2 THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE ch.

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yet farther, when it might have restored, the delicate,complicated organisation, already shaken and brokenby war, through which alone the European peoples canemploy themselves and live.

In England the outward aspect of life does notyet teach us to feel or realise in the least that anage is over. We are busy picking up the threadsof our life where we dropped them, with this differ-ence only, that many of us seem a good dealricher than we were before. Where we spentmillions before the war, we have now learnt thatwe can spend hundreds of millions and apparentlynot suffer for it. Evidently we did not exploit tothe utmost the possibilities of our economic life.We look, therefore, not only to a return to thecomforts of 1914, but to an immense broadeningand intensification of them. All classes alike thusbuild their plans, the rich to spend more and saveless, the poor to spend more and work less.

But perhaps it is only in England (andAmerica) that it is possible to be so unconscious.In continental Europe the earth heaves and no onebut is aware of the rumblings. There it is not justa matter of extravagance or "labour troubles" ; butof life and death, of starvation and existence, andof the fearful convulsions of a dying civilisation.

For one who spent in Paris the greater part ofthe six months which succeeded the Armistice an