The Liberals, still believing themselves to be the party of progress, assumed that all progressive movements would be grafted on the Liberal Party as a matter of course, to be patronized and adopted by the Liberal leaders in Parliament as far as they approved. They were disagreeably surprised when the first effect of the adoption of constitutional parliamentarism by the Fabian Society was an attack on the Liberal Government of that day, published in one of the leading reviews, for being more reactionary and hostile to the wage-workers than the Conservatives. The Liberals were so astonished and scandalized that they could only suggest that the Fabian Society had been bribed by the Conservatives to commit what seemed to all Liberals to be an act of barefaced political treachery. They soon had their eyes opened much more widely. The Fabian Society followed up its attack by a proposal for the establishment of a Labor Party in Parliament to oppose both Conservatives and Liberals impartially. A working-class leader, Keir Hardie, formerly a miner, founded a Society called the Independent Labor Party to put this proposal into practice. Among the members of the Fabian Society who became a leader in this new Society was Mr Ramsay MacDonald, who, by his education and knowledge of the world outside the wage-working class, was better qualified than Keir Hardie for successful leadership in Parliament. From the Independent Labor Party sprang The Labor Party, a political federation, much more powerful, of Trade Unions and of Socialist Societies, whose delegates sat on its executive committee. As all the persons who were members of Trade Unions at that time could, by subscribing a penny a week each, have provided a political fund of over £325,000 (there are three times as many now), this combination with the Trade Unionists was decisive. At the election of 1906 enough Labor members were elected to form an independent party in Parliament. By 1923 they had encroached so much that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives had a majority in the House; and Mr Ramsay MacDonald was challenged to form a Government and shew whether Labor could govern or not. He accepted the challenge, and became British Prime Minister with a Cabinet of Socialists and Trade Unionists. It was a more competent government than the Conservative Government that preceded it, partly because its members, having risen from poverty or obscurity to eminence by their personal ability, were unhampered by nonentities, and partly because it knew what the world is like today, and was not dreaming, as even the cleverest of the Conservative leaders still were, of the Victorian mixture of growing cotton lordship and decaying feudal lordship in the capitalist class, with starved helpless ignorance and submissive servitude in the proletariat, which had not even lasted out Queen Victoria’s lifetime. In fact, the Labor leaders were to an extraordinary degree better