increasing the population and aggregate wealth of the country; and even
those who suffered most under it were not without pride in its results.
The ill-paid workman of the last century would have thought it a poor
thing to do a deliberately bad day's work.

I am not praising either the age of feudalism or the 'hungry forties' of
the nineteenth century. In the latter case especially the sacrifice
exacted from the poor was too great for the rather vulgar success of
which it was the condition. But to call that age the period of
individualism, and our own generation the period of socialism, is in my
opinion a profound mistake. In Germany, too, the real socialists are not
the 'Spartacist' scoundrels who have betrayed and ruined their country,
but the bureaucracy with their _Deutschland über Alles_. If I were a
little more of a socialist, I could almost admire them, in spite of all
their crimes.

The landed gentry (and in honesty I must add the endowed clergy) are a
survival of feudalism, as the capitalist is a survival of industrialism.
Both have to a large extent survived their functions. The mailclad
baron, round whose fortified castle the peasants and others gathered for
protection, has become the country gentleman, against whom the
indictment is not so much that his only pursuit is pleasure, as that his
only pleasure is pursuit. 'The rich man in his castle, the poor man at
his gate' were intelligible while the rich man protected the poor man
from being plundered and killed by marauders; but in our times nobody
wants a castle or to live under the shadow of a castle. The clerical
profession was a necessity when most people could neither read nor
write. But to-day our best prophets and preachers are laymen. As at
ancient Athens, in the time of Aristophanes, 'the young learn from the
schoolmaster, the mature from the poets.' Similarly, the captain of