Not only is the present in its resistance to the future secure in its own armies and entrenchments. It is continually trafficking--and successfully--with the forces of the invader, purchasing them in single spies and in battalions. Every reform, successfully effected, transfers whole divisions and army corps from the attacking to the defending army. The giving of old age pensions, for example, at one stroke swings half a million aged persons passionately on the side of the _status quo_, passionately against any upheaval which would jeopardise, or might be thought to jeopardise, the regular reckonable dole of two half-crowns per week. And amongst individuals, nine out of ten at least of the men who would be competent to lead a movement towards change are to-day immediately caught up in the huge machine and provided outlet for their ambitions within a tangible and realisable present. How many potential Labour leaders and Socialists, through the operation of the huge sieve-net of the new scholarship system, are being swept into secondary schools from working-class homes? and thence, as clerks in great businesses, through university training, in subsequent Government or private employment, destined to be firmly cemented into the fabric of the present social order? Even the Labour leader, if successful, tends to become conservative, to despise the material he once organised, the masses of unskilled labour, as scattered dust or crumbling snow. But the great majority of the children of ability in the industrial classes are being intercepted before the opportunity of becoming “Labour leaders” will arise. Their energies are being deflected from politics into commercial or industrial enterprise. Socialism seems destined to be left to the idealist and the economic failure, to the man with ready tongue and little stable capacity for work, like the “Masterman” so cruelly portrayed in Mr. Wells’s “Kipps,” to the reformer who revolts from the harsh operation of present law, but finds no allies except a proletariat from which the intelligence has been steadily drained in early boyhood. We seem destined to pass from the antithesis of the class war--the rich against the poor--to the antithesis which Nietzsche foresaw many years ago--the Many against the Few; the demands of incapacity to share in the benefits created by the competent. It is under such circumstances that the very sombre architecture of the present seem to smile down derisive indulgence at the vapourings and pleadings of those who still hope to change the world a little. The infant, says Mr. Whiteing in _The Yellow Van_, was blowing lustily upon a tin whistle as the van of the land reformers passed under the walls of Allonby Castle. “Nothing happened to the walls.”