Page:The Case for Capitalism (1920).djvu/27

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

seen "many men and cities," and to have exchanged ideas with dwellers in many distant lands.

Here again it is easy to counter the argument with examples of homely folk who have never been ten miles from their native village and yet, owing to their powers of observation and sympathy, have made themselves masters of all that life means within a small compass. But these examples of genius working under circumstances of great difficulty do not make it any the less true that it is good for the average human being to roam about the world and submit to the process by which men knock sparks out of one another by personal impact. For all this—education in a much wider sense than has yet been attempted and improvements in human intercourse of which we can hardly yet dream—a great increase is needed in the output of good and services that mankind enjoys.

It will not be enough, of course, unless those to whom these advantages are given make the right use of them. Travel, as it is at present granted to a comparatively small class, often seems to fail lamentably in widening their outlook. The young English Philistine who goes to Switzerland only for skung and tobogganing,