Not only the newspapers, but the news-agents and booksellers of both Great Britain and America are entirely at the disposal of any hostile power which chooses to buy them up quietly and systematically.  It is merely a question of wealth and cleverness.  And if the failure of the Germans to grip the Press of the French and English speaking countries has been conspicuous, she has been by no means so unsuccessful in—­for example—­Spain.  At the present time the thought and feeling of the Spanish speaking world is being educated against the Allies.  The Spanish mind has been sold by its custodians into German control.

Muddle and venality do not, however, exhaust the demonstrated vices of individualism.  Individualism encourages desertion and treason.  Individualism permits base private people to abscond with the national resources and squeeze a profit out of national suffering.  In the early stages of the war some bright minds conceived the idea of a corner in drugs.  It is not illegal; it is quite the sort of thing that appeals to the individualistic frame of mind as entirely meritorious.  As the New Statesman put it recently:  “The happy owners of the world’s available stock of a few indispensable drugs did not refrain from making, not only the various Governments, but also all the sick people of the world pay double, and even tenfold, prices for what was essential to relieve pain and save life.  What fortunes were thus made we shall probably never know, any more than we shall know the tale of the men and women and children who suffered and died because of their inability to pay, not the cost of production of what would have saved them, but the unnecessarily enhanced price that the chances of the market enabled the owners to exact.”

And another bright instance of the value of individualism is the selling of British shipping to neutral buyers just when the country is in the most urgent need of every ship it can get, and the deliberate transfer to America of a number of British businesses to evade paying a proper share of the national bill in taxation.  The English who have gone to America at different times have been of very different qualities; at the head of the list are the English who went over in the Mayflower; at the bottom will be the rich accessions of this war....

And perhaps a still more impressive testimony to the rottenness of these “business men,” upon whom certain eccentric voices call so amazingly to come and govern us, is the incurable distrust they have sown in the minds of labour.  Never was an atmosphere of discipline more lamentable than that which has grown up in the factories, workshops, and great privately owned public services of America and Western Europe.  The men, it is evident, expect to be robbed and cheated at every turn.  I can only explain their state of mind by supposing that they have been robbed and cheated.  Their scorn and contempt for their employees’ good faith is limitless.  Their morale is undermined by an invincible distrust.