IV

POLITICS

337

the economic Juggernaut was allowed to crashalong the highway of Progress without ob-struction and even with applause.

Half the copybook wisdom of our statesmenis based on assumptions which were at one timetrue, or partly true, but are now less and lesstrue day by day. We have to invent new wis-dom for a new age. And in the meantime wemust, if we are to do any good, appear unortho-dox, troublesome, dangerous, disobedient tothem that begat us.

In the economic field this means, first of all,that we must find new policies and new instru-ments to adapt and control the working ofeconomic forces, so that they do not intolerablyinterfere with contemporary ideas as to what isfit and proper in the interests of social stabilityand social justice.

It is not an accident that the opening stage ofthis political struggle, which will last long andtake many different forms, should centre aboutmonetary policy. For the most violent inter-ferences with stability and with justice, to whichthe nineteenth century submitted in due satis-faction of the philosophy of Abundance, wereprecisely those which were brought about bychanges in the price level. But the conse-quences of these changes, particularly when theAuthorities endeavour to impose them on us ina stronger dose than even the nineteenth cen-tury ever swallowed, are intolerable to modernideas and to modern institutions.

We have changed, by insensible degrees, our