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 than was good for them, nearly all of us a great deal harder than we had before the war, in order to provide the goods and services needed for the defeat of the enemy and the maintenance of the population at home. And the result had been that, in spite of the general belief when the war began that it could not last more than a few months owing to the financial exhaustion that it would inevitably bring with it, it had actually lasted for four years, though the demands that it had made on human production had been immeasurably greater than anybody imagined when it began.

There was then this solid material basis for the dreamings of those who had hoped for a new world when the war was over. Productive capacity was very much greater than anybody had believed, and, since man lives on what he produces, life might evidently have been made more generally comfortable, if, when the war was over, all nations and classes had worked together for production and exchange as well as they had worked together, or against one another, for destruction and slaughter. It was a question of good or bad temper, and bad temper won, as was perhaps inevitable after the trials to the temper of the human race which the war had inflicted on it. Bad temper kept the war spirit alive long after it had done its