Sixty years ago, Disraeli described the rich and poor of England as two nations. To-day, even national distinctions seem less estranging than the fissure between the summit and basis of society. “Their civilisations are not two stages of the same civilisation, but two civilisations, two traditions which have grown up concurrently.” And a similar testimony is expressed by many who have intimate and first-hand knowledge of the life of the hand worker. “The more one sees of the poor in their own homes,” is the verdict of Miss Loane, a witness of varied and peculiar experience, “the more one becomes convinced that their ethical views, taken as a whole, can be more justly described as different from those of the upper classes than as better or worse.” Most present-day failures in legislation and social experiment are due to neglect of this fact. It has been assumed that the artisan is but a stunted or distorted specimen of the small tradesman; with the same ideals, the same aspirations, the same limitations: demanding the same moulding towards the fashioning of a completed product. We are gradually learning that “the people of England” are as different from, and as unknown to, the classes that investigate, observe, and record, as the people of China or Peru. Living amongst us and around us, never becoming articulate, finding even in their directly elected representatives types remote from their own, these people grow and flourish and die, with their own codes of honour, their special beliefs and moralities, their judgment and often their condemnation of the classes to whom has been given leisure and material advantage. The line is cut clean by both parties, neither desiring to occupy the territory of the other. “There is not one high wall, but two high walls, between the classes and the masses,” declares this witness; “and that erected in self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to climb.”