The ideal of some intelligent and respectable business men, the restoration of the golden sixties, when workmen were docile and confiding, and trade unions were still half illegal, and foreign competition meant English competition in foreign countries, and prices were rising a little and not rising too much, is the one Utopia which can never be realized. The King may walk naked as long as his courtiers protest that he is clad; but when a child or a fool has broken the spell a tailor is more important than all their admiration. If the public, which suffers from the slackening of economic activity, {146} desires to end its _malaise_, it will not laud as admirable and all-sufficient the operation of motives which are plainly ceasing to move. It will seek to liberate new motives and to enlist them in its service. It will endeavor to find an alternative to incentives which were always degrading, to those who used them as much as to those upon whom they were used, and which now are adequate incentives no longer. And the alternative to the discipline which Capitalism exercised through its instruments of unemployment and starvation is the self-discipline of responsibility and professional pride. So the demand which aims at stronger organization, fuller responsibility, larger powers for the sake of the producer as a condition of economic liberty, the demand for freedom, is not antithetic to the demand for more effective work and increased output which is being made in the interests of the consumer. It is complementary to it, as the insistence by a body of professional men, whether doctors or university teachers, on the maintenance of their professional independence and dignity against attempts to cheapen the service is not hostile to an efficient service, but, in the long run, a condition of it. The course of wisdom for the consumer would be to hasten, so far as he can, the transition. For, as at present conducted, industry is working against the grain. It is compassing sea and land in its efforts to overcome, by ingenious financial and technical expedients, obstacles which should never have existed. It is trying to produce its results by conquering professional feeling instead of using it. It is carrying not only its inevitable economic burdens, but an ever increasing {147} load of ill will and skepticism. It has in fact "shot the bird which caused the wind to blow" and goes about its business with the corpse round its neck. Compared with that psychological incubus, the technical deficiencies of industry, serious though they often are, are a bagatelle, and the business men who preach the gospel of production without offering any plan for dealing with what is now the central fact in the economic situation, resemble a Christian apologist who should avoid disturbing the equanimity of his audience by carefully omitting all reference either to the fall of man or the scheme of salvation. If it is desired to increase the output of