To interpret human history in this way is, of course, to deny its spiritual meaning, to deny that it is a record of the progress of the human _spirit_ at all. It is to read it as a tale of the improvement, or rather the increasing complication, of _things_, rather than of the advance of man. It is to view the world as a Domain of Matter, not as the Kingdom of Man--still less, as the Kingdom of God. It is to tie us helplessly to the chariot wheels of an industrial Juggernaut which knows nothing of moral values. Let the progress of industry make life noisy and ugly and anxious and unhappy: let it engross the great mass of mankind in tedious and uncongenial tasks and the remainder in the foolish and unsatisfying activities of luxurious living; let it defile the green earth with pits and factories and slag-heaps and the mean streets of those who toil at them, and dim the daylight with exhalations of monstrous vapour. It is not for us to complain or to resist: for we are in the grip of a Power which is greater than ourselves, a Power to which mankind in all five continents has learnt to yield--that Economic Process which is, in truth, the God, or the Devil, of the modern world. No thinking man dare acquiesce in such a conclusion or consent to bow the head before such fancied necessities. The function of industry, he will reply, is to serve human life not to master it: to beautify human life not to degrade it: to set life free not to enslave it. Economics is not the whole of life: and when it transgresses its bounds and exceeds its functions it must be controlled and thrust back into its place by the combined activities of men. The soul is higher than the body, and life is more than housekeeping. Liberty is higher than Riches, and the welfare of the community more important than its economic and material progress. These great processes, which the increase of man's knowledge has set in motion, are not impersonal inhuman forces: Men originated them: men administer them: and men must control them. Against economic necessity let us set political necessity: and let the watchword of that political necessity, here as always, be the freedom and the well-being of mankind. With this caution in mind, then, let us approach our subject. What is Economics? Economics is simply the Greek for 'house-keeping'. If writers and thinkers on the subject had only kept this simple fact in mind, or used the English word instead of the Greek, the world would have been saved much misery and confusion. Political economy is not, what Mill and other writers define it to be, 'the Science of Wealth'. It is the art of community-housekeeping, and community-housekeeping, as every woman knows, is a very important if subsidiary branch of the art of community-management or government.