The great delusion of the war was that its end would be peace. William was encouraged by that delusion to wrestle with the war-problems of his business: the shortage of raw cotton, the leaping costs of production, the shortage of shipping. The home trade was good beyond precedent, it almost seemed that the higher the price the greater the demand; but the home market, at its most voracious, took only a minor part of Hepplestall’s output. Turkey was an enemy; India, China and South America followed warily the upward trend of prices, expecting the end of the war to bring a sudden fall, and, also, were difficult of access by reason of the transport shortage. In spite of the military service act, in spite of their woolen dyeing, and of every device that William and the Board could contrive to keep the great mills active, there was unemployment at Hepplestall’s. Cotton was rationed in Lancashire and Hepplestall’s quota of the common stock was insufficient to keep their spindles at work. The situation was met adequately by the Cotton Control Board and the Unions and by the substitution of corporate spirit for individualism; by high wages; by a pool of fines imposed on those who worked more spindles and took more cotton than their due; and ends were met all round, but, however different the case of the munition trades, cotton was no beneficiary of the war. The year 1919 brought a great and a dangerous reaction. It was seen by the foreign markets that their expectations of a spectacular fall in prices were not to be realized, and, for a time, buyers scrambled to supply, at any price, cotton goods to countries starved of cotton practically throughout the war. William looked back to his father’s time when the margin of profit on a pound of yarn had been reckoned by an eighth or a farthing: it was now sixpence or more, and he trembled for the cotton trade. Such margins had the febrile unhealthiness of an overheated forcing-house. He hadn’t expected peace to duplicate for him the conditions of 1913, but these profits, current in 1919, expressed for him the hazards of the peace. There was a madness in the very air, and a frenzy of speculation resulted from this rebound of the cotton trade from war-depression to extreme buoyancy. The profits were notorious, and Labor could not be expected to remain without its share of the loot. That was reasonable enough, but William had no faith in the boom’s lasting and knew the difficulty of persuading Labor to accept reduction when the tight times came. Meanwhile, certainly, Labor had a sound case for a large advance in wages, even though wages had steadily risen throughout the war. William wondered if any helmsman of Hepple-stall’s had ever faced such anxious times as these; the very appearance of prosperity, deceptive and fleeting as he held it to be, was incalculable menace. In spite of himself, he was a profiteer--not a war, but an as-a-result-of-the-war profiteer--and both hated and feared it.