The Crying Need

Extract

The truth of the crisis upon which England is entering is becoming clear to a growing number of people. In that fact lies the hope of her ultimate regeneration.

Let us summarize the position.

A little more than a century and a half ago, England —or rather her governing classes—plumped for industrialism. That is to say they deliberately set themselves to destroy what was then in the main a land of peasants, owning and cultivating their patches of land and sharing the advantages of the commons, and to convert it into a commercial unit based upon factories and overseas trade. The immediate pecuniary advantages to a limited, number of people were striking. We had a start of the world, and our expanding dominions provided us with an abundance of markets. The richness of the land itself in coal and iron ore accelerated the success of the experiment. The English developed a machine-sense and a money-mind, and the gradual disappearance of her agriculture was compensated for by the large profits made (by the controlling minority) from the sale of manufactured goods. Banks and a huge system of credit grew apace; for they were the life-blood of the new enterprise. The directness of local production of food and clothing for local consumption and use gave way to the dazzling indirectness of a network of exchanges, in which each mesh of the net gave opportunity to the manipulator to squeeze out his little bit of usury. We became the carrying and banking centre of the world.