with all reverence for other men's desires and with all respect for
natural prejudgments. As I have conceived it, the one business of the
world to-day is to find out what we are for and to find out what men in
the world--on the whole--really want. When men know what they want they
get it. Every wrong thing we have to face in modern industrial life is
due to men who know what they want, and who therefore get it, due to the
passions and the dreams of men; and the one single way in which these
wrong things will ever be overcome is with more passions and with more
and mightier dreams of men.

Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world without dreams,
especially an economic world. It is because even bad dreams are better
in this world than having no dreams at all that bad people so called are
so largely allowed to run it.

In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics to be
reckoned with is Desire.

The next move in economics is going to be the statement of a shrewd,
dogged, realizable ideal. It is only ideals that have aroused the wrong
passions, and it is only ideals that will arouse the right ones.

It will have to be, I imagine, when it comes, not a mere statement of
principles, an analysis, or a criticism, but a moving-picture, a
portrait of the human race, that shall reveal man's heart to himself.
What we want is a vast white canvas, spread, as it were, over the end of
the world, before which we shall all sit together, the audience of the
nations, of the poor, of the rich, as in some still, thoughtful
place--all of us together; and then we will throw up before us on the
vast white screen in the dark the vivid picture of our vast desires,
flame up upon it the hopes, the passions of human lives, and the grim,
silent wills of men. _"What do we want?" "Where are we going?"_

In place of the literature of criticism we have come now to the
literature of Desire.

This literature will have to come slowly, and I have come to believe
that the first book, when it comes, will be perhaps a book that does not
prove anything, a book that is a mere cry, a prayer, or challenge; the
story of what one man with these streetfuls of the faces of men and the
faces of women pouring their dullness and pouring their weariness over
him, has desired, and of what, God helping him, he will have.

There is a certain sense in which merely praying to God has gone by. In
the present desperate crisis of a world plungin