was created instanter by the summons to the colours of a million or two men in the prime of life, and the employment of other millions on munitions. With this artificial scarcity, the price of labour, like the price of shipping and of sugar, rose by leaps and bounds. The workers, who previously had been accustomed to regard a job as a favour, now discovered that the favour was on their side. Hitherto it had been said that their patronage was only courted on those rare occasions when the governing classes wanted their vote. But now they were treated with respect and flattered by appeals all day and every day, Sundays included. Where employers had picked and chosen the men whom they would engage, the employed now picked and chose the employers whom they would serve and the hours at which they would render that service. Naturally, they selected those days of the week and those hours of the day when the highest rates could be earned. And their output at times showed some tendency to decline, even in districts where the necessities of war were peremptory.

This situation, already strange enough, was complicated by a new fact that is, the world-wide demand for munitions. In time of peace output is the source of wages, profits, and national prosperity. In modern war it is an essential of national existence. As saviour of his country, the man at the forge gained a prestige which is usually reserved for the hero on the battlefield. He was offered money and medals if only he would work. At Liverpool the greatest territorial magnate of the county has spent his time drilling a dockers' battalion. The wage-earner's sobriety, the quality of his whiskey, the strength of his beer, his early breakfast, and his habits on the Sabbath, provoked not only controversy, but a Parliamentary crisis. Bonuses were showered upon him. In many areas he could, without excessive effort, make a wage that far exceeded the income-tax limit. Yet often, though able-bodied, he declined to do so. In the same family there would be one man so patriotic as to enlist, and another man so seemingly apathetic as to content himself with short time. Exasperated onlookers set off the example of the one against that of the other, not perceiving that the two men belonged to the same class or that the readiness to enlist and the reluctance to earn good wages arose from one and the same cause. Both men alike had been in unconscious revolt against the monotony of their usual toil. The one has preferred the perilous exhilaration of Flanders, and the other, when dissuaded from that, has flagged in his zeal for the old duties, which, before the heavens opened, were accepted as a matter of course. Given the usual money for the wife at home, and a fair margin for tobacco, the worker has often been content to eschew additional earnings, and the

very man who might have won the Victoria Cross for gallantry at the Dardanelles would, when staying at home by special request of the War Office, sullenly endorse Mr. Keir Hardie's famous dictum that, after all, he would be no worse off as a wage earner if the Germans did rule in England. Not that he meant it. Not that he was really unmindful of his country's need. What, with restricted imagination, he could not see was the special heroism of a faithful performance of monotonous duties.

Enlistment has all the fascination of a splendid moral adventure. And, for the wage earner, that fascination is enhanced by personal contact with officers of high social rank. At the works, mate meets mate while the master sits at his desk, a distant figure, often suspected of financial designs, and too seldom known personally. But in the trench the soldier eats and sleeps, fights, is wounded, and dies side by side with an heir to the peerage, a Gladstone, a Member of Parliament, and an Asquith, not one of whom can be accused of making a dividend out of the For the first time, it may be for the last time, the man feels that he counts one, and that with shrapnel bursting nobody counts more. He is clothed as never before. The best leather is reserved for his boots. Ladies wait on him in hospital, and give him rides in their motor-cars. He sees France, hears a new language, witnesses what no journalist may describe, and has at last something to talk about which others want to hear.

war.

It is well that we should clearly perceive these realities before we have to deal, as a nation, with the position which will arise inevitably when, after the war, we endeavour to renew the old fabric of industry. To turn swords back into ploughshares will be a formidable task, but far more delicate will be the handling of immense bodies of men whose minds have been unsettled by the collapse of the old régime and by their one hour of glorious life. At normal times, to talk about "back to the land" for the clerk and the average industrial was folly. These men did not want to go back to the land. Trench warfare has taught the softest-handed townsman how to dig and master the soil. After such fusion with mother earth, will the clerk return to his desk? Will the industrial desert the open sky for his loom and his lathe ? Moreover, we have for the first time admitted full State responsibility for dependents-not a mere 5s. a week, but a subsistence income amounting to a guaranteed wage paid by the State. Will the agricultural labourer return to 16s. a week, when his wife alone with her children has been receiving a sovereign? and will wives ever again submit to housekeeping on a portion of their "man's wage, after having handled their own money, in

hard cash across the counter of the Post Office, without deduction,

whether for beer or "baccy"? Again, what about these war bonuses? They are easy to grant, especially when the State pays the piper, but they are less easy to terminate, and, for the classes affected, their continuance during the war obviously weakens the personal motive for desiring an end to the struggle which has reduced unemployment to nil. Yet to maintain the bonuses when Government contracts are brought to an end might be to strain commerce to breaking point.

