Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/124

 party policies of opportunist concessions before 1914. The pretence that capitalism is consistent with a real democracy in which the organized working classes can take their due part in Government, that “gradualness” along the old familiar lines can still suffice, wears thinner and thinner, as the recent course of events discloses.

To present the appearance of democracy, without handing over the reality of government to the people, had long been the unchallenged achievement of the upper classes in Britain and America. The machinery of two-party politics was successfully devoted to this end. How successfully I have shown in Victorian England, but in America the party machinery was even more cleverly applied, being less hampered by traditional allegiances and assisted by the limits of the federal system.