because the pay is too low and the hours are too long. The producer
cannot employ him because the wage is too high, and the hours are too
short. If the high wage is paid and the short hours are granted, then
the price of the thing made, so it seems, rises higher still. Even the
high wages will not buy it. The process apparently moves in a circle
with no cessation to it. The increased wages seem only to aggravate the
increasing prices. Wages and prices, rising together, call perpetually
for more money, or at least more tokens and symbols, more paper credit
in the form of checks and deposits, with a value that is no longer based
on the rock-bottom of redemption into hard coin, but that floats upon
the mere atmosphere of expectation.

But the sheer quantity of the inflated currency and false money forces
prices higher still. The familiar landmarks of wages, salaries and
prices are being obliterated. The "scrap of paper" with which the war
began stays with us as its legacy. It lies upon the industrial landscape
like snow, covering up, as best it may, the bare poverty of a world
desolated by war.

Under such circumstances national finance seems turned into a delirium.
Billions are voted where once a few poor millions were thought
extravagant. The war debts of the Allied Nations, not yet fully
computed, will run from twenty-five to forty billion dollars apiece. But
the debts of the governments appear on the other side of the ledger as
the assets of the citizens. What is the meaning of it? Is it wealth or
is it poverty? The world seems filled with money and short of goods,
while even in this very scarcity a new luxury has broken out. The
capitalist rides in his ten thousand dollar motor car. The
seven-dollar-a-day artisan plays merrily on his gramophone in the broad
daylight of his afternoon that is saved, like all else, by being
"borrowed" from the morning. He calls the capitalist a "profiteer." The
capitalist retorts with calling him a "Bolshevik."

Worse portents appear. Over the rim of the Russian horizon are seen the
fierce eyes and the unshorn face of the real and undoubted Bolshevik,
waving his red flag. Vast areas of what was a fertile populated world
are overwhelmed in chaos. Over Russia there lies a great darkness,
spreading ominously westward into Central Europe. The criminal sits
among his corpses. He feeds upon the wreck of a civilization that was.

The infection spreads. All over the world the just claims of