The Chancellor of the Exchequer here bids for Labor's political support on the plea that what he was doing for Labor meant an expense and not a profit to the middle class, and that these reforms would only be assented to by that class as the necessary price of the Labor vote. I have shown grounds for believing that the chief motives of the new reforms have nothing to do with the Labor vote. However much Mr. Lloyd George, as a political manager, may desire to control that vote, he knows he can do without it, as long as it is cast _against_ the Tories. The Liberals will hold the balance of power, and their small capitalist followers will continue to carry out their capitalistic progressive and collectivist program--even without a Labor alliance. Nor does he fear that even the most radical of reforms, whether economic or political, will enable Labor to seize a larger share of the national income or of political power. On the contrary, he predicted in 1906 that it would be a generation before Labor could even hope to be sufficiently united to take the first step in Socialism. "Does any one believe," he asked, "that within a generation, to put it at the very lowest, we are likely to see in power a party pledged forcibly to nationalize land, railways, mines, quarries, factories, workshops, warehouses, shops, and all and every agency for the production and distribution of wealth? I say again, within a generation? He who entertains such hopes must indeed be a sanguine and simple-minded Socialist."[45] Mr. Lloyd George sought the support of Labor then, not because it was all-powerful, but because, for a generation at least, it seemed doomed to impotence--except as an aid to the Liberals. The logic of his position was really not that Labor ought to get a price for its political support, but that _having no immediate alternative_, being unable to form a majority either alone or with any other element than the Liberals, they should accept gladly anything that was offered, for example, a material reform like his Insurance bill--even though this measure is at bottom and in the long run purely capitalistic in its tendency. And this is practically what Labor in Great Britain has done. It has supported a government all of whose acts strengthen capitalism in its new collectivist form, both economically and politically. And even if some day an isolated measure should be found to prove an exception, it would still remain true that the present policies _considered as a whole_ are carrying the country rapidly and uninterruptedly in the direction of State Capitalism. And this is equally true of every other country, whether France, Germany, Australia, or the United States, where the new reform program is being put into execution.