hats; to punish anybody who has promised hats and failed to provide
hats. The modern mind is that which says that if we only cut off the
heads of two of the little boys, they will not want hats; and then the
hats will exactly go round. The suggestion that heads are rather more
important than hats is dismissed as a piece of mystical metaphysics.
The assertion that hats were made for heads, and not heads for hats
savours of antiquated dogma. The musty text which says that the body is
more than raiment; the popular prejudice which would prefer the lives
of boys to the mathematical arrangement of hats,--all these things are
alike to be ignored. The logic of enlightenment is merciless; and we
duly summon the headsman to disguise the deficiencies of the hatter.
For it makes very little difference to the logic of the thing, that we
are talking of houses and not of hats.... The fundamental fallacy
remains the same; that we are beginning at the wrong end, because we
have never troubled to consider at what end to begin." [24]


Section 5. POVERTY AND CIVILISATION

A modern writer is burdened by many words that carry an erroneous meaning,
and one of these is the word "civilisation." Intended to mean "The Art
of Living," this word, by wrong usage, now implies that our method of
combining mental culture and bodily comfort is the highest, noblest, and
best way to live. Yet this implication is by no means certain. On the
contrary, the spectacle of our social life would bring tears to eyes
undimmed by the industrial traditions of the past hundred years. This I
know to be true, having once travelled to London in the company of a young
girl who came from the Thirteenth Century. She had lived some twelve years
on the Low Sierra of Andalusia, where in a small sunlit village she may
have vainly imagined our capital to be a city with walls of amethyst and