were
abolished. The problem of poverty is by no means insoluble within the
existing system, except when account is taken of psychological factors
and the uneven distribution of power.

The graver evils of the capitalist system all arise from its uneven
distribution of power. The possessors of capital wield an influence
quite out of proportion to their numbers or their services to the
community. They control almost the whole of education and the press;
they decide what the average man shall know or not know; the cinema
has given them a new method of propaganda, by which they enlist the
support of those who are too frivolous even for illustrated papers.
Very little of the intelligence of the world is really free: most of
it is, directly or indirectly, in the pay of business enterprises or
wealthy philanthropists. To satisfy capitalist interests, men are
compelled to work much harder and more monotonously than they ought to
work, and their education is scamped. Wherever, as in barbarous or
semi-civilized countries, labour is too weak or too disorganized to
protect itself, appalling cruelties are practised for private profit.
Economic and political organizations become more and more vast,
leaving less and less room for individual development and initiative.
It is this sacrifice of the individual to the machine that is the
fundamental evil of the modern world.

To cure this evil is not easy, because efficiency is promoted, at any
given moment, though not in the long run, by sacrificing the
individual to the smooth working of a vast organization, whether
military or industrial. In war and in commercial competition, it is
necessary to control individual impulses, to treat men as so many
"bayonets" or "sabres" or "hands," not as a society of separate people
with separate tastes and capacities. Some sacrifice of individual
impulses is, of course, essential to the existence of an ordered
community, and this degree of sacrifice is, as a rule, not regretable
even from the individual's point of view. But what is demanded in a
highly militarized or industrialized nation goes far beyond this very
moderate degree. A society which is to allow much freedom to the
individual must be strong enough to be not anxious about home defence,
moderate enough to refrain from difficult external conquests, and rich
enough to value leisure and a civilized existence more than an
increase of consumable commodities.

But where the material conditions