Wherever an individual feels the pressure of economic conditions too keenly he loses what little poise he may have had. He becomes restless and sleepless and the whole tone of his mind and body is lowered. Where the distress from such pressure becomes general, there the nation loses tone; quarrels are readily picked with other nations, and war is resorted to as a means of reducing population and of destroying all forms of wealth, so that a new demand may be created and the economic pressure for a time be lessened. These conditions recur again and again at longer or shorter intervals, and always the same futile means of meeting them is adopted. Man so little understands life that he has not learned that harmony with the laws of the Universe underlies his economic relations as well as his physical relations. If he knew this, he would know that the distress and dissatisfaction common to all nations could come only from the violation of natural laws, and he would begin to search out those laws. Men for a long time held false ideas of the laws of the solar system, and exhausted ingenious devices and systems to explain its phenomena. Then they began to discover underlying laws which explain phenomena more satisfactorily: some of those laws were found, and our knowledge of the solar system to-day is based upon these sure fundamentals. It is as possible to make sure of the laws governing our economic conditions as of those that govern the solar system. They must lie at the root of all things economic and must explain all phenomena that any condition of society, whether the most primitive or the most complex, can produce. Until these laws are discovered and applied the earth will “turn, troubled in sleep,” and men may not know peace. CHAPTER LII ECONOMIC REST Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep. SHAKESPEARE. There are deep-lying causes of anxiety, unrest, and sleeplessness that more or less affect us all: yet, eighteen hundred years ago, One cried, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” Not, to come eventually, or to future peoples, but “the Kingdom is at hand.” We have looked over a world filled with injustice, for the coming of the kingdom—but we have not seen it. What is it that hides “the Kingdom at hand” from our eyes? Is it not iniquity? What kind of iniquity? We once had chattel slavery, which was denounced as “the sum of all villainies.” We still have monopoly of the gift of God, which is the fundamental iniquity. For every one of his children a loving father made ample provision in the earth, but we have allowed a few to monopolize it all; some nine out of every hundred own our earth, and we find that, under such circumstances, the laws of God are impracticable; therefore, we say “the Kingdom is not a real Kingdom—it is only in men’s minds, only in some far-off imaginable day it may be in their hearts.”