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Updated: June 4, 2025
I do not defend either of them; they are unimaginative and selfish, and I do not care how severely they are dealt with; but I do say that the majority of them are not wicked in intention. A good many of the more innocent profiteers are men whose sin is that they take an offer of two shillings rather than an offer of eighteenpence for what cost them one and a penny.
If the anti-social individual should be punished, what of many of the profiteers and captains of industry who manipulate business and property for purely selfish ends?
While the government officially was leading a united people into action, these scheming political profiteers were perfecting their plans for appealing to the people on the ground that the government a party government which had not invited any measure of close co-operation from the opposition must have a mandate to carry on the war.
The result is that powers of destruction that could hardly without uneasiness be entrusted to infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence are placed in the hands of romantic schoolboy patriots who, however generous by nature, are by education ignoramuses, dupes, snobs, and sportsmen to whom fighting is a religion and killing an accomplishment; whilst political power, useless under such circumstances except to militarist imperialists in chronic terror of invasion and subjugation, pompous tufthunting fools, commercial adventurers to whom the organization by the nation of its own industrial services would mean checkmate, financial parasites on the money market, and stupid people who cling to the status quo merely because they are used to it, is obtained by heredity, by simple purchase, by keeping newspapers and pretending that they are organs of public opinion, by the wiles of seductive women, and by prostituting ambitious talent to the service of the profiteers, who call the tune because, having secured all the spare plunder, they alone can afford to pay the piper.
A terrible thing war!... Perhaps she had better give up dancing for a week, until Charlie had been put into the casualty lists. "What are we fighting for?" asked officers back from leave, turning over the pages of the Sketch and Tatler, with pictures of race-meetings, strike-meetings, bare backed beauties at war bazaars, and portraits of profiteers in the latest honors list.
What other people in the world than the Germans would stand that? But they did stand it. "These are only the early potatoes the main crop will be all right," said the profiteers right and left, and gradually the masses began to echo them, as is usual in Germany.
Also there was a new peril looming up; the returned soldiers were coming back, and a lot of them were dissatisfied, presuming to complain of their treatment in the army, and of the lack of good jobs at home, and even of the peace treaty which the President was arranging in Paris. They had fought to make the world safe for democracy, and here, they said, it had been made safe for the profiteers.
Every new phase in industrial progress has its profiteers men who capitalize the advanced ideas of their field for their own interest, regardless of the harm which they bring to the whole by their methods. Every scientific discovery has its charlatans who mix enough of the truth with their lies to undermine the whole truth when their lies become known.
Then the capitalists believed in themselves, in their value to society, in the propriety of their continued existence in the full enjoyment of their riches and the unlimited exercise of their power. Now they tremble before every insult; call them pro-Germans, international financiers, or profiteers, and they will give you any ransom you choose to ask not to speak of them so harshly.
I might have seen it at first.... Three experts who'd been got at; they thought I'd been got at; two Labour men who'd do anything you wanted them to do provided you called them 'level-headed. Wagstaffe the socialist art critic who could be trusted to play the fool and make nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway managers, oil profiteers, financial adventurers...."
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