When the accomplishment of certain things--the production of shells, the assembling of certain forces, the carriage of cargoes--became a matter of life and death, we did not argue about nationalisation or socialism; we put it into effect, and it worked. There existed for war a will which found a way round all the difficulties of credit adjustment, distribution, adequate wages, unemployment, incapacitation. We could take over the country's railways and mines, control its trade, ration its bread, and decide without much discussion that those things were indispensable for its purposes. But we can do none of these things for the upbuilding of the country in peace time. The measures to which we turn when we feel that the country must produce or perish, are precisely the measures which, when the war is over, we declare are the least likely to get anything done at all. We could make munitions; we cannot make houses. We could clothe and feed our soldiers and satisfy all their material wants; we cannot do that for the workers. Unemployment in war-time was practically unknown; the problem of unemployment in peace time seems beyond us. Millions go unclothed; thousands of workers who could make clothes are without employment. One speaks of the sufferings of the army of poverty as though they were dispensations of heaven. We did not speak thus of the needs of soldiers in war-time. If soldiers wanted uniforms and wool was obtainable, weavers did not go unemployed. Then there existed a will and common purpose. That will and common purpose the patriotism of peace-time cannot give us. Yet, again, we cannot always be at war. Women must have time and opportunity to bear and to bring up children, and men to build up a country-side, if only in order to have men for war to slay and things for war to destroy. Patriotism fails as a social cement within the nation at peace, it fails as a stimulus to its constructive tasks; and as between nations, we know it acts as a violent irritant and disruptive force. We need not question the genuineness of the emotion which moves our duchess when she knits socks for the dear boys in the trenches--or when she fulminates against the same dear boys as working men when they come home. As soldiers she loved them because her hatred of Germans--that atrocious, hostile 'herd'--was deep and genuine. She felt like killing Germans herself. Consequently, to those who risked their lives to fulfil this wish of hers, her affections went out readily enough. But why should she feel any particular affection for men who mine coal, or couple railway trucks, or catch fish in the North Sea? Dangerous as are those tasks, they are not visibly and intimately related to her own fierce emotions. The men performing them are just workpeople, the relation of whose labour to her own life is not, perhaps, always very clear. The suggestion that she should scrub floors or knit socks for _them_ would appear to her as merely silly or offensive.