Have you ever seen the curiosity called a Prince Rupert’s Drop? It is a bead of glass in such a state of internal strain that if you break off the tiniest corner the whole bead flies violently to bits. Europe was like that in 1914. A handful of people in Serbia committed a murder, and the next moment half Europe was murdering the other half. This frightful condition of internal strain and instability was not set up by human nature: it was, I repeat, intensely repugnant to human nature, being a condition of chronic terror that at last became unbearable, like that of a woman who commits suicide because she can no longer endure the dread of death. It was set up by Capitalism. Capitalism, you will say, is at bottom nothing but covetousness; and covetousness is human nature. That is true; but covetousness is not the whole of human nature; it is only a part, and one that vanishes when it is satisfied, like hunger after a meal, up to which point it is wholesome and necessary. Under Capitalism it becomes a dread of poverty and slavery, which are neither wholesome nor necessary. And, as we have just seen, capital is carried by its own nature beyond the control of both human covetousness and human conscience, marching on blindly and automatically, until we find on the one hand the masses of mankind condemned to poverty relieved only by horrible paroxysms of bloodshed, and on the other a handful of hypertrophied capitalists gasping under the load of their growing millions, and giving it away in heaps in a desperate attempt, partly to get rid of it without being locked up as madmen for throwing it into the sea, and partly to undo, by founding Rockefeller institutes and Carnegie libraries, and hospitals and universities and schools and churches, the effects of the welter of ignorance and poverty produced by the system under which it has accumulated on their hands. To call these unfortunate billionaires monsters of covetousness in the face of their wild disgorgings (to say nothing of their very ordinary portraits) is silly. They are rather to be compared to the sorcerer’s apprentice who called up a demon to fetch a drink for him, and, not knowing the spell for stopping him when he had brought enough, was drowned in an ocean of wine. 42 HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to little familiar things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to women.