he had been sent to fetch, but was told that the stocks were exhausted; so he had to fill his pockets with tins of a more expensive patent cereal. The grocer refused to give him change for a five-pound note, although he explained clearly that there could be no need for withdrawing gold from currency until the government had issued instructions to that effect. To this the grocer (who had hoarded fifty pounds in his safe) replied that this was no time for theories.

Yet when the Lady's husband turned homeward, completely breakfastless, with the big milk-can swinging against his legs, and the knobby little tins rattling in his pockets, and arguments against the hoarding of gold boiling over in his head, he was possessed by a white flame of tranquillity. Exaltation poured through his veins like light. I cannot explain the quality of the glory which filled us all on that disordered morning, except by quoting the phrase from one of those articles by which Mr. H. G. Wells expressed as no other writer has done the good intent with which we faced this war. "This shall be the war that ends war.' Such was our early passion. It still lingers. Every time a Cabinet minister appeals for more munition-workers and begs the women to step forward, innumerable women of all sorts-dressmakers, shopkeepers, typists-throw up their businesses, sometimes even raising money enough to defray the cost of their training, and flock to the nearest big town to offer their services and receive no answer to their applications. The government talks to us private people of thrift, but what extravagance have we ever comImitted like their waste of our exaltation?

But all this unrest died down in about three weeks. As soon as the Ger

man advance on Paris was checked the social organization began to recover itself. And when the Lady's husband got a post in the laboratory of an explosives factory near London, and they rented a farmhouse in a Hertfordshire village, the Lady could stand at her porch under the white creeper and finger the rough sun-crumbled brick and look down the valley of green watermeadows and cherish once more the illusion of stability. She could rejoice again at trivial things at the beauty of the berries that year, for instance: the hawthorn tree in the middle of the meadow in front of the house was like one of those little coral trees on which old-fashioned ladies hang their rings. It was not that the thought of the war was not perpetually present, that letters did not come to tell the death of their friends, that she did not find tears in her eyes the minute she let her mind stray from the immediate world. But the war was not here. The nearest it came was when the dairy farmer's wife told her, as she was paying the bill, that her eldest son had seen the Virgin Mary in the trenches- 'the last person,' she said in the clipped accents ladies' maids carry into married life, 'he was looking for.' The Lady laughed, imagining a commander ordering a saint off the field because she was giving the range to the enemy, but was impressed to find herself present at the birth of legend.

But otherwise, except for the high price of food and the difficulty of getting coal, the war did not seem to touch this life, until one April day when the Lady was working in the garden because the gardener had enlisted and there was not a man left in the district to take his place. She paused in her work of planting beans to look at the beauty about her. A young moon was silver in a primrose sky; a burning of leaves made a gold flame on the crest of

some near hill; the valley was full of a liquid evening light in which the pollard willows moved with glassy undulations like seaweed under water. And through the fork of an apple tree she saw the face of her cook, yellow and laughing. The Lady dropped forward on her knees in the wet mould. After a still moment the woman went up the path and crossed the lawn, still laughing. That night she came into the diningroom and put her cheeks against the oak paneling, and began to pour out obscene tales about the nurse and the housemaid in the blotted speech of undecided consonants that comes to the mad. She was certified the next day, and in the evening they took her in the doctor's automobile to the County Asylum. For a long part of their journey they traveled under the shadow of the high brick wall of Hatfield, that great piece of England so proudly held by the Cecils. It was a Cecil who devised the Treaty of Berlin that caused this war.

This woman had gone mad because she had lost her sweetheart and her three brothers in the war.

The very next evening, as the Lady returned depressed from a day in London registry offices which one and all explained that there were no more servants to be got, as all the girls were making munitions or filling men's places, a man in khaki came up the path and requisitioned her for Kitchener's Army. She watched him fascinated as they went round the house selecting rooms in which the billeted soldiers were to sleep; for he was at once brazenly, blaringly not a gentleman and keenly, splendidly an officer. When the Lady banged the door a trifle roughly and said, 'I beg your pardon,' he responded, as no officer ever did before England gathered all sorts to her Army, 'Granted, I'm sure.' Yet he talked of his men and their fitness and comfort with the

confidence that he was guarding them so that one day they would follow him into noble danger, and surely that is the fine heart of officership. He billeted eleven soldiers on her, and informed her that, as the commissariat had fallen behind on their journey from the West Country, she would have to find and cook food for them for oh! ten days, perhaps.

