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he regular staff." "Of course Jim will come out," said the father firmly, "if the others come out." "The fact is," they explained, after further silence, "we don't talk about the strike here; we try to forget that there ever may be one." It was the experience of a thousand homes. There was no recognised or felt grievance. There was no clear understanding of the purpose and meaning of it all. But there were firmly planted in the mind two bedrock facts: the one, the tragedy that the strike would mean in this particular household; the other, the complete impossibility of any other choice but of the boys standing with their comrades in the day of decision. And this is England; an England which has learnt more than all other peoples the secret of acquiescence, of toleration, of settling down and making the best of things in a world on the whole desirable; but an England also of a determination unshaken by the vicissitudes of purpose and time, with a certain ruthlessness about the means when it has accepted the end, and with a patience which is perhaps more terrible in its silence than the violence of a conspicuous despair.

These and other qualities form an absorbing subject of study. A figure emerges from it all. It is the figure of an average from which all its great men are definitely variants. No body of men have ever been so "un-English" as the great Englishmen, Nelson, Shelley, Gladstone: supreme in war, in literature, in practical affairs; yet with no single evidence in the characteristics of their energy that they possess any of the qualities of the English blood. But in submitting to the leadership of such perplexing variations from the common stock, the Englishman is merely exhibiting his general capacity for accepting the universe, rather than for rebelling against it. His idea of its origin or of its goal has become vague and cloudy; definite statements of the average belief, set out in black and white by the average congregation, would astonish the average preacher. But he drives ahead along the day's work: in pursuing his own business, conquering great empires: gaining them by his power of energy and honesty, jeopardising them by his stiffness and lack of sympathy and inability to learn. So he will continue to the end; occupying, not in Mr. Pinero's bitter gibe the "suburb of the Universe"; but rather that locality whose jolly, stupid, brave denizens may be utilised for every kind of hazardous and unimaginable enterprise; fulfilling the work of another, content to know nothing of the reason of it all; journeying always, like Columbus, "to new Americas, or whither God wills."

It may be helpful to break up this composite figure of an "Englishman" into the various economic divisions of the present time, to examine what changes are fermenting amongst the rich, the middle stratum of comfort, the multitudinous ranks of the toilers, the dim hordes of the disinherited. A summary of science, art, literature, and religion in their influence upon the common life will indicate the changes most manifest, less in material conveniences than in the spirit of man. At the end arises the question of the future of a society, evidently moving in a direction which no one can foresee, towards experience of far-reaching change.

THE CONQUERORS

"England is a sieve" is the cry of the astonished audience in Mr. Belloc's brochure on the fiscal question. "Poor old England is a sieve." They were filled with horror at the Tariff Reformer's revelation of the surplusage of imports over exports, and his vision of the golden sovereigns being drained from this country to pay for these undesirable incursionists. They already contemplated the time when the last piece of gold would have been transported to meet the demands of the insatiable "foreigner," and the whole country would suddenly realise that its pockets were empty--that it had spent all that it had. Undoubtedly similar if less pleasant arguments of a vigorous fiscal campaign have succeeded in shaking belief in England's prosperity. It is still possible in train or street, or places where men assemble, to find observers, with an air of sagacity, declaiming upon England's headlong rush towards poverty and the abyss. I remember listening for many hours, on the journey over the St. Gothard to Milan, to a fluent English traveller explaining to some astonished Italians that England was steadily growing poorer year by year; less money accumulated, less money spent. Such are the follies of untrained minds, who are unable to read experience or to interpret figures. They cannot apprehend the astonishing facts of "super-wealth" as accumulated in this country; as accumulated in the past thirty years. That rate of accumulation has never been before paralleled: just as the expenditure which accompanies accumulation--for we are not a thrifty race--offers something new in a standard of whole classes. A serious study of the superfluous wastage of the nation might bring reassurance to all who are afraid of an enforced austerity of manners; even if it provides little gratification to those who would see expenditure devoted to desirable ends. Statistics present to the reader incredible arrays of increase: so much leaping forward of income-tax returns, unchecked by wars, borrowings, or trade depressions; nearly two hundred millions of the National Income divided amongst people whose individual incomes exceed five thousand a year. Where does it go to? How is it consumed? What asset of permanent value will be left behind as evidence of the super-wealth of the twentieth century? The answers to these questions are not entirely satisfactory. "Waste" is written large over a very substantial proportion of the national expenditure, and that far more in the private than in the public consumption. A Conservative leader once informed a meeting in Scotland that if all the rich men were abolished there would be no one left to give work to the poor people. That, however, was rather a popular method of combating Socialism, than a serious contribution to political economy. "To a retailer of news," says Mr. George Russell, "who informed him that Lord Omnium, recently deceased, had left a large sum of money to charities, Mr. Gladstone replied with characteristic emphasis, 'Thank him for nothing. He was obliged to leave it. He couldn't carry it with him.'" And what the rich man is to do with his money except to find employment, and how he is to escape the burden of death duties or graduated income tax in a world where every civilised nation has an eye upon his "super-wealth," are queries whose answer is conjectural.

The most obvious increase of this waste comes from the "speeding up" of living which has taken place in all classes in so marked a fashion within a generation. The whole standard of life has been sensibly raised, not so much in comfort as in ostentation. And the result is something similar to that in the insane competition of armaments which takes place amongst the terrified nations of the world. One year ten huge ironclads confront twenty. A decade after, fifteen huge ironclads of another type have replaced the first: to be confronted again with thirty of the new floating castles. So many millions have been thrown to the scrap heap. The proportion of power has remained unaffected. It is the same in the more determined private competition for supremacy in a social standard. Where one house sufficed, now two are demanded; where a dinner of a certain quality, now a dinner of a superior quality; where clothes or dresses or flowers, now more clothes, more dresses, more flowers. It is waste, not because fine clothes and rare flowers and pleasant food are in themselves undesirable, but because by a kind of parallel of the law of diminishing returns in agriculture, additional expenditure in such directions fails to result in correspondent additions of happiness. In many respects, indeed, the effect is not only negatively worthless, but even positively harmful. Modern civilisation in its most highly organised forms has elaborated a system to which the delicate fibre of body and mind is unable to respond. And the result is the appearance of a society expending half its income in heaping up the material of disease, to which the other half of its income is being laboriously applied for remedy.

Public penury, private ostentation--that, perhaps, is the heart of the complaint. A nation with the wealth of England can afford to spend, and spend royally. Only the end should be itself desirable, and the choice deliberate. The spectacle of a huge urban poverty confronts all this waste energy. That spectacle should not, indeed, forbid all luxuries and splendours: but it should condemn the less rewarding of them as things tawdry and mean. "Money! money!" cries the hero--a second-grade Government clerk--of a recent novel--"the good that can be done with it in the world! Only a little more: a little more!" It is the passionate cry of unnumbered thousands. Expenditure multiplies its return in human happiness as it is scattered amongst widening areas of population. And the only justification for the present unnatural heaping up of great possessions in the control of the very few would be some return in leisure, and the cultivation of the arts, and the more reputable magnificence of the luxurious life. We have called into existence a whole new industry in motor cars and quick travelling, and established populous cities to minister to our increasing demands for speed. We have converted half the Highlands into deer forests for our sport; and the amount annually spent on shooting, racing, golf--on apparatus, and train journeys and service--exceeds the total revenue of many a European principality. We fling away in ugly white hotels, in uninspired dramatic entertainments, and in elaborate banquets of which every one is weary, the price of many poor men's yearly income. Yet we cannot build a new Cathedral. We cannot even preserve the Cathedrals bequeathed to us, and the finest of them are tumbling to pieces for lack of response to the demands for aid. We grumble freely at halfpenny increases in the rates for baths or libraries or pleasure-grounds. We assert--there are many of us who honestly believe it--that we cannot afford to set aside the necessary millions from our amazing revenues for the decent maintenance of our worn-out "veterans of industry."

To the poor, any increase of income may mean a day's excursion, a summer holiday for the children; often the bare necessities of food and clothes and shelter. To the classes just above the industrial populations, who with an expanding standard of comfort are most obviously fretting against the limitations of their income, it may mean the gift of some of life's lesser goods which is now denied; music, the theatre, books, flowers. Its absence may mean also a deprivation of life's greater goods: scamped sick-nursing, absence of leisure, abandonment of the hope of wife or child. All these deprivations may be endured by a nation--have been endured by nations--for the sake of definite ends: in wars at which existence is at stake, under the stress of national calamity, or as in the condition universal to Europe a few hundred years ago, when wealth and security were the heritage of the very few. But to-day that wealth is piling up into ever-increasing aggregation: is being scrutinized, as never before, by those who inquire with increasing insistence, where is the justice of these monstrous inequalities of fortune? Is the super-wealth of England expended in any adequate degree upon national service? Is the return to-day or to posterity a justification for this deflection of men and women's labour into ministering to the demands of a pleasure-loving society? Is it erecting works of permanent value, as the wealth of Florence in the fifteenth century? Is it, as in the England of Elizabeth, breeding men?

