ch comes from syphilis, whose breeding-ground is
war.

The majority of our men were clean-living and clean--hearted fellows
who struggled to come unscathed in soul from most of the horrors of war.
They resisted the education of brutality and were not envenomed by the
gospel of hate. Out of the dark depths of their experience they looked
up to the light, and had visions of some better law of life than that
which led to the world-tragedy. It would be a foul libel on many of them
to besmirch their honor by a general accusation of lowered morality
and brutal tendencies. Something in the spirit of our race and in the
quality of our home life kept great numbers of them sound, chivalrous,
generous-hearted, in spite of the frightful influences of degradation
bearing down upon them out of the conditions of modern warfare. But the
weak men, the vicious, the murderous, the primitive, were overwhelmed
by these influences, and all that was base in them was intensified, and
their passions were unleashed, with what result we have seen, and shall
see, to our sorrow and the nation's peril.

The nation was in great peril after this war, and that peril will not
pass in our lifetime except by heroic remedies. We won victory in the
field and at the cost of our own ruin. We smashed Germany and Austria
and Turkey, but the structure of our own wealth and industry was
shattered, and the very foundations of our power were shaken and sapped.
Nine months after the armistice Great Britain was spending at the rate
of L2,000,000 a day in excess of her revenue. She was burdened with
a national debt which had risen from 645 millions in 1914 to 7,800
millions in 1919. The pre-war expenditure of L200,000,000 per annum on
the navy, army, and civil service pensions and interest on national debt
had risen to 750 millions.

Our exports were dwindling down, owing to decreased output, so that
foreign exchanges were rising against us and the American dollar was
increasing in value as our proud old sovereign was losing its ancient
standard. So that for all imports from the United States we were paying
higher prices, which rose every time the rate of exchange dropped
against us. The slaughter of 900,000 men of ours, the disablement of
many more than that, had depleted our ranks of labor, and there was a
paralysis of all our industry, owing to the dislocation of its machinery
for purposes of war, the soaring cost of raw material, the crippling
effect of high ta