sobering balance, in the guise of hunger, cold, poor roads, and lack of education, we have a fairly formidable daily resistance to overcome, in addition to that which democracy has stupidly imposed or has not taken the trouble to clear away; and it is stimulating to realize that ahead of us we have effort to be exerted which must be at least as great as this resistance. If there is to be any economic millennium it will be earned, inch by inch; but with increasing ease as resistance is a diminishable quantity and effort is capable of increase. Each honestly-striving individual, under a rational conception of economic value, should be able to command a handsome minimum wage as he goes—not from the economist’s “wage fund” but from some thing much more available, namely, from the value masked by the resistance to be overcome.
Reckoning upon our unquenchable desire for freedom, we are ensured, with the one provision of order, a flow of effort more constant and more spontaneous, as a whole, than any thing we know in physics, not excluding radio-activity or solar energy, which, after all, are both dying impulses. The rate of flow of the stream of human effort, no matter how varied the individual contributions, seems capable of almost indefinite acceleration. An individual acceleration of effort should mean an individual enhancement of freedom; and the “economic man,” conceived by Henry George,[1] “who seeks to gratify his desires by the least exertion,” will be found to have desires of the least economic value. Two individuals under an orderly conception of economic value would be a law to themselves, being buyers or sellers of personal effort. (This provides handsomely for the individualist.) But if we are to ensure such advantageous exchanges we must provide our individualists with a just measure of value, and if we decide to do this we are first compelled to merge our varied streams of effort in the confines of order, and measure value as a whole. Once value is measurable in ultimate terms as a whole it can then be measured in part. To appreciate this we have only to conceive the intermittent chaos in the cylinder of an internal combustion engine and the orderly movement of the piston. The
- ↑ See page 178.
