t's delight," suffered a good deal more than London,
although Italy still remained neutral. In London itself a good example
of the parasitic industry are the firms which make ingeniously useless
silver toys for rich people to give each other at Christmas.[51]

Many such industries may indeed have suffered in England, although many
of the trades mentioned in the Berlin list have not been affected in
London, and at least two of them have made conspicuous profits. But in
any case it is probable that they suffered if at all only during the
first period of the war, when the general feeling of strangeness and
insecurity was strong enough to inhibit the shopping instinct of the
wealthier classes. As soon as these became accustomed to the state of
war they reverted with even greater energy to their old pastime of
spending money: and meanwhile the luxury trades had acquired an entirely
new set of customers, for a large part of the profits accumulated in
other trades were now being spent by a newly enriched class who were
unaccustomed to save, for the simple reason that they had never before
been in a position to do so. Consequently the luxury trades after a year
of war had not only recouped their temporary losses but were doing a
bigger business than ever. The natural adaptability of the trades which
pander to fashion must also be taken into account. A number of them
after the first panic recaptured the failing demand by advertising very
simple modifications of their ordinary supply. Some, for instance,
turned to the manufacture of equally plausible superfluities of military
equipment--such as silver and gold identity disks and watches with
luminous dials and queer little hieroglyphs in place of the ordinary
figures. Trades already so well organised for exploitation could easily
defeat any general attempt at social economy. Thus for women of the
upper middle class the most obvious form of war economy was to carry on
with only a slight alteration of last year's dresses; and such was their
declared intention when their hands were forced by the Dressmakers'
revolutionary change in the fashion which substituted the full skirt for
the tight skirt of 1913-14. The extraordinary ingenuity of this move
was, not only that it thwarted any good intention of not buying a new
dress this year, it being manifestly impossible to "alter" a tight skirt
into a crinoline, but also that the extra cloth required for the
unusually full skirts more than