WAY OF'REDEMPTION 323

in all lands but whose intelligent foreknowledge offered favour-
ably-placed speculators and monopolists opportunities of
enormous profits.1

In countries like the U.S.A., Britain and France, which had
strong traditional social systems, reserves of wealth and access
to raw materials purchasable in their own currencies, such evils
could be endured for a time. Despite the sufferings of large
minorities they even could become^-as the event showed—
accepted as a matter of course. In less fortunate countries,
especially those which had suffered defeat in war, they shook
the social system to its foundations. The broken nations of
Europe revolted against the misery of recurrent unemployment,
the burden of contractual usury and the waste of poverty in the
midst of potential plenty.

In place of these things there arose out of the fires of revolu-
tion monstrous and primeval tyrannies. For society in the throes
of rebirth fell inevitably into the hands of men who subordinated
all things to their struggle for power. To them violence, at first
a necessity of revolution, became an end in itself, power a con-
suming lust. The idealists, seeking to rescue mankind from its
cross of gold, conceived the ends of these revolutions; but it
was men more ruthless, violent and resolute who supplied the
means. Having gained power, they maintained it by the
centralising weapons of modern science. Murderers, torturers
and perjurers, they took their place on the thrones of kings.
The State became their tool and their will the law. In their
cruel hands creeds, which first arose as a human protest against
inhumanity, became far more harmful to man's happiness and
liberty even than the evil things they supplanted.

. . »«•••••

What happened in these less fortunate strongholds of Christian
civilisation did not occur "in Britain. Her victory in the war,
her vast accumulated reserves of wealth won in her Victorian
hey-day, above all the greater strength of her political and
social institutions and the natural kindliness and good humour
of her people, enabled her to withstand the corrosion of a disr

1How great such profits were can be seen from the fluctuating prices of commodities.
In the three years between 1935 and 1938 the variations in the maximum and minimum
prices of lead, zinc, copper, and rubber, were respectively, 176, 170, 152, and 132 per
cent. In 1938 wheat prices at Liverpool ranged between 585. 4d. aad 245. 6d. Such vast
variations in a world unified by science and cheap transport cannot be explained soldj
by natural causes.