will be struck to see with what facility and in how short a’ time your needs of dress and of thousands of articles of luxury can be satisfied, when production is carried on for satisfying real needs rather than for satisfying shareholders by high profits or for pouring gold into the pockets of promoters and bogus directors. Very soon you will yourselves feel interested in that work, and you will have occasion to admire in your children their eager desire to become acquainted with Nature and its forces, their inquisitive inquiries as to the powers of machinery, and their rapidly developing inventive genius.
Such is the future — already possible, already realisable; such is the present — already condemned and about to disappear. And what prevents us from turning our backs to this present and from marching towards that future, or, at least, making the first steps towards it, is not the “ failure of science,” but first of all our crass cupidity — the cupidity of the man who killed the hen that was laying golden eggs — and then our laziness of mind — that mental cowardice so carefully nurtured in the past.