Passing through the factory towns and noticing that no smoke came
from the tall chimneys and that the doors of the factories were
shut, I was led to the conclusion that they were closed.

Observing that the streets of the industrial centres were everywhere
filled with idle men, I gathered that they were unemployed: and when
I learned that the moving picture houses were full to the doors every
day and that the concert halls, beer gardens, grand opera, and
religious concerts were crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the
country was suffering from an unparalleled depression. This
diagnosis turned out to be absolutely correct. It has been freely
estimated that at the time I refer to almost two million men were out
of work.

But it does not require government statistics to prove that in
England at the present day everybody seems poor, just as in the
United States everybody, to the eye of the visitor, seems to be rich.
In England nobody seems to be able to afford anything: in the United
States everybody seems to be able to afford everything. In England
nobody smokes cigars: in America everybody does. On the English
railways the first class carriages are empty: in the United States
the "reserved drawingrooms" are full. Poverty no doubt is only a
relative matter: but a man whose income used to be 10,000 a year and
is now 5,000, is living in "reduced circumstances": he feels himself
just as poor as the man whose income has been cut from five thousand
pounds to three, or from five hundred pounds to two. They are all in
the same boat. What with the lowering of dividends and the raising of
the income tax, the closing of factories, feeding the unemployed and
trying to employ the unfed, things are in a bad way.