become a citizen in sedentary or low-paid occupation may be only in the position of the actual combatant on the battlefield who accepts the squalor of any temporary place of protection, so long as he is freed from immediate danger and the intolerable sound of the guns. He may yet, when the senses are partially restored, regain a consciousness of the inadequacy of his present position to the sacrifices which he made; and the promises of the rulers of his country that these sacrifices would be more than recompensed to him. But it is certain that the larger movements of social unrest amongst the workers in Britain were at the beginning fomented, not by or among the men who fought abroad, but by and among the men who stayed at home. It was the great centres of home industry which were exempted from the conscription who first agitated the nation with truculent demand for the betterment of their conditions. The railwaymen, the coal-miners, the dock-labourers, the workers in the munition cities such as Glasgow, were the leaders in this revolt. No prominent part in this revolt was taken by the travellers who had returned. They were mostly, as discharged soldiers and sailors, for the moment at least, returned to a world where they were very contented to find security and any place reserved for them at all; very content, indeed, to find themselves alive. Later there have been signs that this numbness is passing away, and passing away even now, not as the truculent demand of the returned hero, but because that hero has been shelled out of the lair which he thought secure by the coming of unemployment, as once he was shelled out of the dug-out by the enemy's guns.
At first men expected a visible destruction. One of my colleagues in the Cabinet, in those awful twelve days in which the world broke under our feet, asserted to me that if we went to war, within a fortnight every mill and factory would be closed in the north, and that hunger-maddened multitudes would sack every rich man's house and break into a kind of civil riot in their need for food. And indeed it seemed impossible that civilisation should
