The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-TimeWile, Frederic William
History
The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time
Wile, Frederic William
World War, 1914-1918
$5,000,000,000 instead of $2,000,000,000 a year. In other words, they
must reorganize their scheme and standards of living--and of
spending--so that they saved $50 for every $20 saved in the past. In no
other conceivable way, said the Prime Minister, could Great Britain
shoulder the burden of a struggle already costing her at the rate of
$5,475,000,000 a year. To ask the notoriously most extravagant people
in Europe--the returns from the United States are not in yet--to
"economize" on the Brobdingnagian lines which these figures conjured up
was a very tall order, indeed.
But the gassed Tommies back from the trenches and the widows and the
orphans manufactured by the _Lusitania_ and the impregnability of the
German lines were uppermost in England’s mind, and she set her jaw to
the inevitable. The Simple Life did not find itself among friends in
the midst of a race which believes in a maximum of servants on a minimum
of income; whose very homes and kitchens are the paradise of wasters;
which venerates leisure, week-ends, "good addresses" and "parties";
which left the omnibuses to the crowd and scorned anything beneath the
rank of a taxi for the truly well-born; which would gladly go poor for a
week for the sake of a Saturday lunch at the Piccadilly grill and a
supper at the Savoy, with a theater and a music-hall between, and
Murray’s afterward till dawn; which, while never ostentatious, was
addicted to luxury; which worshiped golf, football, bridge and
horse-racing like liberty itself, and which drank like sailors all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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