prepared to buy rather than sell. Each country will have great masses of
soldiers waiting to return to industrial life, and will therefore be
extremely indisposed to break up any existing productive organisation.

In the face of these facts, will any of the Allied Powers be so foolish
as to disband this great system of national factories and nationally
worked communications? Moreover, we have already risked the prophecy
that this war will not end with such conclusiveness as to justify an
immediate beating out of our swords into ploughshares. There will be a
military as well as a social reason for keeping the national factories
in a going state.

What more obvious course, then, than to keep them going by turning them
on to manufacture goods of urgent public necessity? There are a number
of modern commodities now practically standardised: the bicycle, the
cheap watch, the ordinary tradesman's delivery automobile, the farmer's
runabout, the country doctor's car, much electric-lighting material,
dynamos, and so forth. And also, in a parallel case, there is
shipbuilding. The chemical side of munition work can turn itself with no
extreme difficulty to the making of such products as dyes.

We face the fact, then, that either the State must go on with this
production, as it can do, straight off from the signing of peace,
converting with a minimum of friction, taking on its soldiers as they
are discharged from the army as employees with a minimum waste of time
and a minimum of social disorder, and a maximum advantage in the
resumption of foreign trade, or there will be a dangerous break-up of
the national factory system, a time of extreme chaos and bitter
unemployment until capital accumulates for new developments. The risks
of social convulsion will be enormous. And there is small hope that the