The physical devastation, heart-breaking as the spectacle of it is, is not the difficult part of the problem, nor quantitatively the most important.[18] It is not the devastated districts that are suffering from famine, nor their losses which appreciably diminish the world supply of food. It is in cities in which not a house has been destroyed, in which, indeed, every wheel in every factory is still intact, that the population dies of hunger, and the children have to be fed by our charity. It is the fields over which not a single soldier has tramped that are condemned to sterility because those factories are idle, while the factories are condemned to idleness because the fields are sterile. The real 'economic argument' against war does not consist in the presentation of a balance sheet showing so much cost and destruction and so much gain. The real argument consists in the fact that war, and still more the ideas out of which it arises, produce ultimately an unworkable society. The physical destruction and perhaps the cost are greatly exaggerated. It is perhaps true that in the material foundations of wealth Britain is as well off to-day as before the War. It is not from lack of technical knowledge that the economic machine works with such friction: that has been considerably increased by the War. It is not from lack of idealism and unselfishness. There has been during the last five years such an outpouring of devoted unselfishness--the very hates have been unselfish--as history cannot equal. Millions have given their lives for the contrary ideals in which they believed. It is sometimes the ideals for which men die that make impossible their life and work together. The real 'economic argument,' supported by the experience of our victory, is that the ideas which produce war--the fears out of which it grows and the passions which it feeds--produce a state of mind that ultimately renders impossible the co-operation by which alone wealth can be produced and life maintained. The use of our power or our knowledge for the purpose of subduing Nature to our service depends upon the prevalence of certain ideas, ideas which underlie the 'art of living together.' They are something apart from mere technical knowledge which war, as in Germany, may increase, but which can never be a substitute for this 'art of living together.' (The arms, indeed, may be the instruments of anarchy, as in so much of Europe to-day). The War has left us a defective or perverted social sense, with a group of instincts and moralities that are disintegrating Western society, and will, unless checked, destroy it. These forces, like the 'ultimate art' which they have so nearly destroyed, are part of the problem of economics. For they render a production of wealth adequate to welfare impossible. How have they arisen? How can they be corrected? These questions will form an integral part of the problems here dealt with. CHAPTER II THE OLD ECONOMY AND THE POST-WAR STATE