The point I am seeking to make was summarized with the insight of genius by Disraeli when he spoke of the rich and poor as in fact two nations. For the poor, their voluntary organizations evoke the same kind of impassioned loyalty as a nation struggling to be free is able to win from its members. Anyone who reads, for example, the early history of bodies like the miners’ unions, and seeks to measure the meaning of the sacrifices men were willing to make on their behalf, will realize that he is meeting precisely the same kind of temper as he can parallel from the history of the Italian struggle against Austria or of the Balkan fight against Turkish domination. What Keir Hardie did for the miners of Ayrshire, what Sidney Hillman has done for the garment workers of America, are as epic and as creative, in their way, as the work of Garibaldi and Mazzini. The latter must have seemed at Vienna just as wrong and as unwise as Keir Hardie seemed to the mineowners fifty years ago, or Hillman to the garment manufacturer accustomed, in the classic phrase, to “conduct his own business in his own way.” The point in each case is the important one that power is challenged in the interest of self-government; that the focal point of conflict is an inability on the part of those who govern to interpret the experience of their subjects as these read its meaning; with the result, again in each case, that the imposition of an interpretation from without leaves those upon whom it is imposed with the sense that their lives and their happiness are instruments and not ends. What is the outcome of it all? For me, at least, essentially that a society pervaded by the fact of unequality is bound to deny freedom and, therefore, to provoke conflict. Its values will be so distorted, its apparatus for magnifying that distortion so complete, that it is blinded to the realities which confront it. We do not need to go far for proof. The daily newspaper, the novel, the poet, all confirm it. Compare Macaulay’s glorification of Victorian progress with the picture in Carlyle’s _Chartism_, or Dickens’ _Hard Times_. Set the resounding complacency of Mr. Gladstone’s perorations against the indignant insight of William Morris and Ruskin. Think of the America of President Coleridge’s speeches, and the America as bitterly described by Mr Sinclair Lewis. Remember that Treitzschke’s eulogy of blood and iron is a picture of the same Germany as that which Bebel and Liebkneckt sought to overthrow. Guizot’s era of the _juste milieu_ is the period of Proudhon and Leroux, of Considerant and Louis Blanc, all of them, however mistakenly, the protagonists of a just society. Men think differently who live differently. If we have a society of unequals, how can we agree either about means or ends? And if this agreement is absent how can we, at least over a considerable period, hope to move on our way in peace?