No honest inquirer could give a dogmatic reply. The present extravagance of England is associated with a strange mediocrity, a strange sterility of characters of supreme power in Church and State. It is accompanied, as all ages of security and luxury are accompanied, by a waning of the power of inspiration, a multiplying of the power of criticism. The more comfortable and opulent society becomes, the more cynicism proclaims the futility of it all, and the mind turns in despair from a vision of vanities. It gives little leadership to the classes below it: no visible and intelligent feudal concentration which, taught in the traditions of Government and inheriting strength and responsibility, can reveal an aristocratic order adequate to the immense political and economic necessities of the people. Never, especially during the reaction of the past twenty years, were fairer opportunities offered to the children of wealthy families for the elaboration of a new aristocratic Government of a new England; and never were those opportunities more completely flung away. Its chosen leaders can offer nothing but a dialectic, a perpetual criticism of other men's schemes, clever, futile, barren as the east wind. The political creed which it embraces--the Protectionist system which is going to consolidate the Empire and make every wife's husband richer--is almost entirely dependent for its propagation upon aliens from outside; politicians, economists, journalists, bred in an austerer life amongst the professional classes, and now employed by a society which seems without capacity to breed leaders of its own. It can compete for the pictures of great masters, but it leaves the men of genius of its own day to starve. It continues, now as always, garnishing the sepulchres of the prophets which its predecessors have stoned. It maintains large country houses which offer a lavish hospitality; but it sees rural England crumbling into ruin just outside their boundaries, and has either no power or no inclination to arrest so tragic a decay. It fills vast hotels scattered round the coasts of England and ever multiplying in the capital, which exhibit a combination of maximum expenditure and display with a minimum return in enjoyment. It has annexed whole regions abroad, Biarritz and the Riviera coast, Austrian and German watering-places, whither it journeys for the recovery of its lost health, and for distractions which will forbid the pain of thinking. It plunges into gambles for fresh wealth, finding the demands of its standards continually pressing against its resources; seeking now in South Africa, now in West Australia, now in other Imperial expansions, the reward which accompanies the conversion of the one pound into the ten. At best it is an existence with some boredom in it; even when accompanied by actual intellectual labour: the management of an estate and its agents, directorships, or the overlooking of public and private philanthropies. At worst, more perhaps in America than in England, where the standard has not so much been overthrown as never securely established, it becomes a nightmare and a delirium.

Delirium would seem to be the fate of all societies which become content in secured wealth and gradually forget the conditions of labour and service upon which alone that security can be maintained. "They describe," says Bagehot of the French memoirs, "a life unsuitable to such a being as man in such a world as the present one: in which there are no high aims, no severe duties, where some precept of morals seems not so much to be sometimes broken as to be generally suspended and forgotten--such a life, in short, as God has never suffered men to lead on the earth long, which He has always crushed out by calamity or revolution." Those who are familiar with the methods of dissipation of much of the new wealth of America--methods creeping across the Atlantic--are familiar also with a life "unsuitable to such a being as man." This society is only distinguished from that which was consumed in the French Revolution, by absence of the wit and grace and polished human intercourse which in part redeemed so selfish and profitless a company. The pictures given from time to time possess a note of exaggeration. They flare a fierce white light upon a certain group of rich people, with no toleration of shadows or half tones. The thing stands ugly, in its pitiless glare, a vision not good to look upon. Yet the essential facts remain. The picture is only not a caricature, because the life it describes is itself a caricature. The forces which have moulded it have driven it inevitably along certain paths: resistance is useless. For in America enormous wealth--not only beyond "the dreams of avarice," but in such aggregations of millions as make it inconceivable even to its possessors--has descended upon a tiny group of persons who have exploited the resources of a continent. The first generation accumulated these great possessions, in a fierce hand-to-hand conflict in which strength and cunning triumphed, and polish and pleasantness of manner and kindliness counted for nothing at all. To the second generation is given the spending of it. There are few traditions of social service. There are no feudal or communal responsibilities of social obligation. Charity is resented by the recipient and tiresome to the giver. The founding of Universities becomes too commonplace to attract. Settlements are voted drab and unsatisfying. Religion has become a plaything. All other avenues being thus closed, there remain but a self-indulgence which in itself breeds satiety, and a competition of luxurious display, which, in its more advanced stages, passes into an actual insanity. The second generation here is often weaker than its fathers. The fierce will-power which ensured financial success in the most terrific financial struggle that the world has ever seen, has exhausted the capacities of the family lineage. It has been raised on the principle of "doing as one likes." It pursues its existence through an unreal, fantastic world, in a luxurious expenditure as fantastic as a veritable "Dance of Death."

Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. Frank Norris, Mrs. Wharton, and other American novelists have presented pictures of the luxurious waste and extravagance of a plutocracy which have been scornfully repudiated by its members. Yet almost every individual incident or place in "the Metropolis"--"Castle Havens," Newport, the queer palaces of New York, the crude scattering of fortunes easily won in scratching the earth or wrecking a railway--could be paralleled in the actual society of America. Many could even be paralleled in England, where millionaire company promoters, on their hectic path between poverty through prosperity to prison or suicide, will purchase so many miles of good English land, build round it a great wall ten feet high, construct billiard rooms under a lake, remove a hill which offends the view. "He was kind to the poor," they wrote on the grave of one of them, who had devastated the middle classes with the promise of high interest for investment, guaranteed on his prospectuses by the names of Proconsuls and Ambassadors of world-wide fame. The disease may not have attained its full consummation in this country; that is in part because of a standard which, though crumbling, still struggles to survive; in part because the wealth accumulation is less sudden and overwhelming: in part also because we are satisfied with less bizarre manifestations of the always unsatisfied demand for pleasure. Yet we have parallels, even in this country to "Castle Havens." "It had cost three or four millions of dollars, and within the twelve-foot wall which surrounded its grounds lived two world-weary people who dreaded nothing so much as to be left alone." The house had many gables, in the Queen Anne style: from the midst of them shot a Norman tower decorated with Christmas tree wreaths in white stucco: overlapping this was the dome of a Turkish mosque rising out of this something like a dove-cot: out of that, the slender white steeple of a Methodist country church: on top a statue of Diana. "Has there ever been any insanity in the Havens family?" is the natural query of the visitor, as he gazed at this astonishing erection.

All round are the "second generation": young men, of whom it was said that "if only they had had a little more brains, they would have been half-witted": women "who boast of never appearing twice in the same gown"; one dreadful personage in Boston who wears each costume once, and then has it solemnly cremated by her butler: women who artificially make themselves barren, because of the inconvenience incidental to motherhood, and lavish their affections upon cats and dogs. "It was the instinct of decoration, perverted by the money-lust." The men are busy making money in order that their idle women may attain supremacy in this mad race for display. The "second generation" are so bored that ever more fantastic amusements are sought to stimulate jaded interest. The one thing they all dread is "to be left alone." "There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras. One heard of monkey dinners and pyjama dinners at Newport, of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New York." "One would take to slumming and another to sniffing brandy through the nose: one had a table-cover made of woven roses, and another was wearing perfumed flannel at sixteen dollars a yard: one had inaugurated ice-skating in August, and another had started a class for the weekly study of Plato." People's health broke down quickly in face of this furious pursuit of pleasure; then they ate nothing but spinach, or lived on grass, or chewed a mouthful of soup thirty-two times before swallowing it. "There were 'rest cures' and 'water cures,' 'new thought' and 'metaphysical healing' and 'Christian Science.'" The young men were filled with the same delusion as the older women. "Some were killing themselves and other people in automobile races at a hundred and twenty miles an hour." "There was another young millionaire who sat and patiently taught Sunday School, in the presence of a host of reporters: there was another who set up a chain of newspapers all over the country, and made war against his class." Behind this second generation there was even the vision of a third, growing up in the heart of such a nightmare: a third generation in which there would no longer remain even the memories of the early struggles of the pioneers of great fortunes to connect them with reality.

That reality it is impossible for such a society ever to apprehend. Newspaper criticisms leave them entirely unmoved. The more unblushing the record of scandals and viciousness and foolish, distorted luxury in any "fashionable" paper, the more secure its circulation amongst the very people who are assailed. They are indifferent to the onslaughts upon their lives by persons "outside." They know that these people are not, as a matter of fact, condemning their lives. They are only expressing their discontent at not being "inside." The pauper wants fresh meat instead of canned. The business man wants his thousand a year to become two thousand a year. The anarchist who demands revolution can be bought with a secure guarantee of a steady income. In Mr. Hueffer's entertaining novel of New York, a rich man's son, scandalised at the method by which his father obtained his super-wealth, attempts restitution to the victims. They one and all indignantly repudiate his "charity." One and all they ask to "come in" on the ground floor in any future flotations and manipulations which he may be designing. They reject the return of the proceeds of piracy. All they desire is a partnership in future piratical raids against a person or persons unknown.

It is a society organised from top to bottom on a "money" basis, a business basis, with everything else as a side show. The men listen to President Roosevelt's fierce words about the Trusts and Corporations. They have no resentment. It is "only Teddy's way." It cheers up the people with the hope that something will be done, while they themselves are secure in the knowledge that everything which can be done is in the control of the money power. When they find a reformer whom they can silence by force, they crush him. If they cannot crush him, they purchase him. If he can neither be crushed nor purchased, they ignore him. Religion is easily woven into the scheme of things, and pleasantly harmonised with the accepted way of living. The Bishop of London preaches in Wall Street, eloquently urging the business men to regard their wealth as a stewardship from God. Far from resentment, the business men abandon the Stock Exchange gamble for a quarter of an hour, press round the bishop to shake his hand. "Bishop," they say, "that discourse of yours made us feel real good." Then they return to the Stock Exchange gamble. A prominent preacher is lured over at an immense salary from England to preach to a church of the wealthy. He braces himself for a great effort, and denounces their riches, their works, and their ways. He expects an outbreak of indignation. He discovers instead a universal congratulation. The wealthy and their wives flock to his church, hoping to hear some more. The receipts of the pew rents double. They talk of raising his salary. The more he denounces, the more they applaud. The experience indeed is common to all similar societies: since the day when the prophet complained that his listeners crowded to hear him as he denounced their vices, "and so," he reproaches himself, "thou art unto them as a very lovely song, of one that hath a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument."

