he comes out.  The Marxian Socialist will not strike till the clock strikes; and the clock is made in Germany, and never strikes.  Moreover, the theory of all history as a search for food makes the masses content with having food and physic, but not freedom.  The best working model in the matter is the system of Compulsory Insurance; which was a total failure and dead letter in France but has been, in the German sense, a great success in Germany.  It treats employed persons as a fixed, separate, and lower caste, who must not themselves dispose of the margin of their small wages.  In 1911 it was introduced into England by Mr. Lloyd George, who had studied its operations in Germany, and, by the Prussian prestige in “social reform,” was passed.

These three tendencies cohere, or are cohering, in an institution which is not without a great historical basis and not without great modern conveniences.  And as France was the standard-bearer of citizenship in 1798, Germany is the standard-bearer of this alternative solution in 1915.  The institution which our fathers called Slavery fits in with, or rather logically flows from, all the three spirits of which I have spoken, and promises great advantages to each of them.  It can give the individual worker everything except the power to alter the State—­that is, his own status.  Finality (or what certain eleutheromaniacs would call hopelessness) of status is the soul of Slavery—­and of Compulsory Insurance.  Then again, Germany gives the individual exactly the liberty that has always been given to a slave—­the liberty to think, the liberty to dream, the liberty to rage; the liberty to indulge in any intellectual hypotheses about the unalterable world and state—­such as have always been free to slaves, from the stoical maxims of Epictetus to the skylarking fairy tales of Uncle Remus.  And it has been truly urged by all defenders of slavery that, if history has merely a material test, the material condition of the subordinate under slavery tends to be good rather than bad.  When I once pointed out how precisely the “model village” of a great employer reproduces the safety and seclusion of an old slave estate, the employer thought it quite enough to answer indignantly that he had provided baths, playing-grounds, a theatre, etc., for his workers.  He would probably have thought it odd to hear a planter in South Carolina boast that he had provided banjos, hymn-books, and places suitable for the cake-walk.  Yet the planter must have provided the banjos, for a slave cannot own property.  And if this Germanic sociology is indeed to prevail among us, I think some of the broad-minded thinkers who concur in its prevalence owe something like an apology to many gallant gentlemen whose graves lie where the last battle was fought in the Wilderness; men who had the courage to fight for it, the courage to die for it and, above all, the courage to call it by its name.