st now?"
And so while I hear plenty of talk about the great reorganisations that
are to come after the war, while there is the stir of doubt among the
_rentiers_ whether, after all, they will get paid, while the unavoidable
stresses and sacrifices of the war are making many people question the
rightfulness of much that they did as a matter of course, and of much
that they took for granted, I perceive there is also something dull
and not very articulate in this European world, something resistant and
inert, that is like the obstinate rolling over of a heavy sleeper after
he has been called upon to get up. "Just a little longer.... Just for
_my_ time."

One thought alone seems to make these more intractable people anxious.
I thrust it in as my last stimulant when everything else has failed.
"There will be _frightful_ trouble with labour after the war," I say.

They try to persuade themselves that military discipline is breaking in
labour....

2

What does British labour think of the outlook after the war?

As a distinctive thing British labour does not think. "Class-conscious
labour," as the Marxists put it, scarcely exists in Britain. The only
convincing case I ever met was a bath-chairman of literary habits
Eastbourne. The only people who are, as a class, class-conscious in
the British community are the Anglican gentry and their fringe of the
genteel. Everybody else is "respectable." The mass of British workers
find their thinking in the ordinary halfpenny papers or in _John Bull._
The so-called labour papers are perhaps less representative of British
Labour than any other section of the press; the _Labour Leader_, for
example, is the organ of such people as Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee,
Morel, academic _rentiers_ who know about as much as of the labour side
of industrialism as they do of cock-fighting. All the British peoples
are racially willing and good-tempered people, quite ready to be led
by those they imagine to be abler than themselves. They make the most
cheerful and generous soldiers in the whole world, without insisting
upon that democratic respect which the Frenchman exacts. They do not
criticise and they do not trouble themselves much about the general plan
of operations, so long as they have confidence in the quality and good
will of their leading. But British soldiers will of their loading. But
British soldiers will hiss a general when they think he is selfish,
unfeeling, or a muff. And the social