ENGLISH SAGA

Yet, as the theory of social responsibility increasingly haunted
the minds of the educated minority, a process characteristically
English took place. The larger and better-established capi-
talists—and above all their sons—began to devote themselves to
the service of the public they or their forebears had fleeced.
They did so without hope of further profit and out of a sense of
noblesse oblige, gained more often than not at the new public
schools which since Arnold of Rugby's days had opened their
gates and their ideology to the commercial classes. A new type
of public man arose—provincial, aggressive and democratic in
method and appeal—whose interest lay neither in foreign policy
nor parliamentary debate but in the extension of municipal
services. Living on the private wealth acquired or inherited under
laissez-faire, they were able to throw their entire energies into the
work of mitigating the evils wrought by laissez-faire. These new,
and to their individualist fathers' way of thinking, heretical rad-
icals were still iconoclastic towards the older notions of privilege
and decorum. But though they resented the power of the landed
aristocracy and lost no opportunity of humbling it, they were
no enemies to the capitalist and manufacturer. The very inroads
they made on laissez-faire practice helped to maintain the prestige
and opportunities of their class by appeasing the social unrest of
the masses. The most famous of these local radical reformers
was Joseph Chamberlain, the dapper young hardware merchant
with the orchid, the monode and the terrible republican senti-
ments who became Mayor of Birmingham in 1873 at 37,
and President of the Board of Trade in Mr, Gladstone's second
Administration in 1880.

In all this the domestic history of Britain during the last two
decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century
constituted the first act of a great revolution. During these years
a vigorous capitalist and less vigorous but still powerful aristo-
cratic England were converted to an elementary socialism whose
basis was that the weak and inefficient should constitute a first
charge on the strong and able. The pioneer activities of a humane
and intelligent minority of their own members contributed to
that conversion. But the real driving force came from the
superior votes of the urban workers, which by a third Reform
Act in 1884 had been reinforced by those of the county house-
holders.

The ruling dasses did not consciously admit their conversion,