eat processes, which the increase of man's knowledge
has set in motion, are not impersonal inhuman forces: Men originated
them: men administer them: and men must control them. Against economic
necessity let us set political necessity: and let the watchword of that
political necessity, here as always, be the freedom and the well-being
of mankind.

With this caution in mind, then, let us approach our subject.

What is Economics? Economics is simply the Greek for 'house-keeping'. If
writers and thinkers on the subject had only kept this simple fact in
mind, or used the English word instead of the Greek, the world would
have been saved much misery and confusion. Political economy is not,
what Mill and other writers define it to be, 'the Science of Wealth'. It
is the art of community-housekeeping, and community-housekeeping, as
every woman knows, is a very important if subsidiary branch of the art
of community-management or government.

Housekeeping, of course, is not a selfish but a social function.
Housewives do not lay in bread and cheese simply to gratify their own
desire to be possessors of a large store, but for the sake of their
household. The true housekeeper or economic man is the man who is
consciously ministering to the real needs of the community. Like the
ruler or minister in the political sphere, he is a man who is performing
a public service.

This is equally true whether the housekeeper has a monopoly of the
purchase of bread and cheese for the household, or whether he or she has
to compete with others as to which is to be allowed to serve the public
in that particular transaction. Just as, under the party system, which
seems to be inseparable from the working of democratic institutions, men
stand for Parliament and compete for the honour of representing their
neighbours, so in most systems of industry men compete for the honour of
supplying the public. Competition in industry is practically as old as
industry. In the earliest picture that has come down to us of Greek
village life we read of the competition between potter and potter and
between minstrel and minstrel--a competition as keen and as fierce, we
may be sure, as that between rival shopkeepers to-day. For the opposite
of competition, as has been truly said, is not co-operation but monopoly
or bureaucracy: and there is no short and easy means of deciding between
the rival systems. Sometimes the community is better served by
entrusting one departme