restrained. He is rising against his tradition, and almost against his
will. The serf still bulks large in him. The whole trend of
circumstance is to substitute science for mere rote skill in him, to
demand initiative and an intelligent self-adaptation to new discoveries
and new methods, to make him a professional man and a job and
pieceworker after the fashion of the great majority of professional
men. Against all these things the serf element in him fights. He
resists education and clings to apprenticeship, he fights for time-
work, he obstructs new inventions, he clings to the ideal of short
hours, high pay, shirk and let the master worry. His wife is a far more
actual creature than the clerk's; she does the house herself in a
rough, effectual fashion, his children get far more food for mind and
body, and far less restraint. You can tell the age of the skilled
operative within a decade by the quantity of books in his home; the
younger he is the more numerous these are likely to be. And the younger
he is the more likely he is to be alive to certain general views about
his rights and his place in the social scale, the less readily will his
finger go to his cap at the sight of broad-cloth, or his hand to the
proffered half-crown. He will have listened to Trade Union organizers
and Socialist speakers; he will have read the special papers of his
class. The whole of this home is, in comparison with the shopman's,
wide open to new influences. The children go to a Board School, and
very probably afterwards to evening classes--or music-halls. Here again
is a new type of home, in which the English of 1920 are being made in
thousands, and which is forced a little way up the intellectual and
moral scale every year, a little further from its original conception
of labour, dependence, irresponsibility, and servility.

Compare, again, the home conditions of the child of a well-connected
British shareholder inheriting, let us say, seven or eight hundred a