human
I sometimes feel that war is the new expression of our national activity, he began.
gpt
Don't the Rolls-Royce people build only for the Government? Well, that's typical of a gigantic state-socialism which has grown up in a night; you can't build a house or buy a suit of clothes until war-needs have been satisfied. Production, transport, distribution have all been taken over; you've an army of controllers directing the machine; and in time we shall dress as we're told, eat the quantity of food we're allowed, move here and there, do this and that, as we're ordered. At one age we shall be drafted into the army, at another we shall be knocked on the head to save feeding; there'll be birth-rate bonuses amounting to state-subsidised polygamy.... Everything that a man did in the old days for his own benefit or amusement,--his daily task, his career, his material output, his accumulation of wealth, his pioneer-work in developing and improving the world, his family-life, even--will now be directed to feeding the war. I don't complain; we're united in a labour gang of forty million souls, and our job is to turn out a better war than Germany. I don't see where it's going to stop and I don't see who's going to stop it. Not the soldiers, because they're shot if they disobey an order; not the Government, because they're the Board of Directors.
human
You'll only stop it by a general strike at home,
gpt
And who's going to carry through a general strike? The people with small fixed incomes can't make themselves heard, and, for all the rise in prices, your industrial wage-earner has never been so prosperous; besides, whenever prices become _too_ high, the Government steps in and controls them, subsidises producers. Again, it's not pleasant to be told that your sons and brothers are being killed because you won't turn out shells.
human
But, if you make it plain that you're not going to turn out shells, the killing stops automatically. If _anyone_ would only come off the high horse and discuss concrete terms!
gpt
But people are getting used to the killing, he objected.
human
Three years ago--take anyone you like, Jim Loring; he could only die as the result of illness or an accident; even if there _were_ a war, he wasn't a soldier. And it came like a sort of icy grip at the heart.... Nowadays a man becomes a soldier, whether he likes it or not, at eighteen. They get mown down at twenty instead of dying in their beds at seventy. And, as we grow accustomed to it, on my soul! George, we cease caring. People who come back from Paris tell me that there's a sort of hedonistic fatalism there--the restaurants never so full, money never so prodigally squandered. And anyone who knows anything knows that French credit in America is _gone_! So it isn't the calm, undismayed spirit of the Spartans at Thermopylæ; it's hysteria, carelessness. I've little doubt that with certain obvious differences you'd find the same thing in Berlin, assuredly you'd find it in Vienna. And we're getting it as badly.