y trace of socialism, with the
relics of sanity and truth, to the confines of the Labour press.[31]

But still the danger was for the moment realised, and the attempt was
made, the desperate and unsuccessful attempt to pull and squeeze and
bind the institutions of capitalism into an organised system of
political obligations. It failed because the very abuses and
intemperances of our commercial system are a sign that the sphere of
government has not expanded with the growing complications of the modern
community. Nevertheless the attempt was made: but no corresponding
effort is being made to extend the system of moral obligations in which
we live.

For it is just as the sphere of morality is unduly restricted and fails
to correspond to the needs of humanity, that, on the political plane,
the unduly restricted sphere of government has never been extended to
include all the interrelations of industrial citizenship. Capitalism is
a survival of the penultimate stage of political development, as war is
a survival of the penultimate stage of morality.

The attempts both spasmodic and continuous to extend the sphere of
government, which now begin to affect nearly all serious legislation,
must remain incomplete without an analogous and indeed corollary
expansion of the moral system which will involve the obsolescence of
war.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 31: This seems to apply to all belligerent states. Certainly
very little sanity finds its way into Germany except through the pages
of _Vorwaerts_. It is therefore humiliating to be told that _Vorwaerts_
has a much larger circulation than any socialist paper in England.]

CHAPTER III

Hinc usura uorax auidumque in tempora fenus et concussa fides et
MULTIS UTILE BELLUM.

Lucan, I, 181.

Individuals are constantly trying to decrease supply for their own
advantage.--_Fabian Essays_, 1889, p. 17.

Sec. 1

Trade during the War

Trade during the war seems to have had a remarkably good time. In the
first year of warfare I began to collect a few facts in support of what
then seemed the paradoxical view that war was, in essence if not in
origin, a very profitable capitalistic manoeuvre; a view deduced from
the opinion I had formed _a priori_ of the nature of all modern
warfare.[32] Instead of a few corroborating voices I found testimony
abundant in every paper I picked up, besides the live evidence received
in private letters and conversations.