So the blameless, and for the purpose imbecile, executive committee of gentlemen-investors has been insensibly losing the confidence and the countenance of the common man; who, when all is said, will always have to do what is to be done.

The order of gentlemanly parleying and brokery has, therefore, with many apprehensions of calamity, been reluctantly and tardily giving ground before something that is of a visibly underbred order.

Increasingly underbred, and thereby insensibly approaching the character of this war situation, but accepted with visible reluctance and apprehension both by the ruling class and by the underlying population.

The urgent necessity of going to such a basis, and of working out the matter in hand by an unblushing recourse to that matter-of-fact logic of mechanical efficiency, which alone can touch the difficulties of the case, but which has no respect of persons,--this necessity has been present from the outset and has been vaguely apprehended for long past, but it is only tardily and after the chastening of heavy penalties on this gentlemanly imbecility that a substantial move in that direction has been made.

It has required much British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of anything whatever in a commercial nation.