These changes, whatever individual Britons or Americans may think of them, are not signs of complacency or indifference. They are rather proofs that the society has not lost its dynamism, that its leaders admit and understand their losses in political influence and economic power and are determined to build a stronger society on the foundations of the old. Admittedly, the British make it difficult for their friends or their enemies to discern the extent of change. They cling to the old established forms. This is a characteristic that is almost universal in mankind. When the first automobiles appeared, they were built to resemble horse-drawn carriages. Men cling to the familiar in the material and the mental. Think of our own devotion, in a period when the nation has developed into a continental and world power, to a Constitution drafted to suit the needs of a few millions living along the eastern fringe of our country. The changes in Britain have taken place behind a façade of what the world expects from Britain. The Queen rides in her carriage at Royal Ascot, the extremists of the Labor Party cry havoc and let slip the dogs of political war, the Guards are on parade, and gentlemen with derbies firm upon their heads walk down St. James's swinging their rolled umbrellas. Literature, the stage, the movies, the appearance of the visiting Englishman in every quarter of the globe has implanted a false picture firmly in the popular mind. "Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun." They also play cricket and drink tea to the exclusion of other entertainments, live on estates or in tiny thatched cottages, say "by Jove" or "cor blimey." Their society is stratified, their workers are idle, their enterprise is negligible. Britain itself is a land of placid country villages, one large city (London), squires and lords, cockney humorists and rustics in patched corduroy. This is Britain as many Americans think of it. It is also, as I have mentioned earlier, the Britain to which many of its inhabitants return in their daydreams. But it is not contemporary Britain. The real Britain is a hurrying, clamorous, purposeful industrial nation. Its people, with a sense of reality any nation might envy, are carrying out major changes in the structure of the national economy and in the organization of society. The Welfare State may be considered a blessing or a curse, according to political taste, but the nation that first conceived and established it cannot be thought deficient in imagination or averse to change.