The workman of the new generation is full of distrust the most demoralising of social influences.  He is like a sailor who believes no longer either in the good faith or seamanship of his captain, and, between desperation and contempt, contemplates vaguely but persistently the assumption of control by a collective forecastle.  He is like a private soldier obsessed with the idea that nothing can save the situation but the death of an incompetent officer.  His distrust is so profound that he ceases not only to believe in the employer, but he ceases to believe in the law, ceases to believe in Parliament, as a means to that tolerable life he desires; and he falls back steadily upon his last resource of a strike, and—­if by repressive tactics we make it so—­a criminal strike.  The central fact of all this present trouble is that distrust.  There is only one way in which our present drift towards revolution or revolutionary disorder can be arrested, and that is by restoring the confidence of these alienated millions, who visibly now are changing from loyalty to the Crown, from a simple patriotism, from habitual industry, to the more and more effective expression of a deepening resentment.

This is a psychological question, a matter of mental states.  Feats of legal subtlety are inopportune, arithmetical exploits still more so.  To emerge with the sum of 4s. 6-1/2d. as a minimum, by calculating on the basis of the mine’s present earnings, from a conference which the miners and everybody else imagined was to give a minimum of 5s., may be clever, but it is certainly not politic in the present stage of Labour feeling.  To stamp violently upon obscure newspapers nobody had heard of before and send a printer to prison, and to give thereby a flaming advertisement to the possible use of soldiers in civil conflicts and set every barrack-room talking, may be permissible, but it is certainly very ill-advised.  The distrust deepens.

The real task before a governing class that means to go on governing is not just at present to get the better of an argument or the best of a bargain, but to lay hold of the imaginations of this drifting, sullen and suspicious multitude, which is the working body of the country.  What we prosperous people, who have nearly all the good things of life and most of the opportunity, have to do now is to justify ourselves.  We have to show that we are indeed responsible and serviceable, willing to give ourselves, and to give ourselves generously for what we have and what we have had.  We have to meet the challenge of this distrust.

The slack days for rulers and owners are over.  If there are still to be rulers and owners and managing and governing people, then in the face of the new masses, sensitive, intelligent, critical, irritable, as no common people have ever been before, these rulers and owners must be prepared to make themselves and display themselves wise, capable and heroic—­beyond any aristocratic precedent.  The alternative, if it is an alternative, is resignation—­to the Social Democracy.