or water and if he lost a leg could grow another. To-day man can make his voice heard three thousand miles away, but he dies if you hold his nose in a water basin and is[Pg 36] a cripple for life when he loses a foot. What he gains in one direction he drops in another, unpopular as Nature or anyone else may be when they tell him so. One is not necessarily a pessimist, therefore, when one chooses to consider what losses may have been entailed by attaining to the present “highest standard of living.”