n fixed and finite limits to human
interest and activity, so that any encroachment from the side of
routine lessens the absolute scope of human spontaneity and interest.
If, as there is reason to believe, human desires and the activities
which are engaged in satisfying them are boundless, the assumption
that an increase in the absolute amount of state-control or
routine-work implies a diminution of the field for individual
enterprise is groundless. The underlying motive, which alone can
explain and justify each step in progressive socialism, is the
attainment of a net economy of individual effort, which, when it is
released from exercise upon a lower plane of competition, may be
devoted to exercise upon a higher. If the result of extending social
control over industry were merely to bring about a common level of
material comfort, attended by spiritual and intellectual torpor and
contentment, the movement might be natural and necessary, but could
hardly be termed progress.

But such a view is based upon a denial of the axiom that the
satisfaction of one want breeds another want. Experience does not
teach the decay but the metamorphosis of individuality. Under
socialised industry progress in the industrial arts would be slower
and would absorb a smaller proportion of individual interest, in order
that progress in the finer intellectual and moral arts might be
faster, and might engage a larger share of life. To future generations
of more highly evolved humanity the peculiar barbarism of our age
will consist in the fact that the major part of its intelligence,
enterprise, genius, has been devoted to the perfection of the arts of
material production through mechanical means. If it is desirable that
more of this individual energy should be engaged in the production of
higher forms of wealth by competition upon higher planes, this can
only be achieved by the process of reducing to routine the lower
functions. Higher progress can only be purchased by an economy of the
work of lower progress, the free, conscious expression of higher
individuality by the routine subordination of lower individuality.
Industrial progress would undoubtedly be slower under state-control,
because the very object of such control is to divert a larger
proportion of human genius and effort from these occupations in order
to apply them in producing higher forms of wealth. It is not, however,
right to assume that progress in the industrial arts would ceas