eve that every European country will struggle
along the path that this war has opened to a far more completely
organised State than has existed ever before. The Allies will become
State firms, as Germany was, indeed, already becoming before the war;
setting private profit aside in the common interest, handling
agriculture, transport, shipping, coal, the supply of metals, the
manufacture of a thousand staple articles, as national concerns.

In the face of the manifest determination of the Central Powers to do as
much, the Allies will be forced also to link their various State firms
together into a great allied trust, trading with a common interest and a
common plan with Germany and America and the rest of the world.... Youth
and necessity will carry this against selfishness, against the
unimaginative, against the unteachable, the suspicious, the "_old
fool_."

But I do not venture to prophesy that this will come about as if it were
a slick and easy deduction from present circumstances. Even in France I
do not think things will move as lucidly and generously as that. There
will be a conflict everywhere between wisdom and cunning, between the
eyes of youth and the purblind, between energy and obstinacy.

The reorganisation of the European States will come about clumsily and
ungraciously. At every point the sticker will be found sticking tight,
holding out to be bought off, holding out for a rent or a dividend or a
share, holding out by mere instinct. At every turn, too, the bawler will
be loud and active, bawling suspicions, bawling accusations, bawling
panic, or just simply bawling. Tricks, peculation, obstinacies,
vanities--after this war men will still be men. But I do believe that
through all the dust and din, the great reasons in the case, the steady
constructive forces of the situation, will carry us.

I believe that out of the ruins of the nineteenth century system of
private capitalism that this war has smashed for ever, there will arise,
there does even now arise, in this strange scaffolding of national
munition factories and hastily nationalised public services, the
framework of a new economic and social order based upon national
ownership and service.

Let us now recapitulate a little and see how far we have got in
constructing a picture of the European community as it will be in
fifteen or twenty years' time. Nominally it will be little more of a
Socialist State than it is to-day, but, as a matter of fact,