Especially is it to be noted, however, that the circumstances which have developed this great problem have not arisen, like many other political problems, from injustice or mismanagement in the past, or from any causes tending to provoke mutual recrimination. Through the simple processes of growth and change, the conditions which satisfied the demands of national life in the past have become insufficient to satisfy its necessities for the future. Nothing could possibly be more helpful for the solution of the question than this fact, that men are able to approach it entirely free from party feuds and local animosities. Why, it may be asked, have not the inconsistency and the temporary character of the existing national system been all along obvious to every one? Why does the public attention require to be directed to facts so manifest? Perhaps the best answer is to be found in the wonderful rapidity of the changes which have been going on, and the intense {23} absorption of British people, both at home and abroad, in the actual processes of national evolution, which left no time for studying their indirect results. Within the last century, and mainly within the last half century, the United Kingdom has passed through the most strenuous period of industrial development known in the history of nations. The social system has been revolutionized by an extraordinary increment of wealth, an immense increase of population, and its concentration in towns, with all the difficult problems which these changes involve. Political thought has had enough to do to adjust the balance between decreasing rural and increasing urban constituencies--to meet the wants of a democracy advancing in prosperity and intelligence, to maintain an equilibrium between new and conflicting forces. Moral effort has been strained to the utmost in dealing with education, sanitation, social reformation, and kindred questions, a deepening sense of public responsibility in such matters going hand in hand with an almost paralyzing increase in the masses to be dealt with. Under such circumstances it is scarcely to be wondered at that British people within the United Kingdom have been too much absorbed in what was directly before them to weigh carefully the results of what was going on abroad; that even when most active in external as well as internal affairs they seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.' {24}