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ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

sterers, and will shelter from irresistible tempta-tion the unhappy class who, in America , arecalled addicts?

I must not stay for an answer, but musthasten to the largest of all political questions,which are also those on which I am mostqualified to speak—the economic questions.

An eminent American economist, ProfessorCommons, who has been one of the first to re-cognise the nature of the economic transitionamidst the early stages of which we are nowliving, distinguishes three epochs, three eco-nomic orders, upon the third of which we areentering.

The first is the Era of Scarcity, “whetherdue to inefficiency or to violence, war, custom,or superstition.” In such a period “there is theminimum of individual liberty and the maxi-mum of communistic, feudalistic or govern-mental control through physical coercion.”This was, with brief intervals in exceptionalcases, the normal economic state of the worldup to (say) the fifteenth or sixteenth century.

Next comes the Era of Abundance. “In aperiod of extreme abundance there is the maxi-mum of individual liberty, the minimum of co-ercive control through government, and indi-vidual bargaining takes the place of rationing.”During the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-turies we fought our way out of the bondage ofScarcity into the free air of Abundance, and inthe nineteenth century this epoch culminatedgloriously in the victories of laissez-faire and