ifting
to the side of the at present negligible group of British pacifists. I
do not think one can count on any limit to their selfishness and
treason.

I believe that the calculations of some of these extreme and apparently
quite unreasonable "pacifists" are right. Before the war is over there
will be a lot of money in the pacifist business. The rich curs of the
West End will join hands with the labour curs of the Clyde. The base are
to be found in all classes, but I doubt if they dominate any. I do not
believe that any interest or group of interests in Great Britain can
stand in the way of the will of the whole people to bring this struggle
to a triumphant finish at any cost. I do not believe that the most
sacred ties of personal friendship and blood relationship with
influential people can save either shipowners or coalowners or army
contractors to the end.

There will be no end until these profit-makings are arrested. The
necessary "conscriptions of property" must come about in Great Britain
because there is no alternative but failure in the war, and the British
people will not stand failure. I believe that the end of the war will
see, not only transit, but shipping, collieries, and large portions of
the machinery of food and drink production and distribution no longer
under the administration of private ownership, but under a sort of
provisional public administration. And very many British factories will
be in the same case.

Two years ago no one would have dared to prophesy the tremendous
rearrangement of manufacturing machinery which is in progress in Britain
to-day. Thousands of firms of engineers and manufacturers of all sorts,
which were flourishing in 1914, exist to-day only as names, as shapes,
as empty shells. Their staffs have been shattered, scattered,
reconstructed; their buildings enlarged and modified; their machinery
exchanged, reconstituted, or taken. The reality is a vast interdependent
national factory that would have seemed incredible to Fourier.

It will be as impossible to put back British industrialism into the
factories and forms of the pre-war era as it would be to restore the
Carthaginian Empire. There is a new economic Great Britain to-day,
emergency made, jerry-built no doubt, a gawky, weedy giant, but a giant
who may fill out to such dimensions as the German national system has
never attained. Behind it is an _idea_, a new idea, the idea of the
nation as one great economic system wor