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But in these critical days, with factories closing everywhere, and men by the thousands being thrown out of work, the best thing a man can do, either for himself or for his country, is to keep business moving. That's why I am selling lumber without profit." Charley was suddenly abashed. "I'm awfully sorry I called you a profiteer," he said humbly. "I beg your pardon."
Why might not new Slave States be created outside the Union, eventually to be drawn in? Why not? said the slave profiteer, and gave money and assistance to the filibusters in Nicaragua. Why not? said Lincoln, also. What protection against such an extension of boundaries? Was the limitation of slave area to be on one side only, the Northern side?
If he had not inherited from a profiteer he would assuredly have been at his office in the Treasury, earning an honest living, at that very moment. For only sick persons of plenteous independent means are ever prescribed for as he had been prescribed for; the others either go on working and making the best of such health as is left to them, or they die.
The schoolmaster who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of the illustrious and the successful.
Thus in an organized society the acquisitiveness and self-assertion proper to a vigorous primitive dependent on his own powers survive as the sins of envy and covetousness, and are seen operating in the dishonesty of the burglar, the greed and egotism of the profiteer: and, on the highest levels, the great spiritual sin of pride may be traced back to a perverted expression of that self-regarding instinct without which the individual could hardly survive.
I repeat that up to a point the profiteer was innocent because he was ignorant; he had been lured on by easy and accommodating events. He was innocent as the new Thane of Glamis was innocent, as the new Thane of Cawdor was innocent; but the King The modern manufacturer, like Macbeth, decided to march on, under the mute menace of the heavens.
Then I go out into No Man's Land and meet Cousin Egbert by a lemonade stand. He was one radiant being. He asked me to have a glass of the beverage, and I done so; and while I was sipping it he says brightly: "Wasn't that some gorgeous display of fireworks? And wasn't it fine to stand there and watch them bottles laugh their heads off at this food profiteer?"
Peace has turned the world up-side-down. We're walking on our heads. You're just out of hospital, but you'll know what I mean when you've been a week in London." "But nothing of what you've been saying applies to Adair Easterday," he objected. "He wasn't a profiteer in khaki; he wasn't even in khaki. He made nothing; he lost nearly everything he had.
It requires very little imagination to see how easy it would be to put away a certain sum each year for that. . . . A question of how much you charge the final purchaser. . . . And the profiteer goes out of the picture. . . . That's what we're aiming at; that is what is coming. . . . No more men like the gentleman sitting three tables away just behind you; no more of the Baxters fattening on sweated labour."
Not till a day or two later, when the remnants of strained pre-occupation with the big things of war have been charmed away by old haunts and old friends, do you feel wholly at home amid your rediscovered fellow-citizens, the Man in the Street, the Pacifist, the air-raid-funk Hysteric, the Lady Flag-Seller, the War Profiteer, the dear-boy Fluff Girl, the Prohibitionist, the England-for-the-Irish politician, the Conscientious Objector, the hotel-government bureaucrat, and other bulwarks of our united Empire.
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