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254
BEFORE THE WAR
Wealth was the first and absolute necessity :
Socialism without money is a nightmare. To
live well man must be able to buy some
leisure, finery, and elbow-room. Anything is
better than a poverty-stricken communism
in which no one can afford to be lazy or
unpractical.
If, as seems probable, the energies of Europe
during the next fifty years must be devoted
to re-amassing the capital that Europe has
squandered, the concentration on business will
be as fatal to the hopes of social reformers as
the poverty that it. provokes One foresees
the hard, unimaginative view of life regaining
re-
the ascendancy, laborious insensibility
crowned queen of the virtues, " Self-help" by
Smiles again given as a prize for good conduct,
and the grand biological discovery that the
fittest to survive do survive adduced again as
an argument against income-tax. When one
remembers the long commercial tyranny that
followed the Napoleonic wars, the tyranny
under which money-making became the chief
duty of man, under which Art foundered and
middle-class morality flourished, one grows
uneasy. And if one cannot forget the strag-
glers from the Age of Reason, the old, pre-
Revolutionary people who, in the reign of
Louis XVIII, cackled obsolete liberalism,
blasphemed, and span wrinkled intrigues