There is much to be said, on general grounds, for an all-round increase in wages. Money, so paid, is not lost. It maintains the home market, conduces on the whole to good health, and tends to diminish pauperism. The mere fact that the workers are doing well out of the war is not in itself to be regretted. But one wishes that they had done better out of peace. For the peril lies just here that the new industrial standards, instead of being based on permanent and wealth-producing industry, are precariously maintained by an obviously artificial boom. The shortage of labour on which all depends may be followed by an unemployed surplus. Such surplus must tend to produce a slump in wages. And if, as is possible, there should continue to be an increased employment of women, and especially of young and marriageable women, it it may be that men will find their places filled by the very girls whom, if they could get these places, they would make their wives. Hence it follows that statesmen will, if they are wise, make a close study in advance of the measures which will be needed to avert a real and even dangerous revulsion of industrial sentiment when the great struggle is over. Relief works of the usual type will be utterly useless. There is much to be said for Mr. Lloyd George's view that, for some years at any rate, trade, if wisely directed by the Allied States, will continue to be good. While, undoubtedly, the war has been exhausting the resources of Europe, it has actually checked the development, some would say the too rapid development, of South America. The world will renew its demand for necessities of civilisation, and, with German credit shattered and German workmen stricken to the ground by the hundred thousand, the opportunities of Great Britain will be not less than in past years. Moreover, the reconstruction of devastated areas must be as boldly financed as the war itself. Whatever may happen as to indemnities, which, if adequate to the case, will take years to clear off, loans must be made in the form of houses and goods for Belgium, Poland, Serbia, and the French provinces. The reconstruction must be carefully and comprehensively planned out in advance. In addition, the lesson must be learnt that a high standard of living, whether for rich or poor, depends, by inevitable law, upon steady,

honest, efficient, sober labour. If a nation will not work, neither will it eat, and in the long run its life will be neither more nor less abundant than the products of its industry and the invested fruits of its thrift. Trade unions have endeavoured by curious and often incomprehensible customs to safeguard their members against overdriving of the machinery of commerce. Those customs should be, for the moment, laid aside. The aim of the unions was good. The method was far less sound. True industry should be based on the fundamental maxim that whatever a man finds for his hand to do, he should do it with his might. The ideal system would be short spells of hard work and complete change entire recreation for the rest of the day. Hitherto we have devoted attention too exclusively to what goes on during hours of labour. We should now realise that labour, while it lasts, must be arduous, dirty, and unpleasant, and that the true compensation must be found, not in any mitigation thereof, but in a better use of a more extended leisure. If Great Britain is wise she will retain her war taxes, burdensome though they be. She will establish a high sinking fund on her debt, and she will invest that sinking fund, either directly or indirectly, in a complete reconstruction of her industrial centres of population, and especially of areas where, as in South Wales, a rapid influx of workers from surrounding counties has produced an acute housing problem. Until this is accomplished she will allow no man to be idle. And when it is accomplished she will have small reason to fear either disloyalty or ingratitude among her working classes. If she allows herself to be too preoccupied to attend to the vital necessities of her population, and especially of that population which labours in the North of England and the South of Scotland, she will quickly discover that the crisis which she has so boldly faced in Europe will be followed by a not less challenging crisis nearer home. The prospect would be alarming if it were not for one fact. Fore-warned is fore-armed, and we may surely assume that our statesmen are alive to the duty of thinking out not only the terms of peace which will re-settle the map of Europe, not only the strategy by which those terms of peace are to be composed, but the industrial conditions by which domestic peace is to be maintained within our own borders.

PHILIP WHITWELL WILSON.

WHAT IT MEANS TO THE ARTIST.

I MET my friend Lionel Hartside in the Park. I had not had the opportunity of seeing him for some time, and although we were tolerably intimate, and had indeed passed a good deal of our youth together, both at school and at the University, diversity of occupations had since those early years kept us apart. One of the odd effects of the present war is that it produces in us a desire to recover old friendships. When all goes well with ourselves or the world we press forward on our own line, not much concerned with the lives of those who once were close to us. But directly a great crisis arrives that shakes us out of our normal ambitions and suggests new trains of thought and action to us we think rather lovingly of our old friends and wish we could see them oftener.

In the case of Lionel Hartside I wondered how the war was affecting him. He was a man who without showing much promise in early years had recently revealed a very remarkable capacity for imaginative work of all kinds. He was well "in the movement," as they say, with regard both to novels and to dramas. He was the most modern of all-if, indeed, the word modern may be used in this connection-in his demand, not for action either in story or in play so much as for intimate psychological analysis. He saw events, not from the outside, but from the inside of a man's personality; he tried to reveal their internal effect rather than their obvious external significance. His plays were not altogether popular, but always received careful and intelligent notice. His novels were to my mind better than his theatrical productions, because as an artist he required space in order to develop his peculiar gifts. Perhaps Manchester or Liverpool knew his plays better than London did. He was the very man for the repertory movements of our great provincial towns.

A curiously sensitive and self-absorbed man, he lived for his work; indeed, I was about to say that he had no other interest. But that would be hardly true. In his early life in London very soon after he left Oxford he married a frail and delicate girl, in whose company he enjoyed a few fleeting years of real happiness. She was not clever, but she must have been really sympathetic. It was to her that he told the plots of his stories and his plays, taking his work to her in its immature stages, asking not for criticism but for approbation. After her death he concentrated all his interests on his boy, and the youth as he grew up seemed to be an exact replica of his father. He, too, was sensitive, emotional, self-absorbed, unlike other boys. Some years had passed, and the boy, in the fine spirit of other youths of his age, had joined the Army.