Page:Bankers and Credit (1924).pdf/144

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worth trying whether they could not, by insisting on a larger share of the national output in return for much less work, put some injustices right by securing for those who did the hard, dirty and uninteresting work of the world a better share of the goods which they helped to produce. They had to find out by bitter experience that it is only by increasing output and making trade prosperous that they could make their demands for better conditions felt. But there is nothing strange about economic mistakes made by uneducated folk, at a time when our leaders, who believed themselves to be the fine flower of the nation's intellect, were wallowing up to their eyebrows in economic and political error, and the mighty brains that directed industry and finance were making enormous miscalculations about the staying power of the after-war demand for goods.

In fact, as we all know, it is human to err; and in the after-war reaction we were all very human indeed and erred with hearty and unanimous vigour, with a few very select exceptions who were not quite human and so did not join in the erroneous orgy. The rest of us, fired by determination to go on beating the enemy after the end of the war, to create an earthly Paradise at home at the expense of