222 THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE ch.

wealth which is the inevitable result of inflation,these governments are fast rendering impossible acontinuance of the social and economic order of thenineteenth century. But they have no plan forreplacing it.

We are thus faced in Europe with the spectacleof an extraordinary weakness on the part of thegreat capitalist class, which has emerged from theindustrial triumphs of the nineteenth century, andseemed a very few years ago our all-powerful master.The terror and personal timidity of the individualsof this class is now so great, their confidence in theirplace in society and in their necessity to the socialorganism so diminished, that they are the easyvictims of intimidation. This was not so in Englandtwenty-five years ago, any more than it is now inthe United States . Then the capitalists believed inthemselves, in their value to society, in the proprietyof their continued existence in the full enjoyment oftheir riches and the unlimited exercise of their power.Now they tremble before every insult; — call thempro-Germans , international financiers, or profiteers,and they will give you any ransom you choose toask not to speak of them so harshly. They allowthemselves to be ruined and altogether undone bytheir own instruments, governments of their ownmaking, and a press of which they are the proprietors.Perhaps it is historically true that no order of societyever perishes save by its own hand. In the complexer