It will be as impossible to put back British industrialism into the
factories and forms of the pre-war era as it would be to restore the
Carthaginian Empire. There is a new economic Great Britain to-day,
emergency made, jerry-built no doubt, a gawky, weedy giant, but a giant
who may fill out to such dimensions as the German national system has
never attained. Behind it is an _idea_, a new idea, the idea of the
nation as one great economic system working together, an idea which
could not possibly have got into the sluggish and conservative British
intelligence in half a century by any other means than the stark
necessities of this war.... Great Britain cannot retrace those steps
even if she would, and so she will be forced to carry this process of
reconstruction through. And what is happening to Great Britain must,
with its national differences, be happening to France and Russia. Not
only for war ends, but for peace ends, behind the front and sustaining
the front, individualities are being hammered together into common and
concerted activities.

At the end of this war Great Britain will find herself with this great
national factory, this great national organisation of labour, planned,
indeed, primarily to make war material, but convertible with the utmost
ease to the purposes of automobile manufacture, to transit
reconstruction, to electrical engineering, and endless such uses.

France and Russia will be in a parallel case. All the world will be
exhausted, and none of the Allies will have much money to import
automobiles, railway material, electrical gear, and so on, from abroad.
Moreover, it will be a matter of imperative necessity for them to get
ahead of the Central Powers with their productive activities. We shall
all be too poor to import from America, and we shall be insane to import
from Germany. America will be the continent with the long purse,