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  "title": "The Economic Consequences of the Peace",
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      "text": "Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.",
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      "text": "He had one illusion — France; and one disillusion — mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.",
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      "text": "Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.\n\nLenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.",
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      "text": "Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.",
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      "text": "The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.",
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      "text": "The duty of \"saving\" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.",
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      "text": "If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.",
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      "text": "Men will not always die quietly.",
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      "text": "The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.",
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      "text": "The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.",
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      "text": "I seek only to point out that the principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of Society and of progress as we then understood it, and to emphasize that this principle depended on unstable psychological conditions, which it may be impossible to recreate. It was not natural for a population, of whom so few enjoyed the comforts of life, to accumulate so hugely. The war has disclosed the possibility of consumption to all and the vanity of abstinence to many. Thus the bluff is discovered; the labouring classes may be no longer willing to forgo so largely, and the capitalist classes, no longer confident of the future, may seek to enjoy more fully their liberties of consumption so long as they last, and thus precipitate the hour of their confiscation.",
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      "text": "The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end, — but generally to be obtained at your neighbor's expense.",
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