Social and national dissatisfaction could be given at the same time a voice and a remedy in the ballot box.  Our liberal intelligences could and do still understand Russians wanting votes, Indians wanting votes, women wanting votes.  The history of nineteenth-century Liberalism in the world might almost be summed up in the phrase “progressive enfranchisement.”  But these are the desires of a closing phase in political history.  The new discords go deeper than that.  The new situation which confronts our Liberal intelligence is the discontent of the enfranchised, the contempt and hostility of the voters for their elected delegates and governments.

This discontent, this resentment, this contempt even, and hostility to duly elected representatives is no mere accident of this democratic country or that; it is an almost world-wide movement.  It is an almost universal disappointment with so-called popular government, and in many communities—­in Great Britain particularly—­it is manifesting itself by an unprecedented lawlessness in political matters, and in a strange and ominous contempt for the law.  One sees it, for example, in the refusal of large sections of the medical profession to carry out insurance legislation, in the repudiation of Irish Home Rule by Ulster, and in the steady drift of great masses of industrial workers towards the conception of a universal strike.  The case of the discontented workers in Great Britain and France is particularly remarkable.  These people form effective voting majorities in many constituencies; they send alleged Socialist and Labour representatives into the legislative assembly; and, in addition, they have their trade unions with staffs of elected officials, elected ostensibly to state their case and promote their interests.  Yet nothing is now more evident than that these officials, working-men representatives and the like, do not speak for their supporters, and are less and less able to control them.  The Syndicalist movement, sabotage in France, and Larkinism in Great Britain, are, from the point of view of social stability, the most sinister demonstrations of the gathering anger of the labouring classes with representative institutions.  These movements are not revolutionary movements, not movements for reconstruction such as were the democratic Socialist movements that closed the nineteenth century.  They are angry and vindictive movements.  They have behind them the most dangerous and terrible of purely human forces, the wrath, the blind destructive wrath, of a cheated crowd.

Now, so far as the insurrection of labour goes, American conditions differ from European, and the process of disillusionment will probably follow a different course.  American labour is very largely immigrant labour still separated by barriers of language and tradition from the established thought of the nation.  It will be long before labour in America speaks with the massed effectiveness of labour in France and England, where