population in uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners
and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised self-importance,
jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the
power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the party
as a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely
confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective
control of land, for example, or state mining and manufactures, or
the nationalisation of the so-called public-house or extended
municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of
property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine
bar. It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement in
these affairs.

Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose
immediate interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor,
increase employment, and make better terms for the working-man
tenant and working-man purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt
constructive minded, but the mass of the following is naturally
suspicious of education and discipline, hostile to the higher
education, and--except for an obvious antagonism to employers and
property owners--almost destitute of ideas. What else can it be?
It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation and
difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and
organising power. It favours the nationalisation of land and
capital with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process;
but, on the other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of
individuals which is implied by military service is steadily and
quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it. It is only in
recent years that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the
huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is still a