president’s ADDRESS — SECTION a. 
165 
as to yield more satisfaction for the wants both of the workers whom 
they employ and of the public whose demands they supply ; and each 
and all of us, as spenders of money and demandera and consumers of 
goods and services, could and should, if we were better and wiser men, 
diminish the enormous waste which now arises from the misdirection 
of labour power to the satisfaction of wants that would be better left 
unsatisfied, and leave so much the more to be turned to good purpose 
for the raising of life to higher levels. Those who conduct our 
Government, if they were better workmen in their line of work, could 
do more than they can safely attempt now to secure tolerable con- 
ditions of life for those who can do little for themselves ; and the 
average voter, if he were a wiser and a better man, would elect a 
Government more capable of doing this. 
From the casual labourer to the Cabinet Minister, we are what 
our past has made us, and our conditions of life are and will be Avhat 
we, being such as we are, may make them for ourselves and for one 
another. No machinery of Acts of Parliament or trade regulations 
can abolish poverty, because no such machinery can make any sudden 
change in the character and ability of millions of men and women, 
all mutually dependent. But we are free to hope that the slow aud 
gradual change which never ceases will be a movement upward aud 
not downward. We shall not see the millennium in our time ; and 
hasty and ill-considered attempts to realise it may easily make things 
worse; but there is always something near at hand that we can do if 
we will ; both individually and collectively, in the way of giving a 
helping hand to those least able to help themselves. To discover what 
this “ something” may be is the special task of the economist. 
