us all into plaster saints at the beginning, and that we might have continued so to the end if the State had dealt with our money in a proper way.  But without setting up any such idealistic arguments as these, looking back on those early days of the war, one can still remember the thrill of earnestness and of eagerness for self-sacrifice which has since then given way lamentably to war profiteering, war strikes, and a general struggle among many classes of the community to make as much as possible out of the war, merely because our financial leaders have never really put the country’s financial problem properly before the country.

We were not plaster saints, but we were either Idealistic and perhaps foolish people who attached great importance to the freedom and security of small nations and all those items in the programme of idealistic Radicalism, or else we were good, red-hot, true-blue Jingoes with a hearty hatred for Germany, and enjoyed the thought that the big fight which we had long foreseen between the two countries was at last going to be fought out.  Or, again, we were just commonplace people who did not much believe in idealistic Radicalism or anti-German bitterness, but saw that the whole future of our country was at stake, and were prepared to do anything for it.  A fine example was set us in those days by the Trade Union leaders.  The industrial world was seething with discontent.  The Suffragettes in London and the Carsonites in Ireland had shown us how much could be done by appeals to physical force in a lazy-minded community; and hints of industrial revolution, with great organised strikes, which were going to tie up the transport industry of the country were in the air.  And then, when the war came, the Labour leaders said, “No strikes until the war is over.  Our country comes first.”

This was the lead given to the country by those down at the bottom, who had the least to lose, and whose patriotism during the course of the war has frequently been questioned.  At the top the financial and property-owning classes, having been saved by Mr Lloyd George’s able adroitness from a bad crisis in the City, were entirely tame, and would have suffered anything in the way of taxation or financial conscription if the need for it had been properly put before them.

It is almost amusing to remember now that in those early days of the war the shareholders in Home Railway companies were thought lucky.  The Government were taking the railways over, and were guaranteeing that their proprietors should receive the same dividends as they had had before the war.  Such was the view in financial and property-owning circles of results of war that, so far from any expectation of the huge profits which war has put into the pockets of certain classes, they were only too thankful if they could be assured that their gross incomes were not going to be reduced.