ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

368

The strenuous purposeful money-makers maycarry all of us along with them into the lap ofeconomic abundance. But it will be thosepeoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate intoa fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do notsell themselves for the means of life, who willbe able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

Yet there is no country and no people, Ithink, who can look forward to the age ofleisure and of abundance without a dread. Forwe have been trained too long to strive and notto enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinaryperson, with no special talents, to occupy him-self, especially if he no longer has roots in thesoil or in custom or in the beloved conventionsof a traditional society. To judge from the be-haviour and the achievements of the wealthyclasses to-day in any quarter of the world, theoutlook is very depressing! For these are, soto speak, our advance guard—those who arespying out the promised land for the rest of usand pitching their camp there. For they havemost of them failed disastrously, so it seems tome—those who have an independent incomebut no associations or duties or ties—to solvethe problem which has been set them.

I feel sure that with a little more experiencewe shall use the new-found bounty of naturequite differently from the way in which the richuse it to-day, and will map out for ourselves aplan of life quite otherwise than theirs.

For many ages to come the old Adam willbe so strong in us that everybody will need to