No, commercial prosperity means only the prosperity of a class.  Yet such is the curious glamour that surrounds this, subject and makes a fetish of statistics about “imports and exports,” that nothing is more common than for such prosperity to be taken to mean the prosperity of the nation as a whole.  The commercial people, having command of the Press, and of the avenues and highways of public influence, do not find it at all difficult to persuade the nation that they are its representatives, and that their advantage is the advantage of all.  This illusion is only a part, I suppose, of a historical necessity, which as the Feudal regime passes brings into prominence the Commercial regime; but do not let us be deluded by it, nor forget that in submitting to the latter we are being nose-led by a class just as much as the Germans have been in submitting to the Prussian Junkers.  Do not let us, at the behest of either class, be so foolish as to set out in vain pursuit of world-empire; and, above all, do not let us, in freeing ourselves from military class-rule, fall under the domination of financiers and commercial diplomats.  Let us remember that wars for world-markets are made for the benefit of the merchant class and not for the benefit of the mass-people, and that in this respect England has been as much to blame as Germany or any other nation—­nay, pretty obviously more so.

What is clearly wanted—­and indeed is the next stage of human evolution in England and in all Western lands—­is that the people should emancipate themselves from class-domination, class-glamour, and learn to act freely from their own initiative.  I know it is difficult.  It means a spirit of independence, courage, willingness to make sacrifice.  It means education, alertness to guard against the insidious schemes of wire-pullers and pressmen, as well as of militarists and commercials.  It means the perception that only through eternal vigilance can freedom be maintained.  Yet it is the only true Democracy; and the logic of its arrival is assured to us by the historical necessity that progress in all countries must pass through the preliminary stages of feudalism and commercialism on its way to realize the true life of the mass-peoples.

To-day the uprising of Socialist ideals, of the power of Trade Unions, and especially the formation of International Unions, show us that we are on the verge of this third stage.  We are shaping our way towards the real Democracy, with the attainment of which wars—­though they will not cease from the world—­will certainly become much rarer.  The international entente already establishing itself among the manual workers of all the European countries—­and which has now become an accepted principle of the Labour movement—­is a guarantee and a promise of a more peaceful era; and those who know the artisans and peasants of this and other countries know well how little enmity they harbour in their breasts against