for unprecedented ends—­against the system, against the fundamental conditions of labour, to strike for no defined ends at all, perplexingly and disconcertingly.  The old-fashioned strike was a method of bargaining, clumsy and violent perhaps, but bargaining still; the new-fashioned strike is far less of a haggle, far more of a display of temper.  The first thing that has to be realised if the Labour question is to be understood at all is this, that the temper of Labour has changed altogether in the last twenty or thirty years.  Essentially that is a change due to intelligence not merely increased but greatly stimulated, to the work, that is, of the board schools and of the cheap Press.  The outlook of the workman has passed beyond the works and his beer and his dog.  He has become—­or, rather, he has been replaced by—­a being of eyes, however imperfect, and of criticism, however hasty and unjust.  The working man of to-day reads, talks, has general ideas and a sense of the round world; he is far nearer to the ruler of to-day in knowledge and intellectual range than he is to the working man of fifty years ago.  The politician or business magnate of to-day is no better educated and very little better informed than his equals were fifty years ago.  The chief difference is golf.  The working man questions a thousand things his father accepted as in the very nature of the world, and among others he begins to ask with the utmost alertness and persistence why it is that he in particular is expected to toil.  The answer, the only justifiable answer, should be that that is the work for which he is fitted by his inferior capacity and culture, that these others are a special and select sort, very specially trained and prepared for their responsibilities, and that at once brings this new fact of a working-class criticism of social values into play.  The old workman might and did quarrel very vigorously with his specific employer, but he never set out to arraign all employers; he took the law and the Church and Statecraft and politics for the higher and noble things they claimed to be.  He wanted an extra shilling or he wanted an hour of leisure, and that was as much as he wanted.  The young workman, on the other hand, has put the whole social system upon its trial, and seems quite disposed to give an adverse verdict.  He looks far beyond the older conflict of interests between employer and employed.  He criticises the good intentions of the whole system of governing and influential people, and not only their good intentions, but their ability.  These are the new conditions, and the middle-aged and elderly gentlemen who are dealing with the crisis on the supposition that their vast experience of Labour questions in the ’seventies and ’eighties furnishes valuable guidance in this present issue are merely bringing the gunpowder of misapprehension to the revolutionary fort.