One almost inevitable feature of any such adaptation will be a changed spirit in the general body of society.  We have come to a serious condition of our affairs, and we shall not get them into order again without a thorough bracing-up of ourselves in the process.  There can be no doubt that for a large portion of our comfortable classes existence has been altogether too easy for the last lifetime or so.  The great bulk of the world’s work has been done out of their sight and knowledge; it has seemed unnecessary to trouble much about the general conduct of things, unnecessary, as they say, to “take life too seriously.”  This has not made them so much vicious as slack, lazy, and over-confident; there has been an elaboration of trivial things and a neglect of troublesome and important things.  The one grave shock of the Boer War has long been explained and sentimentalised away.  But it will not be so easy to explain away a dislocated train service and an empty coal cellar as it was to get a favourable interpretation upon some demonstration of national incompetence half the world away.

It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation that the British prosperous and the British successful, to whom warning after warning has rained in vain from the days of Ruskin, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, should be called to account at last in their own household.  They will grumble, they will be very angry, but in the end, I believe, they will rise to the opportunities of their inconvenience.  They will shake off their intellectual lassitude, take over again the public and private affairs they have come to leave so largely in the hands of the political barrister and the family solicitor, become keen and critical and constructive, bring themselves up to date again.

That is not, of course, inevitable, but I am taking now the more hopeful view.

And then?  What sort of working arrangements are our renascent owning and directing classes likely to make with the new labouring class?  How is the work going to be done in the harder, cleaner, more equalised, and better managed State that, in one’s hopeful mood, one sees ahead of us?

Now after the experiences of the past twelve months it is obvious that the days when most of the directed and inferior work of the community will be done by intermittently employed and impecunious wage-earners is drawing to an end.  A large part of the task of reconstruction ahead of us will consist in the working out of schemes for a more permanent type of employment and for a direct participation of the worker in the pride, profits, and direction of the work.  Such schemes admit of wide variations between a mere bonus system, a periodic tipping of the employees to prevent their striking and a real and honest co-partnery.