classes. It is not so much "Wake up, England!" that I would say as "Wake
up, gentlemen!"--for the new generation of the workers is beyond all
question quite alarmingly awake and critical and angry. And they have
not merely to wake up, they have to wake up visibly and ostentatiously
if those old class reliances on which our system is based are to be
preserved and restored.

We need before anything else a restoration of class confidence. It is a
time when class should speak with class very frankly.

There is too much facile misrepresentation, too ready a disposition on
either side to accept caricatures as portraits and charges as facts.
However tacit our understandings were in the past, with this new kind of
Labour, this young, restive Labour of the twentieth century, which can
read, discuss and combine, we need something in the nature of a social
contract. And it is when one comes to consider by what possible means
these suspicious third-class passengers in our leaking and imperilled
social liner can be brought into generous co-operation with the second
and the first that one discovers just how lamentably out of date and out
of order our political institutions, which should supply the means for
just this inter-class discussion, have become. Between the busy and
preoccupied owning and employing class on the one hand, and the
distressed, uneasy masses on the other, intervenes the professional
politician, not as a mediator, but as an obstacle, who must be
propitiated before any dealings are possible. Our national politics no
longer express the realities of the national life; they are a mere
impediment in the speech of the community. With our whole social order
in danger, our Legislature is busy over the trivial little affairs of
the Welsh Established Church, whose endowment probably is not equal to
the fortune of any one of half a dozen _Titanic_ passengers or a tithe
of the probable loss of another strike among the miners. We have a
Legislature almost antiquarian, compiling a museum of Gladstonian
legacies rather than governing our world to-day.

Law is the basis of civilisation, but the lawyer is the law's
consequence, and, with us at least, the legal profession is the
political profession. It delights in false issues and merely technical
politics. Steadily with the ascendancy of the House of Commons the
barristers have ousted other types of men from political power. The
decline of the House of Lords has been the last