Poverty is to a large extent the cause of this weakness in self-government and of the consequent danger to the nation. People whose minds have been crushed under the daily anxiety about the daily bread have little thought for any object but “how to live,” and thus they are apt to lose the power of vision. They see money as the only good, and they are disposed to measure beauty, tradition, and work in its terms. The pictures of “the happy homes of England” and the tales of her greatness have for them little meaning. “What are our homes that we should fight for them?” “What has England done for us?” The welfare of the nation is nothing alongside that of their own class; their chief want is security from starvation. Some conception of the nation as a whole is necessary to kindle interest in self-government, and modern poverty is gradually blotting out the old conception which grew up when people loved the countryside, where the fields laughed and sang with corn and the cottages nestled in gardens, and when they had leisure to enjoy the tales of their fathers’ great deeds. Some knowledge is also necessary if those who give votes have to decide on policies which affect international relations, and hold firmly to principles in dark as well as in bright times. But how can the men and women have such knowledge who have been driven by the poverty of their homes to go to work as children, and have had no leisure in which to read history or to dream dreams? Of course they vacillate and of course they fall victims to shallow philosophy. The people, in a word, because of poverty, are not free. They are “cogs in a great machine which uses human lives as the raw stuff out of which to fashion material wealth”. They are by fear of starvation compelled to be instruments of production almost as much as if they were under a law of slavery. They do not live for an end in themselves, but for an end for which others desire to use them. The poverty of the multitude of workpeople, which limits their capacities for enjoyment and for self-government, and is divided only by a very thin partition from the destitution of squalor and starvation, is, I believe, the chief source of our present discontent, and of the bitterness which makes that discontent dangerous. The “cares of this life” equally with “the deceitfulness of riches” are apt to choke that communion with an ideal which is the source of healthy progress.