a debased currency. The shock has been severe, and a century may be required for recovery; but the structure endures.
There are forces, however, which that shock has set working, which will not be exhausted to-day or to-morrow, and which are well worth examination; for upon right understanding of them will depend the future peaceful development of the race. It is difficult, for example, rightly to estimate the effect upon the future of Britain of the gigantic migration which tore men from the fields or from town and office stool, and sent them out by millions beyond the sea to risk their lives in every corner of the world. In France each citizen had passed through the disturbing and unifying influence of the two years' conscription in times of peace. France had still close at hand the bitter memories of foreign invasion. And France was for the most part fighting during the war on the soil, and in defence of the soil, of its own sacred land. The French armies were also largely peasant armies, recruited from the owners of the soil and their children, accepting the necessity for the defence of their own fields and homes. But in Britain none of these conditions occurred. Men volunteered or were pressed into the armies and shipped over the sea in millions who otherwise would never have seen the sea or visited foreign lands or left their native town. They owned no piece of the land in which they fought. They had owned no portion of the land from which they had gone. They went out into the great adventure of all the world. They served in France and Italy, in Gallipoli and Salonica, in Egypt and Palestine and India and Mesopotamia, in the frosty Caucasus and the White Sea. And at the end they came home also in millions again, also without owning any piece of their own land, to take up the thread of life which had been so rudely snapped by service in a struggle they had always previously regarded as incredible. A friend of mine heard fragments of conversation between a bus conductor and a passenger, while the vehicle was held up by the passing of a regiment of Guards.
