4 ;.\i :/p:.gjg,:POLICY OF THE PLOUGH 



self-respect, in order to save a shilling. Economists 

 of the old tradition admit to-day that alongside the 

 purely mathematical operations of this or that system 

 of economics there are moral, physical, perhaps 

 spiritual, motives operating, which may utterly out- 

 weigh hard economic rules. 



II 



SOME HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 



The proofs that special human incentives may have 

 a stronger governing force than economic laws already 

 appeared in the past, it is true, but they were generally 

 undiscerned. After the American Civil War, the 

 exhausted citizens of the United States set to work 

 to rebuild their shattered industrial edifice. High 

 prices and the high cost of labour caused them to 

 invent labour-saving appliances, and to standardise 

 their products, and they thus evolved a wonderful 

 system which produced cheaply in spite of the dear- 

 ness of all the elements of production. Necessity, in 

 fine, had become their incentive. That incentive, 

 working as it were unconsciously, was more valuable 

 to them in terms of money than the most perfectly 

 economised system of production would have been 

 before the war when there was no new and pecuHar 

 motive. 



Similarly Denmark, after being crushed by Germany 

 in 1864, determined to "cultivate her garden" more 

 than ever. She had, as she still has, comparatively 

 few industries. Agriculture was, as it still is, her one 



