What great destruction of real wealth do you envisage that
cannot be made good in a life-time? We are continually replacing our real wealth, almost without being aware of it. Even were the world at peace, how much of our wealth existing today will exist in even ten years time? We may be living in the same houses, but the decorations and furnish- ingt will have undergone continuous modification ; we shall be eating different food, most probably off different china ; we shall be wearing different clothes whose cloth may well be woven by machinery not yet in existence ; we shall drive to the office in a different car or travel by railways part of whose rolling stock will certainly have undergone replacement. We shall be reading new books and listening to new songs, probably over a new wireless set. We shall, in fact, be referring to- objects over ten years old as " that old thing."
All this replacement of wealth, capital as well as consumable, goes on all the time and is not beyond the normal powers of industry to cope with. Why is this recuperative power of man to be so greatly diminished by war?
Since all wealth is the product of labour applied to the earth's resources, there are only two valid reasons for supposing that we must all be poorer, not for a matter of five or ten years, but for " the rest of our lives." One would be the wholesale destruction of skilled labour (which we are taking conscious pains to avoid) and the other an extensive and permanent diminution of the earth's resources by war. With the possible exception of petrol, I have seen no suggestion that the latter is to be looked for. But unless the potential wealth of the earth itself is appreciably destroyed by this war, the after-war poverty you predict can only arise from human mal- adjustments, susceptible of human remedy. Possibly you have pictured what may be, but not what must be.—Yours, &c.,
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