No one will deny that under present conditions relationships are artificial, and that for all practical purposes England is divided, not into two nations only, as Disraeli said many years ago, but into dozens of separate and distinct classes each warring to supplant the others. When the class-war is spoken of, many people shrug their shoulders and refuse to acknowledge its existence; they bury their heads in the sands of make-believe. But the war of classes is here; it is a literal fact in peace time and in war time; it is the most soul-destroying fact of modern life; and every reader of this book (let him realise it!) is inevitably one of the protagonists. During the present war there has been a great deal of Press talk about the breakdown of class distinctions; the nation has been represented as showing a united front, and ready to spend and to be spent on behalf of the country. Those acquainted with the facts of everyday life know that this unity has been to a very large extent quite superficial. It is true that on the battlefield men of all classes have sacrificed themselves with a heroism and devotion unequalled in the history of the world. But at home luxury and wealth, poverty and misery still abound. High profits and dividends are still being accumulated, and large numbers of people owning shares in shipping companies, munition works, and other industrial concerns have piled up money to an ever-increasing extent. We read of shipping companies whose profits have quadrupled, of coal-owners whose dividends have been trebled, of monopolists who by control of our food supplies and other necessaries of life have piled up enormous profits, of Government contractors who are patriotic enough to limit their profits for a few months’ work to the sum of £170,000, of owners of land who receive almost a king’s ransom as the purchase price of land which the nation needs. Other owners of land keep so selfish a hold on it that they refuse its use to the poor for cultivation, preferring to hold it idle until an altogether fabulous price is paid for its use. And we also read of men discharged from the Army without pensions, of others with a miserable dole of 4s. 8d. or thereabouts. At the same time we hear of national gifts to great generals of £100,000, of pensions for judges of £3,500 a year, of Cabinet Ministers who retire on pensions of £1,200 a year; and these men have all received great salaries. The soldier in the Army is said to cost £250 a year. Out of the Army the same man is expected to keep himself, wife, and family on wages from 16s. to 40s. a week. Not much equality either of service or sacrifice is shown by these facts from life to-day.