the ordinary comfortable
man with a stake in the country--have been thinking altogether too much
of the claims and rights and expectations and economies of Bocking and
Braintree and Mr. John Smith. They have to think now in a different
way....

Just consider the work of reconstruction that Great Britain alone will
have to face in the next year or so. (And her task is, if anything, less
than that of any of her antagonists or Allies, except Japan and Italy.)
She has now probably from six to ten million people in the British
Isles, men and women, either engaged directly in warfare or in the
manufacture of munitions or in employments such as transit, nursing, and
so forth, directly subserving these main ends. At least five-sixths of
these millions must be got back to employment of a different character
within a year of the coming of peace. Everywhere manufacture, trade and
transit has been disorganised, disturbed or destroyed. A new economic
system has to be put together within a brief score or so of weeks; great
dislocated masses of population have to be fed, kept busy and
distributed in a world financially strained and abounding in wounded,
cripples, widows, orphans and helpless people.

In the next year or so the lives of half the population will have to be
fundamentally readjusted. Here is work for administrative giants, work
for which no powers can be excessive. It will be a task quite difficult
enough to do even without the opposition of legal rights, haggling
owners, and dexterous profiteers. It would be a giant's task if all the
necessary administrative machinery existed now in the most perfect
condition. How is this tremendous job going to be done if every Bocking
in the country is holding out for impossible terms from Braintree, and
every Braintree holding out for impossible terms from Bocking, while
the road out remains choked and confused between them; and if every John
Smith with a claim is insisting upon his reasonable expectation of
profits or dividends, his reasonable solatium and compensation for
getting out of the way?

I would like to record my conviction that if the business of this great
crisis is to be done in the same spirit, the jealous, higgling, legal
spirit that I have seen prevailing in British life throughout my
half-century of existence, it will not in any satisfactory sense of the
phrase get done at all. This war has greatly demoralised and discredited
the governing class in Great Britain,