h. And also, in a parallel case, there is
shipbuilding. The chemical side of munition work can turn itself with no
extreme difficulty to the making of such products as dyes.

We face the fact, then, that either the State must go on with this
production, as it can do, straight off from the signing of peace,
converting with a minimum of friction, taking on its soldiers as they
are discharged from the army as employees with a minimum waste of time
and a minimum of social disorder, and a maximum advantage in the
resumption of foreign trade, or there will be a dangerous break-up of
the national factory system, a time of extreme chaos and bitter
unemployment until capital accumulates for new developments. The risks
of social convulsion will be enormous. And there is small hope that the
Central Powers, and particularly industrial Germany, will have the
politeness to wait through the ten or twelve years of economic
embarrassment that a refusal to take this bold but obviously
advantageous step into scientific Socialism will entail.

But the prophet must be on his guard against supposing that, because a
thing is highly desirable, it must necessarily happen; or that, because
it is highly dangerous, it will be avoided. This bold and successful
economic reconstruction upon national lines is not inevitable merely
because every sound reason points us in that direction. A man may be
very ill, a certain drug may be clearly indicated as the only possible
remedy, but it does not follow that the drug is available, that the
doctor will have the sense to prescribe it, or the patient the means to
procure it or the intelligence to swallow it.

The experience of history is that nations do not take the obviously
right course, but the obviously wrong one. The present prophet knows
only his England, but, so far as England is concerned, he can cover a
sheet of paper with scarcely a pause, jotting down memoranda of
numberless forces that make against any such rational reconstruction.
Most of these forces, in greater or less proportion, must be present in
the case of every other country under consideration.

The darkest shadow upon the outlook of European civilisation at the
present time is not the war; it is the failure of any co-operative
spirit between labour and the directing classes. The educated and
leisured classes have been rotten with individualism for a century; they
have destroyed the confidence of the worker in any leadership whatever.