Since 1870 the nation has given a certain amount of education to all children above five years of age. Meagre as the education is, it has nevertheless been sufficient to make many workmen understand their social and economic subjection, and it is this realisation of their helpless subjection to others which determines so many of them to join the Trade Unionist and Socialist movements. They want to share in the ownership of national industries; they want to control and organise the working of industries. Up to a few years ago the workman only demanded better wages and shorter hours, but he has now discovered by actual experience that high prices and high rents continually swallow up increases in wages. He has been educated by Mr. Lloyd George to understand that private ownership of land means that a landowner can sit down and, by just doing nothing, actually grow in riches because of the power which ownership gives--power which the owner can exercise at an opportune moment in order to squeeze rack rents from those who have created the values which make such rack rents possible. In addition, the workman understands that with the introduction of labour-saving machinery the Capitalist has become able to put a man’s own children in competition with the man himself. The automatic machine has made it possible for a man’s economic foes to be members of his own household; and, realising this, and understanding also that the opportunities of rising in the social scale grow less and less, men are now organising for a complete change in the present system. Their work in this direction has been very much hampered because of the war, but there are groups of people who are determined to keep together in order that when the war is over they may once more take the field and by united effort establish a co-operative system of production and distribution to replace the present unsound order, based as it is on the subjection of the workers by means of the wages- and profit-making system. We know that until this fundamental change is made our labour is in vain. People talk at large sometimes about the greed and avarice of the working classes--their unwillingness to give service without payment and their exorbitant demands in respect of wages and hours. I have never been able to accept such a point of view at all, for it seems to me all the old bad rules which govern our industrial relationships are inherent in the system. What I mean is that, given a society where men and women are expected to compete and scramble for a living, it is inevitable that cheating and meanness should follow. Besides, what sort of an example do the other classes set the workers? Is not their law of life to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market? And do they not insist that cheapness, not worth, is the governing factor in life?