In a parliamentarian State like ours, the economic cleavage, which divides the proprietors from the propertyless, ever growing wider and more clearly defined, must have its analogue in the world of politics. The revolution of the last century, which ended in the installation of the Grand Industry, was the last of the great unconscious world changes. It was helped by legislation of course; but the help was only of the negative and destructive sort. “Break our fetters and let us alone,” was the cry of the revolutionists to Parliament. The lawmakers, not knowing quite what they were doing, responded, and then blythely contracted debts, and voted money for commercial wars. Such a sight will never be seen again. The repeated extension of the suffrage has done more than make the industrial masses articulate, it has given them consciousness; and for the future the echo of the voices of those who suffer from economic changes will be heard clamoring for relief within the walls of St. Stephen’s and the urban guildhalls. Thus the coming struggle between “haves” and “have nots” will be a conflict of parties, each perfectly conscious of what it is fighting about and fully alive to the life and death importance of the issues at stake. I say “will be”; for one has only to read a few speeches of political leaders or attend a discussion at a workman’s club to be convinced that at present it is only the keener and more alert minds on either side which are more than semi-conscious of the true nature of the campaign of which the first shots may even now be heard at every bye-election. But as nothing makes one so entirely aware of one’s own existence as a sharp spasm of pain; so it is to the suffering--the hunger, the despair of to-morrow’s dinner, the anxiety about the next new pair of trousers--wrought by the increasing economic pressure upon the enfranchised and educated proletariat that we must look to awaken that free self-consciousness which will give the economic changes political expression and enable the worker to make practical use of the political weapons which are his.