and this is as true of the nation as of the individual. In England, even during the high flood of the industrial plutocracy, during the Victorian days when its excellence as a system was unquestioned, and when it stood for the consummation of civilization and progress, the older phases of political and social thought still lingered in the by-ways of national life and shaded the fierce sunlight of that modernity. Any ideal that has once definitely permeated society remains for ever an ingredient of its social life. Those who know England well and understand her historical personality can easily detect to-day the traces of the feudal system, of the Catholic Church, of the Puritans, and naturally of the recently disinherited landed aristocracy, influences that have softened the supremacy of the industrial plutocracy, and that have made its pretensions to permanent superiority more absurd and less irksome. England is full of people still believing in and still trying to live according to old systems long discarded by the majority. This not only makes for tolerance; it has the more important effect of rendering uneasy on their temporary thrones the powers that be, but may not be to-morrow.

In America it is different. The traditions that make men cynical or tender, the memories of many a creed that seemed divine, and many a system that seemed perfection, gone to seed

in failure and disillusion, are there no guide to wisdom. The continuity of social effort that links Mr. Smillie not only with Wilkes but with Wat Tyler and even Simon de Montfort does not exist. Since America became a nation the industrial plutocracy has been supreme, and those who love it cannot conceive any reservation to or hesitation in their belief, and those who hate it detest it with untempered zeal. To them industrial plutocracy is not a phase, a temporary phenomenon in the march of human history. "Business" has taken complete possession of the soul of the people in a way that is almost inconceivable to the more illogical and much lazier English. Business is the sole occupation of the nation, and so absorbed in it are they that it has altered in a peculiar way their social problems and political outlook. In America the rich are not idle; they do not even want to be idle. That accusation of idleness so familiar to us in political argument, so fundamental in its indication of what we are and what we wish to be, cannot be made by the American poor against the American rich. We who work to live, whose main effort is towards escape from toil into a life of ample leisure, whose main quarrel with the rich is not that they have too much of these things, but that we have too little, can hardly conceive a plutocracy in which the plutocrats do not

desire leisure, and live laborious days because they love them.

This genuine love of work is characteristic of all classes of the community. The familiar sight of the wives of rich Americans travelling luxuriously in Europe without their husbands has given rise to a legend amongst us that the American business man is a henpecked slave, toiling year in, year out, to provide the pleasures of his female relations. It is an illusion. The truth is that nothing will induce the business man to leave his business. He is bored to death in Europe, and he cannot believe that any pleasure his wife obtains from spending his income comes within a thousand miles of the pleasure that he obtains from making it. His holiday and his sport are no real delight to him; they are not, as they are with us, the eagerly anticipated and greedily enjoyed emblems of real existence. On the contrary, they are to him merely a medicine, necessary, like food and sleep, to keep him fit for the business life. I know a rich man over seventy years old, the possessor of four houses, a yacht, and eight motors, who can hardly be forced to take a fortnight's holiday in the year. He cannot be persuaded to eat a good lunch five minutes' walk from his office, because he can save time by eating a bad one in his own street. And every summer morning at eight o'clock his

yacht, to us the symbol of expensive pleasure, joins the crowd of other rich yachtsmen on the waterways that lead to the city of New York. This adoration of the strenuous life would seem fantastic both to rich and poor in England. Yet we must not rashly assume that it is derived from mere love of money. On the contrary, love of money, safely invested money, is far more prevalent in England. It is the absorbing fascination of the game, the splendid results to be obtained from his endeavour in that wide undeveloped country that calls the rich man to his office in the sweltering summer days. And in America the same spirit permeates the poor. The agitation for shorter hours is not in America bound up with the hatred of intolerable toil, or the desire for leisure and recreation, it is merely a wish to lessen the number of hours before which overtime pay comes into operation, and is in reality an offshoot of the agitation for higher wages. The whole nation is united in the enjoyment of its effort to extract wealth, and the power that wealth brings, from life, and from that novel angle they view the social problems of the age.

Idleness being ruled out, the discussion between those who work with their brains and those who work with their hands is almost entirely concerned with relative reward. Liberal thinkers belonging to the educated classes are

willing to surrender several positions of the capitalist case. They agree that the element of luck, whether it takes the form of inheritance or of speculation, cannot be defended. But they maintain that real brains, genuine business ability is a rare gift, and can never be on an absolute level with manual labour. The man who develops a country, who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before, who has the quality of inspiration and the capacity to organize, deserves a higher reward than do the mere instruments that carry out his ideas. The manual workers agree that this is so, but that the brain-worker's reward is disproportionate. The brain-worker replies that only a disproportionate reward is sufficient to make an incentive. These are the higher levels of social science, and the argument deteriorates in practice into angry disputes concerning the size of the wage-bill that a particular business will carry, and whether men who insist on taking most of the profits can justly refuse to share the losses. The acerbity of the quarrel is somewhat increased by the fact that the modern Government, however radical and advanced, is financially dependent on the class from whom all taxes are drawn. So among ordinary men the ancient struggle for the golden eggs continues; while, above them, some say that the indispensable goose is very sick and may die, and