fRUMBLING HERITAGE 30?

reflection, let alone action. They had more than enough to do to
earn their daily bread and, so far as they were able, a decent life
for themselves and their dear ones. Beyond voting in masses at
set intervals for t\vo or more organised groups of politicians
offering stereotyped legislative programmes of a general kind,
whose practical purport was never very clear, they could not
shape the course of events. They merely lived through them,
reacting to them as their native feelings and their limited know-
ledge—mostly acquired through the newspapers—dictated. For
the rest, they looked for jobs, worked hard to hold them when
they had them—though seldom for the joy of working since
few available jobs offered any scope for this—and, Englishwise,
took whatever pleasure their confined lives afforded: in the
bosom of their families, listening to the wireless, watching
League football or the flickers, and holiday-making in cheap
cars or charabancs.

What followed in the world of public affairs bore small
relation to their desire. The emphasis at first was almost wholly
domestic. It seemed attended by a great deal of bitterness and
strife. There were constant strikes and lock-outs, and violent
speeches in which Britons in the public eye called each other
tyrants, bloodsuckers, murderers, firebrands, and red revolu-
tionaries. These industrial upheavals involved much recurrent
inconvenience to the ordinary man: clerks had to make their
way to the office without trains or trams, housewives to cook
without coal or gas, shareholders to forgo their wonted divi-
dends, and strikers their wages, and often, as a result of pro-
longed economic dislocation and the loss of foreign customers,
their employment. There was a general atmosphere of uncer-
tainty and among the industrial masses who, though the osten-
sible beneficiaries, were the worst sufferers from these acrimonious
efforts to better conditions, a gi;eat deal of very real bitterness
against the social system in general and their more fortunate
countrymen in particular. The paradise of "Blighty" as seen in
wistful anticipation from the trenches proved, on closer acquaint*
ance, to be somewhat precarious, even for those who had had the
luck of the economic roulette. For the less fortunate there were
times when it seemed, what with slum housing, tightened belts,
hungry, querulous womenfolk and pinched children, almost as
grim as the trenches and far less friendly.

Seen through the medium of the daily papers the first years of