of their heart's desire. We
in our turn dedicate to the future, and often to a distant future, an
immense portion of our energies. Let any reader who doubts this, study
the statistics of the occupations of the people, and reflect on how
long a period must elapse before the labors of this trade or that can
fulfil their ultimate function. How long would the period be in the
case of a man making bricks, which will later be employed in the
erection of a factory, where machinery will be made, to equip an
electrical generating station designed to supply, over a period of
many years, light, heat, and power to people living in a remote
Continent? A longer time, it may be hazarded, than he is accustomed
to look ahead.

Like the daily cooperation of living men, this cooperation of past,
present and future is essential to the well-being of mankind, and yet
it is undesigned and unorganized. As private individuals, men do,
indeed, deliberately provide for their own future, and for that of
their kith and kin: as the directors of businesses, they try to
forecast the trend of demand. But such conscious calculations and
deliberate acts would avail little if they stood alone. They are
hardly more than the necessary spokes in the great wheel which
regulates the relations of past, present and future. The hub of the
wheel is an elaborate system of borrowing and lending, essentially
similar to the buying and selling of commodities. The private
individual in order to provide for his family or for his old age
"saves" and "invests." But what exactly does this mean? It means that
he transfers so much purchasing power, which he might have spent on
his personal pleasures, to some one else in return for the expectation
of receiving, year by year in the future, he and his heirs after him,
a certain smaller quantity of purchasing power. The other party to the
transaction will be, we may suppose, a business man who enters into it
because he sees the opportunity of a promising industrial development,
to undertake which he requires more purchasing power than he himself
possesses. And, because this transaction is entered into, a smaller
number of us will shortly be engaged in making motorcars, or
gramaphones, and a larger number of us in making factories and
machinery, which will later enhance the world's productive power.

Many transactions of the kind take place daily in modern communities,
and their multiplicity gives rise to a mass of phenomena wit