Only some realities cannot be altogether excluded. Change and Death knock with gaunt hands, and refuse all proffered monetary bribes. Here a frantic millionaire, going blind, offers two million dollars to any one that can cure him. The high gods remain indifferent to the challenge. Teeth drop out, hair drops off; old age creeps on apace: the wealthiest are trembling at the approach of the end. The visitor to "The Metropolis" from the south beholds "a golf course, a little miniature Alps, upon which the richest man in the world pursued his lost health, with armed guards and detectives patrolling the place all day, and a tower with a search-light whereby at night he could flood the grounds with light by pressing a button." A motor accident, an occasional sensational divorce case, the death of a child, tear down suddenly all the blinds and cushions, revealing the richest as unprotected as the poorest in a universe altogether indifferent to such slight things as man's profit and gain. Outside, an occasional crisis, the panic fear of people to whom wealth means attainment, that their wealth is vanishing, brings the accumulation of vast fortune toppling to the ground. There follows a crop of suicides: then the machine recovers and swings forward again on its blind, staggering progress nowhither. The secret places of the world are ravaged, the wise men subpoenaed, all cunning invention subsidised, that some alchemy may be found which will resist the ravages of time, preserve a beauty that is departing, stay the inexorable chariots of the hours. There are even attempts to turn the flank of the enemy: by "Christian Science" liberally supported, to abolish, if not disease, at least its sufferings; by "Psychical Research," to communicate with a company pursuing a similar ineffectual existence beyond the grave. "What is it all worth?" is the question which lurks in the background, refusing to be stifled; which drives occasional revolters, wearied of the repetition of these pleasures, into efforts after philanthropies, or to shoot wild beasts in remote places, or even into political and religious adventure. So they come and after a little while they go, none knowing whence or whither: a company of tired children, flushed and uncomfortable from the too violent pursuit of pleasure: who thought, in the snatching of what things seemed desirable in a life given over to enjoyment, to effect an attainment which has ever been jealously denied to the family of mankind.

But here, after all, in England or America, is only the life of the few. If their existence is conspicuous it is because in distortion and dangerous cases there can be most clearly realised the ravages of disease. In England for the most part wealth is encased and preserved in a wall of social tradition; and the majority of men, however opulent, have some interests and occupations which redeem them from the mere blind pursuit of pleasure. Yet in England it is becoming increasingly questioned how far this wealth is providing permanent benefit to the community. It is expended in the maintenance of a life--a life and a standard--bringing leisure, ease and grace, some effort towards charities and public service, an interest, real or assumed, in literature, music, art, social amenity, and a local or national welfare. But it offers little substantial advantage, in endowment, building, or even direct economic or scientific experiment. The percentages of legacy bequeathed to charity or to education are lamentably low; and of these percentages most are deflected into charity or religion in its least remunerative forms. Philanthropy is large and liberal, but the aggregate of poverty remains unaffected by it, or even, to the minds of the intimate observer, deepened. Much of it appears less as the effort of intelligence and compassion than as the random and often harmful attempt to satisfy a conscience disturbed by penury adjacent to plenty. Social experiments involving thought as well as money--a Bournville, a Toynbee Hall, a Limpsfield colony for epileptics, a hospital for the new cure of consumption--are still sufficiently rare as to attract attention. A few thousands bequeathed to miscellaneous institutions out of a fortune of many hundred thousands is still so unusual as to evoke considerable newspaper adulation. The fact is, that the necessary expenditure upon an accepted standard of living is so exacting and so continually increasing with the increase of new demands, that little superfluity remains for adventure in social or charitable effort. Some of the wealthiest landlords have been reducing their pensions on their estates, now that the State provides five shillings a week; in part, perhaps, in order that the recipients should not be demoralised by this enormous access of fortune; but in part because they can see other channels into which this expenditure may at once be deflected. Families with incomes of many thousands a year--caught in the cog-wheels of this vast machine, this swollen definition of essential things--find a real difficulty in making "both ends meet." Most--in a calm hour--will deplore it. The old look back with regret to an austerer day, to the time when central London had no Sunday restaurant, and it was only necessary for the few to know the few. The young--or the more thoughtful of them--look forward with foreboding, wondering how long the artisan, the shop assistant, the labourer, the unemployed, will content to acquiesce in a system which expends upon a few weeks of random entertainment an amount that would support in modest comfort a decent family for a lifetime.

"The most unpremeditated, successful, aimless Plutocracy"--so it appears to one shrewd observer--"that ever encumbered the destinies of mankind." He sees it continually being recruited from below. Companies rise like bubbles, expand, burst, carrying with them into the upper air their promoters and the parasites which follow in their train. Now it is the gold mines of South Africa which offer a particular crop of amiable, ignorant, generously spending persons to swell the general extravagance. Now from America comes the importation of millions which are scattered in the home country in various forms of elaborate expenditure. Now old-established businesses are renovated, purchased, floated on the market inordinately "boomed"; with subsequent collapse to the shareholders, with substantial margin of profit to the "undertakers." Those who retain the wealth thus cleverly won, settle down in the English countryside to make the money circulate, and generally to have a good time. Now, again, the more feverish industry and energy of the new cities pile up a monopoly value of millions upon the land which is "owned" by private persons: who find themselves, as they rise and sleep, suddenly inundated with a steady flow of money which is exacted as tribute from the working peoples. So, in various ways, the enrichment of a new wealthy class which is compensating for its newness by liberal hospitalities, and the effort of some old-established rich families not to be pushed under in display by these alien intruders, has "set a pace" which is driving the whole of modern life into a huge apparatus of waste. Numbers go down in the competition: then the country estates are sold and pass into the hands of South African millionaires or the children of the big traders, or the vendors of patent medicines. Others find themselves continually in debt, adventuring into the City as directors of companies, or attempting to obtain unearned increase by following in the train of the great adventurers. Sometimes, as in the South African promotions of 1895, the whole of a society flings itself into a furious gambling mania, from which the few astute suck no small advantage, and ultimately attain the honour which is the reward of great possessions. There are many who endeavour to keep their heads in this confused tumultuous world, who still cherish an ideal of simplicity, and upon exiguous income will maintain a standard of manners and intelligence. More and more, it would appear, these are destined to capitulate: to be compelled to "give in" and accept the new expenditure, or to be pushed aside as outside the main current of successful life. The vision of this new "Plutocracy" appears to be drifting steadily away from the vision which, at any historic time, has been held to justify the endowment of leisure and comfort, and the control of great fortunes, as a trust for the service of mankind.

For this "Plutocracy," though accepting distinction in art, in literature, in the governance of Empire, as a matter of evidence to-day itself contributes but little to these desirable ends. Mr. Mallock can laboriously demonstrate--in counter reply to the demands of Socialism--that the wealth of the world is in the main increased by the inventor, the individual, the ingenious multiplier of energy and discoverer of scientific appliances. Many of the richer classes accept such a demonstration as an infallible proof of the justice of present wealth distribution. Other writers can justify an opulent and leisured class above, for the provision of clever and energetic persons who will cultivate the tradition of statesmanship, or encourage disinterested experiment in advancement of knowledge or the service of humanity. But the actual rulers of Empire, the men of science, the great soldiers, the great artists and writers, as a matter of fact very rarely appear as the children of, or are rewarded by the qualifications for entrance into, the governing classes. The wills and legacies presented day by day in the newspapers are themselves a judgment and refutation of any attempt to demonstrate parallel between achievement and material acquisition. At the summit are usually names of obscure unknown persons, who bequeath, with sundry small diversions into charity or hospitals, the bulk of their hundreds of thousands to their relatives. Here a successful brewer, there a speculator in land, again a "financier" in the city, or a landlord who has not even had the enterprise to speculate, but merely placidly drawn his rents from the developing town or half a countryside; or again, the owners of large trade organisations now run by skilled and alert managers as limited liability companies: these form the staple material of the huge accumulations which make up the bulk of those hundreds of millions which regularly pass every year from some few hundred persons to some few other hundreds. Quite low down in this list of obscure wealthy, conspicuous if they attain six figures, and often falling below five, are the men who have created and have served; authors of European distinction, generals with ten campaigns to their name, politicians who have devoted their lives to public affairs, men of science who have effected discoveries for which all humanity is richer. Under no kind of analysis does examination of these names and figures provide any co-ordination of wealth and capacity, or wealth and national or imperial or humanitarian service. The observer has not only to lament the paucity of talent amongst the children of families with high past record of spacious and splendid renown. He is not compelled to turn his attention in perhaps unfair emphasis to that section of society which regards its possessions as a trinket or plaything, and, amid an atmosphere of frivolity, is engaged in squandering its brief existence through every variety of passionless pleasure. It is enough for him, in analysing the ordinary undistinguished accumulation of great wealth, to note the balance of social service on the one hand, of remuneration on the other; and to wonder how long the obscure multitudes who labour with so scanty a return, in order that these may enjoy, will continue to be satisfied with what appears so improvident a bargain. And if this detached observer, inspired neither by hate nor envy, were asked to summarise the social advantage of all this heaped-up wealth expended by the few who have attained, he would be compelled to find it in a social convenience and amenity; in the provision of opportunity, embedded in pleasant surroundings and with bodily discomforts as far as possible removed, for entertaining conversation.

So, concentrating themselves especially in London, for an annual campaign of association, there gather every year the companies of the successful. They have expended some half their days in tranquillity and quiet places--in rural England, in high Swiss mountain valleys--anywhere in which the too exasperated material of the human mind can be nursed back into some semblance of sanity. They gather, from the four winds, into the tumult of the capital, to occupy the remaining half of the year in deliberate tearing the fabric of that mind to pieces in an orgy of human intercourse. It is effort directed at the highest pressure, with no interspaces of silence in which to learn, to suffer, or to enjoy. It is the effort of those few who have attained success in a race where the majority are content with existence and endurance, to exhibit the magnitude of that success in a transitory experience of too violently accelerated life. For these months nobody is ever alone; nobody ever pauses to think; no one ever attempts to understand. All quick and novel sensations are pressed into the service of an ever more insistent demand for new things. Parliament pays its tribute, in a labyrinth of dining-rooms and a famous terrace, which is an annexe--as the Empire is an annexe--to the activities of this restless energy. What passes for British Art in a Royal Academy and other exhibitions; the Opera, dragging European singers to stimulate an audience numbed by the whirl of circumstance; any unexpected appeal, a decadent French play, actors from an earlier, simpler, passionate South, an audacious novel or two, a passing scandal, serve to infuse the concoction with some lambent vitality. But, for the most part, it is talk--talk--talk; talk at luncheon and tea and dinner; talk at huge, undignified crowded receptions, where each talker is disturbed by the consciousness that his neighbour is desirous of talking to others; talk at dances and at gatherings, far into the night; with the morning devoted to preparation for further talking in the day to come. It is talk usually commonplace, sometimes clever, occasionally sincere; of a society desirous of being interested, more often finding itself bored, filled with a resolute conviction that it must "play the game"; that this is the game to be played, that it must be played resolutely to the end. Elemental things occasionally intrude, marriages, and those unexpected deaths which refuse to postpone themselves to a more convenient out-of-season. What does it all mean? No one knows. What does it all come to? Again, no one knows. To many it stands for the inevitable, as the factory life is inevitable to some, the field drudgery to others. A few it stimulates with a consciousness of power in human intercourse and the subtle sensation of rejoicing in a crowd. To a tiny remnant alone it presents the appearance of a complicated machine, which has escaped the control of all human volition, and is progressing towards no intelligible goal; of some black windmill, with gigantic wings, rotating untended under the huge spaces of night.

