And if you asked again “Their protection from what?” you would have the whole plan and problem of the Servile State plain in front of you.  Whatever notion there is, there is no notion whatever of protecting the employed person from his employer.  Much less is there any idea of his ever being anywhere except under an employer.  Whatever the Capitalist wants he gets.  He may have the sense to want washed and well-fed labourers rather than dirty and feeble ones, and the restrictions may happen to exist in the form of laws from the Kaiser or by-laws from the Krupps.  But the Kaiser will not offend the Krupps, and the Krupps will not offend the Kaiser.  Laws of this kind, then, do not attempt to protect workmen against the injustice of the Capitalist as the English Trade Unions did.  They do not attempt to protect workmen against the injustice of the State as the mediaeval guilds did.  Obviously they cannot protect workmen against the foreign invader—­especially when (as in the comic case of Belgium) they are imposed by the foreign invader.  What then are such laws designed to protect workmen against?  Tigers, rattlesnakes, hyenas?

Oh, my young friends; oh, my Christian brethren, they are designed to protect this poor person from something which to those of established rank is more horrid than many hyenas.  They are designed, my friends, to protect a man from himself—­from something that the masters of the earth fear more than famine or war, and which Prussia especially fears as everything fears that which would certainly be its end.  They are meant to protect a man against himself—­that is, they are meant to protect a man against his manhood.

And if anyone reminds me that there is a Socialist Party in Germany, I reply that there isn’t.

THE EMPIRE OF THE IGNORANT

That anarchic future which the more timid Tories professed to fear has already fallen upon us.  We are ruled by ignorant people.  But the most ignorant people in modern Britain are to be found in the upper class, the middle class, and especially the upper middle class.  I do not say it with the smallest petulance or even distaste; these classes are often really beneficent in their breeding or their hospitality, or their humanity to animals.

There is still no better company than the young at the two Universities, or the best of the old in the Army or some of the other services.  Also, of course, there are exceptions in the matter of learning; real scholars like Professor Gilbert Murray or Professor Phillimore are not ignorant, though they are gentlemen.  But when one looks up at any mass of the wealthier and more powerful classes, at the Grand Stand at Epsom, at the windows of Park-lane, at the people at a full-dress debate or a fashionable wedding, we shall be safe in saying that they are, for the most part, the most ill-taught, or untaught, creatures in these islands.