storms of rage about nothing at all. It was frightening. . . . There was an epidemic of violence and of horrible sensual crimes with women-victims, ending often in suicide. There were mob riots by demobilised soldiers, or soldiers still waiting in camps for demobilisation. Police-stations were stormed and wrecked and policemen killed by bodies of men who had been heroes in the war and now fought like savages against their fellow-citizens. Some of them pleaded guilty in court and made queer statements about an utter ignorance of their own actions after the disorder had begun. It seemed as though they had returned to the psychology of that war when men, doped with rum, or drunk with excitement, had leapt over the parapet and remembered nothing more of a battle until they found themselves panting in an enemy trench, or lying wounded on a stretcher. It was a dangerous kind of psychology in civil life.
Labourers back at work in factories or mines or rail-*way-stations or dock-yards, after months or years of the soldier-life, did not return to their old conditions or their old pay with diligence and thankfulness. They demanded higher wages to meet the higher cost of life, and after that a margin for pleasure, and after that shorter hours for higher pay, and less work in shorter hours. If their demands were not granted they downed tools and said, "What about it?" Strikes became frequent and general, and at a time when the cost of war was being added up to frightful totals of debt which could only be reduced by immense production, the worker slacked off, or suspended his labours, and said, "Who gets the profits of my sweat?. . . I want a larger share." He was not frightened of a spectre that was scaring all people of property and morality in the Western world. The spectre of Bolshevism, red-eyed, dripping with blood, proclaiming anarchy as the new gospel,
