To the effect of this on the minds of the more intelligent workers, we have to add another psychological effect, a certain recklessness, inseparable from the conditions of war, reflected in the workers' attitude towards social reform. Perhaps a further factor in the tendency towards Communism is the habituation to confiscation which currency inflation involves. Under the influence of war contrivances States have learned to pay their debts in paper not equivalent in value to the gold in which the loan was made: whole classes of bondholders have thus been deprived of anything from one-half to two-thirds of the value of their property. It is confiscation in its most indiscriminate and sometimes most cruel form. _Bourgeois_ society has accepted it. A socialistic society of to-morrow may be tempted to find funds for its social experiments in somewhat the same way. Whatever weight we may attach to some of these factors, this much is certain: not only war, but preparation for war, means, to a much greater degree than it has ever meant before, mobilisation of the whole resources of the country--men, women, industry. This form of 'nationalisation' cannot go on for years and not affect the permanent form of the society subjected to it. It has affected it very deeply. It has involved a change in the position of private property and individual enterprise that since the War has created a new cleavage in the West. The future of private property which was before the War a theoretical speculation, has become within a year or two, and especially, perhaps, since the Bolshevist Revolution in Russia, a dominating issue in European social and political development. It has subjected European society to a new strain. The wearing down of the distinction between the citizen and the State, and the inroads upon the sacro-sanctity of private property and individual enterprise, make each citizen much more dependent upon his State, much more a part of it. Control of foreign trade so largely by the State has made international trade less a matter of processes maintained by individuals who disregarded their nationality, and more a matter of arrangement between States, in which the non-political individual activity tends to disappear. We have here a group of forces which has achieved a revolution, a revolution in the relationship of the individual European to the European State, and of the States to one another.