FREE WILL AND DESTINY.
[To THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR."] Sig,—In the otherwise friendly notice of my Free Will and Destiny, the Spectator of July 24th makes a statement which is distinctly, and I regret to say quite unwarrantably, mis- leading. A piece of caustic irony, wrenched from its proper context, is represented as the author's deliberate opinion. Your reviewer speaks of my "contention that the world is ' richer ' to-day than it was before the war because the price of the world's wealth (i.e., its exchange value expressed in terms of money) has risen above the pre-war level." The quotation marks above the word " richer," in the passage referred to, are mine, not the reviewer's as readers of the review might be led to infer. The whole chapter, from which this extract is taken, is an argument against the mental habit of over-emphasizing the economic aspects of life—a most pernicious habit the growth of which I am endeavouring to counteract. I do not dispute the importance of the economic sphere, on the contrary I have recognized it specifically, but I maintain throughout this chapter, as elsewhere, that the considerations of economic wealth, with which are inextricably interwoven those of legal property, should be, and in the end must be, subordinated to the considerations of general welfare. This is indeed a proposition the truth of which few would be inclined to dispute, and least of all I should have thought the Spectator, with its ever-watchful insistence on the supreme importance of righteousness.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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