The above are only a few among the unsuspected and possible contributory causes of modern misery. It would be easy to continue on the same lines at considerable length, and further suggestions will be made in the last chapter; but surely, even at this stage, enough has already been said, to persuade the thoughtful reader that social reform alone, as it is generally understood, both in its moderate and extreme guise, might be completely and even magnificently realised, and yet leave some of the most potent causes of despondency as flourishing and as prevalent as ever. Some of our most respected values lie at the root of the contributory causes just outlined. Would it not be wiser, before starting on our wild goose chase in search of new world orders, to decide whether such values as those which are radical to the contributory causes, are sufficiently sound to be maintained? For these contributory and unsuspected causes, which have been outlined above, are all supplementary to the principal cause analysed in the first part of this chapter. Thus a good deal of spade work would appear to be both wise and even indispensable, before we can proceed with any confidence to the facile solution of modern misery, consisting in altering our economic [p178] conditions;[34] and this spade work, which seems to the thinker to be little more than a measure of ordinary prudence, overlooked though it has been by the Bolshevists, may in the end prove the very means of sustaining the success and ensuring the permanence of whatever economic modifications may subsequently appear necessary and advisable. At all events, to proceed along any other lines, would certainly mean that a large number of essential and principal elements in the general causation of modern misery, would run a grave risk of being overlooked; it would therefore mean that the continued presence of these elements would remain to mar any measure of success that any radical economic reform might achieve, and would thus demonstrate to the whole world a fact which, despite the example of Russia, is by no means sufficiently clear: that social reform like Protestantism in the 15th century, like Puritanism in the 17th, and like Republicanism in the 18th, is an obsession, the hypnotic power of which is out of all proportion to the amount of good it can possibly establish by its successful fulfilment. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 33: The ideas from which this essay has been developed were first embodied in a short article called _Happiness and Social Reform_, contributed by the present writer to the “Oxford Fortnightly,” in November, 1913.]