a wasteful and incurable conflict. But that distressful possibility is
the worst and perhaps the least probable of many. It is much more
acceptable to suppose that our social order will be able to adjust
itself to the new outlook and temper and quality of the labour stratum
that elementary education, a Press very cheap and free, and a period of
great general affluence have brought about.

One almost inevitable feature of any such adaptation will be a changed
spirit in the general body of society. We have come to a serious
condition of our affairs, and we shall not get them into order again
without a thorough bracing-up of ourselves in the process. There can be
no doubt that for a large portion of our comfortable classes existence
has been altogether too easy for the last lifetime or so. The great bulk
of the world's work has been done out of their sight and knowledge; it
has seemed unnecessary to trouble much about the general conduct of
things, unnecessary, as they say, to "take life too seriously." This has
not made them so much vicious as slack, lazy, and over-confident; there
has been an elaboration of trivial things and a neglect of troublesome
and important things. The one grave shock of the Boer War has long been
explained and sentimentalised away. But it will not be so easy to
explain away a dislocated train service and an empty coal cellar as it
was to get a favourable interpretation upon some demonstration of
national incompetence half the world away.

It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation that
the British prosperous and the British successful, to whom warning after
warning has rained in vain from the days of Ruskin, Carlyle, Matthew
Arnold, should be called to account at last in their own household. They
will grumble, they will be very angry, but in the end, I believe, they
will rise to the opportunities of their inconvenience. They will shake