r right, than
the supporters of the Government have?

It is not these objects which we deprecate. On the contrary, they have
our ardent sympathy. What we do deprecate is the spirit in which they
are so often preached and pursued. No progress is going to be
made--quite the contrary--by stirring up class hatred or trying to rob
Peter in order to pay Paul. It is not true that you cannot benefit one
class without taking from another class--still less true that by
taking from one you necessarily benefit another. The national income,
the sum total of all our productive activities, is capable of being
enormously increased or diminished by wise or foolish policy. For it
does not only depend on the amount of capital and labour. A number of
far subtler factors enter into the account--science, organisation,
energy, credit, confidence, the spirit in which men set about their
business. The one thing which would be certain to diminish that
income, and to recoil on all of us, would be that war of classes which
many people seem anxious to stir up. Nothing could be more fatal to
prosperity, and to the fairest hopes of social progress, than if the
great body of the upper and middle classes of the community had cause
to regard that progress as indissolubly associated with an attack upon
themselves. And that is why, if reforms such as I have indicated are
costly--as they will be costly--you must find some better way of
providing for them than by merely giving another turn to the
income-tax screw, or just adding so much per cent. to the estate duty.

From my point of view, social reform is a national affair. All classes
benefit by it, not only those directly affected. And therefore all
should contribute according to their means. I do not in any way object
to the rich being made to contribute, even for purposes in which they
are not directly interested. What I do object to is that the great
body of the people should not contribute to them. It is thoroughly
vicious in principle to divide the nation, as many of the Radical and
Labour men want to divide it, into two sections--a majority which only
calls the tune, and a minority which only pays the piper.

I own I am aghast at the mean opinion which many politicians seem to
have of the mass of their working fellow countrymen, when they
approach them with this crude sort of bribery, offering them
everything for nothing, always talking to them of their claims upon
the State, and never of their