no smoke came from the tall
chimneys and that the doors of the factories were shut, I was led to the
conclusion that they were closed.

Observing that the streets of the industrial centres were everywhere
filled with idle men, I gathered that they were unemployed: and when I
learned that the moving picture houses were full to the doors every day
and that the concert halls, beer gardens, grand opera, and religious
concerts were crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the country was
suffering from an unparalleled depression. This diagnosis turned out to
be absolutely correct. It has been freely estimated that at the time I
refer to almost two million men were out of work.

But it does not require government statistics to prove that in England
at the present day everybody seems poor, just as in the United States
everybody, to the eye of the visitor, seems to be rich. In England
nobody seems to be able to afford anything: in the United States
everybody seems to be able to afford everything. In England nobody
smokes cigars: in America everybody does. On the English railways the
first class carriages are empty: in the United States the "reserved
drawingrooms" are full. Poverty no doubt is only a relative matter: but
a man whose income used to be 10,000 a year and is now 5,000, is living
in "reduced circumstances": he feels himself just as poor as the man
whose income has been cut from five thousand pounds to three, or from
five hundred pounds to two. They are all in the same boat. What with the
lowering of dividends and the raising of the income tax, the closing of
factories, feeding the unemployed and trying to employ the unfed, things
are in a bad way.

The underlying cause is plain enough. The economic distress that the
world suffers now is the inevitable consequence of the war. Everybody
knows that. But where the people differ is in regard to what is going to
happen next, and what we must do about it. Here opinion takes a variety
of forms. Some people blame it on the German mark: by permitting their
mark to fall, the Germans, it is claimed, are taking away all the
business from England; the fall of the mark, by allowing the Germans to
work harder and eat less than the English, is threatening to drive the
English out of house and home: if the mark goes on falling still further
the Germans will thereby outdo us also in music, literature and in
religion. What has got to be done, therefore, is to force the Germans to
lif