and have carried out their most characteristic development. Merely to enable so large a number of people to be alive is not everything, but it is a great deal. Under Capitalism all these millions saw the light of the sun, smelt the scent of spring, knew love and friendship, made and laughed at good and bad jokes, ate and digested their meals, made their queer guesses at the secret of life, played games, read books, cherished their hobbies and their prejudices, knew a little, thought they knew much more, and went their way leaving others behind them to take up the thread of life and spin another strip of its mysterious cloth.
If life is on the whole a good thing—and most of us waste little time in sending for a doctor if we do not feel well—Capitalism has made the enjoyment of that good possible to millions. And all the time during which that huge increase in our population was growing we were pouring out a stream of emigrants to fill and till the waste places of the earth, and sending them capital to help them to increase production there. Thus Capitalism has bred millions of active, busy men and women, spread them over the world, reclaimed its waste places and increased its output so fast that, as we shall see,
