Page:Bankers and Credit (1924).pdf/71

 were quite useless for lessening sacrifice but only too effective in distributing it unjustly and enabling a small minority to make fortunes out of the war that was bringing ruin to many, especially of those who were fighting for us.

These results were so far from being expected when the war began that the arrangement made by the Government with the railway companies, under which they were to be guaranteed their pre-war net revenue, was viewed with envy by the shipowning, coalowning and engineering firms and companies which afterwards wallowed up to their chins in the war profits in which bad war finance immersed them, but then saw nothing but bad times ahead. The capitalist class was fearful and tame and quite ready to be told, what it already believed, that war meant sacrifice and stinting, and probably ready to be convinced that taxation was the cheapest and fairest way of imposing and distributing the burden. I remember being told by a stockbroker in the first week of the war that of course the whole Stock Exchange saw nothing but ruin ahead of it. "But we don't care a damn," he added. "We know this war had to happen and we know we're going to win and that's all that matters."