"Until nations are generous they will never be wise," wrote Washington Irving in the early half of the nineteenth century; "true policy is generous policy; all bitterness, selfishness, etc., may gain small ends, but lose great ones." This statement has particular application to the problems of today, when national and international relationships may be cemented with solemn and lasting union, on the one hand, or disintegrated by the steps taken or ignored by the councils of the victorious nations, as indeed results have proved they were only two decades ago.
The human family has as a whole failed to penetrate the mist of materiality which surrounds its human living, and has cast its all, not into the treasury of Truth, from which it could have reaped a harvest far exceeding its human aspirations, but into the cauldron of materiality. Here its false values have largely been consumed, or have been so magnified to imaginative greed and envy as to become idols obscuring all other ends and aims but the exacting worship of themselves.
The phenomenon of surpluses, which on the one hand prove undistributable and unsalable, and on the other cause starvation and unemployment, reveals the maladjustment of human planning and consequently the failure of the human machine to gain its own aim and object, that is, the satisfactory balance between supply and demand. And this, because the basis of its action is largely fear or greed, or both.
