ing up store of corn, wine, wool, silk, and other such
preservable materials of food and clothing; and that it has a currency
representing them. Imagine farther, that on days of festivity, the
society, discovering itself to derive satisfaction from pyrotechnics,
gradually turns its attention more and more to the manufacture of
gunpowder; so that an increasing number of labourers, giving what time
they can spare to this branch of industry, bring increasing quantities
of combustibles into the store, and use the general orders received in
exchange to obtain such wine, wool, or corn, as they may have need of.
The currency remains the same, and represents precisely the same amount
of material in the store, and of labour spent in producing it. But the
corn and wine gradually vanish, and in their place, as gradually, appear
sulphur and saltpetre, till at last the labourers who have consumed corn
and supplied nitre, presenting on a festal morning some of their
currency to obtain materials for the feast, discover that no amount of
currency will command anything Festive, except Fire. The supply of
rockets is unlimited, but that of food, limited, in a quite final
manner; and the whole currency in the hands of the society represents an
infinite power of detonation, but none of existence.

48. This statement, caricatured as it may seem, is only exaggerated in
assuming the persistence of the folly to extremity, unchecked, as in
reality it would be, by the gradual rise in price of food. But it falls
short of the actual facts of human life in expression of the depth and
intensity of the folly itself. For a great part (the reader would not
believe how great until he saw the statistics in detail) of the most
earnest and ingenious industry of the world is spent in producing
munitions of war; gathering, that is to say the materials, not of
festive, but of consuming fire; filling its stores with all power of the
instruments of pain, and all affluence of the ministries of death. It
was no true _Trionfo della Morte_[19] which men have seen and feared
(sometimes scarcely feared) so long; wherein he brought them rest from
their labours. We see, and share, another and higher form of his triumph
now. Task-master, instead of Releaser, he rules the dust of the arena no
less than of the tomb; and, content once in the grave whither man went,
to make his works to cease and his devices to vanish,--now, in the busy
city and on the serviceable sea, makes