ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century carried to extravagant lengths the criterion of what one can call for short ‘the financial results,’ as a test of the advisability of any course of action sponsored by private or by collective action. The whole conduct of life was made into a sort of parody of an accountant's nightmare. Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder city, the men of the nineteenth century built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, ‘paid,’ whereas the wonder city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have ‘mortgaged the future’ – though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy… The same rule of self-destructive financial calculation governs every walk of life… We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend… But once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.
