but a servant. The moment the people become adjuncts to government, then
the law of retribution begins to work, for such a relation is unnatural,
immoral, and inhuman. We cannot live without business and we cannot live
without government. Business and government are necessary as servants,
like water and grain; as masters they overturn the natural order.

The welfare of the country is squarely up to us as individuals. That is
where it should be and that is where it is safest. Governments can
promise something for nothing but they cannot deliver. They can juggle
the currencies as they did in Europe (and as bankers the world over do,
as long as they can get the benefit of the juggling) with a patter of
solemn nonsense. But it is work and work alone that can continue to
deliver the goods--and that, down in his heart, is what every man knows.

There is little chance of an intelligent people, such as ours, ruining
the fundamental processes of economic life. Most men know they cannot
get something for nothing. Most men feel--even if they do not know--that
money is not wealth. The ordinary theories which promise everything to
everybody, and demand nothing from anybody, are promptly denied by the
instincts of the ordinary man, even when he does not find reasons
against them. He _knows_ they are wrong. That is enough. The present
order, always clumsy, often stupid, and in many ways imperfect, has this
advantage over any other--it works.

Doubtless our order will merge by degrees into another, and the new one
will also work--but not so much by reason of what it is as by reason of
what men will bring into it. The reason why Bolshevism did not work, and
cannot work, is not economic. It does not matter whether industry is
privately managed or socially controlled; it does not matter whether you
call the workers' share "wages" or "dividends"; it does not matter