But none the less, the fatal overcrowding which he foresaw, the self-divestment by Mammon of direct and immediate responsibilities, has produced a fresh class of the “sweated” and rookeried masses, multiplying the unemployed and--what is worse--the unemployable in compound ratio, and still menacing the physique of the nation. The pressure of poverty is ever with us; of its wretchedness research has indeed called forth a science. As what we deemed the lowest ascends, a fresh depth of distress is always bared to our shame. The democratisation of local government through the county councils has indeed done much, and will do more, for the proletariate; but their lack, with notable exceptions, of high leadership, their tendency to municipal centralisation, their careless and inexperienced prodigality with the public purse, their bias towards pauperisation, their tendency to promote the feverish political ambitions of a class, and sometimes to confuse the cause of industry with that of its captains, remain a danger, though, I believe, a vanishing danger, to the State. * * * * * Disraeli’s earliest novel--one of the books “written by boys,” vague in its restlessness and untamed in its dazzling extravagance, contains in its episode of “Poor John Conyers” the germ of that genuine sympathy with Labour which he afterwards more seriously developed. Apart from his human instincts and from his desire for a real national unity, it was founded on his contempt for the merely mechanical or formal in society; and in 1845, on that tour of experience in Lancashire which brought home to him anew the terrible gulf between “the two nations” of rich and poor, and which the pathos, the humour, the wit and the thought of _Sybil_ have immortalised. Few that have read _Coningsby_ will forget the vivid impressions of Manchester machinery in its pages. They are, perhaps, too familiar for quotation, and I prefer here to cite some sentences from _Sybil_.