Meanwhile Socialist societies were growing up among students of Karl Marx’s famous exposure of the sins of Capitalism, and of a very widely circulated book called Progress and Poverty, written by an American named Henry George, who had seen within his own lifetime American villages, where people were neither poor enough to be degraded and miserable nor rich enough to be idle and extravagant, changed by the simple operation of private property in land and capital into cities of fabulous wealth, so badly divided that the mass of the people were weltering in shocking poverty whilst a handful of owners wallowed in millions. These Societies broke the tradition of proletarian attachment to the Liberal Party by making the workers what Marx called class-conscious, a phrase which the Intelligent Woman has probably met several times in the papers without knowing any more clearly than the newspaper writers exactly what it means. The voters who had believed that there were only two parties in politics, the Conservatives and the Liberals (or Tories and Whigs), representing the two great religious parties of the Churchmen and the Dissenters, and the two great economic interests of the country farmers with their landlords and the town men of business with their capitalists, were now taught that from the point of view of the employee there is not a penny to choose between Conservatives and Liberals, as the gain of either means the employee’s loss, and that the only two parties who really have opposed interests are the party of the propertied class on the one hand and the party of the propertyless proletariat on the other: in other words, the party of Capital and the party of Labor. What mattered was not the Parliamentary struggle between the Liberal Mr Gladstone and the Conservative Mr Disraeli as to which should be Prime Minister, or between their successors Mr Balfour, Mr Bonar Law, and Mr Baldwin of the one party, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr Asquith, and Mr Lloyd George of the other. To the class-conscious proletarian all that is mere Tweedledum and Tweedledee: what is really moving the world is the Class Struggle, the Class War (both terms are in use) between the proprietors and the proletariat for the possession of the land and capital of the country (the Means of Production). When a man realized that, he was said to be class-conscious. These terms are misleading because they imply that all the proletarians are in one camp and all the bourgeoisie in the other, which is untrue; but as the Intelligent Woman who has read thus far now knows what they mean, let them pass for the moment.