WAY OF REDEMPTION 32^

that of civic virtue. By the mathematical rules of laissez-faire
the two had nothing to do with each other except on the assump-
tion that the accumulation of cash was itself tantamount to
virtue. The war, with its contrasts between penniless V.C.S and
hard-faced profiteers, had proved the falsity of this assumption.
Yet the slick company promoter, with his untidy trail of bank-
ruptcies and ruined concerns, the slum landlord, the conscience-
less usurer were still allowed to render whole communities
miserable and unstable. So, without realising it, were the
rentiers and small savers who, under a system of joint-stock
companies and giant trusts, lent the use of their money to those
whom they could not control.

A man might be a fine craftsman, a self-sacrificing citizen, a
gallant soldier, but in peace-time Ms virtues were worth only
what they could earn in the market-place. They could not of
their own buy him a house with a garden, a decent bed with
clean sheets, goods and clothes for himself and his family. They
could not even guarantee him a job or keep him in it. In such
^matters money alone spoke. If he was without it he was at a
hopeless disadvantage in a community governed by contract
instead of status: He could only with the greatest difficulty live
a good life: it was almost impossible for him not to live a
higgledy-piggledy one. He had to face the prospect of being
workless, living on a dole insufficient to buy more than the
barest necessities, sheltering from the weather with his family
in a single verminous room in some dreary slum street without
the slightest security of tenure and suffering the abasement which
every man feels who has not the dignity of an assured craft and
a home. The State, true to an enduring English tradition that had
survived even the worst rigours of laissez-faire^ saw to it that a
workless man did not starve. But it-did no more. It left him to
the operation of economic laws which condemned him to a life
of ceaseless discomfort and degrading squalor, enforced idleness
and the absence of almost, everything that can delight and
ennoble man.

Instead of a world fit for heroes, let alone decent men and
women, the corroding shame of unemployment and the degrada-
tion of urban poverty became the lot of millions. Nobody wished
Englishmen to bear such suffering. It arose unavoidably out of
the economic system and the circumstances of the age.

The masses who had been given unrestricted adult suffrage

B.S. Y