Th is prescription was not to be interpreted as grim and exceptional, he clarifi ed, but rather as a condition for economic progress to be developed into a universal norm. Blackett admonished the crowd, “[w]ere we not all tired of the ostentatious extravagances of the prewar period? Has not the war taught us that our sense of values had gone wrong?” (ibid., 20). Learning the custom of thrift , he told the New York teachers, had to begin at a very early age: “By not buying candy, or by not going to the movies, they [children] could increase the amount standing to their credit in the school War Savings Association” (ibid., 73– 74).

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 898