Sometimes in old buildings which have stood firm for centuries a little insect enters the woodwork and gradually eats away its strength. To all outward appearances for a long time it seems as solid as ever but the mischief is gradually reducing the core of the timber into dust.
Our economic system is crumbling, not from external pressure but from inside. Can Mr. Baldwin persuade the deathwatch beetle to stop nibbling at the rafters for three whole years? Time is pressing. Governments are too dilatory and easygoing in dealing with this tremendous emergency. Whatever happens there must be fundamental changes. No one doubts this. They are in process now of being effected; everywhere the old order is passing away; nay, it has passed away already. What will take its place? Are statesmen thinking out that problem?
The existing industrial, financial, and economic order with its bland and cruel greed, with its extravagance and its poverty, its luxuries and its miseries, its waste and its chaos, with its tens of millions of honest workers reduced to eating the bread of charity whilst the riches of Providence are rotting in the fields because they are not permitted to reach the needy; with its slums where no humane man would house his cattle, with its nations organising to starve and slaughter each other — this system has been tried and found wanting.
(From a speech at Carnarvon on Thursday, January 19th. Manchester Guardian, January 20th. Reproduced in the Socialist Standard, February 1933.)
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