It is not illuminated by high ardours. It is not disfigured by great crimes. The criticism of its "smartness," its vulgarity, its selfishness, advanced largely by women novelists and unfamiliar critics, is based upon a biassed reading of values. There are those who are pushing to get in, as there are those who are pushing to get out. There are egoisms here as in all human energies; revolts which drive their victims outside the accepted standards; reactions which find expression in a petulance or a despair. Neither to-day nor to-morrow will this strange turmoil stand for anything conformable to the record of various pleasure-loving societies, which from time to time have lived and flourished and died. But if its viciousness be but the palest reflection of similar past efforts, its activities and devotions are also set in grey. It has none of the fury of passionate pleasure which accompanied the decline and fall of Rome; but it has little of the large utterance, and magnificence of artistic display, and consciousness of occupying a great arena in the world's affairs, which speaks from every day's record of that long autumn of decay. It has few of those feverish and almost unintelligible lusts and cruelties which make the story of the Early Renaissance in Italy like the memory of evil dreams. But, on the other hand, it will neither stamp upon the stone and marble of its dwelling-places, nor store up upon the walls of its cities and opulent houses, nor write in the life history of its men and women, that harvest of an artistic beginning and a rich individual experience which makes the Renaissance appear as one of the wonder-ages of the world. To-day, here, in England, it plays and trifles with large forces which, if it once understood, it might flee from in terror and dismay. Its social and philanthropic enterprises are fairly ample; it bestows considerable sums on public and private charities, shepherding its friends into drawing-room meetings to listen to some attractive speaker--an actor, a Labour Member, a professional humorist--pleading for pity to the poor. It discusses the possibility of social upheavals in that dim, silent, encompassing life in which all its activities are embedded--the incalculable populations, which set the society that matters in the midst of a rude and multitudinous society that does not count. It plays in good humour with light schemes of Social Reform; wondering, like the pleasant salons of Paris in the new age of gold before the Revolution, whither events are tending; convinced, as these salons also were convinced, that nothing can alter the effectual standards of its world. It plays with religion; listening to the agreeable discourses of one popular preacher, urging kindliness and charity and toleration to all men; amused at the violence of another, denouncing all its works and ways; a little disturbed by a third, feeling the sudden intrusion of the cold hand of a universe in which all its standards are unknown. "Sydney Smith talking," wrote Carlyle in his diary, "other persons prating, jargoning. To me, through these thin cobwebs, Death and Eternity sat glaring." Only in an occasional solitary hour, in that magic twilight of a London summer evening, or in the flare of a dim dawn over the sleeping city, do such disturbing visitants tear the silence as with a sudden cry.

It is an aggregation of clever, agreeable, often lovable people, whose material wants are satisfied by the labour of unknown workers in all the world, trying with a desperate seriousness to make something of a life spared the effort of wage-earning. It is built up and maintained in an artificial, and probably a transitory, security--security which has never been extended in the world's history to more than a few generations. It will continue with each until each drops out, if uncomplaining, a little fatigued, and the fresh recruits take the place of the deserters and the dead.

No study is more disheartening, none more disturbing, than the study of those companies of human beings, which in various periods of social security have attempted in similar fashion to play with the purposes of life. "Some set their hearts on building and gardening," wrote Tavannes of the Court of the Valois, "on painting or reading or the chase. They run after an animal all day and get their faces torn in the woods; or they trot from morning till evening after a ball of wool; or they spend the day and the night in games of hazard, from which they rise without any great reluctance; or they buy arms and horses, and never use them." "Sadness and melancholy without a legitimate cause," he declares, "are their own just punishment; a failure to recognise the grace of God which has made us immortal." More than an age of Adventure, more even than an age of reckless Wickedness, does time judge and condemn an age of ineffectual Pleasure.

Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed? The plumes, the armours--friend and foe? The cloth of gold, the rare brocade? The mantles glittering to and fro? The pomp, the pride, the royal show? The cries of war and festival? The youth, the grace, the charm, the glow? Into the night go one and all.

"Defying Life to make him look at her" has been the effort of all societies which have been removed for a time from the immediate necessities of labour, hunger, and cold. That defiance of life is not so mad a thing as it at first appears. It attempts, and to a certain extent with success, to create a possible existence for an average which can never be far removed from the conventional. It works: that is its justification; this gospel of the Second Best, which substitutes a placid friendliness for love's high ardour, and prettiness for beauty, and a compromise of cruelty and kindliness for social justice, and a standard of convention for the demands of a compelling religion. It is assailed in scornfulness and bitterness and passion, by the advocates of these various flaming emotions; by the religious prophets who demand sincerity; by the social prophets who cry for equality and compassion; by the artists who wish to challenge the unveiled Truth; by the great lovers who are outraged by this ignoble treatment of the "Lord of Life of terrible aspect." But the thing swings forward, indifferent or but politely tolerant of the clamour; because its inhabitants know that the secure second best is a wiser choice than the hazards of an effort towards a doubtful larger attainment. Most of those who have demanded less limited horizons, and pressed forward to sail on uncharted seas, and adventured "beyond the sunset," have vanished and been heard of no more. There is surely justification for any who in the face of such disasters confine their voyages to the familiar creeks and havens, and never willingly forsake the shelter of the shore.

And still to other nations--less successful in the economic struggle, less immovably confident in attainment--these people appear as "the Conquerors": dominating the world with a certain serene confidence in the justice of their supremacy which is at once enviable and exasperating to the critic from outside. The Englishman abroad is inclined to gush a little at the fascination of the foreign freedom, especially at the charm and beauty of the South. He finds here manners, and an immemorial tradition of courtesy, and a less slavish devotion to material ends. But the South itself is under no such illusion. To these it is the English who are the people that have attained. Italy, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, are all desirous of unravelling the secret and accepting the standard of the dominant race. Even the writers of literature, although they may mingle a delicate irony with their praise, yet are content to emphasise the deficiences of their own people; in the contrast presented to them by the immigrant English who settle in their coasts, and maintain their own life and manners unconscious of the life and manners of their neighbours.

But beyond these superficial truculencies the observer may find a deeper interpretation of the cause of these triumphs. He sees the English, in these new Englands that they have made abroad, less intelligent, less generally cultivated than the French; less cultivated, less scientific, artistic, and laborious than the Germans. Yet it is these "barbarians," not the French or the Germans, who have attained, almost without effort, the overlordship of the world. He ascribes this attainment to the fact that to-day the English are the only people who have truly national manners and characteristics. In a different order of things, but in equal measure, they exercise upon the manners of the world the Authority which the French exercised in the eighteenth century; when even those who hated them were compelled to copy them. "Manners and Customs in France," he asks dejectedly, "what is it that can be developed to-day under this title? We have no longer 'Manners and Customs.' But the English retain their manners and customs with a stubborn placidity." "You can love--more or less--certain qualities of this conquering people," he concludes, "but how is it possible not to admire its strong national discipline?" "That is what ought to be learnt from it," he exhorts his fellow-countrymen, "rather than ways of smoking or rules of play."

For its efforts at conquest, however annoying to those who resent its domination, are enterprises of no mean or timid order. No nation need be ashamed of Empire on a large scale, or apologise for the overlordship of a Continent. To-day's criticism deplores the weakening or vanishing of the qualities by which such conquest was attained: in an aristocratic caste which is merging itself in a wealthy class, and undergoing weakening in the process. It is not from the "Conquerors" but from a rather harassed and limited Middle Class that the "Empire builders" are now drawn: a Lord Macdonnell from the home of a peasant farmer in Ireland, a Cecil Rhodes from an English country parsonage. The men who are administering with varying success British East Africa and Northern Nigeria, and the huge machine of government in India, are mainly the children of the professional families, drawn abroad by love of adventure or absence of opportunity at home. There is little danger in England of any general popular uprising against aristocratic privilege, or even against a system which has concentrated in few hands so disproportionate a percentage of the national accumulation. But there may be danger of a kind of internal collapse and decay, in the deflection of vigour and intellectual energy to irrelevant standards and pleasures; in the inadequacy of that vigour and energy before nations ever becoming better equipped in the world struggle, and determined to make desperate efforts for the supreme position. The invocation to "wake up" is supposed to be addressed mainly to the working peoples, whose extravagant thirst for alcoholic refreshment, and whose Trade Unions, encouraging an enforced idleness, are creating, in this theory, a falling-off in commercial and industrial efficiency. But far more than among the "rude mechanicals," a facing of realities is needed among the classes who have conquered and attained; who now, absorbed in the difficult art of living under elaborate standards, find little superfluous energy or wealth remaining for the setting of the house in order. A variable and random philanthropy is the substitute for Social Reform. A buying-off of the more energetic from below by honours and titles liberally bestowed, prevents the attack upon a whole class by the resentment of energy and intellect excluded from privilege. Free patronage and a liberal entertainment of authors, critics, playwrights, musicians, and ambitious politicians, removes the menace of an intellectual proletariat exciting anger and envy amongst the dim millions of the industrial populace. It has the sense also to know the limits of its interferences; to know that its power, inadequate to constructive effort, rests on inhibitions rather than activities. The rather ignoble r?le played by the House of Lords during the past decade reveals its weaknesses. It will allow changes which it profoundly dislikes, when compelled by fear. It will resist changes in action when that fear is controlled. It will altogether abandon the effort to initiate changes where change is essential. It can do little but modify, check, or destroy other men's handiwork. It has no single constructive suggestion of its own to offer to a people confronting difficult problems, and harassed by the obligations of necessary reorganisations. It can neither breed leaders nor ideas. And because of this ultimate sterility--though it has all the cards in its hands and every material force in its favour--its power may gradually pass and be destroyed; to appear in history as one more aristocracy declining, not through the batterings of external enemies, but from the fretting and crumbling of an internal decay.

