our economic tangle. And then came this pamphlet with one of our greatest scientific names upon it, and I looked for light at last. Professor Soddy states his intention to try to bring the existing knowledge of the physical sciences to bear upon the question "How do men live?" He says that the modern economist, for whom he evidently has a most hearty contempt, seems to have forgotten that there is such a question.
To illustrate it he asks what makes a railway train go. He admits that in one sense or another the achievement may be claimed by the engine driver, the guard, the signalman, the manager, the capital, the shareholder, the scientific poineers who discovered the nature of fire, the investor who harnessed it, labour which built the railway and the train, but "the fact remains that all of them by their united efforts could not drive the train." This seems to be a sort of fact that an ordinary mind might almost have hit upon without the help of a great scientist, and when Professor Soddy goes on to say that "the real engine driver is the coal" he seems to imply, by contrast, that the coal, by its sole, unaided effort could have driven the train without the assistance of all the other factors. Whereas if the capitalists and the engineers and the navvies had not financed and
