[34] See Appendix I.
[35] Quoted in the New Age, March 16, 1916.
[36] April 8, 1916, from the "City" article by Emil Davies.
[37] My italics.
[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.
[39] Which was first drafted in a letter to The Garton Foundation more than a year ago.
[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.
[41] Also, of course, by the campaign for Preferential Tariffs, which, it was hoped, would have increased consumption by excluding a few foreign competitors from colonial markets.
[42] Cf. the many stories of beef and other rations being supplied to troops in such quantities that the units responsible for their consumption were obliged to bury them. These stories come mostly from Flanders. At home the same superabundance may have been the undoing of many a Quartermaster-Sergeant, who, not knowing what to do with such a plethora of beef, and having a proper superstition against throwing away good food, was tempted to sell it for about a penny a pound to the local butcher.
[43] And the fact that they are doing so at the public expense is, of course, only an additional advantage to the traders who supply their needs; as they do not risk losing any of their money through bad debts.