Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PECUNIARY STANDARD " The deeper cause of the oppression of the factory operative and of the terrible degradation and pauperisation of the agricultural labourer, was not the mere fact that machines were invented which multiplied the efficiency of labour, but the previous monopolisation, in the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, of the land and of education. The great change then took place in the current philosophy of life, which made the whole of the governing classes of England, with exceptions practically negligible, accept with avidity the idea merely more clearly formulated by political economists, that the highest duty of man was to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market." Patrick Geddes. THE saying that " man shall not live by bread alone " has been in familiar circulation so long and on authority so good that it is remarkable how slightly it has affected the general conduct of life. Bread and the things symbolised by bread in the saying are and must remain the first care of men, but they are first only in the sense of being preliminary, the necessary conditions of the main and supreme business of life. Yet modern civilisation as a whole has shown no manifest sign of a conception of life which requires that the chief interest and energy of men should be directed to ends of a higher order tjian that of maintaining physical existence. This fact is to some extent obscured from us by the elaborate development of commercial organisation, so that multitudes of men are engaged in enterprises and vocations apparently so removed from the actualbusiness of clothing, feeding and housing other men that they are not aware of being connected with it at all. Yet the entire structure of commerce rest...