f gentlemen-investors has been insensibly losing the
confidence and the countenance of the common man; who, when all is said,
will always have to do what is to be done. The order of gentlemanly
parleying and brokery has, therefore, with many apprehensions of
calamity, been reluctantly and tardily giving ground before something
that is of a visibly underbred order. Increasingly underbred, and
thereby insensibly approaching the character of this war situation, but
accepted with visible reluctance and apprehension both by the ruling
class and by the underlying population. The urgent necessity of going to
such a basis, and of working out the matter in hand by an unblushing
recourse to that matter-of-fact logic of mechanical efficiency, which
alone can touch the difficulties of the case, but which has no respect
of persons,--this necessity has been present from the outset and has
been vaguely apprehended for long past, but it is only tardily and after
the chastening of heavy penalties on this gentlemanly imbecility that a
substantial move in that direction has been made. It has required much
British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the
unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier
excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than
such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of
anything whatever in a commercial nation. And then, too, there is a
pecuniary interest in being interested in financial transactions.

This shifting of discretionary control out of the hands of the gentlemen
into those of the underbred common run, who know how to do what is
necessary to be done in the face of underbred exigencies, may
conceivably go far when it has once been started, and it may go forward
at an accelerated rate if the pressure of necessity lasts long enough.
If time be given for habituation to this manner of directorate in
national affairs, so that the common man comes to realise how it is
feasible to get along without gentlemen-investors holding the
discretion, the outcome may conceivably be very grave. It is a point in
doubt, but it is conceivable that in such a case the gentlemanly
executive committee administering affairs in the light of the
gentlemanly pecuniary interest, will not be fully reinstated in the
discretionary control of the United Kingdom for an appreciable number of
years after the return of peace. Possibly, even, the regime may be
perm