CHAPTER II
THE MAKING OF INCOMES
It is now widely recognised that if economic havoc and maladjustment attributable to the Great War were repaired, our major problems of waste and injustice would still remain unsolved. It may even be urged that, if the industrial and financial troubles due to the war were healed and the productive capacities of all the civilised peoples were liberated to take full advantage of the recent improvements in technique and organisation, the inability to utilise these enlarged productive powers would be even more conspicuous than it is. Up-to-date modern capitalism under such conditions would exhibit a far larger wastage than is represented by the idle labour and capital at the present time. While, therefore, the war injuries of high tariffs, war debts, reparations, expensive armaments, obstructed emigration, disordered finance, bulk large in the immediate foreground, their very presence has obscured the far more important need of an economic government capable of coping with the more permanent evils of a disordered economic system. The difficulty here is a state of mind incapable of understanding the nature of the problem, chiefly because it is unwilling to try to understand. It is unwilling because what it deems to be its personal and group interests block the way. "In the absence of pas-
