NEWS from one hundred years ago: THE WAR WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING

The Evening Post, one of the leading Liberal newspapers in the country, editorialises today about the way many people feel betrayed by how things have gone since the end of the First World War. Although the country has won a ‘Victory’ against its supposed foreign enemy, ‘the danger to the Nation is actually greater now than it was during the War.’ Citizens went to war because they thought they were fighting for a fairer, juster, more equal society. ‘During the war everyone agreed, in principle, that ... peace must bring in its train a more even distribution of things; that the economic equation must be revised, even if something had to be broken.’ The newspaper claims that since the war there has been almost no improvement in social justice and equality. One outcome is a ‘widespread revulsion of feeling against vested interests’ controlled by the wealthy. The fight for ‘a more even distribution of things’ goes on. ‘The war was only the beginning.’

Evening Post, 17 September 1920