it seems to me, not a theory of trading based on bad psychology, but
physics applied to problems in the theory of sociology. The general
problem of Utopian economics is to state the conditions of the most
efficient application of the steadily increasing quantities of
material energy the progress of science makes available for human
service, to the general needs of mankind. Human labour and existing
material are dealt with in relation to that. Trading and relative
wealth are merely episodical in such a scheme. The trend of the
article I read, as I understood it, was that a monetary system based
upon a relatively small amount of gold, upon which the business of
the whole world had hitherto been done, fluctuated unreasonably and
supplied no real criterion of well-being, that the nominal values of
things and enterprises had no clear and simple relation to the real
physical prosperity of the community, that the nominal wealth of
a community in millions of pounds or dollars or Lions, measured
nothing but the quantity of hope in the air, and an increase of
confidence meant an inflation of credit and a pessimistic phase a
collapse of this hallucination of possessions. The new standards,
this advocate reasoned, were to alter all that, and it seemed to me
they would.

I have tried to indicate the drift of these remarkable proposals,
but about them clustered an elaborate mass of keen and temperate
discussion. Into the details of that discussion I will not enter
now, nor am I sure I am qualified to render the multitudinous aspect
of this complicated question at all precisely. I read the whole
thing in the course of an hour or two of rest after lunch--it was
either the second or third day of my stay in Utopia--and we were
sitting in a little inn at the end of the Lake of Uri. We had
loitered there, and I had fallen reading because of a shower of