ies as
gilt-edged as was compatible with the period.

Passing the more feverish parts of the City toward the most perfect
backwater in London, he ruminated. Money was extraordinarily tight; and
morality extraordinarily loose! The War had done it. Banks were not
lending; people breaking contracts all over the place. There was a
feeling in the air and a look on faces that he did not like. The country
seemed in for a spell of gambling and bankruptcies. There was
satisfaction in the thought that neither he nor his trusts had an
investment which could be affected by anything less maniacal than
national repudiation or a levy on capital. If Soames had faith, it was
in what he called "English common sense"--or the power to have things, if
not one way then another. He might--like his father James before
him--say he didn't know what things were coming to, but he never in his
heart believed they were. If it rested with him, they wouldn't--and,
after all, he was only an Englishman like any other, so quietly tenacious
of what he had that he knew he would never really part with it without
something more or less equivalent in exchange. His mind was essentially
equilibristic in material matters, and his way of putting the national
situation difficult to refute in a world composed of human beings. Take
his own case, for example! He was well off. Did that do anybody harm?
He did not eat ten meals a day; he ate no more than, perhaps not so much
as, a poor man. He spent no money on vice; breathed no more air, used no
more water to speak of than the mechanic or the porter. He certainly had
pretty things about him, but they had given employment in the making, and
somebody must use them. He bought pictures, but Art must be encouraged.
He was, in fact, an accidental channel through which money flowed,
employing labour. What was there objectionable in that? In his charge
money was in quicker and more useful flux than it would be in charge of
the State and a lot of slow-fly money-sucking officials. And as to what
he saved each year--it was just as much in flux as what he didn't save,
going into Water Board or Council Stocks, or something sound and useful.
The State paid him no salary for being trustee of his own or other
people's money he did all that for nothing. Therein lay the whole case
against nationalisation--owners of private property were unpaid, and yet
had every incentive to quicken up the flux. Under nationalisatio