318 ENGLISH SAGA

the moral truth, hidden from the utilitarians, that greed always
overreaches itself. By enthroning it as the motivating principle
of all economic activity, they set society on a downward declivity.
At first the profits accruing to a man of enterprise, who under
such a system was encouraged to apply his entire energies to
their pursuit, could be great. Operating in a community in
which wholesale exploitation had not hitherto been permitted,
he was able to command the vigour, contentment, health and
character of its people without paying anything towards the
cost of these commercial assets—the accumulated legacy of
former ages of sane and virtuous living and the real wealth of
any continuing society. But with each generation the margin of
available profit diminishes until the day arrives when the society
under exploitation consists of debilitated, inefficient and resent-
ful human beings without property, social cohesion or religion.
The seven good years of the capitalist's policy are presently
consumed by the seven lean. The exploiter is driven to seek
new fields to succeed those already used up. .And in these fields
rival exploiters encounter each other, narrowing profits still
further. . i

The peacemakers who assembled in 1919 could not see the
flaw in the system. They were not bad men: only uninspired
and, for all their entourage of experts, ignorant. They had none
of theknowledge of far humbler men whom their great limousines
passed marching on the dusty roads around Paris. They had
not shared the soldier's crucifixion and his blinding, revealing
vision. They could not therefore conceive a new world. They
could only speak in the language of an old. They thought in
terms of maps, political frontiers, racial rights and creeds, above
all in markets and fields of profits for their bankers and in-
dustrialists. With infinite pains they re-erected the structure not
of a co-operative but of a competitive world. They never saw
the simple'truth that for four years had been flashed nightly
across the sky above the trenches in which millions of men who
had no conceivable personal quarrel lived troglodyte lives to
slay one another in the slime: that a competitive world ends in
a warring world.

The peacemakers not only strove to reconstruct an imprac-
ticable system: they unconsciously aggravated it. They not
only set the profit-makers and usurers of all nations in renewed
competition with one another, they intensified and embittered