Page:Bankers and Credit (1924).pdf/143

 enormous profits in spite of taxation designed to prevent their doing so; they had seen amazing things happen in their own class, as when one member of the family faced all the hardships and dangers of exposure and of warfare in a mine sweeper, for pay which left him very little better off than an ordinary seaman before the war, while his brother or his cousin who stayed at home because he was not physically fit to fight, earned wages which may have ranged from £15 to £20 a week in a munition factory, or, if he happened to be a shopkeeper, might amass a fortune which enabled him to start a county family. Such had been some of the economic effects of the war, contrary to all logic or common sense, and largely due to bad war finance.

It is not to be wondered at that having seen such things before their eyes the working classes of the country should come to the conclusion that practical sense did not count in money matters, and that anything was possible for those who only persisted in demanding it with a sufficiently loud voice. They believed, and with good reason, that immeasurable economic injustice had been inflicted during the war especially upon the best men of the community who were fighting its battles at the front; and they argued that it was at any rate