But still the danger was for the moment realised, and the attempt was made, the desperate and unsuccessful attempt to pull and squeeze and bind the institutions of capitalism into an organised system of political obligations. It failed because the very abuses and intemperances of our commercial system are a sign that the sphere of government has not expanded with the growing complications of the modern community. Nevertheless the attempt was made: but no corresponding effort is being made to extend the system of moral obligations in which we live.
For it is just as the sphere of morality is unduly restricted and fails to correspond to the needs of humanity, that, on the political plane, the unduly restricted sphere of government has never been extended to include all the interrelations of industrial citizenship. Capitalism is a survival of the penultimate stage of political development, as war is a survival of the penultimate stage of morality.
The attempts both spasmodic and continuous to extend the sphere of government, which now begin to affect nearly all serious legislation, must remain incomplete without an analogous and indeed corollary expansion of the moral system which will involve the obsolescence of war.
[Footnote 31: This seems to apply to all belligerent states. Certainly very little sanity finds its way into Germany except through the pages of _Vorwaerts_. It is therefore humiliating to be told that _Vorwaerts_ has a much larger circulation than any socialist paper in England.]
Hinc usura uorax auidumque in tempora fenus et concussa fides et MULTIS UTILE BELLUM.
Individuals are constantly trying to decrease supply for their own advantage.--_Fabian Essays_, 1889, p. 17.
Trade during the war seems to have had a remarkably good time. In the first year of warfare I began to collect a few facts in support of what then seemed the paradoxical view that war was, in essence if not in origin, a very profitable capitalistic manoeuvre; a view deduced from the opinion I had formed _a priori_ of the nature of all modern warfare.[32] Instead of a few corroborating voices I found testimony abundant in every paper I picked up, besides the live evidence received in private letters and conversations. This pamphlet being rather philosophic than statistical, I have taken the easy course of printing a selection of these testimonies, crude and undigested, in an appendix--a cold storage of facts and figures that allows me to repeat with a quiet conscience that trade is booming. The greater the war, apparently, the greater the profits. In the words of the _Manchester Guardian_:--