energy and proffered devotion in an agitation for the vote. Sixpenny reprints of proof or disproof of religion, the world’s classics in neat shilling volumes, sevenpenny novels, and a variety of printed matter are irrigating the suburbs with a fresh flood of literature. It is not impossible to conceive of a time when a Middle Class will definitely build up a standard of its own: no longer turning to a wealthy and leisured company above it for effective imitation of a life to which it is unsuited. Becoming conscious, for the first time, that it possesses elements to contribute to the stream of national life which can be provided neither by the rich nor the poor, it may gain that collective respect and pride in itself which it has not yet achieved. Abandoning its panic fear of the industrial peoples, it may find itself treating with them as an equal, exacting terms in return for its alliance. At best it may even resist the stampedes of those who find the support of the “Middle Classes” always easily obtainable for an agitation against the Income Tax or in favour of municipal reaction, or for any system which will “broaden the basis of taxation” by shifting it from the shoulders of the rich to the shoulders of the poor. This fissure in the alliance between the Middle Class and the wealthy--the most absurd and irrational of all alliances, in which the advantage is all sucked by the one, and the burden borne by the other--would long ago have been demanded by the suburbans themselves but for one remarkable element in their present condition. Revolution, or at least vigorous progress, may always be predicted when in the case of any particular class the standard of comfort is permanently beating against a limitation of income, and permanently in revolt against such limitation. Such a conflict seemed inevitable a few years ago in the case of the Middle Classes. The “intellectual proletariat” was evidently being created, which could never obtain full satisfaction for its desires. It would fret always at its limitations. Its fretting would become vocal in a clamorous demand for economic change. And the “intellectual proletariat” has been the historic leader of all political and social revolutions. The process of its creation, however, seems likely to be checked, and in a curious fashion. The pressure is being reduced, not by any lowering of the standard of comfort demanded by the individual, for that is steadily rising in suburban England, but by the limitation of the family, pursued as a deliberate method of adjusting expenditure to income. The headlong collapse in the birth-rate of this country during the past twenty years--a fall greater than that in any other nation in Europe--is a collapse to which all classes save the very poorest are probably contributors. There are no exact figures available, of allocation to one section rather than to another. But there is much to indicate that this decline has gone