Page:The League of Nations and the democratic idea.djvu/18

 workers' hatred of war is intensified by the plain facts of their own class interest, and this makes the general sentiment for peace stronger in the working class than among the wealthy. But the working-class crowds at racecourses and football matches, in public-houses and music halls, are not appreciably more peaceful-minded nor yet high-minded than wealthier people of the same type.

Throughout most of human history there have been from time to time outbreaks of theory tending to glorify the absolute proletariate. Not merely the worker or craftsman, but the outcast, the disinherited, the oppressed. Its latest outcrop is Bolshevism. The proletariate, in the strict sense of the word, is that completely undistinguished mass of human kind which remains permanently at the bottom, while other people have either saved money or shown ability or made a reputation or learnt a trade, or somehow provided themselves with some security against the future. And the ground for glorifying them is mere despair of human nature. The Bolshevik theorist has observed that it is not only kings and priests and soldiers who oppress the community; all through society each class is hard upon the class below it. The capitalist oppresses the small trader, the bourgeois oppresses the workman, the skilled artisan oppresses the unskilled and unorganized. Therefore, he argues, the only way to avoid oppression is to put power in the hands of