As he swung off down the path, the Lady tried to feel aghast at the prospect before her. But instead she found her heart light and strong like a bird. What had been a tedious domestic crisis had turned suddenly into a tough and invigorating job to be done for the country's sake. That evening she cycled five miles to get a joint for them, as the news of the coming of a thousand men had already emptied the village of food. She was not bored or exasperated by the morning's cooking; and when the eleven Hampshire men, their faces dust-colored with fatigue, threw down their packs in the garden and entered the kitchen, she was filled not with apprehension at their weatherbeaten bigness or their encrusted muddiness, but simply with the hope that she might not fail them. And although food was scarce and had often to be fetched from a town six miles away, and the price of beef and mutton rose by twenty-five to thirty-five per cent, she never found the business of keeping these men fit and happy anything but an enjoyment. They were temperate and amiable beings, very helpful at mending lamps and doing up the garden, and given to spending the evening by the fire singing songs like "The Rosary.' And when the Lady contrasted these clear-skinned, kindly men in khaki with the dull-eyed, surly things they would have been in civil life, she suddenly began to understand that Solomon was right when he said. that the destruction of the poor was

their poverty. It was not until they had been allowed good food, fresh air, and leisure, that they had been able to show how good their essence was. And as she realized that England had given them none of these things until it had need of their lives, she felt ashamed, and worked for them more than ever until she was arrested by a cry from the nursery.

There had happened in this Hertfordshire village what has happened in every district where soldiers are billeted. The dairymen watered the milk to meet the demand. And so the Lady's lusty child, who had been one of those babies of flushed, abundant flesh, became suddenly froglike and unfriendly, waving hostile, helpless hands and wailing a gathering distress. Everything fell away from it, its fatness, its beauty, even its personality. 'Why should these devils be able to tamper with his food?' cried the Lady. 'It ought to be like gas or water a local authority' and sobbed her way into Socialism. The doctor advised her to go away until the soldiers were moved, and took her in his automobile to look for lodgings. But this country could no longer be kind to them. It looked just the same as always, with the red cattle munching knee-deep in shining buttercups and the fields of young corn a singing green under the moonshine hedges of May, but it had lost its liberty. All the land to the sea was given over to the men in khaki.

So very hastily the Lady had to take her child and the nurse to one of those vulgar Thames-side towns, an idiot's paradise of geraniumed houseboats and polished punts. And there, once the excitement of feeding the child back into health was over, the Lady found that her heart was full of a sense of emptiness. She wanted to be back in Hertfordshire, getting up at six, burning her face over the kitchen range, working

for the soldiers. She wanted passionately, as one wants to be a sailor or to return to one's home, to be of service. And she did more than feel this: when her husband, who came to her for the week-end with a fatigue and need for comfort that oddly renewed their relationship, said, 'I must go on doing something useful after the war: one needs it,' she registered it as one of the emotions that respectable people act

upon.

Though decent life has been raised to fineness by the war, base life is baser than it was in peace. The Thames-side hotel, which always was a place of grimed plush hangings and gilt cornices, accepted the scarcity of servants as an excuse for a franker filth; and on the lawns by the river degraded old men and French and Belgian embusqués got drunk because there was a war. The Lady longed for the clean order of some country home where summer was not a blowsy female in a motor-launch, but a profitable heat running along the earth to warm it for harvest. But that old, simple, loosely organized life of the countryside, from which she and her kind drew their virtue, was gone. The Army was destructively established upon it as a factory is built upon a meadow. The incalculable movements of troops, the consequent sudden scarcities of food, the impossibility of getting goods through from London on the disordered railways, the difficulties of getting servants, made it dangerous and tedious. Moreover, subscriptions to the War Loan and depreciated investments had brought down their income so that they could not long afford two households, and must have a suburban home to which the Lady's husband could return every evening after work.

