He was competent to reach a conclusion standing himself at the head of one of Europe’s great industries. And he made a dream. It was that, when the war had come to an end and people were themselves again, they would see the vital importance to civilization of dividing among them the work of the world agreeably to their special aptitudes and the facts of environment—those to produce a surplus of whatever it was they had a genius for making and the materials ready; these others another kind of thing in which their skill and situation gave them an advantage; and so on through the whole series of natural and artificial things with which human wants are satisfied. Thus duplication and strife would be eliminated. Not only would there be enough of everything: from the elimination of senseless waste in private and public war there would be a saving of power and capital sufficient to water all the deserts of the earth and recreate man’s vistas here. As a dream, it was most alluring. As a plan it was worthless, for it contained two fatal assumptions, namely, that you could always find a Solomon to administer it and that people would submit to the benevolent tyranny of his wisdom. He himself was destined by his end to illustrate how people really behave. Shortly after the close of the war he was murdered in the name of fanatic nationalism. It was a sign. The war released a flood of repressed passions in nationalism. Great and small groups of submerged people asserted rights of self-determination and clothed themselves with frontiers and nationhood. Nearly all of these, together also with old countries whose character until then had been agricultural, were concurrently seized with the thought of economic independence—that is to say, with the thought of having machines and industries of their own, for they had seen a new thing. Industrial nations and none other were powerful in the world. Nations without machines were helpless, subject, in fact, to those that had them. Enormously stimulated in its function of reproduction by the onset of this human idea, the machine broke bounds. No one now has any control of it.