I conclude, therefore, that the factor of consent is not likely effectively to operate in any society where there is a serious unequality of economic condition; and I assume, further, that the absence of such consent is, in the long run, fatal to social peace. I do not deny that men will long postpone their protest against that absence; there are few wrongs to which men do not become habituated by experience, few, therefore, which, after the long passage of time, they will not be persuaded are inherent in nature. But such habituation is never permanent; sooner or later someone arises, like the child in the fairy-story, to point out that in fact the emperor is naked. If attention is drawn to some need which is widely experienced, the denial that the need is real by those who have not experienced it, will not prove effective. Workingmen never found it easy to believe that long hours of work or low wages were the essential conditions of industrial leadership in the nineteenth century. Few Nonconformists sympathized with Burke’s attitude to parliamentary reform. Few American trade unionists see in the use of the injunction by the courts a method of preserving social peace in terms of a strict impartiality between capital and labour. Opponents of Mussolini are not moved by his plea that he thinks only of the well-being of Italy. Russian working-men have probably been often tempted to the view that their Bolshevik masters mistake Communist dogma for social truth. To satisfy experience, in short, we must weigh experience as we move to the making of decisions. We cannot rule it out because it is not ours; that is the error of autocracy which insists upon the _a priori_ rightness of its own experience. We have to regard experience as significant in itself and seek to come to terms with it. If it is mistaken in the implications it assumes, we have to convince it of its error. Our business, hard as it is, is the discovery of that need in the experience which must be satisfied if successful government is to be possible. For successful government is simply government which satisfies the largest possible area of demand. It is not mysterious or divine. It is simply a body of men making decisions which, in the long run, live or die by what other men think of them. Their validity as decisions is in that thought if only because its content is born of what the decisions mean to ourselves. All of us are inescapably citizens, and, at some point, therefore, the privacy in which we seek escape from our obligation as citizens, will seem unsatisfying. A crisis comes which touches us; a decision is made which contradicts something we happen to have experienced as fundamental; we then judge our rulers by the fact of that denial, and act as we think its terms warrant.