So, as the summer waned, the Lady found herself living, not in an old farmhouse standing among elms on a Roman road and looking itself ancient

and living like the trees, but in a villa that looked as though but yesterday its parts had lain unrelated in a builder's yard. And there she lived a pinched life, saving, placating servants, trying to do all the plumbing and carpentering herself, till one glorious night when the factory hooters cried orchestrally and she was readmitted into that real world she had lived in when she was doing service for Kitchener's Army. The night was full of light and noise. There was the roar and whistle of the shells, the bang of bombs; and through the white world of brightness cast on the black sky by the searchlights, there fled a fat silver slug which dropped threads of fire into the darkness as it went. It came near, it passed overhead. The Lady felt as though she were lit like a lamp by pride. She was rapt in delight at the mighty power of brain and nerve that were steering that thing. She was radiant with joy at the sudden knowledge that it mattered nothing if they sent down death on her and her dearer part, the child, because they could not break her will. And fear struggled weakly in her, deep and quite disregarded.

Surely it is not a little thing that people who had lived in love with stability

should learn all this in a year: that one can find exaltation at impersonal affairs that do not feed one's appetite; that war is an undignified brute that kills country louts and steals the wits of servant girls; that participation in the collective life by service is a happiness necessary to the human animal; that the careless individualist organization of society may lead to the murder of children; and as for the Zeppelin raid, what more could artist desire than that people should rejoice in tragedy? It may seem to neutrals, when they read of the triumphant greed of the coal-owners and army contractors, and the politicians' gamblings for leadership, that this war has done nothing to Europe except make it a swill-tub for the capitalist class. But we little private people, like the Lady and her husband, have lately endured many experiences and found them to be revelations that we could never have received in the grossish times of peace that lay on the land before August.

Yet war is an outrageous thing, and we will not pay the price again: when we have recovered peace we must live so intently and intelligently, with eyes made clear by these expensive recent visions, that nevermore will we need to be awakened by the roar of cannon.

It follows, therefore, that the relations of men engaged in industry are human relations. Men do not live merely to toil; they also live to play, to mingle with their fellows, to love, to worship. The test of the success of our social organization is the extent to which every man is free to realize his highest and best self; and in considering any economic or political problem, that fundamental fact should be recognized. If in the conduct of industry, therefore, the manager ever keeps in mind that in dealing with employees he is dealing with human beings with flesh and blood, with hearts and souls; and if, likewise, the workmen realize that managers and investors are themselves also human beings, how much bitterness will be avoided!

Are the interests of these human beings with labor to sell and with capital to employ necessarily antagonistic or necessarily mutual? Must the advance of one retard the progress of the other? Should their attitude toward each other be that of enemies or of partners? The answer one makes to

these fundamental questions must constitute the basis for any consideration of the relationship of Labor and Capital.

Our difficulty in dealing with the industrial problem is due too often to a failure to understand the true interests of Labor and Capital. And I suspect this lack of understanding is just as prevalent among representatives of Capital as among representatives of Labor. In any event the conception one has of the fundamental nature of these interests will naturally determine one's attitude toward every phase of their relationship.

Much of the reasoning on this subject proceeds upon the theory that the wealth of the world is absolutely limited, and that if one man gets more, another necessarily gets less. Hence there are those who hold that if Labor's wages are increased or its working conditions improved, Capital suffers because it must deprive itself of the money needed to pay the bill. Some employers go so far as to justify themselves in appropriating from the product of industry all that remains after Labor has received the smallest amount which it can be induced or forced to accept; while on the other hand there are men who hold that Labor is the producer of all wealth, hence is entitled to the entire product, and that whatever is taken by Capital is stolen from Labor. If this theory is sound, it might be maintained that the relation between Labor and Capital is fundamentally one of antagonism, and that each should consolidate and arm its forces, dividing