This growth of the importance attached to economic problems has appeared sudden only to those who have been at once deaf to the warnings of history and without experience of personal hardship. The dangers once expected from extensions of the franchise had receded from the view of a plutocracy and a middle class, which had contemplated for twenty years a common people dazzled by visions of national greatness.[351] The clamour with which these disposing classes greeted the new democracy in 1906 expressed the natural dismay of those who had thought that they could always manage the people as they pleased, and now realized, in the presence of forty working men elected to the House of Commons, that the people were going to manage themselves. Gladstone's concentration upon Ireland had delayed this advent. But for his adoption of Home Rule, the new policy, already suggested by Mr. Chamberlain, would have been incorporated in practical Liberalism at least fifteen years earlier. It was not made less ominous by the postponement. Economic discontent was both more bitter and more articulate in 1906 than it would have been in 1891. The Trade Unions had been roused by hostile judicial decisions. The political organizations of workmen were perfected, and the Trade Unions and the Independent Labour Party worked in harmony. The workmen formed a distinct party of their own, and several of their {328} representatives were of definitely Socialist opinions. Outside the working classes the public mind had been directed more and more to the study of industrial problems. The Fabian Society had been active for twenty years, and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb were only the most industrious of the many investigators who were establishing a historical and scientific case for reform. All this improvement of machinery marched with an increase in actual distress. The war added not only to the temporary, but also to the permanent burdens of the poor, and not merely by accumulating debt, but by increasing the expenditure on armaments which an immoral policy required for its defence. The dislocation of industry, which always follows a war, had brought insecurity to many and destitution to not a few. Casual labour was more general, and sweating not less than at any previous period. In every direction distress and discontent had increased, and the political machinery was now adapted to the direct and articulate expression of the feelings of the common people. The Parliament of 1906 represented the desire of the masses to fit their conditions of life to their own capacity for growth.