Its fear to-day is Socialism: Socialism which it does not understand, but which presents itself as an uprising of the uneducated, suddenly breaking into its houses; their clumsy feet on the mantelpiece, their clumsy hands seizing and destroying all beautiful and pleasant things. So it lies awake at night, listening fearfully to the tramp of the rising host: the revolt of the slave against his master. From Socialism--as a code of economic organisation, ordering life on a military, disciplinary, and rational basis--it has perhaps less to fear than it sometimes imagines. For this "Socialism" is farther away in time than many ardent Socialists suppose. And if "Socialism" were consummated, there might be found under its rigorous r?gime more tenderness to an aristocratic caste and tradition than is anticipated by those who are terrified at the promise of its advent. These people, indeed, have less to fear from a demand for equality, than from a demand for efficiency: from the enforced necessity, either in a hazardous national crisis abroad, or in some stress of economic adversity at home, for the rule of energy and intelligence. The demand of the Napoleonic system--"the declared principle," to "seek talent wherever it may be found"--might make havoc of the supremacy of the children of the "Conquerors"; might drastically determine that some less ruinous proportion of the national wealth was expended on aimless conventions and enjoyments. It may be desirable that the land of England, for example, shall be held in the hands of private owners, instead of being owned by the whole community. It seems to be increasingly questioned whether the land of England shall continue to be held by its present private owners: whether the landed classes of this country, in any ultimate standard of profit and loss, can justify the trust and high calling which has placed the welfare of the rural population in their keeping, and now sees little return but a decaying, deserted countryside. There is much, again, to be said for a Second Chamber in Government. There is little to be said for the present Second Chamber, except that in practice it appears to have disproved all its theoretical advantages: abstaining where in theory it ought to have struck, and striking where in theory it ought to have abstained. Aristocracy in England has been kindly and generous. Even as in part transformed into a plutocracy, it provides little of that attitude of insolence to the less fortunate which is the surest provocation of revolution. The action of a section of the motoring classes, indeed, in their annexation of the highways and their indifference to the common traditions, stands almost alone as an example of wealth's intolerable arrogances, and has certainly excited more resentment amongst the common people than any extravagance of pleasure or political reaction. It is only in such manifestations as those of enjoyment deliberately associated with careless injury to the general convenience, that there is revealed the remotest possibility of a deliberate "class war" between the rich and the poor. Feudal England is dying, and the attempt to transform a caste basis of land and breeding into a caste basis of material possession seems doomed to failure. But it will fail less from external assault than from the inability of the inheritors of great fortune to maintain the energies and devotions through which that fortune has been made. "The Conquerors" will leave little bitterness behind them. There may even remain, in the memory of a more exacting age to come, a pleasant recollection of those who upheld, in time of tranquillity, a standard of manners and a tradition of kindliness, duty, and courage before life's lesser ills. From public schools, which profess to teach "character" rather than to stimulate intelligence, through universities encouraging large expenditure on comfort, limitless bodily exercise, and an exiguous standard of intellectual effort, they pass to the "truly national manners and characteristics" which M. Pr?vost so much admires. In country residence, in solid aggregation in the metropolis, in lesser imitative effort amongst the provincial cities, they have cherished a code of hospitality, courtesy, criticism, mild and generous interest in public and private affairs. If that code is in part vanishing before the influx of the new "Super-wealth," it yet exhibits, in the present generation, a still active power of assimilation. Not for conspicuous crimes, for selfishness, for class exclusiveness, or for insolence will this society be judged and condemned by the progress of time. It will pass--if it passes--because it is mistaking abnormal and insecure experience for the normal and secure; because an unwillingness to face reality is gradually developing a confusion between reality and illusion; because in its prosperity it may be stricken with blindness to the signs of the time.

THE SUBURBANS

They are easily forgotten: for they do not strive or cry; and for the most part only ask to be left alone. They have none of those channels of communication in their possession by which the rich and the poor are able to express their hostility to any political or social change. The Landed Classes or the brewing interests, on the one hand, find newspapers energetic in fighting their cause; on the other, see themselves securely entrenched in a "Second Chamber," which offers them a permanent majority. The Working Classes can organise into unions, subsidise members of Parliament and a Labour Party, make themselves both respected and feared. No one fears the Middle Classes, the suburbans; and perhaps for that reason, no one respects them. They only appear articulate in comedy, to be made the butt of a more nimble-witted company outside: like "Mr. Hopkinson," who is aspiring to transfer his residence from Upper Tooting to Belgravia, or the queer people who dispute--in another recent London play--concerning the respective social advantages of Clapham and Herne Hill. Strong in numbers, and in possession of a vigorous and even tyrannical convention of manners, they lack organisation, energy, and ideas. And in consequence they have been finding themselves crushed between the demands of the industrial peoples on the one hand, and the resistance of the "Conquerors" on the other. They act only when their grievances have become a burden impossible to be borne. They act without preparation, without leadership, without preliminary negotiation. They rise suddenly, impervious to argument, unreasoning and resolute. And the result is often a cataclysm which would be almost ludicrous if it were not both random and pitiful.

Such action, for example, was revealed in the complete overturn of London's system of government which took place in the spring of 1908, after a continuous rule of nearly twenty years of administration by one party. Lord Randolph Churchill ended his political career because he had "forgotten Goschen." The Progressive Party ended its political career in the Metropolis because it had forgotten the Middle Classes. It recognised, indeed, and estimated not unfairly, the strength of the rich, the artisans, the unskilled labourers. These three classes are prominent factors in the modern European polity. But it had forgotten the dimensions and latent power of those enormous suburban peoples which are practically the product of the past half-century, and have so greatly increased, even within the last decade. They are the creations not of the industrial, but of the commercial and business activities of London. They form a homogeneous civilisation,--detached, self-centred, unostentatious,--covering the hills along the northern and southern boundaries of the city, and spreading their conquests over the quiet fields beyond. They are the peculiar product of England and America; of the nations which have pre-eminently added commerce, business, and finance to the work of manufacture and agriculture. It is a life of Security; a life of Sedentary occupation; a life of Respectability; and these three qualities give the key to its special characteristics. Its male population is engaged in all its working hours in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense sums, adding up other men's accounts, writing other men's letters. It is sucked into the City at daybreak, and scattered again as darkness falls. It finds itself towards evening in its own territory in the miles and miles of little red houses in little silent streets, in number defying imagination. Each boasts its pleasant drawing-room, its bow-window, its little front garden, its high-sounding title--"Acacia Villa," or "Camperdown Lodge"--attesting unconquered human aspiration. There are many interests beyond the working hours: here a greenhouse filled with chrysanthemums, there a tiny grass patch with bordering flowers; a chicken-house, a bicycle shed, a tennis lawn. The women, with their single domestic servants, now so difficult to get, and so exacting when found, find time hang rather heavy on their hands. But there are excursions to shopping centres in the West End, and pious sociabilities, and occasional theatre visits, and the interests of home. The children are jolly, well-fed, intelligent English boys and girls; full of curiosity, at least in the earlier years. Some of them have real gifts of intellect and artistic skill, receiving in the suburban secondary schools the best education which England is giving to-day. You may see the whole suburbs in August transported to the more genteel of the southern watering-places; the father, perhaps, a little bored; the mother perplexed with the difficulty of cramped lodgings and extortionate prices. But the children are in a magic world, crowding the seashore, full of the elements of delight and happy laughter.

The rich despise the Working People; the Middle Classes fear them. Fear, stimulated by every artifice of clever political campaigners, is the motive power behind each successive uprising. In feverish hordes, the suburbs swarm to the polling booth to vote against a truculent Proletariat. The Middle Class elector is becoming irritated and indignant against working-class legislation. He is growing tired of the plaint of the unemployed and the insistent crying of the poor. The spectacle of a Labour Party triumphant in the House of Commons, with a majority of members of Parliament apparently obedient to the demands of its leaders, and even a House of Lords afraid of it, fills him with profound disgust. The vision of a "Keir Hardie" in caricature--with red tie and defiant beard and cloth cap, and fierce, unquenchable thirst for Middle Class property--has become an image of Labour Triumphant which haunts his waking hours. He has difficulty with the plumber in jerry-built houses needing continuous patching and mending. His wife is harassed by the indifference or insolence of the domestic servant. From a blend of these two he has constructed in imagination the image of Democracy--a loud-voiced, independent, arrogant figure, with a thirst for drink, and imperfect standards of decency, and a determination to be supported at some one else's expense. Every day, swung high upon embankments or buried deep in tubes underground, he hurries through the region where the creature lives. He gazes darkly from his pleasant hill villa upon the huge and smoky area of tumbled tenements which stretches at his feet. He is dimly distrustful of the forces fermenting in this uncouth laboratory. Every hour he anticipates the boiling over of the cauldron. He would never be surprised to find the crowd behind the red flag, surging up his little pleasant pathways, tearing down the railings, trampling the little garden; the "letting in of the jungle" upon the patch of fertile ground which has been redeemed from the wilderness. And whatever may be the future, the present he finds sufficiently intolerable. The people of the hill are heavily taxed in order that the people of the plain may enjoy good education, cheap trams, parks, and playgrounds; even that they may be taught Socialism in Sunday schools, with parodies of remembered hymns. And the taxes thus extorted--this, perhaps, is the heart of the complaint--are all going to make his own life harder, to make life more difficult for his children. The man of forty has already sounding in his ears the noise of the clamour of the coming generations. And these coming generations, who are going to push him roughly out of his occupation, and bring his little castle in ruins to the ground, are being provided with an equipment for the struggle out of the funds which he himself is compelled to supply. He is paying for his own children's start in life, and he is having extorted from him the price of providing other people's children with as good a start in life, or a better. He has to lay by for his old age in painful accumulation of pence and shillings, every one of which he can ill spare. And he now finds the old age of the loafer and the spendthrift--so he interprets recent legislation on the subject--bountifully provided for. He wonders where it is all going to stop. He is becoming every day more impatient with the complaining of the poor. He refuses to mourn over the sufferings of the factory girl when he is offering a desirable position as general "help" and can find no applicant. He believes that the "unemployed" consist exclusively of those who are determined to go softly all their days at the public expense--the expense of himself and his class. He is labouring at his dismal sedentary occupation so many incredible hours a day, while these men are parading their woes in exuberant rhetoric at the street corner. And as he labours there enters into his soul a resentment which becomes at times almost an obsession; in which all the disability of his devitalised life is concentrated into revolt against the truculent demands of "the British working man."

