Everyone who heard her looked shocked.  But that was the tone of everyone of importance in the dark years that followed the Napoleonic wars.  That is just one survivor of the old tradition.  Another is Blight the solicitor, who goes about bewailing the fact that we writers are “holding out false hopes of higher agricultural wages after the war.”  But these are both exceptions.  They are held to be remarkable people even by their own class.  The mass of property owners and influential people in Europe to-day no more believe in the sacred right of property to hold up development and dictate terms than do the more intelligent workers.  The ideas of collective ends and of the fiduciary nature of property, had been soaking through the European community for years before the war.  The necessity for sudden and even violent co-operations and submersions of individuality in a common purpose, is rapidly crystallising out these ideas into clear proposals.

War is an evil thing, but most people who will not learn from reason must have an ugly teacher.  This war has brought home to everyone the supremacy of the public need over every sort of individual claim.

One of the most remarkable things in the British war press is the amount of space given to the discussion of labour developments after the war.  This in its completeness peculiar to the British situation.  Nothing on the same scale is perceptible in the press of the Latin allies.  A great movement on the part of capitalists and business organisers is manifest to assure the worker of a change of heart and a will to change method.  Labour is suspicious, not foolishly but wisely suspicious.  But labour is considering it.

“National industrial syndication,” say the business organisers.

“Guild socialism,” say the workers.

There is also a considerable amount of talking and writing about “profit-sharing” and about giving the workers a share in the business direction.  Neither of these ideas appeals to the shrewder heads among the workers.  So far as direction goes their disposition is to ask the captain to command the ship.  So far as profits go, they think the captain has no more right than the cabin boy to speculative gains; he should do his work for his pay whether it is profitable or unprofitable work.  There is little balm for labour discontent in these schemes for making the worker also an infinitesimal profiteer.

During my journey in Italy and France I met several men who were keenly interested in business organisation.  Just before I started my friend N, who has been the chief partner in the building up of a very big and very extensively advertised American business, came to see me on his way back to America.  He is as interested in his work as a scientific specialist, and as ready to talk about it to any intelligent and interested hearer.  He was particularly keen upon the question of continuity in the business, when it behoves the older generation to let in the younger