terary style of the
English governesses who had had a share in their education. The
catchpenny manoeuvres of publishers are really only a branch of
journalism,[19] and such trivial offences were not, after all,
unexpected, because the very profession of journalism is to take
advantage. But the journalist is a man of straw who shows which way the
wind blows, and his raucous exultation over disaster was the manifest
symbol of a commercial exploitation of war by tradesmen and speculators
which soon became sensible from one end of belligerent Europe to the
other. Like the Vali of Aleppo, I am not good at statistics. It is well
known however without the assistance of a mathematician that in England
during the winter of 1915, when the cost of living had already risen by
nearly 50 per cent, wholesale dealers often kept provisions of all sorts
rotting in their stores rather than break the artificial scarcity they
had created; farmers would not sell fresh eggs when the price was
twopence-halfpenny, because they knew that in a week or two the price
for the same eggs would have risen to threepence. Here is a cartoon from
a Hungarian paper[20] showing the bloated profiteer of The Sugar Trust
laughing at the women who feebly attack his barricade of sugar loaves. I
mention it here because it is sufficiently remote from English affairs,
and because it happens to come to hand, and because it is a good
fragment of evidence, there being no reason why sugar should be scarce
in Hungary as an immediate result of the war. And from every country
between England and Hungary, from every country in Europe, can be heard
the same complaint, unmistakable but how much too feeble, the cry of the
people who discover that one of the horrors of war is Trade.[21]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: Cf. the present writer's introduction to Whyte-Melville's
_Gladiators_ in _Everyman's Library_, 1911.]

[Footnote 19: It was certainly, for example, the Headline Instinct which
caused Mr. John Lane, a publisher of some repute, to impose on Mr. Ford
Madox Hueffer's novel _The Saddest Story_, one of the most remarkable
novels of the century, such an absurdly irrelevant title as _The Good
Soldier_. _The Good Soldier_ was published in April, 1915. The evidence
that the publisher must have changed the title just before publication
is that an instalment of it had appeared serially as _The Saddest Story_
in the summer of 1914, and that as _The Saddest Story_ it actually
fi