when they are multiplied on that scale. Snowball letters, which seem a kindly joke to the idiots who start them, would wreck our postal system if sensible people did not conscientiously throw them into the waste paper basket. It is necessary to understand these things very clearly, because most people are so simple and ignorant of big business matters that the private capitalists are actually able to persuade them that Capitalism is a success because it makes profits, and public service (or Communism) a failure because it makes none. The simpletons forget that the profits come out of their own pockets, and that what is the better for the private capitalists in this respect is the worse for their customers, the disappearance of profit being simply the disappearance of overcharge. 36 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION You now see how it is that the nation cannot depend on private capital because there are so many vitally necessary things, from town drainage to lighthouses, which it will not provide at all, and how what it does provide it provides in the wrong order, refusing to make a harbor until it has made as many distilleries as the trade will hold, and building five luxurious houses for one rich person whilst a shocking proportion of the nation’s children is dying of overcrowding in slums. In short, the private capitalists, instead of doing the most desirable work first, begin at the wrong end. All that can be said for this policy is that if you begin at the wrong end you may be driven towards the right end when you have done your worst and can get no further in the wrong direction; and this is in fact the position into which our most respectable capitalists have been forced by circumstances. When the poor have bought all the strong drink they can afford to pay for, and the rich their racing stables and all the pearls they can find room for on their wives’ necks, the capitalists are forced to apply their next year’s accumulations of capital to the production of more necessary things.