hat the State should not merely interfere in business but
should take over the business, and pay all men as equal wage-earners, or
at any rate as wage-earners. The employers were not willing to surrender
their own position to the State, and this project has largely faded from
politics. But the wiser of them were willing to pay better wages, and
they were specially willing to bestow various other benefits so long as
they were bestowed after the manner of wages. Thus we had a series of
social reforms which, for good or evil, all tended in the same
direction; the permission to employees to claim certain advantages as
employees, and as something permanently different from employers. Of
these the obvious examples were Employers' Liability, Old Age Pensions,
and, as marking another and more decisive stride in the process, the
Insurance Act.

The latter in particular, and the whole plan of the social reform in
general, were modelled upon Germany. Indeed the whole English life of
this period was overshadowed by Germany. We had now reached, for good or
evil, the final fulfilment of that gathering influence which began to
grow on us in the seventeenth century, which was solidified by the
military alliances of the eighteenth century, and which in the
nineteenth century had been turned into a philosophy--not to say a
mythology. German metaphysics had thinned our theology, so that many a
man's most solemn conviction about Good Friday was that Friday was named
after Freya. German history had simply annexed English history, so that
it was almost counted the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud
of being a German. The genius of Carlyle, the culture preached by
Matthew Arnold, would not, persuasive as they were, have alone produced
this effect but for an external phenomenon of great force. Our internal
policy was transformed by our foreign policy; and foreign policy was
dominated by the more and more drastic steps which the Prussian, now
clearly the prince of all the German tribes, was taking to extend the
German influence in the world. Denmark was robbed of two provinces;
France was robbed of two provinces; and though the fall of Paris was
felt almost everywhere as the fall of the capital of civilization, a
thing like the sacking of Rome by the Goths, many of the most
influential people in England still saw nothing in it but the solid
success of our kinsmen and old allies of Waterloo. The moral methods
which achieved it, the jug