Or turn if one will to the moral side. The older way of being good was by much prayer and much effort of one's own soul. Now it is done by a Board of Censors. There is no need to fight sin by the power of the spirit: let the Board of Censors do it. They together with three or four kinds of Commissioners are supposed to keep sin at arm's length and to supply a first class legislative guarantee of righteousness. As a short cut to morality and as a way of saving individual effort our legislatures are turning out morality legislation by the bucketful. The legislature regulates our drink, it begins already to guard us against the deadly cigarette, it regulates here and there the length of our skirts, it safeguards our amusements and in two states of the American Union it even proposes to save us from the teaching of the Darwinian Theory of evolution.
The ancient prayer "Lead us not into temptation" is passing out of date. The way to temptation is declared closed by Act of Parliament and by amendment to the constitution of the United States. Yet oddly enough the moral tone of the world fails to respond. The world is apparently more full of thugs, hold-up men, yeg-men, bandits, motor-thieves, porchclimbers, spotters, spies and crooked policemen than it ever was; till it almost seems that the slow, old-fashioned method of an effort of the individual soul may be needed still before the world is made good.
This vast new system, the system of leaning on the government, is spreading like a blight over England and America, and everywhere we suffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union of effort and a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the land. It has become like a dead weight upon us. Wherever it touches industry it cripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy deficit:
it builds ships and loses money on them: it operates the ships and loses more money: it piles up taxes to fill the vacuum and when it has killed employment, opens a bureau of unemployment and issues a report on the depression of industry.
Now, the only way to restore prosperity is to give back again to the individual the opportunity to make money, to make lots of it, and when he has got it, to keep it. In spite of all the devastation of the war the raw assets of our globe are hardly touched. Here and there, as in parts of China and in England and in Belgium with about seven hundred people to the square mile, the world is fairly well filled up. There is standing room only. But there are vast empty spaces still.
Mesopotamia alone has millions of acres of potential wheat land with a few Arabs squatting on it. Canada could absorb easily half a million settlers a year for a generation to come. The most fertile part of the world, the valley of the Amazon, is still untouched: so fertile is it that for tens of thousands of square miles it is choked with trees, a mere tangle of life, defying all entry. The idea of our humanity sadly walking the streets of Glasgow or sitting mournfully fishing on the piers of the Hudson, out of work, would be laughable if it were not for the pathos of it.
