ed
industries" can be cut off from the main body, or restored to some
measure of health. The State can set up a minimum standard of health
and wage, below which it will not allow its citizens to sink; it can
step in and dispense employment and restorative force under strictly
specified conditions, to a small body of more or less "sick" workers;
it can supply security for a far greater, less dependent, and more
efficient mass of labourers, in recurring crises of accident,
sickness, invalidity, and unemployment, and can do so with every hope
of enlisting in its service voluntary forces and individual virtues of
great value.

This is not a problem of "relief," it is a method of humanity, and its
aim is not merely to increase the mechanical force of the State, but
to raise the average of character, of _morale_, in its citizens. Nor
do these speeches represent only a batch of platform promises. The
great scheme of social betterment preached in these pages is already
embodied in half a dozen Acts of Parliament, with corresponding
organisations in the Board of Trade and elsewhere; and if the Budget
passes, the crown can be put upon them next year or the year after by
measures of insurance against invalidity and unemployment.

Mr. Churchill's second proposition is the correlative of the first.
How shall this imposing fabric of industrial security be reared and
made safe? The answer is, by modifying, without vitally changing, the
basis of taxation. The workman cannot be asked to pay for everything,
as under Protection he must pay. In any case, he must pay for
something. But if he is asked for too much, the sources of physical
efficiency are drained, and the main purpose of the new
Liberalism--the ideal of an educated, hopeful, and vigorous people--is
destroyed. Now Liberalism, in ceasing to rely on indirect taxation as
its main source of revenue, has opened up for contribution not merely
the superfluities of society, the "accumulations of profit," as Mr.
Churchill calls them, but those special forms of wealth which are
"social" in origin, which depend on some monopoly of material agents,
on means not of helping the community but of hindering it, not of
enriching its powers and resources, but of depleting them for private
advantage. In other words, the State in future will increasingly ask
the taxpayer not only "What have you got?" but "How did you get it?"
No one contends that such an analysis can be perfect; but, on the
othe