to
political and economic egalitarianism as is that of the aristocracy: and
the mass of the English people, whose liberation can never be
accomplished under the existing regime of political and economic
privilege, looks with complacency and awe upon the good time enjoyed by
their betters. Popular bondage is the price of national consistency. A
century of industrial expansion and over half a century of free trade
has left the English people miserably poor and contentedly hopeless; and
in the future the people cannot depend upon any increase even of the
small share of the benefits of industrial expansion, which they have
hitherto obtained, because the national expansion is itself proceeding
at a much slower rate. The dole, which is now being accorded in the
shape of old-age pensions, may fairly be compared to the free
transportation to their homes with which the Bank of Monte Carlo
assuages the feelings of its destitute victims. The national
organization and policy is so arranged that the majority must lose. The
result will be inevitably a diminution of the ability of the United
Kingdom to hold its own in competition with its economic and political
rivals; and in all probability this pressure from the outside will
eventually force the English nation to reconsider the basis of its
political and economic organization and policy.

IV

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY IN FRANCE

The recent history and the present position of France illustrate another
phase of the interdependence of the national and the democratic
principles. The vitality of English national life has been impaired by
its identification with an inadequate and aristocratic political
principle. In France the effective vitality of the democracy has been
very much lowered by certain flaws in the integrity of French national
life. France is strong where England is weak and is weak where England
is strong; and this divergence of development is by no means accidental.
Just because they were the first countries to become effectively
nationalized, their action and reaction have been constant and have
served at once to develop and distinguish their national temperaments.
The English invasions accelerated the growth of the French royal power
and weakened domestic resistance to its ambitions. The English
revolutions of the seventeenth century made the Bourbons more than ever
determined to consolidate the royal despotism and to stamp out
Protestantism. The excesses of the F