Those who cheered loudest, the people of the upper middle class who detested Russia, were the ones who, in the end, suffered most from the cold war. Britain's rearmament, under the impact of the Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Blockade, and, finally, the attack on South Korea, was a costly business. It began soon after the great expansion of social services had created the Welfare State. Taxes, already high, rose further. In thousands of middle-class homes the decline from the old pre-war standards continued. The maidservant gave way to the "daily" who came in once or twice a week to help with the cleaning. The savings for old age were diverted to the rising costs of keeping the boys at school. In a hundred pathetic ways, the middle class strove to maintain its standards under the burden of taxation in a Britain it neither liked nor understood. But to balance this gradual depression of one class there was the expansion of another. The victory of the Labor Party in 1945 encouraged the working class of the nation to seek a richer, fuller life. It opened vistas of a new existence and greater opportunities. It created confidence. Traveling to Cardiff in September 1945, I talked with a miner's wife, a huge woman who spoke in the singsong accents of the mining valleys of South Wales. She dandled a plump baby on her knee and talked of what life would be like now. "My Dai's not going down the mine like his dad," she told me. "Now that _we_ have _our_ government, he can be anything he wants, do anything." British society, despite its fixed barriers between class and class, has always enjoyed considerable mobility. In the past the country gentry and the aristocracy had surrendered power to the merchants and the industrialists. Now the urban working class that had served the merchants and the industrialists believed it had wrested control from its masters. Labor's election victory seemed to prove it.