ive scheme with an electorate
of men who are being slowly submerged in an economic bog?

The process that has brought the middle class into these troubles is a
complex one, but the essential thing about it seems to be this, that
there is a _change of scale_ going on in most human affairs, a
substitution of big organizations for detached individual effort
almost everywhere. A hundred and fifty years ago or so the only very
rich people in the community were a handful of great landowners and a
few bankers; the rest of the world's business was being done by small
prosperous independent men. The labourers were often very poor and
wretched, ill clad, bootless, badly housed and short of food, but
there was nevertheless a great deal of middle-class comfort and
prosperity. The country was covered with flourishing farmers, every
country town was a little world in itself, with busy tradespeople and
professional men; manufacturing was still done mainly by small people
employing a few hands, master and apprentice working together; in
every town you found a private school or so, an independent doctor and
the like, doing well in a mediocre, comfortable fashion. All the
carrying trade was in the hands of small independent carriers; the
shipping was held by hundreds of small shipowners. And London itself
was only a larger country town. It was, in effect, a middle-class
world ruled over by aristocrats; the millstones had as yet scarcely
stirred.

Then machinery came into the lives of men, and steam power, and there
began that change of scale which is going on still to-day, making an
ever-widening separation of master and man and an ever-enlarging
organization of industry and social method. Its most striking
manifestation was at first the substitution of organized manufacture
in factories for the half-domestic hand-industrialism of the earlier
period; the growth of the fortunes of some of the merchants and
manufacturers to dimensions comparable with the wealth of the great
landowners, and the sinking of the rest of their class towards the
status of wage-earners. The development of joint-stock enterprise
arose concurrently with this to create a new sort of partnership
capable of handling far greater concerns than any single wealthy
person, as wealth was measured by the old scale, could do. There
followed a great development of transit, culminating for a time in the
coming of the railways and steamships, which abolished the isolation
of