t interesting--altogether too interesting
indeed, when I was still only a little boy. My father was one of that
multitude of small shopkeepers which has been caught between the
"Stores" and such-like big distributors above and the rising rates
below, and from the knickerbocker stage onward I was acutely aware of
the question hanging over us. "This isn't going on," was the
proposition. "This shop in which our capital is invested will never
return it. Nobody seems to understand what is happening, and there is
nobody to advise or help us. What are we going to do?"

Except that people are beginning to understand a little now what it
all means, exactly the same question hangs over many hundreds of
thousands of households to-day, not only over the hundreds of small
shopkeepers, but of small professional men, of people living upon
small parcels of investments, of clerks who find themselves growing
old and their value depreciated by the competition of a new,
better-educated generation, of private school-masters, of boarding-and
lodging-house keepers and the like. They are all vaguely aware of
something more than personal failure, of a drift and process which is
against all their kind, of the need of "doing something" for
themselves and their children, something different from just sticking
to the shop or the "situation"--and they don't know what to do! What
ought they to do?

Well, first, before one answers that, let us ask what it is exactly
that is grinding the middle class in this way. Is it a process we can
stop? Can we direct the millstones? If we can, ought we to do so? And
if we cannot, or decide that it isn't worth while, then what can we do
to mitigate this cruelty of slowly impoverishing and taxing out of
existence a class that was once the backbone of the community? It is
not mere humanity dictates this much, it is a question that affects
the State as a whole. It must be extremely bad for the spirit of the
nation and for our national future that its middle mass should be in a
state of increasing financial worry and stress, irritated, depressed,
and broken in courage. One effect is manifest in our British politics
now. Each fresh election turns upon expenditure more evidently than
the last, and the promise to reduce taxation or lower the rates
overrides more and more certainly any other consideration. What are
Empire or Education to men who feel themselves drifting helplessly
into debt? What chance has any construct