We have learned to look upon the doctrine of interdependence of classes within the nation as a truth self-evident to all eyes unblinded by wilful prejudice or ignorance of that disabling kind charitably defined by the Roman Catholic Church as invincible. To say that unemployment in the mills of Lancashire or the shipyards of the Clyde not only affects the happiness and well-being of cotton operatives and boiler-makers and the great businesses which are carried on by their means, but depresses the national vitality and puts a drag on the national energy throughout the kingdom--to assert that no people can be wholly strong and vigorous while any corner of its territory or any layer in its social strata remains in the possession of a group physically weak, mentally undeveloped, and morally below the standard of ethics which, as a people, it has tacitly agreed to accept as necessary, seems to many of us in these days to state truisms. Yet it is not so long ago that facts which we now presume to be familiar, at least to every undergraduate, were the dangerous discovery of the few who, in an age when people said 'Socialist' as Mr. Pecksniff said 'Pagan', had the temerity to point out, that in things human and political as in mechanics, a chain was and could be no stronger than its weakest link. Even now, in the reaction, often only half conscious, of the employing class against any force which tends to raise the employed to a social plane less removed from that on which they themselves move, in the genuine dislike of education, concealed under ceremonial phrases in days of peace but breaking into fire and fury when the natural man is roused by a touch of excitement, we can see how skin-deep in many cases is the general belief in the widely proclaimed creed that economically as well as spiritually, we are all members one of another. And if the truth of our interdependence as citizens has won acceptance slowly and grudgingly, because the facts that prove it lie other-where than on the surface, it is easy to understand that the interdependence which is international, resulting as it does from the meeting, and crossing, and twining in the web of national life of innumerable fine threads drawn from the utmost corners of the civilized world, has scarcely yet come within the consideration of the ordinary man as an influence from which he cannot escape, and with which, therefore, he is bound to reckon. That, doubtless, is why international movements in general arouse so little interest in the mind of the average reader of newspapers. He does not regard them as practical. The persons engaged in promoting them he defines as cranks, dividing them into two classes, of whom one may be dismissed as harmlessly absurd, while the other ought probably to be suppressed as dangerous.