ty
of those most competent to speak on these questions to-day, including
many leading economists and sociologists and prominent figures in
practical political life. Winston Churchill, for example, says that "the
differences between class and class have been even aggravated in the
passage of years," that while "the richer classes [are] ever growing in
wealth and in numbers, and ever declining in responsibility, the very
poor remain plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless
misery." This being the case, he predicts "a savage strife between class
and class," unless the most radical measures are taken to check the
tendency. Nor are his statements mere rhetoric, for he shows
statistically "that the increase of income assessable to income tax is
at the very least more than ten times greater than the increase which
has taken place in the same period in the wages of those trades which
come within the Board of Trade returns."[208] In other words, the income
of the well-to-do classes (which increased nearly half a billion pounds,
that is, almost doubled, in ten years) is growing ten times more rapidly
than that even of the organized and better paid workmen, who alone are
considered in the Board of Trade returns.

Here is a situation which is world-wide. The position of the working
class, or certain parts of it, may be improving; the income of the
employing and capitalist class is certainly increasing _many fold_ more
rapidly. Here is the financial expression of the growing _divergence_ of
classes which Marx had in mind, a divergence that we have no reason
whatever for supposing will be checked, as Mr. Churchill suggests, even
by his most "Socialistic" reforms, short of surrendering the political
and economic power to those who suffer from this condition.

At the German Socialist Congress at Hanover in 1899, Bebel said that
even if the income of the working class was increasing, or even if the
purchasing power of total wages was becoming greater, the income of the
nation as a whole was increasing much more rapidly and that of the
capitalist class at a still more rapid rate. The great Socialist
statesman laid emphasis on the essential point that capitalists are
absorbing continually a greater and a greater proportion of the national
income.

The class struggle, says Kautsky, rests not upon the fact that the
misery of the proletariat is growing greater, but on _its need to
annihilate a pressure that it feels more an