If at the time of the Coal Strike we had inquired what English plays had recently called forth the most criticism and interest in intellectual circles, we should probably have named, first, Mr. Galsworthy's _Justice_, and secondly, his _Strife_. The latter was concerned with a situation exactly similar to that developed by the Coal Strike. The action of the drama took place in the middle of a great strike. Mr. Galsworthy presented typical characters representing owners and men, both acting on principle, both determined and irreconcilable, stubborn and loyal, both betraying human qualities fundamentally the same. I am not for the moment concerned with the conclusion drawn by the dramatist, but with the fact that the serious attention which is given to modern literature and drama is the same sort of attention as that given to the great social questions of our time. 2. To search for hidden unities in the literature of an age is often to distort facts in the interest of theory. But there may come a point--and I think the most notable literature of the year preceding the Coal Strike marks such a point--when certain salient facts emerge so violently and so repeatedly from the written page that no one but the blindest can ignore or deny them. If one should take six books written in that period by six authors who are fairly representative of contemporary English literature--E.M. Forster, Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Granville Barker, Bernard Shaw, and John Galsworthy--there would be found one truth about them so obvious that it has been remarked by dozens of reviewers. It is that they are concerned with the same social problems as those which fall under the science of sociology; that they advocate, criticise, or imply reforms scarcely less directly than do those for whom social reform is a profession.