There will be no end until these profit-makings are arrested.  The necessary “conscriptions of property” must come about in Great Britain because there is no alternative but failure in the war, and the British people will not stand failure.  I believe that the end of the war will see, not only transit, but shipping, collieries, and large portions of the machinery of food and drink production and distribution no longer under the administration of private ownership, but under a sort of provisional public administration.  And very many British factories will be in the same case.

Two years ago no one would have dared to prophesy the tremendous rearrangement of manufacturing machinery which is in progress in Britain to-day.  Thousands of firms of engineers and manufacturers of all sorts, which were flourishing in 1914, exist to-day only as names, as shapes, as empty shells.  Their staffs have been shattered, scattered, reconstructed; their buildings enlarged and modified; their machinery exchanged, reconstituted, or taken.  The reality is a vast interdependent national factory that would have seemed incredible to Fourier.

It will be as impossible to put back British industrialism into the factories and forms of the pre-war era as it would be to restore the Carthaginian Empire.  There is a new economic Great Britain to-day, emergency made, jerry-built no doubt, a gawky, weedy giant, but a giant who may fill out to such dimensions as the German national system has never attained.  Behind it is an idea, a new idea, the idea of the nation as one great economic system working together, an idea which could not possibly have got into the sluggish and conservative British intelligence in half a century by any other means than the stark necessities of this war....  Great Britain cannot retrace those steps even if she would, and so she will be forced to carry this process of reconstruction through.  And what is happening to Great Britain must, with its national differences, be happening to France and Russia.  Not only for war ends, but for peace ends, behind the front and sustaining the front, individualities are being hammered together into common and concerted activities.

At the end of this war Great Britain will find herself with this great national factory, this great national organisation of labour, planned, indeed, primarily to make war material, but convertible with the utmost ease to the purposes of automobile manufacture, to transit reconstruction, to electrical engineering, and endless such uses.

France and Russia will be in a parallel case.  All the world will be exhausted, and none of the Allies will have much money to import automobiles, railway material, electrical gear, and so on, from abroad.  Moreover, it will be a matter of imperative necessity for them to get ahead of the Central Powers with their productive activities.  We shall all be too poor to import from America, and we shall be insane to import from Germany.  America will be the continent with the long purse, prepared to buy rather than sell.  Each country will have great masses of soldiers waiting to return to industrial life, and will therefore be extremely indisposed to break up any existing productive organisation.