4

ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

already shaken and broken by war, throughwhich alone the European peoples can employthemselves and live.

In England the outward aspect of life doesnot yet teach us to feel or realise in the least thatan age is over. We are busy picking up thethreads of our life where we dropped them,with this difference only, that many of us seema good deal richer than we were before. Wherewe spent millions before the war, we have nowlearnt that we can spend hundreds of millionsand apparently not suffer for it. Evidently wedid not exploit to the utmost the possibilitiesof our economic life. We look, therefore, notonly to a return to the comforts of 1914, but toan immense broadening and intensification ofthem. All classes alike thus build their plans,the rich to spend more and save less, the poorto 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 noone but is aware of the rumblings. There itis not just a matter of extravagance or “labourtroubles”; but of life and death, of starvationand existence, and of the fearful convulsionsof a dying civilisation.

For one who spent in Paris the greater partof the six months which succeeded the Armis-tice, an occasional visit to London was a strangeexperience. England still stands outsideEurope. Europe ’s voiceless tremors do not