Mostly they call themselves Imperialists, which is just their harmless way of expressing their satisfaction with things as they are.  In practice their Imperialism resolves itself into a vigorous resistance to taxation and an ill-concealed hostility to education.  It matters nothing to them that the whole next generation of Canadians has drawn its ideas mainly from American publications, that India and Egypt, in despite of sounder mental nourishment, have developed their own vernacular Press, that Australia and New Zealand even now gravitate to America for books and thought.  It matters nothing to them that the poverty and insularity of our intellectual life has turned American art to France and Italy, and the American universities towards Germany.  The slow starvation and decline of our philosophy and science, the decadence of British invention and enterprise, troubles them not at all, because they fail to connect these things with the tangible facts of empire.  “The world cannot wait for the English.” ...  And the sands of our Imperial opportunity twirl through the neck of the hour-glass.

THE LABOUR UNREST

(May, 1912.)

Sec. 1

Our country is, I think, in a dangerous state of social disturbance.  The discontent of the labouring mass of the community is deep and increasing.  It may be that we are in the opening phase of a real and irreparable class war.

Since the Coronation we have moved very rapidly indeed from an assurance of extreme social stability towards the recognition of a spreading disorganisation.  It is idle to pretend any longer that these Labour troubles are the mere give and take of economic adjustment.  No adjustment is in progress.  New and strange urgencies are at work in our midst, forces for which the word “revolutionary” is only too faithfully appropriate.  Nothing is being done to allay these forces; everything conspires to exasperate them.

Whither are these forces taking us?  What can still be done and what has to be done to avoid the phase of social destruction to which we seem to be drifting?

Hitherto, in Great Britain at any rate, the working man has shown himself a being of the most limited and practical outlook.  His narrowness of imagination, his lack of general ideas, has been the despair of the Socialist and of every sort of revolutionary theorist.  He may have struck before, but only for definite increments of wages or definite limitations of toil; his acceptance of the industrial system and its methods has been as complete and unquestioning as his acceptance of earth and sky.  Now, with an effect of suddenness, this ceases to be the case.  A new generation of workers is seen replacing the old, workers of a quality unfamiliar to the middle-aged and elderly men who still manage our great businesses and political affairs.  The worker is beginning now to strike