Great Britain and Russia in this, as in so many other matters, are at once close kindred and sharp antithesis.  Each is mentally crippled by the corruption of its educational system by an official religious orthodoxy, and hampered by a Court which disowns any function of intellectual stimulus.  Neither possesses a scientifically educated class to which it can look for the powerful handling of this great occasion; and each has acquired under these disadvantages the same strange faculty for producing sane resultants out of illogical confusions.  It is the way of these unmethodical Powers to produce unexpected, vaguely formulated, and yet effective cerebral action—­apparently from their backbones.

As I sit playing at prophecy, and turn over the multitudinous impressions of the last year in my mind, weighing the great necessities of the time against obstacles and petty-mindedness, I become more and more conscious of a third factor that is neither need nor obstruction, and that is the will to get things right that has been liberated by the war.

The new spirit is still but poorly expressed, but it will find expression.  The war goes on, and we discuss this question of economic reconstruction as though it was an issue that lay between the labour that has stayed behind and the business men, for the most part old men with old habits of mind, who have stayed behind.

The real life of Europe’s future lies on neither side of that opposition.  The real life is mutely busy at present, saying little because of the uproar of the guns, and not so much learning as casting habits and shedding delusions.  In the trenches there are workers who have broken with the old slacking and sabotage, and there are prospective leaders who have forgotten profit.  The men between eighteen and forty are far too busy in the blood and mud to make much showing now, but to-morrow these men will be the nation.

When that third factor of the problem is brought in the outlook of the horoscope improves.  The spirit of the war may be counted upon to balance and prevail against this spirit of individualism, this spirit of suspicion and disloyalty, which I fear more than anything else in the world.

I believe in the young France, young England, and young Russia this war is making, and so I believe that every European country will struggle along the path that this war has opened to a far more completely organised State than has existed ever before.  The Allies will become State firms, as Germany was, indeed, already becoming before the war; setting private profit aside in the common interest, handling agriculture, transport, shipping, coal, the supply of metals, the manufacture of a thousand staple articles, as national concerns.

In the face of the manifest determination of the Central Powers to do as much, the Allies will be forced also to link their various State firms together into a great allied trust, trading with a common interest and a common plan with Germany and America and the rest of the world....  Youth and necessity will carry this against selfishness, against the unimaginative, against the unteachable, the suspicious, the “old fool.”