he following truth":

That our free modern society in which the means of production are
owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is
tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the
establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those
who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those
who do. With this principle of compulsion applied against the
non-owners there must also come a difference in their status; and
in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided
into two sets; the first economically free and politically free,
possessed of the means of production, and securely confirmed in
that possession; the second economically unfree and politically
unfree, but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in
certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath
which they shall not fall.[21]

Now, the reader who has followed the brief summary of the preceding
chapter cannot fail to arrive at a consideration of apparently cardinal
importance. Even if he be convinced--as we are convinced--that the
servile state is actually upon us, he will yet feel that a people still
politically free will never allow what is to-day but a young growth to
attain its full stature. The English people, he will argue, hold their
own destiny in their own hand. We already possess all but manhood
suffrage; and, until that power is taken from us, which it could never
be without a fierce struggle, we possess a weapon with which any and
every attempt to re-introduce the servile status can successfully be
resisted.

A man reasoning thus should ask himself two questions: first, does the
proletariat object to the re-introduction of the servile status,
provided it brings with it security and sufficiency? second, does the
enjoyment of a wide suffrage connote the power of self-government?

These are questions which every intelligent man must be able to answer
for himself, and, if he answer them honestly, his answers, we think,
will agree with those Mr. Belloc has given. In _The Servile State_ he
affirms what we all know to be the fact, that the English proletariat of
to-day would not merely fail to reject the servile status, but would
welcome it. He puts the matter in this way:

If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a
wage with the proposal for the contract of