"I told him that after the war he'd be glad enough to get anything.
Grateful! They'll all be coming back after the war--all of 'em, glad
enough to get anything. Asking for another shilling indeed!"
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.
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