CHAPTER IV
THE PRESENT ISSUE
As the eye ranged from the slope of Traitor's Hill through the golden haze of summer, London seemed a city of gold.
Was not this a true emblem of our future? Had not the time come for the people to enjoy those riches which they had wrested from Nature during a century and a half of industrial revolution? Such an outcome might present itself as a natural sequence from our past. For England, in deciding to be free, chose next to be industrial. But the aim and object of industrialism is prosperity. Hence the future of England might primarily lie in the general fruition of that wealth which we had won.
Are not things tending that way from a remote history? Under the Tudors, England was governed according to the will of her monarchs. In the succeeding seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we were managed by our landed gentry and aristocracy, the lovers of freedom. In the nineteenth century our directors were the middle classes, the trustees of industrialism. But now the twentieth century is to belong to the masses,
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