It was at this time that the secret funds on which labour disturbances throve were discovered—by her—to come from Irish organizations in America and Jewish societies in Russia; perhaps her brain was tired, but in the course of one brief conversation the Indian home-ruler, the modernist in religion, the eccentric in music and the individualist in dress were all found to be tainted with “bolshevism”. Their predecessors, I recalled, had all been anarchists. “I must send you a little book on _The Soviet Peril_,” promised Lady Dainton, who at other times and in her untiring search for whipping-boys had sent me pamphlets on _A Short Way with Profiteers_. I refrained from commenting on her husband’s incautious boast that he had increased his capital twenty _per cent._ since 1914. “Are these agitators actually to be found in England?,” I asked. Lady Dainton assured me that they were, though neither she nor any one she knew had actually met one. Not content with fomenting revolution on earth, they were unseating religion from on high. Communist schools were springing up to poison youthful minds with secularist literature. So far as I could make out, she accounted it for enlightenment when her own friends paraded their scepticism; but, if there had been no god, she would have invented one for the poorer classes. It was no defence that the secular propagandist might be a sincere secularist; so long as he was paid, he stood condemned. “By the same test,” I asked, “would you call the clergy of the Established Church or the officers of the Employers’ Defence League ‘paid agitators’?” “Certainly not! Good gracious, why . . .?” she asked in a voice that faded into the silence of stupefaction. The pulse of the Dainton family was the last that I felt before returning to London and presenting Bertrand with my report on the first phase of reconstruction. Looking over this review later, I noticed a _diminuendo_ in the rather robust optimism with which I began. England was still enjoying superficial plenty; and yet I heard a mutter of misgiving. Some of the factories were over-producing; finished articles, of material bought at war prices, had to be sold at post-war prices; credit became harder to obtain from the banks; and, as the first year of peace hastened to its close, other people than the Daintons woke to the unpleasant discovery that income-tax would have to be paid as though the war were still being waged and that they had for a year, in disregard of Bertrand’s battle-cries, been producing less and consuming more than they could afford.