Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/375

 tensions, its shape and implications may survive, survive all the more disastrously because they are increasingly insincere. Indeed, in a sense, the British system, the pyramid of King, land-owning and land-ruling aristocracy, yeomen and trading middle-class, and labourers, is dead—it died in the nineteenth century under the wheels of mechanism—and the crude beginnings of a new system are clothed in its raiment, and greatly encumbered by that clothing. Our greatest peers are shareholders, are equipped by marriage with the wealth of Jews and Americans, are exploiters of colonial resources and urban building enterprises; their territorial titles are a mask and a lie. They hamper the development of the new order, but they cannot altogether prevent the emergence of new men. The new men come up to power one by one, from different enterprises, with various traditions, and one by one, before they can develop a sense of class distinction and collective responsibility, the old system with its organised "Society" captures them. If it finds the man obdurate, it takes his wife and daughters, and it waylays his sons. Because the hereditary kingdom and aristocracy of Great Britain is less and less representative of eco-