1914 1915 £ £ Smithfield and Argentine Meat Co. 25,732 142,055 Waring and Gillow 35,217 100,885 Projectile Co. 30,739 194,136 Lanarkshire Steel 28,144 45,985 Frederick Leyland Steamship 337,188 1,196,683 Sutherland Steamship 94,600 295,200
Waring and Gillow's sudden prosperity is not due to any better business in the ordinary furniture trade, but to war contracts. The Projectile Company figures are astonishing even for an armament company; after applying £47,500 in satisfying the balance of the prior claims of the Debentures, the Ordinary Shares receive their first dividend--one of 50 per cent. No sane man would accuse leaders of these great industrial concerns of doing anything to bring about an outbreak of war; many of them have, indeed, paid a heavy price for their prosperity in the shape of the loss of sons or near relatives; but when all is said and done, the fact that a war should put many half-bankrupt concerns on their legs, and make fairly prosperous companies three or four times more prosperous than before the war, is an influence in an undesirable direction.
[Footnote 33: Moreover, as I hope to suggest later, even these losses to a few individual _industries_ do not necessarily imply losses to the _capital_ involved, which in some cases has been diverted or adapted to other industries more appropriate to the times. For a review of Trade profits in 1916 see the _Manchester Guardian_, January 1, 1917.]
[Footnote 35: Quoted in the _New Age_, March 16, 1916.]
[Footnote 36: April 8, 1916, from the "City" article by Emil Davies.]
[Footnote 38: The rise in freights is a good example of the way in which abnormal profits are extorted from the public as soon as any scarcity puts them at the mercy of the trader. (See above, p. 45.) The rise in freights is unalloyed profit, for the shipping companies have no increased risk, since the Insurance Companies are guaranteed by the State.]
[Footnote 39: Which was first drafted in a letter to _The Garton Foundation_ more than a year ago.]
[Footnote 40: April 29, 1916. One might also mention for its verisimilitude the situation described at the end of Mr. F. Brett Young's novel _The Iron Age_ (Secker, 1916), in which the insolvent ironworks of Mawne are saved in the nick of time by the declaration of war.]