.

The chief immediate danger in the case of the two older parties is that,
owing to the growing expense of electioneering and the growing effect of
legislation on commerce and finance, an increasing proportion of the
members and candidates may be drawn from the class of 'hustling'
company-promoters and financiers. The Labour Party, on the other hand,
can now draw upon an ample supply of genuine public spirit, and its
difficulties in this respect will arise, not from calculated individual
selfishness, but from the social and intellectual environment of
working-class life. During the last twenty years I have been associated,
for some years continuously and afterwards at intervals, with English
political working men. They had, it seemed to me, for the most part a
great advantage in the fact that certain real things of life were real
to them. It is, for instance, the 'class-conscious' working men who, in
England as on the Continent, are the chief safeguard against the horrors
of a general European war. But as their number and responsibility
increase they will, I believe, have to learn some rather hard lessons as
to the intellectual conditions of representative government upon a large
scale. The town working man lives in a world in which it is very
difficult for him to choose his associates. If he is of an expansive
temperament, and it is such men who become politicians, he must take his
mates in the shop and his neighbours in the tenement house as he finds
them--and he sees them at very close range. The social virtue therefore
which is almost a necessity of his existence is a good-humoured
tolerance of the defects of average human nature. He is keenly aware of
the uncertainty of his own industrial position, accustomed to give and
receive help, and very unwilling to 'do' any man 'out of his job.' His
parents and grandparents read very little and he was brought up in a
home with few books. If, as he grows up, he does not himself read,
things beyond his direct observation are apt to be rather shadowy for
him, and he is easily made suspicious of that which he does not
understand. If, on the other hand, he takes to reading when he is
already a grown man, words and ideas are apt to have for him a kind of
abstract and sharply outlined reality in a region far removed from his
daily life.

Now the first virtue required in government is the habit of realising
that things whose existence we infer from reading are as important as
th