n two Hungarian and one Bulgarian loan, in a linoleum factory at
Rouen and in a Swiss Hotel company. All these stopped payments, and the
dividends from their other investments shrank. There seemed no limit set
to the possibilities of shrinkage of capital and income. Income tax had
leapt to colossal dimensions, the cost of most things had risen, and the
tangle of life was now increased by the need for retrenchments and
economies. He decided that Gladys, the facetiously named automobile, was
a luxury, and sold her for a couple of hundred pounds. He lost his
gardener, who had gone to higher priced work with a miller, and he had
great trouble to replace him, so that the garden became disagreeably
unkempt and unsatisfactory. He had to give up his frequent trips to
London. He was obliged to defer Statesminster for the boys. For a time
at any rate they must go as day boys to Brinsmead. At every point he met
this uncongenial consideration of ways and means. For years now he had
gone easy, lived with a certain self-indulgence. It was extraordinarily
vexatious to have one's greater troubles for one's country and one's son
and one's faith crossed and complicated by these little troubles of the
extra sixpence and the untimely bill.

What worried his mind perhaps more than anything else was his gradual
loss of touch with the essential issues of the war. At first the
militarism, the aggression of Germany, had seemed so bad that he could
not see the action of Britain and her allies as anything but entirely
righteous. He had seen the war plainly and simply in the phrase, "Now
this militarism must end." He had seen Germany as a system, as
imperialism and junkerism, as a callous materialist aggression, as the
spirit that makes war, and the Allies as the protest of humanity against
all these evil things.

Insensibly, in spite of himself, this first version of the war was
giving place to another. The tawdry, rhetorical German Emperor, who had
been the great antagonist at the outset, the last upholder of Caesarism,
God's anointed with the withered arm and the mailed fist, had receded
from the foreground of the picture; that truer Germany which is thought
and system, which is the will to do things thoroughly, the Germany of
Ostwald and the once rejected Hindenburg, was coming to the fore. It
made no apology for the errors and crimes that had been imposed upon it
by its Hohenzollern leadership, but it fought now to save itself from
the destr