It is
a gathering together of all the smaller interests which find themselves
at a disadvantage against the big established classes, the leasehold
tenant as against the landowner, the retail tradesman as against
the merchant and the moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the
Churchman, the small employer as against the demoralising hospitable
publican, the man without introductions and broad connections against
the man who has these things. It is the party of the many small men
against the fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for
loving the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer
is doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but
it resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages
common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the king.
The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege" because it
represents no class advantages, but it is also the party that is on
the whole most set against Collective control because it represents
no established responsibility. It is constructive only so far as its
antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than its jealousy of the
state. It organises only because organisation is forced upon it by the
organisation of its adversaries. It lapses in and out of alliance with
Labour as it sways between hostility to wealth and hostility to public
expenditure....

Every modern European state will have in some form or other these three
parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and unsympathetic
party of establishment and success, the rich party; the confused,
sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small, struggling,
various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a third party
sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes reuniting with
it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses, the proletarians,
Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to Republican and Democrat, for
example, and you have the conditions in the United States. The Crown or
a dethroned dynasty, the Established Church or a dispossessed church,
nationalist secessions, the personalities of party leaders, may break
up, complicate, and confuse the self-expression of these three necessary
divisions in the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out
none the less for that....

And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;--the ideas go
on--as though we are all no more than