He has had enough of it. He is turning in desperation to any kind of protection held out to him. His ideals are all towards the top of the scale. He is proud when he is identifying his interests with those of Kensington, and indignant when his interests are identified with those of Poplar. He possesses in full those progressive desires which are said to be the secret of advance. He wants a little more than he can afford, and is almost always living beyond his income. He has been harassed with debts and monetary complications; and the demands of rent and the rate-collector excite in him a kind of impotent fury. In that fury he turns round and suddenly strikes down the party in possession, glad to vote against the working man, whom he fears; and for a change, which he hopes may lighten his present burden; and against a Socialism which he cannot understand. So in an unexpected whirlwind of ferocity, a Progressive Party, hitherto unconquerable, finds itself almost annihilated. The general effect is that of being suddenly butted by a sheep.

It is no despicable life which has thus silently developed in suburban London. Family affection is there, cheerfulness, an almost unlimited patience. Its full meaning to-day and the courses of its future still remain obscure. Is this to be the type of all civilisations, when the whole Western world is to become comfortable and tranquil, and progress finds its grave in a universal suburb? Or is the old shaggy and untamed earth going to shake itself suddenly once again and bring the whole edifice tumbling to the ground? It has no clear recognition of its own worth, or its own universe, or the scheme of the life of the world. It is losing its old religions. It still builds churches and chapels of a twentieth-century Gothic architecture: St. Aloysius, reputed to be dangerously "High," because its curates wear coloured scarves; the Baptist Chapel, where the minister maintains the old doctrines of hell and heaven, and wrestles with the sinner for his immortal soul; the Congregational Church, where the minister is abreast with modern culture, and proclaims a less exacting gospel, and faintly trusts the larger hope. But the whole apparatus of worship seems archaic and unreal to those who have never seen the shaking of the solid ground beneath their feet, or the wonder and terror of its elemental fires. There are possibilities of havoc in this ordered and comfortable society which cannot easily be put by. The old lights have fallen from the sky, existence has become too complex and crowded for the influences of wide spaces reaching to a far horizon. Summer and winter pass over these little lamplit streets, to-day the lilac and syringa, to-morrow the scattered autumn leaves, in an experience of tranquillity and repose. But with the ear to the ground there is audible the noise of stranger echoes in the labyrinthine ways which stretch beyond the boundaries of these pleasant places; full of restlessness and disappointment, and longing, with a note of menace in it; not without foreboding to any who would desire, in the security of the suburbs, an unending end of the world.

Why does the picture of this suburban life, presented by however kindly a critic, leave the reader at the end with a sense of dissatisfaction? The query is aroused by examination of its actual condition. It is excited not only by works written in revolt, such as those of Mr. Wells or George Gissing, but also by the writings of Mr. Keble Howard and Mr. Shan Bullock and Mr. Pett Ridge and others, who have attempted, with greater or less success, to exhibit a kindly picture of suburban society. At first this society appeared in literature as depicted by cleverness, delighting in satire at the expense of bourgeois ideals. Its historians were always in protest against its limitations, its complacencies, its standards of social success and intellectual attainment. But in later time this somewhat crude attitude of scornful superiority has passed. Many writers with an intimate knowledge of suburban and English Middle Class provincial life have attempted a sympathetic and truthful description: the sincere representation of a civilisation. But in all their efforts the general effect is of something lacking; not so much in individual happiness, or even in bodily and mental development, as of a certain communal poverty of interest and ideal. The infinite boredom of the horrible women of "The Year of Jubilee"--with its vision of Camberwell villadom as idle and desolate as Flaubert's vision of French provincial bourgeois life in "Madame Bovary"--has been replaced by a scene of busy activity, with interest in cricket and football results, "book talk," love-making, croquet and tennis parties for young men and women. And yet at the end, and with the best will in the world, one closes the narrative with a feeling of desolation; a revolt against a life which, with all its energies and satisfactions, has somehow lost from it that zest and sparkle and inner glow of accepted adventure which alone would seem to give human life significance. Civilise the poor, one complains, expand their tiny rubbish yards into green gardens, introduce bow-windows before and verandahs behind; remove them from the actual experience of privation, convert all England into a suburban city--will the completed product be pronounced to be "very good"?

It is not the simplicity of suburban life which is at fault. Simplicity in writing, or in character, is as difficult of attainment as it is worth the attaining. And in so far as simplicity here exists--character cut on elemental lines, or occupied with elemental things--it provides an antidote to the complexities or cynicisms of other classes. No one, except the vulgar, despises a Middle Class existence because it has substituted a high tea for an elaborate dinner, because it uses speech to reveal rather than to conceal thought, or because it refuses to torture itself with analysis and emotion which are the products of mind divorced from the ancient sanities of existence. Nor, again, is the narrow separation from poverty and the abyss a cause for any legitimate contempt, which makes the business of life for so many of them in their tiny two-storeyed villas an enterprise hazardous and insecure. Rather is the observer conscious, where this struggle exists, that there has entered into the atmosphere the breath of salt wind, bracing if austere, which can provide a more heroic sustenance than the atmosphere in which such tests and challenges are denied. We may compare, for example, two of Mr. Bullock's stories of suburban life; the one, in which he traces the attempt of a "twopenny clerk" to provide for the needs of a family on an exiguous and precarious income; the other, in which a prosperous family who have attained security set themselves to the business of living under such favourable conditions. There is humour in the struggles of Robert Thorne, as of all similar millions of Robert Thornes, in his attempt to maintain his hardly-won standard of decencies and modest comfort. There is resistance to hard circumstance which the most critical onlooker will applaud--in the little boxes for the division of income, labelled "Necessities," "Outings," "Savings"--the first so rarely permitting any overflow into the second and third; in the revolt against the shabby clothes and difficulties created by unexpected illness; in the necessities of a clerk, who is also a man, wheeling the perambulator on Peckham Rye, or scrubbing the front doorsteps furtively after nightfall. But the humour is of the ancient, not of the modern, significance; a humour not without tears in it, with admiration also at the courage and determination which could yet be content, and under such conditions, with "the glory of going on and still to be." For here is the sense of battles; and battle, whether against deliberate foes, against the inimical force of Nature, or the indifference of the crowd to the individual survival, is always stimulating and bracing. And it is the battle depicted by Mr. Davidson in his "thirty bob a week"; the "naked child against a hungry wolf," "the playing bowls upon a splitting wreck," "daily done by many and many a one" in a tenacious struggle, against the enemies of human welfare, which illuminates and glorifies the monotonous streets of suburban England.

But where this "struggle to live" has passed into a "struggle to attain," the verdict is less enthusiastic. For that struggle to attain too often means absorption in ignoble standards, and an existence coming more and more to occupy a world of "make-believe." When the family is in a position of assured comfort or of affluence, the houses ample stuccoed or pseudo-Georgian edifices, and the breadwinners in posts of established security in the commercial or financial houses of the city, the atmosphere often becomes stifling and difficult. It may be that such a condition is in itself unsuitable to mankind in the life of so uncertain and transitory a world: that existence which is occupied with sedentary labour in an artificially constructed aggregation of human beings herded in the same narrow grooves, is an existence of necessity carrying with it the seeds of futility and decay. Certainly the two chief accusations against the product of such an existence would be of an imperfect standard of value about the things which exist, and of a lack of demand for the existence of things at present unattained. It is a wrong estimate of the significance--of rank, of birth, of wealth, of various material accumulations--which produces the more desolating ingredients of suburban life. Listen to the conversation in the second-class carriages of a suburban railway train, or examine the literature and journalism specially constructed for the suburban mind; you will often find endless chatter about the King, the Court, and the doings of a designated "Society"; personal paragraphs, descriptions of clothes, smile, or manner; a vision of life in which the trivial and heroic things are alike exhibited, but in which there is no adequate test or judgment, which are the heroic, which the trivial. Liberated from the devils of poverty, the soul is still empty, swept and garnished; waiting for other occupants. This is the explanation of the so-called "snobbery" of the suburbs. Here is curiosity, but curiosity about lesser occupations; energies,--for the suburbs in their healthy human life, the swarms of happy, physically efficient children, are a storehouse of the nation's energy,--but energies which tend to scatter and degrade themselves in aimless activities; "random and meaningless sociabilities" which neither hearten, stimulate, nor inspire. So into a feud with a neighbour over a disputed garden fence, or a bustling and breezy church or chapel's mundane entertainment, or a criticism of manners and fashion, dress and deportment, will be thrown force and determination which might have been directed to effort of permanent worth, in devotion to one of the great causes of the world.

