ficial operations and bringing it down to “brass tacks.” Though, as we have seen, the social-economic problems which were sedulously kept in the background throughout the mid-Victorian epoch were beginning to show their heads in the nineties, and to infect party politics with inconvenient extensions of social services, the full significance of a politics in which organized labour sought to use the State for the control of economic life, productive, distributive, consumptive, was made manifest for the first time in the post-War period. Even then its full pressure did not occur until the time of the great depression. For though the decade following the Peace saw mighty changes in the political structure of most European countries, involving the financial and economic ruin of whole classes of the community and setting up new barriers to commercial intercourse, it was not until the world depression that the workers’ demand to control Government and the capitalist resistance of that demand began to divide Europe into “reds” and “whites,” “Fascists” and “Socialists.” This division is very indistinct in England, and even in France, where logic has a fuller sway, there are several modifications of the cleavage. Indeed, everywhere, even in dictatorial countries, there is some pretence of shunning a sheer class cleavage under the cover of national unity.
But it remains true that the Great War and still more the Bad Peace have ripened and speeded up those class economic conflicts which were kept under by
