My own point of departure could not be better illustrated than by a quotation from Descartes and the aspects I propose to examine might well be called Cartesian Economics. "Starting from the forms of knowledge most useful to life, instead of from that speculative philosophy taught in our schools, and knowing the force and processes of fire, the air, the stars and all the other bodies which surround us as distinctly as we know the different occupations of our own workmen, we shall be able to employ them in the same fashion and so render ourselves as the masters and possessors of nature and contribute to the perfection of the human life."
All forms of energy previously utilised by life, with one or two minor exceptions, as tidal energy and that of hot springs, were forms of the solar revenue. Wind-power, water-power and wood fuel are parts of the year-to-year revenue of sunshine no less than cereals and other animal foods. But when coal became king, the sunlight of a hundred million years ago added itself to that of to-day and by it was built a civilization such as the world had never seen.
In the flamboyant period of utilisation of the capital store of energy in fuel which is now closing, so far at least as this country is concerned, we could and did by machinofacture make almost every sort of commodity and all sorts of labour-saving machinery in exchange for the food which we could not so make and did not make. The population of Great Britain rose on account of this exchange of capital for revenue, of factory products for food, from 10.5 million in 1801 to 40.9 million in 1911. Whereas in Ireland which has not coal, it fell from 5 to 4.3 million over the same period, as Sire Leo Chiozza Money has pointed out. Cartesian economics is capable of diagnosing instantly the root of the Irish trouble.
But this is a passing phase. ...the flamboyant period of prosperity through which Great Britain has passed is destined to be short-lived. Imperialism marks its final bid for survival.
For untold years men froze on the site of what now are coal mines, and starved within sound of the Niagara that is now at work providing food. Every single factor in wealth production existed prior to the phenomenal expansion of the last century except one, the knowledge of how to control and utilise for life the capital store of sunlight preserved in fuel. It is precisely the same to-day. We are as far from utilising the stores of energy, which we know exist all round us in unlimited abundance, as savage men, who had not yet learned how to kindle fire, were from utilising the power which has made our own age great. The whole matter could not compete in public interest with a ball game or a prize-fight...
If ... there is at hand not merely in the remote stars, but at our feet, an unlimited source of energy of the order of a million times more powerful than any known, what tremendous social consequences await the discovery of artificial transmutation!
The flamboyant era through which we have been passing is due not to our own merits, but to our having inherited accumulations of solar energy from the carboniferous era, so that life for once has been able to live beyond its income. Had it but known it, it might have been a merrier age! So, if atomic energy is ever tapped, an outburst of human activity would occur such as would make the triumphs of our times seem tawdry, and primitive humanity's struggle for energy as the fantastic memory of some horrid dream.