Into an England where Faith was indigenous, Charity a common virtue, and Hope a sane, constructive effort, Caxton was admitted as a man with a wonderful new toy. He was, in fact, the pioneer of materialism, and the legacy we have inherited from him after more than four centuries, is the chaos of the modern world.

We live now, at best, in a maze of false optimism. Most men realise that something is wrong with the world; they know that Faith is a limited psychological phenomenon with a certain commercial value, that Charity is either a convincing gesture (also with a commercial value) or a weakness that encourages the lower classes, and that Hope is a pious wish that, in spite of Socialism, Mammon may come into his own; but ‘hard-headed business men’ and their satellites are the last people to face realities; self-preservation is the antithesis of soul-preservation, and the one is pleasing and lucrative, the other painful and exacting, so the issue is cloaked in the obscurity of ink which itself is the maggot that has bred our present corruption. Ink, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is a black liquid ejected by a cuttle-fish to assist its escape from a foe.