interests are rapidly progressing,
but her peasantry is at a standstill, France and Italy have already
grown a fat _bourgeoisie_, but their workers remain in a limbo of
poverty and strikes. And in all these countries, including Germany,
Socialism has arisen as a protest against the commercial order--which
fact certainly does not look as if commercialism were a generally
acknowledged benefit.

No, commercial prosperity means only the prosperity of a class. Yet such
is the curious glamour that surrounds this, subject and makes a fetish
of statistics about "imports and exports," that nothing is more common
than for such prosperity to be taken to mean the prosperity of the
nation as a whole. The commercial people, having command of the Press,
and of the avenues and highways of public influence, do not find it at
all difficult to persuade the nation that _they_ are its
representatives, and that _their_ advantage is the advantage of all.
This illusion is only a part, I suppose, of a historical necessity,
which as the Feudal regime passes brings into prominence the Commercial
regime; but do not let us be deluded by it, nor forget that in
submitting to the latter we are being nose-led by a class just as much
as the Germans have been in submitting to the Prussian Junkers. Do not
let us, at the behest of either class, be so foolish as to set out in
vain pursuit of world-empire; and, above all, do not let us, in freeing
ourselves from military class-rule, fall under the domination of
financiers and commercial diplomats. Let us remember that wars for
world-markets are made for the benefit of the merchant _class_ and not
for the benefit of the mass-people, and that in this respect England has
been as much to blame as Germany or any other nation--nay, pretty
obviously more so.

What is clearly wanted--and indeed is the next stage of human evolution
in England and in all Western lands--is that the people should
emancipate themselves from class-domination, class-glamour, and learn
to act freely from their own initiative. I know it is difficult. It
means a spirit of independence, courage, willingness to make sacrifice.
It means education, alertness to guard against the insidious schemes of
wire-pullers and pressmen, as well as of militarists and commercials. It
means the perception that only through eternal vigilance can freedom be
maintained. Yet it is the only true Democracy; and the logic of its
arrival is assured to us by the his