which Liberalism had developed.[48] It remained an atomic philosophy applicable to a world in which employer and worker confronted each other, as individuals, on equal terms. The assumption was unjustified; and the way lay open for the consolidation by Labour of its growing hold upon the workers. Liberalism remained a middle-class outlook, admirable in its exposition of basic principle, but incapable of adjusting principle to a medium with which its supporters were largely unacquainted. In an interesting passage[49] Lord Balfour has drawn attention to the fact that the success of the British Constitution in the nineteenth century--it is worth adding the general success of representative government--was built upon an agreement between parties in the state upon fundamental principles. There was, that is, a kindred outlook upon large issues; and since fighting was confined to matters of comparative detail, men were prepared to let reason have its sway in the realm of conflict. For it is significant that in the one realm where depth of feeling was passionate--Irish home rule--events moved rapidly to the test of the sword; and the settlement made was effected by violence and not by reason. That was the essence of the Russian problem. The effort to transform a dull and corrupt autocracy into a quasi-constitutional system came, like the efforts of Louis XVI at reform, too late to affect men who had already passed beyond any possibility of compromise with the idea of monarchical power. The concessions which the autocracy was prepared to offer did not touch the fringe of what the opposition regarded as nominal. Nor was that all. Post-war Russia illustrated admirably the truth of Mill’s insistence that “a state which dwarfs its men in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands, even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”[50] III