We had sold perhaps a thousand millions' worth of the investments which our thrifty forefathers had made in the previous century, by lending money to foreign Governments, by financing the building of railways abroad, and by generally stimulating the production of the whole world by providing it with capital. We had also seriously impaired the efficiency of our industrial and distributive machinery, by being unable, largely owing to lack of labour and material, to maintain the usual rate of maintenance and up-keep that is year by year put into our industrial plant under the item of depreciation.
But after making allowance for all these facts, which account for much of the apparent economic miracle that we had worked during the war, it still remains true that we had shown that there were capacities and powers in this country, and in others, which had not been fully developed in the pre-war period. Perhaps this was because for the first time since the industrial revolution, machinery had been allowed to do its work as well as it possibly could, unhindered by restrictive regulations on the part of trade unions, and by the desire to control output, in order to maintain prices, on the part of producers and distributors. We had worked really hard, some few much harder
