This war has brought back into the everyday human life of Europe the great and overriding conception of devotion to a great purpose.  But that does not imply clear-headedness in correlating the ways of one’s ordinary life with this great purpose.  It is no good treating as cynical villainy things that merely exhibit the incapacity of our minds to live consistently.

One Labour paper a month or so ago was contrasting Mr. Asquith’s eloquent appeals to the working man to economise and forgo any rise in wages with the photographs that were appearing simultaneously in the smart papers of the very smart marriage of Mr. Asquith’s daughter.  I submit that by that sort of standard none of us will be blameless.  But without any condemnation, it is easy to understand that the initiative to tax almost to extinction large automobiles, wedding dresses, champagne, pate de foie gras and enclosed parks, instead of gin and water, bank holiday outings and Virginia shag, is less likely to come from the Prime Minister class than from the class of dock labourers.  There is an unconscious class war due to habit and insufficient thinking and insufficient sympathy that will play a large part in the distribution of the burthen of the State bankruptcy that is in progress, and in the subsequent readjustment of national life.

And having made this parenthesis, I may perhaps go on to point out the peculiar limitations under which various classes will be approaching the phase of reorganisation, without being accused of making this or that class the villain of an anticipatory drama.

Now, three great classes will certainly resist the valiant reconstruction of economic life with a vigour in exact proportion to their baseness, stupidity and narrowness of outlook.  They will, as classes, come up for a moral judgment, on whose verdict the whole future of Western civilisation depends.  If they cannot achieve a considerable, an unprecedented display of self-sacrifice, unselfish wisdom, and constructive vigour, if the community as a whole can produce no forces sufficient to restrain their lower tendencies, then the intelligent father had better turn his children’s faces towards the New World.  For Europe will be busy with social disorder for a century.

The first great class is the class that owns and holds land and land-like claims upon the community, from the Throne downward.  This Court and land-holding class cannot go on being rich and living rich during the strains of the coming years.  The reconstructing world cannot bear it.  Whatever rises in rent may occur through the rise in prices, must go to meet the tremendous needs of the State.