proposal for reform. Hence he seems on the
platform less belated than the nineteenth century Liberal with his
stock of shop-soiled principles at full price."[638] "In many people's
minds the terms 'Liberalism' and 'insincerity' are held to be
synonymous. Lacking a central idea of its own, and necessarily failing
to nourish on borrowed ones, there is nothing before the Liberal party
but decay. For progress in the future we must look to a party which
has an ideal and is prepared to stand by it."[639]

Before the general election of 1906 Socialists wrote: "The political
force of Liberalism is spent. During the last twenty years its
aspirations and its watchwords, its ideas of daily life, and its
conceptions of the universe, have become increasingly distasteful to
the ordinary citizen as he renews his youth from generation to
generation. Its worship of individual liberty evokes no enthusiasm.
Its reliance on 'freedom of contract' and 'supply and demand,' with
its corresponding 'voluntaryism' in religion and philanthropy, now
seems to work out disastrously for the masses who are too poor to have
what the economists call an 'effective demand' for even the minimum
conditions of physical and mental health necessary to national
well-being."[640] "For the last twenty years the Liberal party has
been trying to fit itself with a new programme. It took up Home Rule
for Ireland, but found that split the party; it took up temperance
reform, quite a deviation from its old policy of individual liberty,
and again found itself divided; it avowed friendliness to Labour, and
frightened off still another batch of supporters. The Party of
Progress finds itself now in the unhappy position that its basic idea
is old-fashioned, and when it tries to assimilate a new one it becomes
a case of putting new wine into old bottles. That is the sad plight of
the Liberal party. The party is merely living from hand to mouth as an
anti-Tory party, hoping to profit by the mistakes of its rival. The
party has split up on temperance, on labour, on the war, on
Imperialism, on education, simply because there is no central
vivifying ideal to bind together and shape the policy. Can the party
adopt a new ideal? is the great question. Can it drop its fundamental
idea of individualism and take up the idea of co-operation? and the
answer is emphatically 'No.'"[641]

The philosopher of British Socialism thinks that, owing to the
principles and attitude of the Libera