crafts, or taking services as gamekeepers, grooms or chauffeurs, with
the well-to-do classes who earned their profits from industry or
business. Even before the war there was a growing scarcity of labour to
grow, and harvest, even the lessened volume of our agricultural output.
Dr. Bowley's picture was far from being realized and even if the process
of specialization had gone on, it may be hoped that we should have had
sense enough to avoid the blackest of its horrors.

Then came the war, which went far to undermine the great underlying
assumption on which the free interchange of capital among nations and
the consequent specialization that proceeded from it, was taken to be a
safe and sound policy. This assumption was in effect, that the world was
civilized to a point at which there was no need to fear that its whole
economic arrangements would be upset by war. We now know that the world
was not civilized to this point, and is a very long way from being so,
that the ultimate appeal is still to "arms and the man," and that we
have still to be careful to see that our trade and industry are carried
on in such a way as to be least likely to be hurt if ploughshares have
suddenly to be beaten into swords. At first sight, this is a somewhat
tragical discovery, but it carries with it certain consolations. If the
apparent civilization evolved by the nineteenth century had been good
and wholesome, it might have been really sad to find that it was only a
thin veneer laid over a structure that man's primitive passions might at
any moment overturn. In fact, the apparently achieved civilization was
so grossly material in its successes, so forcibly feeble in its
failures, so beset with vulgarity at its summit and undermined by
destitution at its base, that even the horrors of the present war, with
its appalling loss of the best lives of the chief nations of the earth,
may be a blessing to mankind in the long run if they purge its notions
about the things that are worth trying for.