Thus every class came within the range of the lightning that was about to strike at the root of an ancient evil.
The start was interesting. Before the war was a year old definite order emerged of what was at the beginning a scattered protest against reckless spending. But long before the first organised message of saving went to the home and purse of the worker, the rich began to economise. Here is where you encounter the first of the many ironies and contrasts that mark this whole campaign. The people who could most afford to be extravagant were the first to draw in their horns. This, of course, was not particularly surprising because the rich are naturally thrifty. It is one reason why they get and stay rich.
Among the pioneer organisations was the Women's War Economy League founded and developed by a group of titled women who got hundreds of their sisters to pledge themselves to give up unnecessary entertaining, not to employ men servants unless ineligible for military service, to buy no new motor cars and use their old ones for public or charitable work, to buy as few expensive articles of clothing as possible, to reduce in every way their expenditures on imported goods, and to limit the buying of everything that came under the category of luxuries. Champagne was banned from the dinner table, décolleté gowns disappeared: men substituted black for white waistcoats in the evening.
The rich really needed no organised stimulus to retrench. The great target for attack was the mass of the population who did not know what it meant to save and who required just the sort of constructive lesson that an organised thrift movement could teach.
Much of the increase in wages among the workers was going for food and drink. Hence the opening assault was made on the market bill. Fortunately, an agency was already in operation. At the outbreak of the war a National Food Fund was started to feed the hungry Belgians. That work had become more or less automatic (the Belgians' appetite is a pretty regular clock), so its machinery was now trained to the twin conservation of British stomachs and savings.
"Save the Food of the Nation," was the appeal that went forth on every side. "No One is too Rich or Poor to Help. Every man, woman and child in the country who wants to serve the state and help win the war can do so by giving thought to the question of conserving food. Since the great bulk of our food comes from abroad, it takes toll in men, ships and money. Every scrap of food wasted means a dead loss to the Nation in men, ships and money. If all the food that is now being wasted could be saved and properly used it would spare more money, more ships, more men for the National defence."