•	ENGLISH    SAGA
could not see this. They supposed that the fluctuating numbers
of the workless, which in reality depended on world factors out-
side the control of any single government, were due to the mis-
carriage of their politicians. Sometimes they blamed the Con-
servatives and sometimes the Socialists. It was all said to be
Lloyd George's fault or Baldwin's or MacDonald's. This em-
bittered public life, for unemployment and the poverty and
wretchedness that went with it were such evils that they seemed
a crime against the dignity of human nature. Whoever was
responsible for them was obviously a criminal.
' It was this, too, that explained the rapid rise of the Socialist
Party which during the War had been discredited as a pacifist
minority. For men felt that as the rich were so powerful and
yet so impotent or unwilling to remedy such inhuman con-
ditions, there must be something fundamentally wrong with
the private possession of property. A political party that pro-
claimed this could not fail to win votes. Its two chief fields of
recruitment were the masses who suflFered under the industrial
system and the intellectuals who sought remedies for it. The
worse the suffering, the more insistent became the demand that'
the State should restrict the power of the rich by taxing and
ultimately confiscating the wealth that was its source. No
government, even the most conservative, dared oppose this.
Though the project of a capital levy, much discussed in the first
post-war years, was easily defeated through the influence of
the great financial houses and trusts whose business it would
have dislocated, high taxation of incomes and inherited estates
was the toll which private wealth was made to pay for the mani-
^!fest suffering and injustice of the social system. It was recognised
as inevitable even by the most diehard.
i So far as Socialism constituted an attack on the existing
system, it thus received support from all but the stupidest and
smallest minority. "The alleviations which it proposed—unem-
ployment insurance, increased social services, help to distressed
areas—became part of the programme of all parties. Yet it
never achieved a dominating hold on the British, far less on the
English electorate. The English reacted against joint-stock
capitalism because they did not want to be wage-slaves. They
reacted against Socialism and still more against Communism
because they did not want to be proletarians. By English indi-
vidual standards of liberty a proletarian, whatever his status in