“Why,” asked a new English officer of some Russian troops who had made a splendid assault on a German position in the spring of 1917, an assault that required high courage and great soldierly skill, “why did you men all lift up your hands just before the charge was made?” The noncom grinned and answered, “We were taking a vote upon the matter of the charge, sir!”

In a theater on the boulevards in Paris recently a hit was made by introducing a stage scene showing the princes and nobility in poverty, looking down from a gallery at the top of the theater, on the rich working people in the boxes below; the princes and nobility were singing a doleful ditty and dancing a sad dance about the changed circumstances that were glooming up the world.

Simultaneously across the channel in England, they were telling this one.  Lord Milner, who in Germany would be one of the All Highest of the High Command, was calling at an English house where the children were not used to nobility.  They heard their father refer to Lord Milner as “my lord.”  And one child edged up to him in awe and asked, “O sir, were you indeed born in a manger?” The All Highest smiled and quoth in reply, “No, my child, no, I was not born in a manger, but if they keep on taxing me, I fear I shall die in one!”

The Italians have high hopes of harnessing their nine millions of horsepower in Alpine water-falls, running their state-owned railroads and public utilities with it, and introducing electricity as an industrial power into Italian homes, thus bringing back to the homes of the people the home industries like weaving which steam took away a century ago.  But this is only a dream.  Yet sometimes dreams do come true.  And dreams are wishes unexpressed; and in this clay of democratic power, a wish with a ballot behind it becomes a will, and soon hardens into a fact.  The times are changing.  But of course human nature remains much the same.  Men under a given environment will do about the same kind of things under one set of circumstances.  But we should not forget in our computations that laws, customs, traditions, the distribution of wealth, make an entirely new environment, and that circumstances are not the same when environment differs.  That the surroundings of those people known collectively as “the poor” have changed, and changed permanently by the war, no one who sees them in Europe can doubt.  They are well-fed, well-housed, and are determined to be well-educated.  They know that they can use their ballots to get their share of the wealth they produce.  They are never going to be content again with crusts.  They are motived now by hope rather than by fear, and they are going to react strangely during the next ten years on the social structure of this old world.  But even the new majority will not change everything of course.  Grass will grow, water will run down hill, smart men will lead fools, wise men will have the places of honour and power, in proportion to the practicality of their wisdom.  But for all that, we shall have in a rather large and certainly in a keenly interesting degree a new heaven and a new earth.