One more example of how your taxes may be used to enrich profiteers instead of to do you any service. At the beginning of the war, the influence of the profiteers was so strong that they persuaded the Government to allow them to make all the shells instead of having them made in national factories. The result was that you were paying taxes to keep workmen standing idle in Woolwich Arsenal at full wages in order that the profiteering firms should have all the work at a profit. You had to pay their workmen too, and the profit into the bargain. It soon turned out that they could not make nearly enough shells. Those they did make were unnecessarily expensive and not always explosive. The result was an appalling slaughter of our young men in Flanders, who were left almost defenceless in the trenches through the shortage of munitions; and we were on the verge of being defeated by simple extermination when the Government, taking the matter in hand itself, opened national factories (you may have worked in some of them) in which munitions were produced on such a scale that we have hardly yet got rid of what was left of them when the war ended, besides controlling the profiteers, teaching them their business (they did not know even how to keep proper accounts, and were wasting money like water), and limiting their profits drastically. And yet, in the face of this experience (which was of course a tremendous triumph for the advocates of nationalized industries), the war was no sooner at an end than the capitalist papers began again with their foolish and corrupt declarations that Governments are such incompetent and dishonest and extravagant jobbers, and private firms so splendidly capable and straightforward, that Governments must never do anything that private firms can make profits by doing; and very soon all the national factories were sold for an old song to the profiteers, and the national workers were in the streets with the demobilized soldiers, living on the dole, two millions strong. This is only a sensational instance of something that is always going on: namely, the wasting of your money by employing profiteering contractors to do the work that could be done better by the authorities themselves without charging you any profit.