The term “social reconstruction” has almost of late years become a pass word assuring admission into the House of Commons. Perhaps by design it is nebulous in meaning and the more capable of adjustment to varied contexts. In common usage an idea is enshrined expressive of consorted endeavour to marshal forces within society with a view to economic needs. With this ill-defined campaign, peace conferences and international treaties may well harmonize. Assurance is given, by an elegant gesture, of every type of worldly gain and to the best advantage. The fulcrum of world leverage is money made productive by wealth. So now peace itself is converted into a commodity on the world market for sale at the costly price of armaments. But here, too, moral values are involved and though disguised as national “interests” cannot be weighed in material scales. The bodies and souls of men are incapable of adjustment to a gold standard. The moral worth indeed of human enterprises is accorded to them by ethical sanctions in regard to which they are deserving of praise or blame.

Civil society has as its worthy aims felicity and prosperity in common, yet to make these aims exclusive is to unsettle the balance of power and to leave standing a tottering ruin. A polarizing of society by the decentralisation of its moral units must inevitably lead to social unbalance. Over-much indulgence to the freedom of disorderly and shattered instincts cannot result in anything harmonious within the social group. Under pain of social anarchy self-realization must be allied in partnership with self-restraint. Social reformers have not been unaware of the unhappy path which events have taken, and have adopted various methods to avert the threatened destruction.