The decisive question is this—­will the British working classes embrace the opportunities which will shortly be offered to them?  They are a new departure; they involve an element of compulsion and of regulation which is unusual in our happy-go-lucky English life.  The opportunity may never return.  For my own part, I confess to you, my friends in Manchester, that I would work for such a policy and would try to carry it through even if it were a little unpopular at first, and would be willing to pay the forfeit of a period of exclusion from power, in order to have carried such a policy through; because I know that there is no other way within the reach of this generation of men and women by which the stream of preventable misery can be cut off.

If I had my way I would write the word “Insure” over the door of every cottage, and upon the blotting-book of every public man, because I am convinced that by sacrifices which are inconceivably small, which are all within the power of the very poorest man in regular work, families can be secured against catastrophes which otherwise would smash them up for ever.  I think it is our duty to use the strength and the resources of the State to arrest the ghastly waste not merely of human happiness but of national health and strength which follows when a working man’s home which has taken him years to get together is broken up and scattered through a long spell of unemployment, or when, through the death, the sickness, or the invalidity of the bread-winner, the frail boat in which the fortunes of the family are embarked founders, and the women and children are left to struggle helplessly on the dark waters of a friendless world.  I believe it is well within our power now, before this Parliament is over, to establish vast and broad throughout the land a mighty system of national insurance which will nourish in its bosom all worthy existing agencies and will embrace in its scope all sorts and conditions of men.

I think it is not untrue to say that in these years we are passing through a decisive period in the history of our country.  The wonderful century which followed the Battle of Waterloo and the downfall of the Napoleonic domination, which secured to this small island so long and so resplendent a reign, has come to an end.  We have arrived at a new time.  Let us realise it.  And with that new time strange methods, huge forces, larger combinations—­a Titanic world—­have sprung up around us.  The foundations of our power are changing.  To stand still would be to fall; to fall would be to perish.  We must go forward.  We will go forward.  We will go forward into a way of life more earnestly viewed, more scientifically organised, more consciously national than any we have known.  Thus alone shall we be able to sustain and to renew through the generations which are to come, the fame and the power of the British race.

LAND AND INCOME TAXES IN THE BUDGET