ll these things,
and can be established by the democracy whenever it grows weary of
enduring evils which there is no reason to endure.

We may distinguish four purposes at which an economic system may aim:
first, it may aim at the greatest possible production of goods and at
facilitating technical progress; second, it may aim at securing
distributive justice; third, it may aim at giving security against
destitution; and, fourth, it may aim at liberating creative impulses
and diminishing possessive impulses.

Of these four purposes the last is the most important. Security is
chiefly important as a means to it. State socialism, though it might
give material security and more justice than we have at present, would
probably fail to liberate creative impulses or produce a progressive
society.

Our present system fails in all four purposes. It is chiefly defended
on the ground that it achieves the first of the four purposes, namely,
the greatest possible production of material goods, but it only does
this in a very short-sighted way, by methods which are wasteful in the
long run both of human material and of natural resources.

Capitalistic enterprise involves a ruthless belief in the importance
of increasing material production to the utmost possible extent now
and in the immediate future. In obedience to this belief, new
portions of the earth's surface are continually brought under the sway
of industrialism. Vast tracts of Africa become recruiting grounds for
the labor required in the gold and diamond mines of the Rand,
Rhodesia, and Kimberley; for this purpose, the population is
demoralized, taxed, driven into revolt, and exposed to the
contamination of European vice and disease. Healthy and vigorous
races from Southern Europe are tempted to America, where sweating and
slum life reduce their vitality if they do not actually cause their
death. What damage is done to our own urban populations by the
conditions under which they live, we all know. And what is true of
the human riches of the world is no less true of the physical
resources. The mines, forests, and wheat-fields of the world are all
being exploited at a rate which must practically exhaust them at no
distant date. On the side of material production, the world is living
too fast; in a kind of delirium, almost all the energy of the world
has rushed into the immediate production of something, no matter what,
and no matter at what cost. And yet our pres