Jl6 ENGLISH SAGA

image had meant him to have these things, and out of the
whirlwind of Verdun and Caporetto had spoken of them.

It was not to these that the returning soldiers, marching
with set faces to demobilisation across a broken Europe, returned.
It was to frustration and disillusion: to hunger and enforced
idleness, to untilled fields and empty factories. All they had
suffered for their loved ones and country ended only in more
suffering: not in a Christian and compassionate commonwealth
but in a pigsty. The politicians in all countries had promised a.
land fit for heroes. But-when the soldiers came home they found
a world designed for stockbrokers and rentiers and civil servants.
It was built not in the image of their apocalyptic dream but in
that of the utilitarian labyrinth of the money-changers from
which they had gone forth in 1914. * •

For industrial society as it had grown up in the past century,
first in island Britain and then everywhere else, did not admit
the fulfilment of the soldiers' need. Laissez-faire capitalism
postulated a fluctuating reserve of labour and therefore unem-
ployment, the power of the man with capital to hire and dismiss
his workers as he chose and therefore insecurity; and the legal
priority of usurious over equitable rights and therefore the
accumulation of property in the hands of the few and its denial
to every one else. The men who had gone to battle to defend
such a society were divided from it by a great chasm which they
had crossed in agony, sweat and blood. But those who had to
reconstruct a broken Europe—the political leaders, the in-
dustrialists, the clever thinkers and capitalists who had stayed
at home—were still on the other side.

The only remedy these men of an older generation could see
. for the ruin around them was to rebuild the world they knew
before the war. It never occurred to them that they were
restoring the situation that had caused the war. The basis of
their world was the overriding necessity of earning expanding
profits. The test of every human enterprise in every country
had increasingly come to be: will it make enough to meet the
contractual demands of the initiating lender? The universal
search of the profit-maker- was a fruitful field for exploitation in
some other country. The desideratum of every national policy
was not whether it increased the actual wealth of a country—
the crops, homes, amenities, health, happiness and character of
its inhabitants—but whether it multiplied the returns of the