least it involves personal risk and hardship and bereavement to
the members of that caste. But the capitalist who has shares in
explosives and cannons and soldiers' boots runs no risk and suffers no
hardship; whilst as to the investor pure and simple, all that happens to
him is that he finds the unearned income obtainable on Government
security larger than ever. Victory to the capitalists of Europe means
that they can not only impose on the enemy a huge indemnity, but lend
him the money to pay it with whilst the working classes produce and pay
both principal and interest.

As long as we have that state of things, we shall have wars and secret
and mendacious diplomacy. And this is one of many overwhelming reasons
for building the State on equality of income, because without it
equality of status and general culture is impossible. Democracy without
equality is a delusion more dangerous than frank oligarchy and
autocracy. And without Democracy there is no hope of peace, no chance of
persuading ourselves that the sacredness of civilization will protect it
any more than the sacredness of the cathedral of Rheims has protected
it, not against Huns and Vandals, but against educated German gentlemen.

*Rheims.*

Commercial wage-slaves can never reproduce that wonderful company of
sculptured figures that made Rheims unlike any other place in the world;
and if they are now destroyed, or shortly about to be, it does not
console me that we still have--perhaps for a few days longer only--the
magical stained glass of Chartres and the choir of Beauvais. We tell
ourselves that the poor French people must feel as we should feel if we
had lost Westminster Abbey. Rheims was worth ten Westminster Abbeys; and
where it has gone the others may just as easily go too. Let us not sneer
at the German pretension to culture: let us face the fact that the
Germans are just as cultured as we are (to say the least) and that war
has nevertheless driven them to do these things as irresistibly as it
will drive us to do similar things tomorrow if we find ourselves
attacking a town in which the highest point from which our positions can
be spotted by an observer with a field glass in one hand and a telephone
in the other is the towering roof of the cathedral. Also let us be
careful how we boast of our love of medieval art to people who well
know, from the protests of Ruskin and Morris, that in times of peace we
have done things no less mischievous and ir