socialism is to assume the inveterate selfishness of everyone. But most
people are a little more disposed to believe what it is to their
interest to believe than the contrary. Most people abandon with
reluctance ways of living and doing that have served them well. Most
people can see the neglect of duty in other classes more plainly than
they do in their own.

This war has brought back into the everyday human life of Europe the
great and overriding conception of devotion to a great purpose. But that
does not imply clear-headedness in correlating the ways of one's
ordinary life with this great purpose. It is no good treating as cynical
villainy things that merely exhibit the incapacity of our minds to live
consistently.

One Labour paper a month or so ago was contrasting Mr. Asquith's
eloquent appeals to the working man to economise and forgo any rise in
wages with the photographs that were appearing simultaneously in the
smart papers of the very smart marriage of Mr. Asquith's daughter. I
submit that by that sort of standard none of us will be blameless. But
without any condemnation, it is easy to understand that the initiative
to tax almost to extinction large automobiles, wedding dresses,
champagne, pâté de foie gras and enclosed parks, instead of gin and
water, bank holiday outings and Virginia shag, is less likely to come
from the Prime Minister class than from the class of dock labourers.
There is an unconscious class war due to habit and insufficient thinking
and insufficient sympathy that will play a large part in the
distribution of the burthen of the State bankruptcy that is in progress,
and in the subsequent readjustment of national life.

And having made this parenthesis, I may perhaps go on to point out the