Commerce originated in social need and should be a social service; nor indeed has its perversion to profit-making prevented it from rendering substantial services to society. Apart from its provision of the necessities of life, many of its inventions have added much to the wealth of life independently of their immediate purposes. The unique facilities for travel which we moderns enjoy owe their origins in the first instance to the demand for better commercial transport. Stephenson’s first locomotive was intended to haul coal trucks. The increasing socialisation of life in our time owes much to the economic motive that has popularised the telegraph and the telephone; and the supreme achievement of Mr. Henry Ford is not a miracle of standardised production, but the contribution which his car has made to the socialisation of the farmer’s life. Our knowledge of the earth’s surface and its peoples, and through this, one of the foundations of the coming internationalism, we owe greatly to the enterprise of the trader. For a hundred great services beyond its ministry to the elementary human needs of food and clothing, we are debtors to commerce and to those merchant venturers in many ages who laid its broad modern foundations. Yet just because we acknowledge a manifest debt even to profiteering commercial enterprise, it is the more necessary that we should assail its modern ascendency over life, and its own perversion to individual aims, and point out the havoc which its more modern developments have wrought. It would be foolish and undiscriminating to say that it is the sole source of our social confusion, but it is simple truth to say that it has become its chief direct occasion; and the result is to be traced to the circumstances which have changed commerce from its essential function as a great social service to a scramble for private gain. The restoration of commerce to its own proper place and office is bound up with a recovery of a true view of life as a whole, with a new understanding of those things other and greater than bread by which it is ordained that men shall live. II