Welsh Journals

sides are trying to persuade themselves that they can serve God and Mammon that they can do their best for the nation and the best for themselves at the same time. Neither side, at bottom, is prepared to let private interest yield to public necessity. Owners insist in regarding their mines as their own private personal and sacred concerns, and in refusing to justify in public the manner of their stewardship. They do not understand that the mineral wealth of the world does not exist primarily to provide them with dividends, but to satisfy the social requirements of mankind that they are but the nation's trustees, and must give account of what has been committed to them. God and Mammon. Surely it is plain that for all our shiftings, we can not serve God and Mammon. We can do something for both. We can give some service to the nation and do fairly well for ourselves at the same time. But we cannot combine the best for both. And it is the best for the nation that we want. We cannot afford longer to endure this weakening of our national effort by the motive of profiteering. It is that which stops us from the most devoted service we can give and that we must destroy. We have played long enough with appeals to public feeling and patriotism. Many would respond, but they find it hard because of those who will not. And the only way is to make profiteering impossible. In other words, let the Government take, not 60 per cent. excess profits tax, but, in addition to the ordinary taxes as now imposed, let it take every penny which an individual citizen has now in excess of his income tax returns for 1914-5. Such a measure will not be the end of profiteering, for profiteering was well enough established before the war. But it will stop war- exploitation and it will make certain that wealth is bearing its proper share of the cost of this tre- mendous struggle. No one pretends that such a The memory of those fleeting hours of gold Gleams in the gloom, as, on a rain-swept day, Through rifted wrack of cloud, a roaming ray, Falling from a reeking wall and cold, Fills every cranny with a wealth untold Of gladness, so that nature's verdured play And mason's cunning, webbed in light, are gay, And into one precarious beauty rolled measure is a triumph of abstract justice. It will operate hardly some people's increases are not due to the war at all and many people have already devoted large sums of their excess profits to public purposes. But it is simple, effective, and decisive. Nor indeed, even if its operation fell hardly on wealth, would wealth have any kind of grievance. Property is less than life and if for the nation's cause men of all classes lay down their lives, and if the nation demands that they should, it is fair that it should demand the surrender of material wealth. Cautious minds will tell us that if we take all war profits, we shall diminish the quality of men's service by depriving them of a legitimate incentive to do their best. Even if that was true, we believe that we should gain more than we lose. For we should be spared the friction, the loss of time and energy, the bitterness of personal feeling and dissipation of unity of endeavour which come from the possibility of exploitation. But there is no reason to suppose that the assumption is true. We have never, save for the shortest time, given the finer motives a chance. We have always dulled them by overlaying them with private gain and if we lift that weight from them, they may prove far more powerful forces than we realise. One test alone can prove to us how men are capable of tremendous effort for a cause, if they realise what the cause is and that its success depends upon them alone. For that is why the Army of the Marne has become the Army of the Somme. And if we-employers and wage-earners-realise what the cause is, and what it requires of us, if we think on these things,' and discipline ourselves to judge our actions by the standard they exact, we shall find the vision an inspiration that will save us and we shall stand behind that Army with such power and resolution that we shall know it some day as the Army of the Meuse, and the Army of the Rhine. REST (To F.P.) Off the jagged edges of the shadowed cloud,- A tremulous joy, to which the senses cling With pathos inexpressible and sweet; So are those hours, welling among the crowd Of dark and desolate hours that round us ring, Friend, as we met, may we yet ever meet ? r. G. J.