That is one possibility that is frequently in my thoughts about the present labour crisis.  There is another, and that is the great desirability of every class in the community having a practical knowledge of what labour means.  There is a vast amount of work which either is now or is likely to be in the future within the domain of the public administration—­road-making, mining, railway work, post-office and telephone work, medical work, nursing, a considerable amount of building for example.  Why should we employ people to do the bulk of these things at all?  Why should we not as a community do them ourselves?  Why, in other words, should we not have a labour conscription and take a year or so of service from everyone in the community, high or low?  I believe this would be of enormous moral benefit to our strained and relaxed community.  I believe that in making labour a part of everyone’s life and the whole of nobody’s life lies the ultimate solution of these industrial difficulties.

Sec. 5

It is almost a national boast that we “muddle through” our troubles, and I suppose it is true and to our credit that by virtue of a certain kindliness of temper, a humorous willingness to make the best of things, and an entirely amiable forgetfulness, we do come out of pressures and extremities that would smash a harder, more brittle people only a little chipped and damaged.  And it is quite conceivable that our country will, in a measure, survive the enormous stresses of labour adjustment that are now upon us, even if it never rises to any heroic struggle against these difficulties.  But it may survive as a lesser country, as an impoverished and second-rate country.  It will certainly do no more than that, if in any part of the world there is to be found a people capable of taking up this gigantic question in a greater spirit.  Perhaps there is no such people, and the conflicts and muddles before us will be world-wide.  Or suppose that it falls to our country in some strange way to develop a new courage and enterprise, and to be the first to go forward into this new phase of civilisation I foresee, from which a distinctive labouring class, a class that is of expropriated wage-earners, will have almost completely disappeared.

Now hitherto the utmost that any State, overtaken by social and economic stresses, has ever achieved in the way of adapting itself to them has been no more than patching.

Individuals and groups and trades have found themselves in imperfectly apprehended and difficult times, and have reluctantly altered their ways and ideas piecemeal under pressure.  Sometimes they have succeeded in rubbing along upon the new lines, and sometimes the struggle has submerged them, but no community has ever yet had the will and the imagination to recast and radically alter its social methods as a whole.  The idea of such a reconstruction has never been absent from human thought since the days of Plato, and it