Do you ken what it is we’ve a’ got to think of the noo?  It’s production.  We must produce more than we ha’ ever done before.  It’s no a steady raise in wages that will help.  Every time wages gang up a shilling or twa, everything else is raised in proportion.  The workingman maun mak’ more money; everyone understands that.  But the only way he can safely get more siller is to earn more—­to increase production as fast as he knows how.

It’s the only way oot—­and it’s true o’ both Britain and America.  The more we mak’ the more we’ll sell.  There’s a market the noo for all we English speaking folk can produce.  Germany is barred, for a while at least; France, using her best efforts and brains to get back upon her puir, bruised feet, canna gae in avily for manufactures for a while yet.  We, in Britain, have only just begun to realize that the war is over.  It took us a long time to understand what we were up against at the beginning, and what sort of an effort we maun mak’ if we were to win the war.

And then, before we’d done, we were doing things we’d never ha dreamed it was possible for us tae do before the need was upon us.  We in Britain had to do without things we’d regarded as necessities and we throve without them.  For the sake of the wee bairns we went without milk for our tea and coffee, and scarce minded it.  Aye, in a thousand little ways that had not seemed to us to matter at all we were deprived and harried and hounded.

Noo, what I’m thinking sae often is just this.  We had a great problem to meet in the winning of the war.  We solved it, though it was greater than any of those we were wont to call insoluble.  Are there no problems left?  There’s the slum.  There’s the sort of poverty that afflicts a man who’s willing tae work and can nicht find work enough tae do tae keep himself and his family alive and clad.  There’s all sorts of preventible disease.  We used to shrug our shoulders and speak of such things as the act of God.  But I’ll no believe they’re acts of God.  He doesna do things in such a fashion.  They’re acts of man, and it’s for man to mak’ them richt and end what’s wrong wi’ the world he dwells in.

They used to shrug their shoulders in Russia, did those who had enough to eat and a warm, decent hoose tae live in.  They’d hear of the sufferings of the puir, and they’d talk of the act of God, and how he’d ordered it that i’ this world there maun always be some suffering.

And see what’s come o’ that there!  The wrong sort of man has set to work to mak’ a wrong thing richt, and he’s made it worse than it ever was.  But how was it he had the chance to sway the puir ignorant bodies in Russia?  How was it that those who kenned a better way were not at work long agane?  Ha’ they anyone but themselves to blame that Trotzky and the others had the chance to persuade the Russian people tae let them ha’ power for a little while’?