"Rats!" observe the Extreme Left; "all that ramp was exposed long ago--ruling class and Parliament, and all of it. Turn down aristocracy and democracy, too, and put your money on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and----" At which the poor tax-paying proletarian looks up with a gleam of hope and asks if he may begin dictating now. With a pitying smile the Extreme Left explains that it is to be named his dictatorship, but that it will be exercised not by him but by the Proper Persons. Will he elect them? he asks. Oh, no; that would be mere _bourgeois_ Liberalism, quite out of date. Well, he asks, how is he to feel sure that they will do what he wants? Can he doubt it?--he is reproachfully asked. Does he not see that men ruling only as dictators for the whole nation, men serving only their country and no grubby individual employer or caucus, will and must be fired, at once and for ever, with a new spirit of devotion, wisdom, purity, humanity, and love such as was never yet seen on earth--indeed, could not be seen on it while its surface was defaced with Houses of Parliament and joint-stock mills? At this point the demobilized business man is likely to go out sorrowfully, reflecting that thanks to the war he has known, in turn, what it is to be one of the rulers, and what it is to be one of the ruled, in a community where the people below have no hold on the people above, and where the people above are pricked by no coarser spur than their own pure zeal for the best of causes in the sorest of its straits. Communism delights him not, nor Toryism either. Nor, indeed, any other political creed of all those that he knows. Liberals he has, perhaps, come to figure as sombre and dry, all-round prohibitors, humanitarians but not humanists, people with democratic principles but not democratic sympathies, uncomradelike lovers of man, preaching the brotherhood of nations but not knowing how to speak without offence to a workman from their own village. The Labour Party, indeed, he may feel to be, as yet, not wholly damned, but chiefly because it has never been tried at the big job. Its leaders have not, like the Liberal and Conservative chiefs, to answer for any grand public triumphs of incapacity like the diplomacy that gave Bulgaria and Turkey to Germany. Labour has not the name of Gallipoli to wear on its party colours; the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_ did not escape with it at the Admiralty; none of its leaders intrigued with any general against his superiors; it did not turn Ireland's offered help into enmity in the hour of need. What of that, though? Liberals and Conservatives, too, might not have failed yet if they had not been tested. As likely as not that the Labour chiefs, too, would show, at a pinch, the old vice of the others--live and act in a visionary world of their own, the world as they would have liked to have it, not the world in which rough work and fighting and starving go on and the people who make it go round are not politicians.