the ships,
the railways, the coal and metal supply, the great metal industries,
much engineering, and most agriculture, will be more or less completely
under collective ownership, and certainly very completely under
collective control. This does not mean that there will have been any
disappearance of private property, but only that there will have been a
very considerable change in its character; the owner will be less of
controller but more of a creditor; he will be a _rentier_ or an
annuitant.

The burthen of this class upon the community will not be relatively
quite so heavy as it would otherwise have been, because of a very
considerable rise in wages and prices.

In a community in which all the great initiatives have been assumed by
the State, the importance of financiers and promoters will have
diminished relatively to the importance of administrative officials; the
opportunities of private exploitation, indeed, will have so diminished
that there will probably be far less evidence of great concentrations of
private wealth in the European social landscape than there was before
the war.

On the other hand, there will be an enormously increased _rentier_ class
drawing the interest of the war loans from the community, and
maintaining a generally high standard of comfort. There will have been a
great demand for administrative and technical abilities and a great
stimulation of scientific and technical education. By 1926 we shall be
going about a world that will have recovered very largely from the
impoverishment of the struggle; we shall tour in State-manufactured
automobiles upon excellent roads, and we shall live in houses equipped
with a national factory electric light installation, and at every turn
we shall be using and consuming the products of nationalised
industry--and paying off the National Debt simultaneously, and reducing
our burden of _rentiers_.

At the same time our boys will be studying science in their schools
more thoroughly than they do now, and they will in many cases be
learning Russian instead of Greek or German. More of our boys will be
going into the public service, and fewer thinking of private business,
and they will be going into the public service, not as clerks, but as
engineers, technical chemists, manufacturers, State agriculturists, and
the like. The public service will be less a service of clerks and more a
service of practical men. The ties that bind France and Great Britain at
th