[95] Such capitulations occur already when the Chancellor of the Exchequer takes advantage of the fall in the current rate of interest (explained on page 20) to reduce Consols. This he does by simply threatening to pay off the stockholders with money freshly borrowed at the current rate. They, knowing that they could not reinvest the money on any better terms than the reduced ones offered by the Chancellor, have to submit. There is no reason why the municipalities should not secure the same advantages for their constituents. For example, the inhabitants of London now pay the shareholders of the gas companies a million and a half annually, or 11 per cent on the £13,650,000 which the gas works cost. The London County Council could raise that sum for about £400,000 a year. By threatening to do this and start municipal gas works, it could obviously compel the shareholders to hand over their works for £400,000 a year, and sacrifice the extra 8 per cent now enjoyed by them. The saving to the citizens of London would be £1,000,000 a year, sufficient to defray the net cost of the London School Board. Metropolitan readers will find a number of cognate instances in Fabian Tract No. 8, “Facts for Londoners.” THE OUTLOOK. BY HUBERT BLAND. Mr. Webb’s historical review brought us from the “break up of the old synthesis” (his own phrase), a social system founded on a basis of religion, a common belief in a divine order, to the point where perplexed politicians, recognising the futility of the principle of Individualism to keep the industrial machine in working order, with “freedom of contract” upon their lips spent their nights in passing Factory Acts, and devoted their fiscal ingenuity to cutting slice after slice off incomes derived from rent and interest. His paper was an inductive demonstration of the failure of anarchy to meet the needs of real concrete men and women--a proof from history that the world moves from system, through disorder, back again to system. Mr. Clarke showed us, also by the historic method, that given a few more years of economic progress on present lines, and we shall reach, _via_ the Ring and the Trust, that period of “well defined confrontation of the rich and poor” upon which German thought has settled as the brief stage of sociological evolution immediately preceding organic change.