We have then the fact, rather paradoxical at first sight, that the dominant class in a competitive society, although unstable as to its individual membership, may well be more secure as a whole than the corresponding class under any other system—precisely because it continually draws into itself most of the natural ability from the other classes. Throughout English history, we are told, the salvation of the aristocracy has been its comparative openness, the fact that ability could percolate into it, instead of rising up behind it like water behind a dam, as was the case in pre-revolutionary France. And the same principle is working even more effectually in our own economic order. A great weakness of the trades-union movement, as of all attempts at self-assertion on the part of the less privileged classes, is that it is constantly losing able leaders. As soon as a man shows that marked capacity which would fit him to do something for his fellows, it is ten to one that he accepts a remunerative position, and so passes into the upper class. It is increasingly the practice—perhaps in some degree the deliberate policy—of organized wealth to win over in this way the more promising leaders from the side of labor; and this is one respect in which a greater class-consciousness and loyalty on the part of the latter would add to its strength. Thus it is possible to have freedom to rise and yet have at the same time a miserable and perhaps degraded lower class—degraded because the social system is administered with little regard to its just needs. This is more the case with our own industrial system, and with modern society in general, than our self-satisfaction commonly perceives. Our one-sided ideal of freedom, excellent so far as it goes, has somewhat blinded us to the encroachments of slavery on an unguarded flank. I mean such things as bad housing, insecurity, excessive and deadening work, child labor and the lack of any education suited to the industrial masses—the last likely to be remedied now that it is seen to threaten industrial prosperity. It is hard to say how much of the timidity noticeable in the discussion of questions of this sort by the comfortable classes is due to a vague dread of anarchy and spoliation by an organized and self-conscious lower class; but probably a good deal. If power, under democracy, goes with numbers, and the many are poor, it would seem at first glance that they would despoil the few. To conservative thinkers a hundred, or even fifty, years ago this seemed almost an axiom, but a less superficial philosophy has combined with experience to show that anarchy, in Mr. Bryce’s words, “is of all dangers or bugbears the one which the modern world has least cause to fear.”[123]