The masses now took prosperity for granted... The country simply did not realize that we were living beyond our income, and would have to pay for it … - Harold Macmillan

So I approach the date on which my story of the Fifty Years Revolution begins. The old world ended, with its strange mixture of beauty and ugliness, happiness and sorrow, good and evil—so much to be proud of; so much, looking back, of which perhaps to be ashamed. Yet the most rabid radical or the most caustic critic of the Britain that had fought and won a twenty-year battle for freedom a century before, that for a hundred years had helped to keep the peace of the world, and spread civilisation to its distant corners, cannot but feel that if, in this sequence of rapid change, much has been gained, something, too, has been lost.

In later years I was to find economists and newspaper editors arguing against the principle of full employment, to which after the Second War all political parties attached so much importance. While I recognise the dangers of "over-employment", I have little sympathy with those who, writing from pleasant suburban retreats or comfortable editorial chairs, dilate upon the disciplinary values of pre-war conditions. It was my fate to live with the problems of heavy unemployment for fifteen years. They were not substantially eased by any conscious effort either in the industrial or economic field. Rearmament under Hitler's pressure and ultimately under war brought their own grim solution.

When I ventured to criticise, the other day, this system I was, I am afraid, misunderstood. As a Conservative, I am naturally in favour of returning into private ownership and private management all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism. I am sure they will be more efficient. What I ventured to question was the using of these huge sums as if they were income. I know now, I have learnt now from the letters that I have received, that I am quite out of date. Modern economists have decided there is no difference between capital and income. I am not so sure. In my younger days, I and perhaps others of your Lordships had friends, good friends, very good fellows indeed too, who failed to make this distinction. For a few years everything went on very well, and then at last the crash came, and they were forced to retire out to some dingy lodging-house in Boulogne, or if the estate were larger and the trustees more generous, to a decent accommodation at Baden-Baden.