with a heroism that has never been approached by the Paladins and Knights Errant of the days before we had been turned into shopkeepers and demoralized by profit-seeking. All who had watched industrial development and its effects in making us sleek and sedentary townsmen must have wondered whether the process would not soften us into folk who could not stand the test of battle. Yet all the battles that had ever been fought before were child's play to the Hell that both sides lately rained on one another for four-and-a-half years, and the nation of shopkeepers was in her old place in the front row, wherever the fighting was hottest by sea and land.
Says the critic, "There may be some truth in all this, but what of the disgusting ugliness and squalor that Capitalism has brought with it—lovely countrysides covered with sordid filthy towns that are a blot on their beauty, and men with their hearts still more foully smirched by scamped work and the scramble of competition?" This is a criticism that cannot be altogether gainsaid, but it is possible to exaggerate it, by imagining too rosy a picture of the system that Capitalism superseded. Capitalism committed crimes in its early days
