Of this gambling chance and the effect it has upon men's minds we may say that, while it has not disappeared, it has very greatly lost in force during the last forty years. One often meets men who tell one, whether they are speaking in defence of or against the Capitalist system, that it still blinds the proletarian to any common consciousness of class, because the proletarian still has the example before him of members of his class, whom he has known, rising (usually by various forms of villainy) to the position of capitalist. But when one goes down among the working men themselves, one discovers that the hope of such a change in the mind of any individual worker is now exceedingly remote. Millions of men in great groups of industry, notably in the transport industry and in the mines, have quite given up such an expectation. Tiny as the chance ever was, exaggerated as the hopes in a lottery always are, that tiny chance has fallen in the general opinion of the workers to be negligible, and that hope which a lottery breeds is extinguished. The proletarian now regards himself as definitely proletarian, nor destined within human likelihood to be anything but proletarian. * * * * * These two factors, then, the memory of an older condition of economic freedom, and the effect of a hope individuals might entertain of escaping from the wage-earning class, the two factors which might act most strongly _against_ the acceptation of the Servile State by that class, have so fallen in value that they offer but little opposition to the third factor in the situation which is making so strongly _for_ the Servile State, and which consists in the necessity all men acutely feel for sufficiency and for security. It is this third factor alone which need be seriously considered to-day, when we ask ourselves how far the material upon which social reform is working, that is, the masses of the people, may be ready to accept the change. The thing may be put in many ways. I will put it in what I believe to be the most conclusive of all. If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a wage, with the proposal for a contract of service for life, guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual full wage, how many would refuse?