sives
to hold the balance of power in order to have everything their own way
both against Socialism and reaction. The powerful Socialist and
revolutionary minority created in industrial communities by equal
suffrage and a democratic form of government, _as long as it remains
distinctly a minority_, is unable to injure the combined forces of
capitalism, while it furnishes a useful and invaluable club by which the
progressive capitalists can threaten and overwhelm the reactionaries.

In Great Britain, for example, the new collectivist movement of Messrs.
Churchill and Lloyd George, basing itself primarily on the support of
the small capitalist class, which there as elsewhere constitutes a very
large part (over a third) of the population, seeks also the support of a
part of the non-propertied classes. It cannot make them any plausible or
honest promise of any equitable redistribution of income or of political
power, but it can promise an increase of well-paid government
employment, and it can guarantee that it will develop the industrial
efficiency of all classes and allow them a certain share, if a lesser
one, in the benefits of this policy.

If then "State Socialism," like the benevolent despotisms and
oligarchies of history, sometimes offers the purely _material_ benefits
which it brings in some measure to all classes, as a _substitute_ for
democratic government, it also favors democracy in those places where
the small capitalists and related classes form a majority of the
community. The purpose of the democratic policy, where it is adopted, is
to stimulate new political interest in the "State Socialistic" program,
and by increasing cautiously the political weight of the
non-capitalists--without going far enough to give them any real or
independent power--to check the reactionary element among the
capitalists that tries to hold back the industrial and governmental
organization the progressives have in view. It was in order to shift the
political balance of power that the reactionary Bismarck introduced
universal suffrage in Germany, and the same motive is leading Premier
Asquith, who is not radical, to add considerably to the political weight
of the working classes in England, _i.e._ not to the point where they
have any power whatever for their own purposes, but only to that point
where their weight, added to that of the Liberals, counterbalances the
Tories, and so automatically aids the former party.

The Liberals a