The increasing apprehension of this contrast, and the increasing consequential effort at readjustment, will furnish the guiding thread to the various political and social changes of the twentieth century. It will influence and control the rise and fall of political parties, each doing the work all unconsciously of forces which it does not understand. It will lead in various ways, and through all oppositions and reactions, towards an organised society profoundly differing from our own. CHAPTER V PRISONERS I The surface view of society is always satisfactory. You may walk to-day through the streets of a Russian city, and watch the people at their business and their pleasure, with no revelation of the unseen hunger for change which is tearing at the heart of it. You may traverse England from north to south and east to west, admiring the beauty of its garden landscape, the refined kindly life of its country houses, the opulence and contentment of its middle class, the evidence everywhere of security and repose. Only at intervals, and through challenges which (after all) are easily forgotten, is there thrust before the attention of the observer some manifestation of the life of the underworld. The sea shines and sparkles in the sunshine beneath an unclouded sky. Why excite disquietude concerning the twisted, distorted life which lives and grows and dies in the darkness of the unplumbed deep? To investigate the life there, it is no longer necessary to follow the romantic novelist or even the private statistician. All these may be under the charge of sensationalism, of writing to a purpose. They excite impatience amongst outside critics, who are convinced that the poor could all be prosperous if they would only work industriously, exercise thought, and avoid alcoholic refreshment. It would be well, therefore, to keep to the safe sobriety of official publications, to all those series of Commissions, Committees, Reports, and Inquiries which, outwardly forbidding, are found on examination to be filled with a rich human interest. Any one familiar with the reports of the Government Inspectors appointed to control the forces of greed and of degeneration in the obscurer regions of modern life, need never be accused of hysteria if he finds the thing henceforth a perpetual companion.