Beyond these incorrect standards of value there is a noticeable absence of vision. Suburban life has often little conception of social services, no tradition of disinterested public duty, but a limited outlook beyond a personal ambition. Here the individualism of the national character exercises its full influence: unchecked by the horizontal links of the industrial peoples, organising themselves into unions, or by the vertical links of the older aristocracy with a conception of family service which once passed from parent to child. Religion--if that were vital and compelling--would provide in part a vista of larger horizons. When and where religion existed--even in its rigid conception of heaven and hell and a straight way of salvation--it offered some universes for contemplation beyond the orderly suburban road and the well-trimmed suburban garden. It is to be feared, however, that in the prevailing cloudiness about ultimate things which is developing in the modern world, religion has been tending more and more to resolve itself into social institutions, "Pleasant Sunday Afternoons," or exercise of the less adventurous forces of suburban philanthropy. What remains? A public spirit in local affairs which is deplorably low, which sends a minute percentage of voters to Council or Guardian Elections, and accompanies a perpetual contempt for present municipal mismanagement with a refusal of the personal effort required to make that management clean and efficient. An outlook upon Imperial affairs which is less a conception of politics than the acceptance of a social tradition: which leaves suburban seats securely Conservative not because the Conservative creed is there definitely embraced, but because Conservatism is supposed to be the party favoured by Court, society, and the wealthy and fashionable classes. And too often an essential ignorance supplemented by an arrogance which refuses advice and despises opposition. The result is a not too reputable product of modern civilisation: that dense and complacent "Imperial citizen" who despises "the foreigner," and could set right or improve upon generals in the field or admirals on the ocean, and is satisfied with its universe and its limitations because it has resolutely closed all doors and windows through which there might appear the vision of larger other worlds. It is this particular suburban figure--with custom dominant, accepted and inherited students of judgment, contempt for the classes below it, envy of the classes above, and no desire for adventure or devotion to a cause or an ideal--which has become too representative a figure of a laborious and praiseworthy race of men. Against this type of "honest man" have warred the anarchists, the artists, the advocates of new moralities, the opponents of the accepted way. In revolt against the dominion of so questionable a citizen, we are perhaps inclined to forget the mitigating features: the good nature and ready generosity, the cleanliness of life, the still unbroken family tradition; all animated by that resolution, not so much deliberate as unconscious, to "make the best of it," in a world of incalculable purposes; in which, indeed, some cloudiness of vision or some unusual courage would seem to be necessary if the struggle is to be continued at all.

But this limitation involves deliberate and artificial repudiation of paternity and motherhood, and as such is condemned by most ethical systems and by the Christian Church. Its widespread operation, now guaranteed by figures which may be deplored, but which cannot be denied, in itself reveals the considerable undermining process which suburban religion has undergone. Once again, therefore, it is necessary to notice this element of weakening supernatural sanctions: to inquire how far this process has gone, and whither it is tending. There will be no immediate catastrophe; for custom and convention will carry on the apparatus of organised belief long after the driving power of definite conviction has vanished, like a machine still running down after the motive power has ceased. There are renewed rallies in each generation, especially at the time of adolescence; revivals under the inspiration of American evangelists, or advocates of new theologies, or vigorous teachers who blend theology with politics, humour, or social entertainment. It may still be confidently affirmed to-day that, of all the various sections of English society, the suburban and Middle Class retains most resolutely its ancient religious convictions. These convictions are here more vigorously preserved than in the class below them, to whom, as a whole, religion has not yet come, or in the class above them, whose attitude towards Christianity has always been one of kindly patronage rather than of accepted allegiance. Yet it would be idle to overlook the ravages which have even here been made. These ravages must not be sought merely amongst the small bodies in open opposition, ethical societies and the like, or the much larger bodies in open indifference, such as the multitude of Sunday cyclists or the patrons of Sunday music. They will be found also amongst those who still own outward allegiance to the faith of their fathers, and still think themselves to be orthodox believers. "Some thirty years ago," writes the Bishop of Birmingham, "there was a sort of Protestant religion, with a doctrine of the Trinity, of Heaven and Hell, of Atonement and Judgment, of Resurrection and Eternal Life, which for good or evil could be more or less assumed. Such a standard has gone. I seriously doubt whether nearly half the grown men of the country could seriously say that they believed that Christ is God, or that He really rose on the third day from the dead. It is not that they have become Unitarians. It is that their religious opinions are in complete chaos."

The drift of this "chaos" in modern thought is, indeed, as noticeable amongst those who still cling to religious exercises and sing the hymns of childhood as amongst the larger populations who regretfully or defiantly, or more often in sheer apathy, have abandoned these ancient traditions and ceremonies. And just as, in Denison's famous verdict, our large organised charities are less a sign of our compassion than of our indifference, so it may be that the noise of fierce fighting amongst rival religions, the queer competition which Mr. Charles Booth discovered even in the remotest slums of London for the bodies and souls of their denizens, may be less an evidence of religious fervour than a manifestation of an ebbing vitality.

The loss of religion would not, indeed, be so serious a matter if it were being replaced by any other altruistic and impersonal ideal. Such have been found in a conception of patriotism, in efforts towards a social redemption, even in a vision of duty, sometimes hard and rarefied, which occupies its mind with the difficulties of the day. It is to be feared that these are not universal amongst the suburban peoples. Their lives are laborious and often disappointing. The rise in the price of the material things which they regard as essential is steady and continuous. House rent, and the rates laid upon house rent, clothes, food, the demands for small enjoyments, with the debt which often accompanies a too radiant conception of the possibilities of fixed income, leave little margin for superfluous expenditure. And as with the body, so with the soul. Considerable hours spent in not too exacting but conspicuously cheerless occupations, the natural harassments of Middle Class poverty, and the misfortune of loss or sickness, which is always unexpected and generally unprovided for, leave little surplusage of mental energy to be devoted to larger issues. Those who are intimate with the modern phases of suburban life think that they can detect a slackening of energy and fibre in a generation which is much occupied with its pleasures. It is a common complaint with the fathers that none of their children seem prepared to work in the manner in which they worked in the older days. It is a common complaint with the whole of a passing generation--the big manufacturers who built up England's commercial supremacy, the veterans who remember the strenuous middle class existence of Victorian England--that the whole newer time thinks that it has little to do but to settle down and enjoy the heritage which has been won. The young men of the suburban society, especially, are being accused of a mere childish absorption in vicarious sport and trivial amusements.

It is curious to find this accusation driven home by just that variety of newspapers which has most completely exploited the nascent hunger of the sedentary boyhood of these classes for the excitements of gambling and adventure. The cheap and sensational Press found here a field ripe for its energies. It attained an immense commercial success from the provision of the stuff which this population demanded. Now the cleverest of its promoters are beginning to be a little alarmed at the results of its handiwork, and to eye with foreboding or with disgust the youth that has been moulded by its ideals. Under the circumstances, resentment at such scolding would appear not unnatural. In a popular play, designed to encourage or to ridicule Volunteering, the creature of this "Yellow Press" was recently revealed in all his vacuous vulgarity; and the "Yellow Press" itself turned in anger to assail its own darling and docile offspring. The retort, indeed, could be final and complete. "We have been nourished," these could say, "in this unreal world of impudence, nonsense, vicarious sport and gambling. We began with our boys' papers and guessing competitions. We were insensibly led on to efforts after a pound a week for life by estimating the money in the Bank of England on a certain day, or amassing gain in hundreds of pounds for guessing missing words or the last line of 'Limericks.' On the Sabbath, committed by our parents to some such literature as the Sunday Syndicated Press, we found there the same cheery game, smeared with a grease of piety; rewards and prizes here for guessing anagrams on Bible cities, or acrostics representing Kings and Queens of Israel. We were led on to talk and read and chatter about 'sport,' in biography of various football heroes, in descriptive reports of football matches, ever deepening in imbecility, until they rivalled the language of the lunatic asylum; stuff that uses its own phraseology, about 'netting the muddied orange' and 'the ubiquitous spheroid,' and 'impelling the pill between the uprights.' Our thoughts and growing interest were sedulously directed away from consideration of any rational or serious universe. We were exhorted to demonstrate patriotism by 'mafficking,' and informed that when we fell into the fountain at Trafalgar Square and subsequently embraced a policeman, we were performing a virtuous action. Then we are denounced because this universe of foolishness and frivolity has rendered us utterly unfit to face real things. Our slight world crumbles before such a challenge, as the daylight judges and condemns the scene of a night's orgie." "This short, slender, pale man," says M. Hanotaux of Taine in 1870, "munching his throat lozenges, with squinting grey eyes behind his thick glasses, had at last seen things which astonished him--dying men, flowing blood, burning cities." Dying men, flowing blood, and burning cities intruded suddenly into a world which is fashioned out of such emptiness and vanity exhibit but the same judgment as is revealed to the discerning mind through every passing hour.

This is the less desirable side of suburban life: a set-off against its many excellences. It probably represents but a passing phase in a progress towards intelligence and a sense of real values. That progress would be aided by any loosening of the city texture by which, and through improved means of transit, something of the large sanities of rural existence could be mingled with the quickness and agility of the town. At least the most hostile critics will acknowledge in these regions a clean and virile life: forming, when criticism has done its worst, in conjunction with the artisan class below, from which it is so sharply cut off in interest and ideas, the healthiest and most hopeful promise for the future of modern England.

