But I do not venture to prophesy that this will come about as if it were a slick and easy deduction from present circumstances.  Even in France I do not think things will move as lucidly and generously as that.  There will be a conflict everywhere between wisdom and cunning, between the eyes of youth and the purblind, between energy and obstinacy.

The reorganisation of the European States will come about clumsily and ungraciously.  At every point the sticker will be found sticking tight, holding out to be bought off, holding out for a rent or a dividend or a share, holding out by mere instinct.  At every turn, too, the bawler will be loud and active, bawling suspicions, bawling accusations, bawling panic, or just simply bawling.  Tricks, peculation, obstinacies, vanities—­after this war men will still be men.  But I do believe that through all the dust and din, the great reasons in the case, the steady constructive forces of the situation, will carry us.

I believe that out of the ruins of the nineteenth century system of private capitalism that this war has smashed for ever, there will arise, there does even now arise, in this strange scaffolding of national munition factories and hastily nationalised public services, the framework of a new economic and social order based upon national ownership and service.

Let us now recapitulate a little and see how far we have got in constructing a picture of the European community as it will be in fifteen or twenty years’ time.  Nominally it will be little more of a Socialist State than it is to-day, but, as a matter of fact, the ships, the railways, the coal and metal supply, the great metal industries, much engineering, and most agriculture, will be more or less completely under collective ownership, and certainly very completely under collective control.  This does not mean that there will have been any disappearance of private property, but only that there will have been a very considerable change in its character; the owner will be less of controller but more of a creditor; he will be a rentier or an annuitant.

The burthen of this class upon the community will not be relatively quite so heavy as it would otherwise have been, because of a very considerable rise in wages and prices.

In a community in which all the great initiatives have been assumed by the State, the importance of financiers and promoters will have diminished relatively to the importance of administrative officials; the opportunities of private exploitation, indeed, will have so diminished that there will probably be far less evidence of great concentrations of private wealth in the European social landscape than there was before the war.