The second factor affecting the response of this class to the nation's needs is the effect upon it of the economic depression of the years between the two world wars. Again and again we have seen how the memory of unemployment, of the dole, of endless empty days at labor exchanges, of hungry children and women's stricken eyes has colored the thinking of the working class. It is too ready to see the problems of the 1950's in terms of its experiences of the 1930's. Consequently, it adopts a partisan attitude toward political development and a reactionary attitude toward industrial innovation. There are those who argue that these attitudes will change as the working class becomes more accustomed to its new condition of life and place in the national pattern. This may prove true. But can Britain afford to wait until the union leaders understand that each new machine or industrial technique is not part of a calculated plan by the bosses to return the workers to the conditions prevailing in South Wales in 1936? This partisan approach to economic problems is as important a factor as complacency and lethargy in obstructing adoption by the working class of a national viewpoint toward the British economic predicament. The British political system is a marvelously well-balanced one. But the balance is disturbed now and has been for some years by the tendency of organized labor to think almost exclusively in terms of its own rather than national interests. Labor can with perfect justice retort that when the middle class dominated British society it thought in terms of its own interests, too. This is true, of course. The difference is that the present national position is too precarious for blind partisanship. Much is made in public speeches of the educational side of trade-union work. It would seem that the great opportunity for the unions now is in this field. Someone or some organization that enjoys the respect of the workers must educate them out of their lethargy and out of their memories of the past. The popular newspapers will not or cannot do it--and, naturally, as largely capitalist, they would be suspected by many of those most in need of such education. But the job must be done if Britain is to benefit fully from the enterprise and ingenuity of her designers and engineers. Certainly the educational process would work both ways. A traveler in Britain in the period 1953-6 would notice that in many cases there was a difference between the TUC leaders' views about what the workers thought and what the workers themselves thought. Many of the unions have become too big. Contact between the leaders and the rank and file is lost. The Communists take advantage of this.