he people
you meet, of a certain bewilderment. A static world and a static order
are dissolving; and in England that order was so static as to make the
present spectacle the more surprising. Signs of the disintegration of
the old social strata were not lacking, indeed, in the earlier years of
the twentieth century, when labour members and north-country radicals
began to invade parliament; but the cataclysm of this war has
accelerated the process. In the muddy trenches of Flanders and France
a new comradeship has sprung up between officers and Tommies, while
time-honoured precedent has been broken by the necessity of giving
thousands of commissions to men of merit who do not belong to the
"officer caste." At the Haymarket Theatre I saw a fashionable audience
wildly applaud a play in which the local tailor becomes a major-general
and returns home to marry the daughter of the lord of a mayor whose
clothes he used to cut before the war.

"The age of great adventure," were the words used by Mr. H. G. Wells to
describe this epoch as we discussed it. And a large proportion of
the descendants of those who have governed England for centuries are
apparently imbued with the spirit of this adventure, even though it
may spell the end of their exclusive rule. As significant of the social
mingling of elements which in the past never exchanged ideas or points
of view I shall describe a week-end party at a large country house of
Liberal complexion; on the Thames. I have reason to believe it fairly
typical. The owner of this estate holds an important position in the
Foreign Office, and the hostess has, by her wit and intelligent grasp of
affairs, made an enviable place for herself. On her right, at luncheon
on Sunday, was a labour leader, the head of one of the most powerful
unions in Britain, and next him sat a member of one of the oldest of
England's titled families. The two were on terms of Christian names. The
group included two or three women, a sculptor and an educator, another
Foreign Office official who has made a reputation since the beginning of
the war, and finally an employer of labour, the chairman of the biggest
shipbuilding company in England.

That a company presenting such a variety of interests should have been
brought together in the frescoed dining-room of that particular house is
noteworthy.

The thing could happen nowhere save in the England of today. At first
the talk was general, ranging over a number of subjec