formers' paths we should improve the world prodigiously. But there is
no more hope in that If than in the equally plausible assurance that if
the sky falls we shall all catch larks. We are not going to tread those
paths: we have not sufficient energy. We do not desire the end enough:
indeed in more cases we do not effectively desire it at all. Ask any
man would he like to be a better man; and he will say yes, most piously.
Ask him would he like to have a million of money; and he will say yes,
most sincerely. But the pious citizen who would like to be a better man
goes on behaving just as he did before. And the tramp who would like
the million does not take the trouble to earn ten shillings: multitudes
of men and women, all eager to accept a legacy of a million, live and
die without having ever possessed five pounds at one time, although
beggars have died in rags on mattresses stuffed with gold which they
accumulated because they desired it enough to nerve them to get it and
keep it. The economists who discovered that demand created supply soon
had to limit the proposition to "effective demand," which turned out, in
the final analysis, to mean nothing more than supply itself; and this
holds good in politics, morals, and all other departments as well: the
actual supply is the measure of the effective demand; and the mere
aspirations and professions produce nothing. No community has ever yet
passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism
enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop
a commercial civilization. Even these stages have never been attained
by public spirit, but always by intolerant wilfulness and brute force.
Take the Reform Bill of 1832 as an example of a conflict between two
sections of educated Englishmen concerning a political measure which was
as obviously necessary and inevitable as any political measure has ever
been or is ever likely to be. It was not passed until the gentlemen of
Birmingham had made arrangements to cut the throats of the gentlemen of
St. James's parish in due military form. It would not have been passed
to this day if there had been no force behind it except the logic and
public conscience of the Utilitarians. A despotic ruler with as much
sense as Queen Elizabeth would have done better than the mob of grown-up
Eton boys who governed us then by privilege, and who, since the
introduction of practically Manhood Suffrage in 1884,