Then, quicker than in France, all this illusion was smashed in the face
by reality. The British nation became aware of its dwindling trade,
the stagnation of its industry. Unemployment began to creep up in a
steady tide, until two million men were out of work and existing only
on Government “doles.” Factories were closing down or working half
time. The Mersey, the Clyde and the Thames were crowded with ships
without cargoes, and all the ports were filled with seamen without
berths. After demobilisation ex-officers as well as men could not
find jobs to do. They tramped the streets in search of work, wearing
out their boots and their hearts. They played piano-organs, moved in
dismal processions with banners flying the words “We want work,” shook
street collecting boxes in the faces of the passers-by. The Trade
Unions were hard and selfish. They refused to admit untrained labour to
their ranks. Without Trade Union tickets men who had saved the country
were turned away at the factory gates. Labour put up a fierce fight to
maintain the standard of wages and of life which had been established
in time of war—no longer possible in time of peace with failing markets
and a world in ruin. One cannot blame them. None of us likes to reduce
his standard of life and go back to miserable conditions of stint and
scrape. Strikes and lockouts beat them down, but did not relieve the
strain or increase the nation’s wealth. Things looked very serious
below the surface of English life. There was a bitterness in the minds
of men who had been promised great rewards for heroic service, and
now found themselves destitute, in overcrowded slums—where were the
“homes for heroes”?—maintained on a miserable “dole” that just saved
them from starvation but was not enough for decent life. There was for
a year or so a danger of revolt, a spreading of revolutionary ideas,
among men like that. Russian Communism put a spell upon many minds who
knew nothing of the agony in Russia but were stirred by the Bolshevik
doctrine of equality and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
When Germany failed to pay the immense reparations which had been
demanded from her the British Government was faced with the necessity
of balancing its yearly Budget without those payments, and, unlike
France, which still banked upon them, or like Germany, which created
false money by inflation, determined to sustain the national credit by
taxation and sound finance. It put the most tremendous burden upon the
nation that has ever been sustained by any people in modern history.
It was accepted with a resignation and courage which will stand for
ever to the credit of the British folk, and especially to the credit
of those who paid at the cost of all that was dearest to them in life
apart from national honour and family blood. Income Tax, Super Tax,
and Death Duties fell upon the people who lived on inherited wealth
with a terrifying ferocity. There are only two and a half million
people in Great Britain who pay any Income Tax at all, and only
eighty-five thousand who are subject to Super Tax, but it was from that
small minority that the Government demanded the revenue necessary
for the upkeep of its services. It caused, and is causing, a social
revolution which is changing the whole aspect of English life. The
old aristocracy are abandoning their houses, selling their estates,
becoming shabby genteel, losing their old splendour, prerogatives and
power. To pay their Income Tax and Death Duties they are eating into
their old capital, selling the old pictures on their walls, abandoning
old mansions haunted by the ghosts of history in which their pride and
spirit dwelt. They have done this not without anguish, not without a
sense of tragedy, not without bitterness, but with an acknowledgment of
inevitable necessity. Bloodlessly the revolution in England is being
accomplished, though the hard road has not yet been travelled to the
end.