bored; the mother perplexed with the difficulty of cramped lodgings and extortionate prices. But the children are in a magic world, crowding the seashore, full of the elements of delight and happy laughter. The rich despise the Working People; the Middle Classes fear them. Fear, stimulated by every artifice of clever political campaigners, is the motive power behind each successive uprising. In feverish hordes, the suburbs swarm to the polling booth to vote against a truculent Proletariat. The Middle Class elector is becoming irritated and indignant against working-class legislation. He is growing tired of the plaint of the unemployed and the insistent crying of the poor. The spectacle of a Labour Party triumphant in the House of Commons, with a majority of members of Parliament apparently obedient to the demands of its leaders, and even a House of Lords afraid of it, fills him with profound disgust. The vision of a “Keir Hardie” in caricature--with red tie and defiant beard and cloth cap, and fierce, unquenchable thirst for Middle Class property--has become an image of Labour Triumphant which haunts his waking hours. He has difficulty with the plumber in jerry-built houses needing continuous patching and mending. His wife is harassed by the indifference or insolence of the domestic servant. From a blend of these two he has constructed in imagination the image of Democracy--a loud-voiced, independent, arrogant figure, with a thirst for drink, and imperfect standards of decency, and a determination to be supported at some one else’s expense. Every day, swung high upon embankments or buried deep in tubes underground, he hurries through the region where the creature lives. He gazes darkly from his pleasant hill villa upon the huge and smoky area of tumbled tenements which stretches at his feet. He is dimly distrustful of the forces fermenting in this uncouth laboratory. Every hour he anticipates the boiling over of the cauldron. He would never be surprised to find the crowd behind the red flag, surging up his little pleasant pathways, tearing down the railings, trampling the little garden; the “letting in of the jungle” upon the patch of fertile ground which has been redeemed from the wilderness. And whatever may be the future, the present he finds sufficiently intolerable. The people of the hill are heavily taxed (as he thinks) in order that the people of the plain may enjoy good education, cheap trams, parks, and playgrounds; even (as in the frantic vision of some newspapers) that they may be taught Socialism in Sunday schools, with parodies of remembered hymns. And the taxes thus extorted--this, perhaps, is the heart of the complaint--are all going to make his own life harder, to make life more difficult for his children. The man of forty has already sounding in his ears the noise of the clamour of the coming generations. And these coming generations, who are going to push him roughly out of his occupation,