Of course in this war, while some of the strange things one sees and hears in Europe may pass with the dawn of peace—­woman, for instance, may return indoors and come out only on election day, yet unquestionably most of the changes in economic adjustment have come to stay.  They are the most important salvage that will come out of the wreck and waste of this war.  In England, for instance, the new ballot reform laws are fundamental changes.  They provide virtually for universal manhood suffrage and suffrage for women over thirty upon something of the same terms as those provided for men.  So revolutionary are the political changes in England that after the war, it is expected—­conceded is hardly too strong a word, that the first political cabinet to arise after the coalition cabinet goes, will be a labour cabinet.  Certainly if labour does not actually dominate the British government, labour will control it indirectly.  And the labour gains during the war will not be lost.  Wages in England, and for that matter in most of the allied countries are now being regulated by state ordinance and not by competitive rates.  “The labour market” has passed with the slave market.  Wages are based not upon supply and demand in labour, but upon the cost of what seems to be a decent standard of subsistence.  This change, of course, is fundamental.  It marks a new order in the world.  And the labour party of England recently adopted a program which provides not merely for the decent living wage for workmen, independent of the “labour market,” but also provides for the democratic control of industry:  national railways, national mines, national electricity, national housing, and national land tenure.  And as if that were not enough the demands of the labour party include the permanent control of the prices of all the necessaries of life, without relation to profits and independent of supply and demand.  Such things have been done during the war, and in a crisis.  Labour demands that they be done permanently.  And still further to press home its claims upon society, British labour demands a system of taxation levied conspicuously and frankly at the rich to bring their incomes and their holdings only to a moderate rise above the common level—­a rise in some relation to the actual differences of mind and heart and soul and service between men, and not a difference based on birth and inheritance and graft and grabbing.  It is, of course, revolution.  But Labour now has political rights in England, and has time and again demonstrated that it has a majority in every part of the United Kingdom, and it is closely organized and rather determined, and probably will have its way.  In France and in Italy where for ten years the Socialists have more or less controlled assemblies and named cabinets, demands like those of the English are being made.

And when the Allies win it will not be so much a change in geography that shall mark off the world of the nineteenth century from the world of the twentieth, as the fundamental social and economic changes in society.  The hungry guns out there at the front have eaten away the whole social order that was!