“That is only one of the flaws in the Syndicalist’s design. His machine has not been constructed with a view to this and other human weakness. In a world of automata it might work; in a world of flesh and blood it wouldn’t. In short, Syndicalism could destroy all the businesses of the world quite easily, but it could not build them again. [Sidenote: The Theories] “Syndicalism, Socialism, Anarchism cannot stand for a moment under the eye of analysis without tumbling to pieces as practical inventions. “They seem daring and ingenious, but they are dishonouring to virile thought. “Let us change for a moment and ask ourselves, not what we would say to the engineer who disregarded natural laws, but what would we say of a playwright who proposed to present life to us in a play constructed without a proper view to human passions, weaknesses, and fallibility, as well as to human virtue, altruism, etc.? “We would say at once: It is not possible. He may write such a play, but it would have this fault: it would represent no society that ever lived in the world, and in a thousand years hence it would be as valueless as it is to-day. “And that is, in fact, what you might say of all the Theorists in Humanity I know. They have written plays for men to act in that are quite valueless to-day, would have been quite valueless a thousand years ago, and will be quite valueless a thousand years hence. “They have left out Human Nature.” [Sidenote: The Laws of Nature] “The Statesman who would leave the world better than he found it must take Human Nature as it is, and, instead of attempting to make it grow in direct violation of the laws that rule it, he must assist it to grow in accordance with those laws. “Those laws are in the main good. “As I have pointed out to you, they are the laws that cultivated crocodiles so that at last they became men, that cultivated a hell of fire until it became a habitable world, and that will cultivate men until they become better than present-day men. “The Reformer must study those laws. He must look at the world generously and widely, and from the very beginning of things. He must have communion with the great earth spirit which has brought all of us to where we are, and, humbling himself to the dust, study the working of that spirit through the ages. “He will, unless he is blind, inevitably see one truth: that this great spirit has never meddled with the growth of life and thought, but has laboured Titanically to prepare the conditions favourable to that growth. “It led life by the fin and claw till life developed hands and a mind wherewith to develop its own conditions favourable to growth. And all the improvements of the world since then have followed that law, the Law of Improvement of Conditions, not any vague Law for the Improvement of Life.