there are countervailing considerations. There is, it
is said, a tendency in Plutocracies either to become unprogressive,
unenterprising and stagnantly autocratic, or to develop states of
stress and discontent, and so drift towards Caesarism. The latter was
the fate of the Roman Republic, and may perhaps be the destiny of the
budding young Plutocracy of America. But the developing British
Plutocracy, like the Carthaginian, will be largely Semitic in blood,
and like the Carthaginian may resist these insurgent tendencies.

So much for the Plutocratic possibility. If the middle-class man on
any account does not like that outlook, he can turn in the other
direction; and then he will find fine promises indeed, but much more
uncertainty than towards Plutocracy. Plutocracies the world has seen
before, but a democratic civilization organized upon the lines laid
down by modern Socialists would be a new beginning in the world's
history. It is not a thing that will come about by itself; it will
have to be the outcome of a sustained moral and intellectual effort in
the community. If there is not that effort, if things go on as they
are going now, the coming of a Plutocracy is inevitable. That effort,
I am convinced, cannot be successfully made by the lower-class man
alone; from him, unaided and unguided, there is nothing to be expected
but wild convulsive attempts at social upheaval, which, whether they
succeed (as the French Revolution did) or fail (as did the
insurrectionary outbreaks of the Republic in Rome), lead ultimately to
a Napoleon or a Caesar. But our contemporary civilization is
unprecedented in the fact that the whole population now reads, and
that intelligence and free discussion saturate the whole mass. Only
time can show what possibilities of understanding, leadership, and
political action lie in our new generation of the better-educated
middle class. Will it presently begin to define a line for itself?
Will it remain disorganized and passive, or will it become intelligent
and decisive between these millstones of the organized property and
the organizing State, between Plutocracy and Socialism, whose
opposition is the supreme social and political fact in the world at
the present time?

Sec. 2.

Perhaps, also, it may be helpful here to insert a view of the
contemporary possibilities of Socialism from a rather different angle,
a view that follows on to the matter of the previous section, but
appeals to a differ