The Lesson of Reality
Then, quicker than in France, all this illusion was smashed in the face by reality. The British nation became aware of its dwindling trade, the stagnation of its industry. Unemployment began to creep up in a steady tide, until two million men were out of work and existing only on Government “doles.” Factories were closing down or working half time. The Mersey, the Clyde and the Thames were crowded with ships without cargoes, and all the ports were filled with seamen without berths. After demobilisation ex-officers as well as men could not find jobs to do. They tramped the streets in search of work, wearing out their boots and their hearts. They played piano-organs, moved in dismal processions with banners flying the words “We want work,” shook street collecting boxes in the faces of the passers-by. The Trade Unions were hard and selfish. They refused to admit untrained labour to their ranks. Without Trade Union tickets men who had saved the country were turned away at the factory gates. Labour put up a fierce fight to maintain the standard of wages and of life which had been established in time of war—no longer possible in time of peace with failing markets and a world in ruin. One cannot blame them. None of us likes to reduce his standard of life and go back to miserable conditions of stint and scrape. Strikes and lockouts beat them down, but did not relieve the strain or increase the nation’s wealth. Things looked very serious below the surface of English life. There was a bitterness in the minds of men who had been promised great rewards for heroic service, and now found themselves destitute, in overcrowded slums—where were the “homes for heroes”?—maintained on a miserable “dole” that just saved them from starvation but was not enough for decent life. There was for a year or so a danger of revolt, a spreading of revolutionary ideas, among men like that. Russian Communism put a spell upon many minds who knew nothing of the agony in Russia but were stirred by the Bolshevik doctrine of equality and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
When Germany failed to pay the immense reparations which had been demanded from her the British Government was faced with the necessity of balancing its yearly Budget without those payments, and, unlike France, which still banked upon them, or like Germany, which created false money by inflation, determined to sustain the national credit by taxation and sound finance. It put the most tremendous burden upon the nation that has ever been sustained by any people in modern history. It was accepted with a resignation and courage which will stand for ever to the credit of the British folk, and especially to the credit of those who paid at the cost of all that was dearest to them in life apart from national honour and family blood. Income Tax, Super Tax, and Death Duties fell upon the people who lived on inherited wealth with a terrifying ferocity. There are only two and a half million people in Great Britain who pay any Income Tax at all, and only eighty-five thousand who are subject to Super Tax, but it was from that small minority that the Government demanded the revenue necessary for the upkeep of its services. It caused, and is causing, a social revolution which is changing the whole aspect of English life. The old aristocracy are abandoning their houses, selling their estates, becoming shabby genteel, losing their old splendour, prerogatives and power. To pay their Income Tax and Death Duties they are eating into their old capital, selling the old pictures on their walls, abandoning old mansions haunted by the ghosts of history in which their pride and spirit dwelt. They have done this not without anguish, not without a sense of tragedy, not without bitterness, but with an acknowledgment of inevitable necessity. Bloodlessly the revolution in England is being accomplished, though the hard road has not yet been travelled to the end.