The paramountcy of the economic motive is no modern phenomenon, and it would be a mistake to identify it exclusively with the modern commercial civilisation. Its modern beginnings are no doubt to be found in the appearance of the small merchant class in the era of craftsmanship; and the difference between him and the merchant prince of the twentieth century is mainly a difference of scale—this difference being chiefly due to the high mobility of property when it assumes the form of money, and the increased facilities for mobilising it through the development of the credit system and the improvement in the means of communication. The fundamental impulses and instincts which determine the social order are broadly identical throughout history. That is why Marx’ economic interpretation of history is probably the most luminous and fruitful clue to the course of human affairs that historical study has yet yielded to us. We are not justified in assuming (as some have done) that it is the only valid clue; still less are those disciples of Marx justified who have developed his theory of historical interpretation into the metaphysical dogma of economic determinism. That economic factors have controlled the general drift of human affairs in the past does not necessarily mean that they are predestined to do so in perpetuity. Yet even those who most vehemently denounce the existing profit-making organisation of society are still obsessed by the notion that social transformation is chiefly an affair of economic revolution. Their thought appears to run wholly within the economic circle. It is in some respects the strangest paradox of modern times that the Russian people with their long and unique tradition of spirituality should have been so completely captured (to all appearance) by the doctrinaire materialism of the Marxian school and have accepted the view that the Kingdom of Heaven comes by a proletarian capture of economic power. The circumstance is, of course, capable of explanation, for in Russia, as elsewhere, political power has gone with economic power; and the Russian revolutionary knew what the Frenchman of 1789 did not know, namely, that no political revolution could be complete or permanent which was not an economic revolution at the same time. That, therefore, the Russian revolution should have been primarily economic is not strange—since Marx had lived and written in the interval between 1789 and 1917; but it remains a somewhat singular fact that the spiritual idealism of Feodor Dostoievsky and Lyof Tolstoi have been so little manifest during these last surprising months. This preoccupation with economic change is characteristic of the attitude of those everywhere who are most urgent in their endeavour after social transformation. The advocates of the National Guild Movement are never weary of reiterating that political power belongs to those who wield economic power, and of urging that the