increasing burden of mortgages, are improving under rising prices and lightened mortgages. And just as populism stopped a few years after the fall of prices stopped, so will I. W. W.ism be arrested a few years after the arrest of the rise of prices.
13. War Prices Cause Discontent
When the history of the war is written, it may well be that we shall find that the growing popular unrest caused by the high cost of living, and the atmosphere of suspicion engendered, had something to do in giving a pretext for, if not causing, the Great War. In fact, before the war, rising costs of living were fast making socialists all over the world, including Germany, and the German government must have weighed, as one of the expected dynastic advantages of war, the suppression of the growing internal class struggle which this high cost of living was bringing on apace.
And, when all the evidence is in, it may well be found that the desire of the Bolsheviki to withdraw from the war was greatly stimulated by the soaring prices from Russian paper money inflation, as well as from scarcity of commodities.
Even in Germany, formerly so well disciplined, there was rioting during the war because of high prices, a part of which was certainly due to inflation. More recently a keen observer, an American officer at Coblenz, reports that the most plausible theory of the sudden collapse of German morale was that the German people were indignant over high prices, profiteering, and grafting. The labor troubles in France and England are attributed to the same cause. Lord D'Abernon says, according
