This breaking down of the old relationship between the classes was a matter of deep concern to many, and their concern went deeper than partisan political feeling. Repeatedly one was told that the worst thing Labor had done was to create class feeling, to encourage class antagonisms in a country that until then had never been affected by them. This was only a half-truth. The class antagonism had been there, all right, but the middle class now was belatedly the victim of the bitterness that a hundred years of slum housing, poor food, and lack of opportunity had created among some but not all of the working class. I write "not all" because there were members of that class who were as disturbed by the growth of class antagonism as any retired colonel in his club. They felt instinctively that the unity of Britain was being sapped by the emergence of a powerful and militant socialist group whose object was change. Most of them had voted for change. But the British are a conservative people. They accept change within the framework of familiar institutions. Extensive reconstruction may go on behind the façade, but the façade must remain untouched. The hope and confidence born of Labor's victory, however, had a long-term effect upon British society. It encouraged those who had dreamed, like the miner's wife, of a better life for their children. Ambitious mothers aimed higher than a few years of school and a factory job for their sons. Young men who had won commissions during the war decided to remain in the Army or the Navy or the Air Force now that the old barriers were falling and the right accent and the right private income did not matter so much as it once had. By 1950 the economic and social forces that were to create the Britain of today were in full motion. Paradoxically, the British electorate was moving slightly to the right. [Illustration] VII. _A Society in Motion_ NEW CLASSES AND NEW HORIZONS _There are but two families in the world--have-much and have-little._ CERVANTES _Society is constantly advancing in knowledge. The tail is now where the head was some generations ago. But the head and the tail still keep their distance._ THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY [Illustration] Marie Lloyd, the darling of the music halls, sang a song that contained the deathless line: "A little of what you fancy does you good." In addition to their evangelism, their occasional ruthlessness, the British have a streak of self-indulgence. This trait was encouraged by the peculiar circumstances of the country after the Conservative victory in the general election of 1951.