desirous of saving and security.

Directly the phase of enormous war loans ends, the new class of
_rentiers_ holding the various great new national loans will find
themselves drawing this collectively vast income and anxious to invest
it. They will for a time be receiving the bulk of the unearned income of
the world. Here, in the high prices representing demand and the need for
some reinvestment of interest representing supply, we have two of the
chief factors that are supposed to be necessary to a phase of business
enterprise. Will the economic history of the next few decades be the
story of a restoration of the capitalistic system upon a new basis?
Shall we all become investors, speculators, or workers toiling our way
to a new period of security, cheapness and low interest, a restoration
of the park, the enclosure, the gold standard and the big automobile,
with only this difference--that the minimum wage will be somewhere about
two pounds, and that a five-pound note will purchase about as much as a
couple of guineas would do in 1913?

That is practically parallel with what happened in the opening half of
the nineteenth century after the Napoleonic wars, and it is not an
agreeable outlook for those who love the common man or the nobility of
life. But if there is any one principle sounder than another of all
those that guide the amateur in prophecy, it is that _history never
repeats itself_. The human material in which those monetary changes and
those developments of credit will occur will be entirely different from
the social medium of a hundred years ago.

The nature of the State has altered profoundly in the last century. The
later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries constituted a period
of extreme individualism. What were called "economic forces" had