THE
FUTURE
was
greater than ever before, and that the net surplus
of
our
foreign balance available for new foreign investment, after paying
for all our imports, was greater last year than that of any other
country, being indeed
50
per cent greater than the corresponding
surplus
of
the United States.
Or
again-if
it
is
to be a matter
of
comparisons-suppose that
we
were to reduce our wages
by a half, repudiate four-fifths
of
the national debt, and hoard
our surplus wealth in barren gold instead
of
lending it at 6 per
cent or more,
we
should resemble the now much-envied France.
But would it
be
an improvement?
The
prevailing world depression, the enormous anomaly
of
unemployment in a world
full
of
wants, the disastrous mistakes
we
have made, blind us to what
is
going on under the
surface-
to the true interpretation
of
the trend
of
things. For I predict
that both
of
the two opposed errors
of
pessimism which now
make
so
much noise in the world
will
be proved wrong in our
own
time-the
pessimism
of
the revolutionaries who think that
things are
so
bad that nothing can
save
us but violent change,
and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance
of our economic and social life
so
precarious that
we
must risk
no
experiments.
My purpose in this essay, however,
is
not to examine the
present or the near future, but to disembarrass myself
of
short
views and take wings into the future. What can
we
reasonably
expect the level
of
our economic life to
be
a hundred years hence?
What are the economic possibilities
for
our grandchildren?
From the earliest times
of
which
we
have
record-back,
say
to two thousand years before
Christ-down
to the beginning
of
the eighteenth century, there
was
no
very great change in
the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised
centres
of
the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations
of
plague, famine, and
war.
Golden intervals. But
no
progressive,
violent change. Some periods perhaps
50
per cent better than
others-at
the utmost
100
per cent
better-in
the four thousand
years
wh
ich ended
(say)
in A.D.
1700.
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