condition of abject poverty, and its intelligence and education is as a body little, if at all, inferior to that of the class that keeps it in subjection. Added to that, it has, as above 276 said, now obtained considerable political power, which is shared to a great extent by the unskilled workmen, with whom they now make common cause.
It seems certain therefore that the workmen, with their eyes fixed on the necessity for their bettering themselves as a class, and the growing consciousness that this can only be done by limiting the power and consequent riches of their masters, will press forward their case politically; that is, by forcing legislation in their favour from the present possessing classes; which will in the long run come to this, that they will deprive those classes of all the privilege that makes them a master-class.
It seems to us that it is along this line, which the workmen are now beginning to take up of themselves, that progress towards revolution will be made. For it must be remembered once more that the great mass of those who are pushing forward by this road, are only very partially conscious of whither it is tending; seeing, not the birth of a new society founded on general equality of condition, but rather a higher and less 277 precarious standard of livelihood and something more of social recognition from their superiors; in short, it is the ideal, not of Socialists, but of men moved by the growing instinct towards Socialism. It must here be noted as to this commonplace and unideal side of the movement, that, throughout modern history, there has been in all democratic fermentations a discrepancy, indeed often an instinctive antipathy, between the theoretic movement, as conceived of by thinkers, and the actual popular or working-class struggle. The latter intent on immediate advantages, and unconscious of any ideal; the former full of the ideal which they have grasped intuitively from the first, but finding the necessary steps towards it so repulsive to them, that they are incapable of taking action. Sir Thomas More, for example, who imagined a society free from the evils of privileged commercialism, which was first raising its