educated and more experienced than their opponents, who infatuatedly took it for granted that rich men must be superior in education because they graduate in the two aristocratic universities instead of in the school of economically organic life. The Liberals and Conservatives, disgusted with this result, and ruefully sorry that by derisively giving Labor a chance to prove its relative incompetence it had proved the opposite, combined to throw Mr MacDonald out of office in 1924. Although he had as yet no real chance of a majority in the country, he had so scared the plutocrats in Parliament by his comparative success as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, which they had regarded as the department in which Labor was certain to break down ridiculously, that they overdid their attack by persuading the country that he was connected with the Communist Government of Russia. The panic which followed, lasting until the election was over, wiped out at the polls, not the Labor Party, which just managed to hold its own, but the innocent Liberal Party. The danger of stampeding a general election is that all sorts of political lunatics, whom no one would dream of taking seriously in quiet times, get elected by screaming that the country is in danger, whilst sober candidates are defeated ignominiously. In 1906, when a general election was stampeded by an alarm of Chinese labor, third rate Liberal candidates ousted first rate Conservative ones by the score. In 1924 the Red Russian scare enabled third rate Conservatives to oust first rate Liberals. In both cases the result was a grave falling-off in the quality of the victorious party. When the Sirdar, our representative in Egypt, was unluckily assassinated just after the election, the Conservatives, drunk with their victory, could not be restrained by the Prime Minister, Mr Baldwin, from hurling at the assassins an insane threat to cut off the water supply of Egypt. This extravagance, which startled all Europe, was felt to be just the sort of thing that Mr MacDonald would not have done. The Government had to climb down rather abjectly when it discovered that it could neither carry out its threat nor expect anything but reprobation from all sides, both at home and abroad, for having been so absurd as to make it; for though a forceful wickedness is, I am sorry to say, rather popular than otherwise when our Governments indulge in it at the expense of foreigners, we expect it to be successful. A climb-down is unpopular in proportion to the arrogance of the climb-up. Consequently the Government lost on the Egyptian fiasco the support won by the Russian scare; but it lost its head again at a crazy threat of a general strike by the Trade Unions. The Russians sent us a very handsome subscription to the strike funds; and the Government, frightened and infuriated, and quite incapable of measuring the danger (which need not have alarmed a mouse) brought in a futile