equipping them for battle and parade, but the drain
upon the vital energies of society by the war-attitude and
the war-terror, the brutality and ignorance, the drunken~
ness, prostitution, and crime it entails, the industrial impo~
tence and the moral deadness? Do you think that it
would be too much to say that two hours of the working
time of every efficient member of a community goes to
feed the red fiend of war?"

And then Schliemann went on to outline some of the
wastes of competition: the losses of industrial warfare;
the ceaseless worry and friction; the vices -- such as drink,
for instance, the use of which had nearly doubled in twenty
years, as a consequence of the intensification of the eco~
nomic struggle; the idle and unproductive members of the
community, the frivolous rich and the pauperized poor;
the law and the whole machinery of repression; the wastes
of social ostentation, the milliners and tailors, the hair~
dressers, dancing masters, chefs and lackeys. "You under~
stand," he said, "that in a society dominated by the fact
of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test
of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power.
So we have, at the present moment, a society with, say,
thirty per cent of the population occupied in producing
useless articles, and one per cent occupied in destroying
them. And this is not all; for the servants and panders
of the parasites are also parasites, the milliners and the
jewelers and the lackeys have also to be supported by the
useful members of the community. And bear in mind
also that this monstrous disease affects not merely the
idlers and their menials, its poison penetrates the whole
social body. Beneath the hundred thousand women of
the elite are a million middle-class women, miserable
because they are not of the elite, and trying to appear of
it in public; and beneath them, in turn, are five million
farmers' wives reading 'fashion papers' and trimming
bonnets, and shop-girls and serving-maids selling them~
selves into brothels for cheap jewelery and imitation seal-
skin robes. And then consider that, added to this
competition in display, you have, like oil on the flames, a

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v?