All these classes, by instinct and the baser kinds of reason also, will be doing their best to check the rise in prices, stop and reverse the advance in wages, prevent the debasement of the circulation, and facilitate the return to a gold standard and a repressive social stability.  They will be resisting any comprehensive national reconstruction, any increase in public officials, any “conscription” of land or railways or what not for the urgent civil needs of the State.  They will have fighting against these tendencies something in their own consciences, something in public opinion, the tradition of public devotion their own dead sons have revived—­and certain other forces.

They will have over against them the obvious urgent necessities of the time.

The most urgent necessity will be to get back the vast moiety of the population that has been engaged either in military service or the making of munitions to productive work, to the production of food and necessary things, and to the restoration of that export trade which, in the case of Great Britain at least, now that her overseas investments have been set off by overseas war debts, is essential to the food supply.  There will be coming back into civil life, not merely thousands, but millions of men who have been withdrawn from it.  They will feel that they have deserved well of their country.  They will have had their imaginations greatly quickened by being taken away from the homes and habits to which they were accustomed.  They will have been well fed and inured to arms, to danger, and the chances of death.  They will have no illusions about the conduct of the war by the governing classes, or the worshipful heroism of peers and princes.  They will know just how easy is courage, and how hard is hardship, and the utter impossibility of doing well in war or peace under the orders of detected fools.

This vast body will constitute a very stimulating congregation of spectators in any attempt on the part of landlord, lawyer and investor to resume the old political mystery dance, in which rents are to be sent up and wages down, while the old feuds of Wales and Ireland, ancient theological and sectarian jealousies and babyish loyalties, and so forth are to be waved in the eyes of the no longer fascinated realist.

“Meanwhile,” they will say, with a stiff impatience unusual in their class, “about us?” ...

Here are the makings of internal conflict in every European country.  In Russia the landlord and lawyer, in France the landlord, are perhaps of less account, and in France the investor is more universal and jealous.  In Germany, where Junker and Court are most influential and brutal, there is a larger and sounder and broader tradition of practical efficiency, a modernised legal profession, and a more widely diffused scientific imagination.

How far in each country will imagination triumph over tradition and individualism?  How far does the practical bankruptcy of Western civilisation mean a revolutionary smash-up, and a phase that may last for centuries, of disorder and more and more futile conflict?  And how far does it mean a reconstruction of human society, within a few score of years, upon sounder and happier lines?  Must that reconstruction be preceded by a revolution in all or any of the countries?