18 THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE ch.

only in theory,—the virtue of the cake was that itwas never to be consumed, neither by you nor byyour children after you.

In writing thus I do not necessarily disparagethe practices of that generation. In the unconsciousrecesses of its being Society knew what it was about.The cake was really very small in proportion to theappetites of consumption, and no one, if it wereshared all round, would be much the better off by thecutting of it. Society was working not for the smallpleasures of to-day but for the future security andimprovement of the race,—in fact for " progress."If only the cake were not cut but was alloAved to growin the geometrical proportion predicted by Malthus of population, but not less true of compound interest,perhaps a day might come when there would at lastbe enough to go round, and when posterity couldenter into the enjoyment of our labours. In thatday overwork, overcrowding, and underfeeding wouldcome to an end, and men, secure of the comfortsand necessities of the body, could proceed to thenobler exercises of their faculties. One geometricalratio might cancel another, and the nineteenth cen-tury was able to forget the fertility of the speciesin a contemplation of the dizzy virtues of compoundinterest.

There were two pitfalls in this prospect: lest,population still outstripping accumulation, our self-denials promote not happiness but numbers; and

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