countervailing considerations that may quite possibly modify or reverse
this tendency.

In this chapter an attempt is to be made to strike a balance between the
two systems of forces, and guess how much will be private and how much
public in Europe in 1930, or thereabouts.

The prophets who foretell the coming of Socialism base their case on
three sets of arguments. They point out, first, the failure of
individual enterprise to produce a national efficiency comparable to
the partial State Socialism of Germany, and the extraordinary, special
dangers inherent in private property that the war has brought to light;
secondly, to the scores of approaches to practical Socialism that have
been forced upon Great Britain--for example, by the needs of the war;
and, thirdly, to the obvious necessities that will confront the British
Empire and the Allies generally after the war--necessities that no
unorganised private effort can hope to meet effectively.

All these arguments involve the assumption that the general
understanding of the common interest will be sufficient to override
individual and class motives; an exceedingly doubtful assumption, to say
the least of it. But the general understanding of the common interest is
most likely to be kept alive by the sense of a common danger, and we
have already arrived at the conclusion that Germany is going to be
defeated but not destroyed in this war, and that she will be left with
sufficient vitality and sufficient resentment and sufficient of her
rancid cultivated nationalism to make not only the continuance of the
Alliance after the war obviously advisable and highly probable, but also
to preserve in the general mind for a generation or so that sense of a
common danger which most effectually conduces to the sweeping aside of