Now the capitalist system, good or bad, right or wrong, rests upon two ideas: that the rich will always be rich enough to hire the poor; and the poor will always be poor enough to want to be hired.

If we cannot go back, it hardly seems worthwhile to go forward. There is nothing in front but a flat wilderness of standardization either by Bolshevism or Big Business. But it is strange that some of us should have seen sanity, if only in a vision, while the rest go forward chained eternally to enlargement without liberty and progress without hope.

When there is once established a widely scattered ownership, there is a public opinion that is stronger than any law; and very often (what in modern times is even more remarkable) a law that is really an expression of public opinion. It may be very difficult for modern people to imagine a world in which men are not generally admired for covetousness and crushing their neighbours; but I assure them that such strange patches of an earthly paradise do really remain on earth.

It is true that I believe in fairy tales – in the sense that I marvel so much at what does exist that I am the readier to admit what might.

It is perfectly feasible to imagine an Industrialism that is not capitalist; machinery and its ownership could easily be decentralized – and never more so than in our day when the direction of technological development in itself points to decentralization. If that tendency does not make its mark, it is only because men of power have so decided, and the mass of men have acquiesced.