The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎629v] (149/239)

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THE POSITION OF WOMEN.
growth of the human consciousness and therefore of its sympa
thies ; on the development of the Art of Life, that most important
and most neglected of all the arts.
“ We want fewer men and more of them,” as some hasty orator
exclaimed in disgust at the swarms of mediocre and inferior human
beings who form the raw material out of which the world has to be
built. This is the great problem in a nutshell : to improve the
quality and diminish the quantity of mankind—that is, in pro
portion to the means of securing for each a truly human life. No
alteration of the form of government radically betters a community
in which a relatively large number of people are doomed to
scramble for a relatively small quantity of necessaries. One may
decry Malthus, but that, at least, is beyond dispute.
Anyone can bring about a perfect analogue to this state of
things by throwing a meagre handful of grain in a teeming poultry-
Let the distribution be ideally just; let each fowl get exactly its
fair share, yet all the fowls go hungry, even though they may
console themselves by the reflection that they are starving under
a regime of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. If man is not
hopelessly and permanently a fool, he need not permit this
ridiculous situation to continue indefinitely.
A man’s work—according to certain well-known calculations—
if directed to productive industries for a few hours of one day, will
T eep him in comfort for a week. Of course it will not do so if he
is engaged in non-productive industry, such as adding up columns
of figures, or making plush photograph frames or demented-
looking flower-vases for the decoration of Rooseveltian homes (for
there would be no time to cultivate the taste beyond this simple
stage if the President were conscientiously obeyed). While the
man was manufacturing his monstrosities other persons would
have to make his clothes and his food for which he would give in
return only those unconsidered trifles.
With every new invention of machinery, the product of a given
amount of labour is increased ten-fold, a hundred-fold, a thousand
fold, according to the nature of the invention.
There is thus no natural fiat against human well-being. Man
is not condemned to earn his bread in toil and suffering; or if he
be so, he condemns himself to that lot by his own stupidity. There
are many schemes for lessening the extremes of riches and poverty
01 the nationalisation of land, for a more equal distribution of the’
results of labour. But nothing, however revolutionary in that
direction can ever emancipate us from the law that is expressed in
that single arithmetical relation between output and consumption.
It is the law of gravitation of the economic world, and against it