Several circumstances of war-experience have given a powerful stimulus to the movement for radical economic change. Before the war, men were still haunted by the fear that the revolutionary changes advocated by the more advanced spirits might turn out to be a transition from the frying pan into the fire. But the cynical readiness of the “big business” interests in all the belligerent countries to turn the nation’s necessity to their own advantage; and the now demonstrated incompetency and wastefulness of the system of private capitalist enterprise have served to remove from among the workers any lingering sense that the good of the nation is bound up with the existing industrial order. In Great Britain in particular the close industrial organisation required by the war has provided a revelation of hitherto unexplored and even unsuspected possibilities of production, proving “big” business to have been uncommonly bad business. The immense increase of output in all industries, through the proper co-ordination and standardisation of processes, the systematic use of scientific investigation, and the more adequate oversight of the physical condition of the workers has made it plain that private capitalism either would not or could not make proper use of the productive resources of the British people. For instance, the ignorant opposition of the average employer to the movement for reducing the hours of labour has convicted him of a stupid incapacity to handle men, especially in view of such findings as those recorded by Lord Henry Bentinck, who shows conclusively (from data drawn from the engineering, printing and textile trades) that “in every case in which experiments have been tried, the result in output has been favourable to a shortening of the working day.”[2] Footnote 2: _Contemporary Review_, February, 1918.