What picture is summoned to our minds by the word 'economics' in relation to war? To the critics whose indignation is so excited at the introduction of the subject at all into the discussion of war--and they include, unhappily, some of the great names of English literature--'economic' seems to carry no picture but that of an obese Semitic stockbroker, in quaking fear for his profits. This view cannot be said to imply either much imagination or much sense of reality. For among the stockbrokers, the usurers, those closest to financial manipulation and in touch with financial changes, are to be found some groups numerically small, who are more likely to gain than to lose by war; and the present writer has never suggested the contrary. But the 'economic futility' of war expresses itself otherwise: in half a Continent unable to feed or clothe or warm itself; millions rendered neurotic, abnormal, hysterical by malnutrition, disease, and anxiety; millions rendered greedy, selfish, and violent by the constant strain of hunger; resulting in 'social unrest' that threatens more and more to become sheer chaos and confusion: the dissolution and disintegration of society. Everywhere, in the cities, are the children who cry and who are not fed, who raise shrunken arms to our statesmen who talk with pride[110] of their stern measures of 'rigorous' blockade. Rickety and dying children, and undying hate for us, their murderers, in the hearts of their mothers--these are the human realities of the 'economics of war.' The desire to prevent these things, to bring about an order that would render possible both patriotism and mercy, would save us from the dreadful dilemma of feeding our own children only by the torture and death of others equally innocent--the effort to this end is represented as a mere appeal to selfishness and avarice, something mean and ignoble, a degradation of human motive. 'These theoretical dilemmas do not state accurately the real conditions of politics,' the reader may object. 'No one proposes to inflict famine as a means of enforcing our policy' ... 'England does not make war on women and children.'