THE MULTITUDE

The Multitude is the People of England: that eighty per cent. of the present inhabitants of these islands who never express their own grievances, who rarely become articulate, who can only be observed from outside and very far away. It is a people which, all unnoticed and without clamour or protest, has passed through the largest secular change of a thousand years: from the life of the fields to the life of the city. Nine out of ten families have migrated within three generations: they are still only, as it were, commencing to settle down in their new quarters, with the paint scarcely dry on them, and the little garden still untilled. How has the migration affected them? How will they expand or degenerate in the new town existence, each in the perpetual presence of all? That is a question of as profound interest in answering as it is difficult to answer. The nineteenth century--in the life of the wage-earning multitudes--was a century of disturbance. The twentieth promises to be a century of consolidation. What completed product will emerge from its city aggregation, the children of the crowd? You must learn of them to-day, as I have said, from outside: from the few observers who have lived amongst them and recorded their experience; from the very few representative men, with articulate utterance, which they have flung up from amongst themselves. You must examine masses of documents and statistics embodied in Government publications, or tentative efforts towards a sociology: recording how they live, and eat and drink, and obtain shelter, and marry and are given in marriage; the particulars of their upbringing, how they seek or elude religions and charity, and escape from the laws which are passed for their protection, and enjoy and suffer, and live and die. The mass of this chaotic and undigested evidence waits for the observer who will create from it some general picture of the life of the English people. And when all these statistics and cold facts are assimilated, there yet remains the further inquiry of the temper and spirit of a race subjected to such forces; hampered and limited by the narrow walls between which they labour and endure.

The tangible things come first, in some such evidence as that provided by Government investigation, in the Blue Book bearing a forbidding title, the "Cost of Living of the Working Classes." It shows them, gathered into astonishing cities, working for variable wage. It reveals the dwellings which they seek to transform into homes. It follows their wages from production to distribution, in the cost of their daily economy, the manner in which they divide up their exiguous incomes, the amounts they think it worth while to allot to shelter, to food, and to pleasure. It analyses over a thousand "family budgets," each giving details of how much is spent weekly on butter, tapioca, or treacle. It shows the rate of birth and the rate of death: varying from city to city, both materially changing. It gives, in fact, in outline only, that blurred image of a huge and industrial population whose complete apprehension would furnish the key to many of the pressing problems of to-day.

Here are the houses in which for a season they abide; in part the product of their own volition, in part the creation of external changes which they can but little control. They have had no choice in these constructions. Their demands and desires have scarcely counted in the provision made for them. Their impetuous need was shelter: shelter "on the spot," around the sites of the new factories which had sucked them up from the deserted countryside. And they were thankful to take what was offered them by those men who foresaw the changes which were coming, and could accumulate fortunes in the rapid provision of immediate necessities. Swept into aggregations by the demand of the newest industries, the clay and stone has been hastily fashioned into place for human habitation. And now these stand to-day, made by, and yet making, the temper and characteristic of the people. Here the normal standard is a four-roomed cottage; there, "back to back" houses ravage the health of their inhabitants; here again huge piles of tenements encompass the bewildered occupants in a kind of human ant-heap; there the ancient dwelling of the wealthy or comfortable classes have been "swarmed out" by the busy people. Carlyle pictured mankind flowing, as it were, through the visible arena of material things. A wave of humanity beats through these solid constructions; it vanishes, another succeeds. "Orpheus built the walls of Thebes by the mere sound of his lyre. Who built these walls of Weissnichtwo, summoning out all the sandstone rocks to dance and shape themselves into Doric and Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses, and noble streets?" All cities are thus built "to music." What discordant melody to-day is responsible for the creation of Jarrow, or Salford, or Canning Town?

England at once, under such an analysis, separates itself into divergent parts. There is rural England, still largely unaffected by modern science and invention, except by the loss of population, drained away; the agricultural labourers, the fishermen, and the artisans of the sleeping provincial towns. There is urban England in hastily created industrial centres, vocal with the clanging of furnaces and the noise of the factories; but still a population in manageable aggregation, set in open spaces, never far from green fields under a wide sky. And there is London: a population, a nation in itself; breeding, as it seems, a special race of men; which only is also produced, and that in less intensive cultivation, in the few other larger cities--Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool--where the conditions of coagulation offer some parallel to this monster clot of humanity. Everywhere, indeed, this million-peopled, exaggerated London sets at defiance the generalisations drawn from the normal town areas. House rent is immensely higher. The mean weekly price for two rooms in London is six shillings, in the provinces a little more than one half; for four rooms the variation is between nine shillings in the one, five shillings in the other. A portion of this surplus is the booty of more highly-paid labour. The greater part vanishes in the increased value of the land, heaped up by the mere fact of aggregation, and flowing away into the pockets of many affluent and fortunate persons. London has been normally Tory; defiant of "Socialism," defiant of change. The cause of this cannot be found entirely in the existence of a metropolis and capital of the Empire living a parasitic existence on tribute levied upon the boundaries of the world. For in most of the great capitals of Europe the advocates of revolutionary programmes find to-day their most fruitful fields of propaganda. It may perhaps best be understood in the apprehension of an actual picture of visible things. The answer is hidden in these strings and congestions of little comfortable two-storeyed red and grey cottages, which multiplied with such amazing rapidity in the preceding generation; pushing their tentacles from factory or industrial centre out over the neighbouring fields, and proclaiming with their cleanliness and tiny gardens and modest air of comfort, a working population prosperous and content. One type of dwelling, indeed, is found to be more or less prevalent through all the urban aggregation. That is the small four or five-roomed cottage, containing on the ground floor a front parlour, a kitchen, and a scullery built as an addition to the main part of the house; and on the upper floor the bedrooms, the third bedroom in the five-roomed house being built over the scullery. And in such dwelling-places, if anywhere, is concealed the secret of the future of the people of England. Abroad, the self-contained "flat," the gigantic tenement, in which the single family is embedded in a cliff of bricks and mortar, is more and more coming to be the staple dwelling of the working classes. Broad, tree-planted avenues, with fast electric locomotion, cut through carefully planned cities of storey piled on storey. The whole effect is grandiose and spacious, if it lacks the picturesqueness of that enormous acreage of chimney-pots and tiny tumbled cottages which is revealed in a kind of smoky grandeur from the railway embankments of South and East London--the desperate efforts made by a race reared in village communities to maintain in the urban aggregation some semblance of a home. Such is the shelter; what of the food? The price of bread varies. Family budgets of the weekly incomes are extraordinarily suggestive of the struggle which takes place in the industrial areas of the city. Classified according to amount of net receipts, they reveal an ever-growing proportion devoted to the essentials of bodily nutriment; until, at the bottom, where the income appears permanently below the "living wage," there is practically no margin left when the food demand is satisfied. "For the incomes below thirty shillings, two-thirds of the total income is spent on food, 'declares a Board of Trade investigator,' while in the case of the incomes of forty shillings and above, about fifty-seven per cent. is spent on food." Amongst the poorest, actually one-fifth of the total food expenditure is spent on bread and flour: a conclusive statistic condemning those who lightly justify a tax on imported corn on the ground that so much stale bread is committed to the pigsty. Tea, in these lowest incomes, demands ninepence farthing a week, and sugar eightpence. It is expenditure on the margin, counted in farthings, a life exceedingly difficult to realise amongst those to whom a few coppers more or less means no appreciable difference.

Variations--from town to town--in a civilisation which is in all essentials homogeneous, and a life of easy flow from one labour centre to another, tend to lessen or to vanish. Yet there still are apparent local variations in wages which appear to be independent of variations in wealth or in prices. Again there are most remarkable differences in habits, customs, productivity, and statistics of birth and death. Why should Middlesborough have the highest birth-rate of England? Why indeed, the cynical might ask, should any children be born in Middlesborough at all, considering the more than dismal picture which investigation discloses of existence in that feverish industrial centre? There is appalling wastage of life force in these percentages of infant mortality, especially in the factory centres--soiled, useless child lives, whose existence stands for no intelligible significance in any rational scheme of human affairs. There are statistics of mortality which reveal so many years knocked off human life in the transition from the life of the field to the life of the factory. And there is the evidence also, amongst the industrial peoples as amongst the classes above them, of perhaps the most remarkable change which is operating to-day in modern England: in the tumbling down of the birth-rate with ominous rapidity, until nothing but a similar reduction of the death-rate, with the increase of sanitation and the limitation of disease, seems to stand between the two meeting in a henceforth stationary population. Is the vitality of the race being burnt up in mine and furnace, in the huddled mazes of the city? And is the future of a colonising people to be jeopardised, not by difficulties of overlordship at the extremities of its dominion, but by obscure changes in the opinion, the religion, and the energies at the heart of the Empire? These and other subjects confront even a superficial examination of the material condition of England. Karl Marx was wrong in his defiant assertion that economic causes were the sole factors in the transformations of history. He would have been right had he asserted that many startling overturnings of opinion, in political and social, and even religious change, can ultimately be traced back to the economic condition of obscure masses of the common people. The majority are in regular labour in summer and winter, tearing from coal and furnace and factory the vast industrial wealth of England. Their disabilities are imperfect houses set often in quite needlessly squalid surroundings: the possibility of finding, through no fault of their own, their labour no longer required; specific diseases and risks of specific accidents which are associated with various specific occupations. Their advantages are a rate of payment higher for shorter hours of work than is at present prevailing in any other country of Europe. The artisan is far better fed than the agricultural labourer, is more intelligent, quicker and more active, with greater pleasures available in popular entertainment, or a Saturday half-holiday, or a week at the seaside. Yet his span of life is shorter and his work more precarious. He possesses little opportunity for the accumulation of property. He has no "stake in the country," and has no permanent possession, lacking even a tiny plot of land which he can bequeath from father to child. His effects--on his decease--are generally negligible. The Multitude, with a substantial although inadequate share of the income of the country, possesses but an infinitesimal proportion of its capital.

Of very special interest, however, is the testimony of those who have endeavoured to get behind the form of cottage or quality of food, to apprehension of the actual life of the people who dwell in the one and are nourished by the other. Such efforts have been made, and not unsuccessfully, by Lady Bell at Middlesborough, by Mr. Charles Booth in London, by Mr. Reynolds amongst his friends the Devon fishermen, by Mr. Reginald Bray from his block tenement in Camberwell. They all bear testimony concerning a life novel to humanity, whose development and future is still doubtful.

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