lling indeed!"

Everyone who heard her looked shocked. But that was the tone of everyone
of importance in the dark years that followed the Napoleonic wars.
That is just one survivor of the old tradition. Another is Blight
the solicitor, who goes about bewailing the fact that we writers are
"holding out false hopes of higher agricultural wages after the war."
But these are both exceptions. They are held to be remarkable people
even by their own class. The mass of property owners and influential
people in Europe to-day no more believe in the sacred right of property
to hold up development and dictate terms than do the more intelligent
workers. The ideas of collective ends and of the fiduciary nature of
property, had been soaking through the European community for years
before the war. The necessity for sudden and even violent co-operations
and submersions of individuality in a common purpose, is rapidly
crystallising out these ideas into clear proposals.

War is an evil thing, but most people who will not learn from reason
must have an ugly teacher. This war has brought home to everyone the
supremacy of the public need over every sort of individual claim.

One of the most remarkable things in the British war press is the amount
of space given to the discussion of labour developments after the war.
This in its completeness peculiar to the British situation. Nothing on
the same scale is perceptible in the press of the Latin allies. A great
movement on the part of capitalists and business organisers is manifest
to assure the worker of a change of heart and a will to change method.
Labour is suspicious, not foolishly but wisely suspicious. But labour is
considering it.

"National industrial syndication," say the business organisers.

"Guild socialism," say the workers.

There is also a considerable amount of talking and writing about
"profit-sharing" and about giving the workers a share in the business
direction. Neither of these ideas appeals to the shrewder heads among
the workers. So far as direction goes their disposition is to ask
the captain to command the ship. So far as profits go, they think the
captain has no more right than the cabin boy to speculative gains; he
should do his work for his pay whether it is profitable or unprofitable
work. There is little balm for labour discontent in these schemes for
making the worker also an infinitesimal profiteer.

During my journey in Italy and France I met several men