is, that will endure half an hour's practical criticism. The
cardinal fact before us is that the workers do not intend to stand
things as they are, and that no clever arguments, no expert handling of
legal points, no ingenious appearances of concession, will stay that
progressive embitterment.

But I think I have said enough to express and perhaps convey my
conviction that our present Labour troubles are unprecedented, and that
they mean the end of an epoch. The supply of good-tempered, cheap
labour--upon which the fabric of our contemporary ease and comfort is
erected--is giving out. The spread of information and the means of
presentation in every class and the increase of luxury and
self-indulgence in the prosperous classes are the chief cause of that.
In the place of that old convenient labour comes a new sort of labour,
reluctant, resentful, critical, and suspicious. The replacement has
already gone so far that I am certain that attempts to baffle and coerce
the workers back to their old conditions must inevitably lead to a
series of increasingly destructive outbreaks, to stresses and disorder
culminating in revolution. It is useless to dream of going on now for
much longer upon the old lines; our civilisation, if it is not to enter
upon a phase of conflict and decay, must begin to adapt itself to the
new conditions of which the first and foremost is that the wages-earning
labouring class as a distinctive class, consenting to a distinctive
treatment and accepting life at a disadvantage is going to disappear.
Whether we do it soon as the result of our reflections upon the present
situation, or whether we do it presently through the impoverishment that
must necessarily result from a lengthening period of industrial unrest,
there can be little doubt that we are going to curtail very considerably
the current extravagance of the spending and directing classes upon
food, clothing, display, and all the luxuries of life. The phase of
affluence is over. And unless we are to be the mere passive spectators
of an unprecedented reduction of our lives, all of us who have leisure
and opportunity have to set ourselves very strenuously to the problem
not of reconciling ourselves to the wage-earners, for that possibility
is over, but of establishing a new method of co-operation with those who
seem to be definitely decided not to remain wage-earners for very much
longer. We have, as sensible people, to realise that the old arrangement