that community.
The first element in the getting of a living is the securing of daily
bread, shelter, clothing and the satisfaction of physical needs. It is a
mistake to think of the community as beginning in religious
institutions--narrowly understood--or in social gatherings or in
educational service. The initial human experience is the finding of
food.

But the getting of a living is a long process. A living is more than
bread, and a roof and a coat. In quest of a living men go from the
country to the town and from the town to the city. They migrate from the
small city to the large. In each of these moves they secure a further
element in their living. Each of these communities is characterized by
the increase which it contributes to the living of its citizens, but in
every community the initial experience is the securing of daily bread,
shelter, clothing and material economic gains. Whatever is done,
therefore, for the community in a service to all the people must have
initial concern with the purely economic welfare of the people.

Sir Horace Plunkett's book, "The Rural Life Problem of the United
States," develops this principle very clearly. He shows that in the
Country Life Movement in Ireland it was necessary to go into the very
heart of the people's aspirations, and organize their economic needs.

It is necessary to understand the word "economic" if one would read
these pages aright. Economic matters are not those of mere money. The
word has a greater meaning than has the word finance. It connotes
poverty as truly as wealth, and is greater than both. The economic
motive animates men in the quest of those vital satisfactions which the
individual craves, and the social group requires. Professor John Bates
Clark has somewhere described this motive as the desire to preserve the
present status, with slight improvement, for oneself and one's children
after him; the desire to live on the same economic standard in one's own
generation; and to be reasonably assured of the same security for one's
children. This is not the desire to get rich, though in individual cases
it is changed into a desire for wealth. But it is a far more general,
indeed a universal aspiration, which inspires most of the work of the
world. Industry is based on it. Civilization is propelled by it. It is
the desire to get a living and the quest of a living.

I believe that this economic motive is religious. It is the quest of
what a man has not,