A.R.

ST. LOYES, BEDFORD: _June_, 1891.




AUTHOR'S PREFACE


The economic and social order of the modern world exhibits a strange
enigma, which only a prosperous thoughtlessness can regard with
indifference or, indeed, without a shudder. We have made such splendid
advances in art and science that the unlimited forces of nature have been
brought into subjection, and only await our command to perform for us all
our disagreeable and onerous tasks, and to wring from the soil and prepare
for use whatever man, the master of the world, may need. As a consequence,
a moderate amount of labour ought to produce inexhaustible abundance for
everyone born of woman; and yet all these glorious achievements have
not--as Stuart Mill forcibly says--been able to mitigate one human woe.
And, what is more, the ever-increasing facility of producing an abundance
has proved a curse to multitudes who lack necessaries because there exists
no demand for the many good and useful things which they are able to
produce. The industrial activity of the present day is a ceaseless confused
struggle with the various symptoms of the dreadful evil known as
'over-production.' Protective duties, cartels and trusts, guild agitations,
strikes--all these are but the desperate resistance offered by the classes
engaged in production to the inexorable consequences of the apparently so
absurd, but none the less real, phenomenon that increasing facility in the