of production. Under its whips and in search of its prizes, mechanical invention proceeded apace, labour was organised and its efficiency multiplied ten, twenty, an hundred fold. Statistics in proof of this live with the wonder that is in them. That twenty men in Lancashire to-day can make as much cotton as the whole of the old cotton-producing Lancashire put together; that 1,000 shoe operatives in Leicester can supply a quarter of a million people with four pairs of boots a year; that 120 men in a mill can grind enough flour to keep 200,000 people's wants fully supplied, seem to come from the pages of romance rather than from the sober history of industry. Commercialism has written those pages, and they are its permanent contribution to human well-being.
As time went on, however, it was seen that this wonderful system of production was quite unable to devise any mechanism of distribution which could relate rewards to deserts. Distribution was left to the stress and uncertainty of competition and the struggle of economic advantages. The law of the survival of the fittest was allowed to have absolute sway, under circumstances which deprived it of moral value. The result was that national wealth was heaped up at one end over a comparatively small number of people and lay thinned out at the other end over great masses of the population. At one end people had too much and could not spend it profitably, at the other end they had too little and never gained that mastery of
