Addresses in America by John Galsworthy — Read

Standing here, privileged to address my betters――I, the least politically educated person in the world, have two thoughts to leave on the air. They arise from the title of your League.

I wish I did not feel, speaking in the large, that politics and education have but a bowing acquaintanceship in the modern State; and I wish I did feel that either education or politics had any definite idea of what they were out to attain; in other words, had a clear image of the ideal State. It seems to me that their object at present is just to keep the heads of the citizens of the modern State above water; to keep them alive, without real concern as to what kind of life they are being preserved for. We seem, in fact, to be letting our civilisation run us, instead of running our civilisation. If a man does not know where he wants to go, he goes where circumstances and the telephone take him. Where do we want to go? Can you answer me? Have you any definite idea? What is the Ultima Thule of our longings? I suppose one ought to say, roughly, that the modern ideal is: Maximum production of wealth to the square mile of a country――an ideal which, seeing that a man normally produces wealth in surplus to his own requirements, signifies logically a maximum head of population to the square mile. And it seems to me that the great modern fallacy is the identification of the word wealth with the word welfare. Granted that demand creates supply, and that it is impossible to stop human nature from demanding, the problem is surely to direct demand into the best channels for securing health and happiness. And I venture to say that the mere blind production of wealth and population by no means fills that bill. We ought to produce wealth only in such ways and to such an extent as shall make us all good, clean, healthy, intelligent, and beautiful to look at. That is the end, and production whether of wealth or population only the means to that end, to be regulated accordingly. As things are, we confuse the means with the end, and make of production a fetich.