security and efficiency.  But Great Britain suffered from no such necessity.  After the fall of Napoleon, she was more secure from foreign interference than ever before in her history; and she could have afforded, with far less risk than France, to identify her national principle with the work of popular liberation and amelioration.  As a matter of fact, the logic of the reform movement which began in England soon after the Treaty of Vienna, required the adoption by England either of more democracy or of less.  The privileged classes should either have fought to preserve their peculiar responsibility for the national welfare, or else, if they were obliged to surrender their inherited leadership, they should have also surrendered their political and social privileges.  But Englishmen, terrified by the disasters which French democratic nationalism had wrought upon France, preferred domestic harmony to the perils of any radical readjustment of the balance of their national life.  The aristocracy and the middle classes compromised their differences; and in the compromise each of them sacrificed the principle upon which the vitality of its action as a class depended, while both of them combined to impose subordination on the mass of the people.

Englishmen have, it is true, always remained faithful to their dominant political idea—­the idea of freedom, and the English political and economic system is precisely the example of the ultimate disadvantage of basing national cohesion upon the application of such a limited principle.  This principle, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, always operates for the benefit of a minority, whose whole object, after they have once won certain peculiar advantages, is to secure their perpetuation.  The wealthy middle class, which at one time was the backbone of the Liberal party, has for the most part gone over to the Conservatives, because its interest has become as much opposed to political and economic egalitarianism as is that of the aristocracy:  and the mass of the English people, whose liberation can never be accomplished under the existing regime of political and economic privilege, looks with complacency and awe upon the good time enjoyed by their betters.  Popular bondage is the price of national consistency.  A century of industrial expansion and over half a century of free trade has left the English people miserably poor and contentedly hopeless; and in the future the people cannot depend upon any increase even of the small share of the benefits of industrial expansion, which they have hitherto obtained, because the national expansion is itself proceeding at a much slower rate.  The dole, which is now being accorded in the shape of old-age pensions, may fairly be compared to the free transportation to their homes with which the Bank of Monte Carlo assuages the feelings of its destitute victims.  The national organization and policy is so arranged that the majority must lose.  The result will be inevitably a diminution of the ability of the United Kingdom to hold its own in competition with its economic and political rivals; and in all probability this pressure from the outside will eventually force the English nation to reconsider the basis of its political and economic organization and policy.