III. _The Psychology of Society_

Europe was so organized socially and economically as to secure the
maximum accumulation of capital. While there was some continuous
improvement in the daily conditions of life of the mass of the
population, Society was so framed as to throw a great part of the
increased income into the control of the class least likely to consume
it. The new rich of the nineteenth century were not brought up to large
expenditures, and preferred the power which investment gave them to the
pleasures of immediate consumption. In fact, it was precisely the
_inequality_ of the distribution of wealth which made possible those
vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which
distinguished that age from all others. Herein lay, in fact, the main
justification of the Capitalist System. If the rich had spent their new
wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such
a régime intolerable. But like bees they saved and accumulated, not less
to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held
narrower ends in prospect.

The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit
of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could
never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.
The railways of the world, which that age built as a monument to
posterity, were, not less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the work of labor
which was not free to consume in immediate enjoyment the full equivalent
of its efforts.

Thus this remarkable system depended for its growth on a double bluff or
deception. On the one hand the laboring classes accepted from ignorance
or powerlessness, or were compelled, persuaded, or cajoled by custom,