I became a little rhetorical at the end of the last chapter, as Socialists will when they have, like myself, acquired the habit of public speaking. I hope I have not carried you away so far as to make you overlook in your indignation the fact that, whilst all these dreadful things have been going on, the profits of the capital which has gone abroad are coming into the country gratuitously (imports without equivalent exports) and being spent here by the capitalists, and that their expenditure gives employment. The capital went out; but the income comes in; and the question arises, are we any the worse for being pampered paupers, living on the labor of other nations? If the money that is coming in in income is more than went out as capital, are we not better off? One’s impulse is to say certainly not, because the same money spent as capital at home would have brought us in just as large an income, and perhaps larger, than it fetches from abroad, though the capitalists might not have got so much of it. Indeed they might have got none of it if it had been spent in great public works like clearing slums, embanking rivers, roadmaking, smoke abatement, free schools and universities, and other good things that cannot be charged for except communistically through rates and taxes. But the question is more complicated than that. Suppose yourself a mill hand in a factory, accustomed to tend a machine there, and to live with your people in a poor quarter of a manufacturing town. Suddenly you find yourself discharged, and the factory shut up, because the trade has mysteriously gone abroad. You find that mill hands are not wanted, but that there is a scarcity of lady’s maids, of assistants in fashionable shops, of waitresses in week-end motoring hotels, of stewardesses in palatial steamships, of dressmakers, of laundresses, of fine cooks (hidden in the kitchen and spoken of as “_the chef_”), of all sorts of women whose services are required by idle rich people. But you cannot get one of these jobs because you do not know the work, and are not the sort of person, and have not the speech, dress, and manners which are considered indispensable. After a spell of starvation and despair you find a job in a chocolate cream factory or a jam and pickles works, or you become a charwoman. And if you have a daughter you bring her up to the chocolate cream or lady’s maid business, and not to weaving and spinning.