ess engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of
destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is
able to diagnose.

In the latter stages of the war all the belligerent governments
practised, from necessity or incompetence, what a Bolshevist might have
done from design. Even now, when the war is over, most of them continue
out of weakness the same malpractices. But further, the Governments of
Europe, being many of them at this moment reckless in their methods as
well as weak, seek to direct on to a class known as "profiteers" the
popular indignation against the more obvious consequences of their
vicious methods. These "profiteers" are, broadly speaking, the
entrepreneur class of capitalists, that is to say, the active and
constructive element in the whole capitalist society, who in a period of
rapidly rising prices cannot help but get rich quick whether they wish
it or desire it or not. If prices are continually rising, even trader
who has purchased for stock or owns property and plant inevitably makes
profits. By directing hatred against this class, therefore, the European
Governments are carrying a step further the fatal process which the
subtle mind of Lenin had consciously conceived. The profiteers are a
consequence and not a cause of rising prices. By combining a popular
hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to
social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract and
of the established equilibrium of wealth which is the inevitable result
of inflation, these Governments are fast rendering impossible a
continuance of the social and economic order of the nineteenth century.
But they have no plan for replacing it.

We are thus faced in Europe with the spectacle of an extraordinary
weakness on the part of the great capitalist class, which has emerged
from the industrial triumphs of the nineteenth century, and seemed a
very few years ago our all-powerful master. The terror and personal
timidity of the individuals of this class is now so great, their
confidence in their place in society and in their necessity to the
social organism so diminished, that they are the easy victims of
intimidation. This was not so in England twenty-five years ago, any
more than it is now in the United States. Then the capitalists believed
in themselves, in their value to society, in the propriety of their
continued existence in the full enjoyment of their riches