readjustment of national life.

And having made this parenthesis, I may perhaps go on to point out the
peculiar limitations under which various classes will be approaching the
phase of reorganisation, without being accused of making this or that
class the villain of an anticipatory drama.

Now, three great classes will certainly resist the valiant
reconstruction of economic life with a vigour in exact proportion to
their baseness, stupidity and narrowness of outlook. They will, as
classes, come up for a moral judgment, on whose verdict the whole future
of Western civilisation depends. If they cannot achieve a considerable,
an unprecedented display of self-sacrifice, unselfish wisdom, and
constructive vigour, if the community as a whole can produce no forces
sufficient to restrain their lower tendencies, then the intelligent
father had better turn his children's faces towards the New World. For
Europe will be busy with social disorder for a century.

The first great class is the class that owns and holds land and
land-like claims upon the community, from the Throne downward. This
Court and land-holding class cannot go on being rich and living rich
during the strains of the coming years. The reconstructing world cannot
bear it. Whatever rises in rent may occur through the rise in prices,
must go to meet the tremendous needs of the State.

This class, which has so much legislative and administrative power in at
least three of the great belligerents--in Great Britain and Germany
perhaps most so--must be prepared to see itself taxed, and must be
willing to assist in its own taxation to the very limit of its
statistical increment. The almost vindictive greed of the landowners
that blackened the history of England after Waterloo, and brought Great
Britain within sight of revolution, must not be repeated. The British
Empire cannot afford a revolution in the face of the Central European
Powers. But in the past century there has been an enormous change in
men's opinions and consciences about property; whereas we were
Individualists, now we are Socialists. The British lord, the German
junker, has none of the sense of unqualified rights that his
great-grandfather had, and he is aware of a vigour of public criticism
that did not exist in the former time....

How far will these men get out of the tradition of their birth and
upbringing?

Next comes the great class of lawyers who, through the idiotic method of
voting in use in