But the war has taught us better than anything else could have done what the words “business is business” really mean. Our nation for the past two and a half years has been in the throes of the most terrible struggle in all her varied history. Millions of men have risked health and life itself in what they believed to be the defence of their Motherland. Boys and men from every quarter of the globe have hurried home to give all they have for the service of the land they love. Those of us who hate and detest this and every other kind of war, and who refuse to take any part in it, equally with those who support the war, must and do respect and honour all those who give themselves on behalf of the cause they love. None of those who volunteered--and they numbered millions--haggled about pay or reward; they simply gave themselves. Indeed, everywhere people were found who felt impelled to offer service. Only the business men refused to turn aside from the one pervading occupation of their lives--money-making. In every direction business men took advantage of the nation’s difficulties to make more and more money. Shipping companies quadrupled their profits; corndealers and millers, coal merchants and meat dealers--in fact, everybody with anything to sell--scrambled in and joined the gamble to make money out of the war. Shipbuilding firms, armament manufacturers, Government contractors and others, considered the opportunity was one which it would be unbusinesslike and foolish to miss. People who supplied stores were not ashamed in public court to confess to a profit of 40 per cent. Coal and iron corporations in Durham who have managed to acquire huge properties consisting of land and coal are paying dividends of 45 per cent. In short, some business men have had a glorious time since the war began; but their success has resulted in well-nigh starving old-age pensioners to death, and has brought the wives and dependents of soldiers and sailors, in spite of increased allowances, to the point of semi-starvation whilst their husbands, brothers, and sons are fighting to defend a land of which they possess not a yard, and within whose borders are these social enemies, operating their profit-making business to the detriment of the rest of the nation. Again, leaders of religion, almost to a man, are silent (except for the feeblest of feeble protests), whilst Ministers in Parliament spend their time proving that high prices and high profits have no connection with each other, but that both are due, in some mysterious manner, to the Germans and the war in general.