their leaders are Socialists in a secondary distant sense, their prime and immediate policy being the betterment of conditions in their own trade, with assistance from the State. A scattered minority in most cities and industrial areas have been getting education in Socialist principles from the handful of middle- and upper-class “intellectuals” whose thought and sympathies have led them to a fuller adoption of Socialism or Communism. But the wide gap in education and in personal bearing between the “workers” and the intellectuals makes solidarity of thought and policy a difficult process. Those who criticize the ineffectiveness of the Labour Party in Parliament, whether as Government or Opposition, should take account of these ‘“class’’ distinctions with the misunderstandings and suspicions they involve. The basic cause of the collapse of the second Labour Government was the failure of most of its leaders and followers to realize the dangers of a financial situation which lay outside their understanding of politics and economics. The Nationalist Government which followed may be regarded as a testimony to the collapse of the older party distinctions rather than to the triumph of Conservatism which it seemed to many. For the fact is that the same opportunist Socialism which was the professed policy of the new Labour Movement permeated in milder degree the two older parties. Conservatism had throughout the nineteenth century been less closely attached to Capitalism than had
