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76
THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND
CH.

upward way. As individualism, it seems, ignores the individual, and socialism swamps him, we are to forget these shibboleths, and are to stow these nineteenth-century antiquities in the lumberroom. Thus in future we are to employ the energies of the State in creating what for want of a better term may be called the Minimum Man. Each swimmer in the maelstrom of life is to be buoyed up partly. The milk of human kindness is to be on tap at every door. There is to be a Plimsoll line of citizenship.

There is a sixth development which the future will witness. Looking abroad over the world, will strikes, disputes, risings, lock-outs and the guerilla warfare of labour and capital, be rife as ever in the immediate future before us? Yes, unfortunately. Why?

One sufficient reason among others is that throughout the world a change, purely economic and of great power, is in silent operation. It is the rise of prices.

Various economists have attributed this rise to various causes. Some point to the recent destruction of capital in the South African, Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese wars; some to the relative unwillingness of this country to invest abroad until recent years; some to the rise of wages and the increased cost of production; some to the heightened standards of comfort and of consumption; some to the alarms which have made credit shy of enterprise. But there is one cause deeper