Mr. Wells guesses that there are fifty thousand reading and thinking persons in England--keepers of the citadel. The fifty thousand are practically England. Perhaps his estimate is too low. John Brisben Walker says that in the United States the number of persons able to think independently about political and social matters has increased from a few score to about two hundred and fifty thousand within thirty years. The fact is, albeit, that the world has been fashioned always by this very small minority. Furthermore the present creation is not one in which there is reason for great pride. The essay on the Great State is especially fine in this connection. Wells's idea of the Normal Social Life and of the constant divergence of a minority is altogether clarifying for the watcher from any vantage, but it is in his discussion of the labor unrest that the reader in Colorado discovers the prophecies he most needs. For illustration this: The worker in a former generation took himself for granted; it is a new phase when the toilers begin to ask, not one man here and there, but in masses, in battalions, in trades: "Why, then, are we toilers, and for what is it that we toil?" The ruling minority in Colorado has been confronted with this question during the coal strike. So far no response has been given save the impromptu utterances of a hideous rage and fright at the thought of awakening workers. Wells answers his own questions. He replies as Colorado will sometime if Colorado is to persist. It is in this tone: The supply of good-tempered, cheap labor--upon which the fabric of our contemporary ease and comfort is erected--is giving out. The spread of information and the means of presentation in every class and the increase of luxury and self-indulgence in the prosperous classes are the chief cause of that. In the place of the old convenient labor comes a new sort of labor, reluctant, resentful, critical, and suspicious. The replacement has already gone so far that I am certain that attempts to baffle and coerce the workers back to their old conditions must inevitably lead to a series of increasingly destructive outbreaks, to stresses and disorder culminating in revolution. It is useless to dream of going on now for much longer upon the old lines; our civilization, if it is not to enter upon a phase of conflict and decay, must begin to adapt itself to the new conditions, of which the first and foremost is that the wage earning laboring class, consenting to a distinctive treatment and accepting life at a disadvantage, is going to disappear. That is the truth which men hate most to hear. It is the doctrine which "Mother" Jones preaches and for which she has been imprisoned regardless of laws and constitutions.