When people thought in terms of
munitions, instead of in terms of general well-being, they saw that the
waste of labour must be, and could be, stopped. They talked no longer
about the laws of supply and demand, but about munitions. Those who had
made trash must be set to make munitions, or to fight, or in some way to
second the Army. Those who still were ready to waste labour on trash for
themselves were no longer obeying the laws of supply and demand; they
were diverting labour from its proper task; they were unpatriotic, they
were helping the Germans. Money, in fact, had no longer the right to an
absolute command over labour. A man, before he spent a sovereign, must
ask himself whether he was spending it for the good of the nation; and
if he did not ask himself that, the Government would ask it for him.
So much the war taught us, for purposes of war. But Morris many years
ago tried to teach it for purposes of peace. When he wrote those words
which we have quoted, he was not talking politics but ordinary common
sense. He was not even talking art, but rather economics; and he was
talking it not to any vague abstraction called the community, but to
each individual human being. At that time every one thought of economics
as something which concerned society or the universe. It was, so to
speak, a natural science; it observed phenomena as if they were in the
heavens; and stated laws about them, laws not human but natural.
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