This class, which has so much legislative and administrative power in at least three of the great belligerents—­in Great Britain and Germany perhaps most so—­must be prepared to see itself taxed, and must be willing to assist in its own taxation to the very limit of its statistical increment.  The almost vindictive greed of the landowners that blackened the history of England after Waterloo, and brought Great Britain within sight of revolution, must not be repeated.  The British Empire cannot afford a revolution in the face of the Central European Powers.  But in the past century there has been an enormous change in men’s opinions and consciences about property; whereas we were Individualists, now we are Socialists.  The British lord, the German junker, has none of the sense of unqualified rights that his great-grandfather had, and he is aware of a vigour of public criticism that did not exist in the former time....

How far will these men get out of the tradition of their birth and upbringing?

Next comes the great class of lawyers who, through the idiotic method of voting in use in modern democracies, are able practically to rule Great Britain, and who are powerful and influential in all democratic countries.

In order to secure a certain independence and integrity in its courts, Great Britain long ago established the principle of enormously overpaying its judges and lawyers.  The natural result has been to give our law courts and the legal profession generally a bias in favour of private wealth against both the public interest and the proletariat.  It has also given our higher national education an overwhelming direction towards the training of advocates and against science and constructive statecraft.  An ordinary lawyer has no idea of making anything; that tendency has been destroyed in his mind; he waits and sees and takes advantage of opportunity.  Everything that can possibly be done in England is done to make our rulers Micawbers and Artful Dodgers.

One of the most anxious questions that a Briton can ask himself to-day is just how far the gigantic sufferings and still more monstrous warnings of this war have shocked the good gentlemen who must steer the ship of State through the strong rapids of the New Peace out of this forensic levity their training has imposed upon them....

There, again, there are elements of hope.  The lawyer has heard much about himself in the past few years.  His conscience may check his tradition.  And we have a Press—­it has many faults, but it is no longer a lawyer’s Press....

And the third class which has immediate interests antagonistic to bold reconstructions of our national methods is that vaguer body, the body of investing capitalists, the savers, the usurers, who live on dividends.  It is a vast class, but a feeble class in comparison with the other two; it is a body rather than a class, a weight rather than a power.  It consists of all sorts of people with nothing in common except the receipt of unearned income....