Second: A limit should be placed upon profits, dividends, incomes and fortunes. This may be done by taxation, inheritance duties and other devices already familiar to the managers of public finance. We should agree to make it cease to be worth anyone’s while to exploit the public, by fixing rigid bounds to the accumulation of private wealth; and this we may do with a good conscience. For all wealth is socially produced; and the society which produces it has the first claim upon it. This is a position which can be challenged only by those who still hold that the possession of property confers upon its possessors a “divine right” to take the lion’s share of the wealth produced by the industry of the whole community. It will be maintained that measures of this kind will take away the incentive to industry and commercial progress. But it may be pointed out in reply that the economic end of British life so far from being disastrously undermined by wholesale interference with economic laws during the war, seems to have been in a rather healthier condition than it had ever known previously. Profits were limited; prices were standardised; the old competitive basis was largely suspended. Virtually all those incentives of self-regard and gain which we have been told were essential to economic development were put out of business. Yet production reached an unprecedented point, both in quality and in amount. Another incentive was indeed operative; but this incentive was not of the personal kind. The peril of the nation in the great hazard of war evoked a social solidarity which proved a more powerful incentive to industry than the self-regarding instincts ever provided. This is our sufficient answer to those who still hold to the cynical superstition that the only motives on which we can rely in dealing with human nature are those of selfishness. What is needed to stimulate effort and devotion is the sense of direct participation in a great social task; and there is no reason to suppose that the systematic education of a couple of generations may not make this same social idealism the normal driving force of national effort. It is no doubt true that, as things are, only such a challenge to patriotic feeling as war brings, could achieve such a result; but it is our business to discover the stimuli which will make this same intensity of devotion a permanent fact.