What advertizing cannot accomplish governments may undertake. There are backward, inert, idle races that do not want much. They are content to do with little. It becomes therefore the diplomatic and military business of the powerful industrial governments to change the ways of such races. They must be brought forward, modernized, electrified, taught how to want more. Why? In order that they shall be able to consume their quota of the machine’s divisible product. Plenty shall be put upon them. There is no limit to that blessing. Those who have it are anxious to share it, must share it in fact, in order to keep it for themselves, under the principle that the cheapness of things is in proportion to the quantity produced. The more the cheaper; the fewer the dearer. Are you beginning to suppose that man has found what he sought? Since in this extraordinary manner he appears to have provided himself with plenty, shall that dusty bundle of prayers be recalled or sent to the furnace? As to his prayers, they were never frank. Perhaps for that reason he should wish he had them back. He prayed for plenty; what he secretly associated with the thought of plenty was leisure—freedom from toil. And once more he is disappointed, thwarted by his own inventions. Plenty he has achieved. Toil he has not escaped. The machine that was to have been a labour-saving device becomes an engine of production that must be served. It is as if you could not save labour at all—as if you could make it only more productive, thereby achieving an abundance of things with no effect whatever upon the necessity to perform monotonous labour. All this labour-saving machinery we live with notwithstanding, never were people more complaining of their tasks. That might mean only that they were increasingly conscious of an abating evil; but there is no certainty that the abatement even where it is noticeable is permanent. The signs are otherwise. In all material respects people are better off than ever before. Their bodies are more comfortable, their minds are free from the terror of hunger, they have much more to enjoy and consume and hope for, because their labour is more richly rewarded in things. See the amazing quantity and variety of things such as only the rich could once afford now circulating at the base of the human pyramid. Not necessaries only. Silks, watches, ornaments, shoes like those of queens and ladies, plated ware, upholstered furniture, soft beds, besides things that were formerly non-existent and therefore beyond the reach of kings, sultans and nabobs, such as electric lights, plumbing, motor-cars. In the United States a motor-car to every six persons! And still no sign that the curve of human contentment is rising; no sign that the curse of toil will ever be got rid of.