The changes in Britain since 1939 have been revolutionary. Yet because Britain is a nation with a highly developed political sense, the revolution has been fought not at barricades but in ballot boxes. And, seen on the broadest scale, what has happened to Britain and its people at home is part of what has been happening all over the world since 1939. The year that saw the start of World War II saw the beginning of a terrible acceleration of forces that for fifty years had been slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly weakening Britain's position.

This book is concerned principally with Britain. But let us look at what has happened to British interests abroad since 1939. The Indian Empire is gone. The lifeline of what remains of the Empire is unraveling in Ceylon, Singapore, Aden, and Cyprus. The rise of the Soviet Union and the United States has dwarfed Britain as a world power, and the imaginative conception of the Commonwealth is not yet, and may never be, an adequate balance to these two vast conglomerations of industrial and military power. Britain's ties with some of the Commonwealth nations—notably South Africa—grow weaker year by year. The remaining colonies are moving toward self-government, as the British always planned, but it is doubtful whether after they leave the Empire nest they will be any more loyal or responsive to British leadership than Ceylon is today.

We are living through one of the most important processes of recent history, the liquidation of an empire that has lasted in various forms for about two hundred and fifty years. It is a tribute to the people who gave it life, to their courage, political flexibility, and foresight, that, despite the changes and the retreats, they are still reckoned a power in world affairs.

History has its lessons. In 1785 Britain had lost her most important overseas possessions, the American colonies, and the courts of Europe rejoiced at the discomfiture of the island people and their armies and navies. A third of a century later the British had organized the coalition that ultimately defeated Napoleon, the supreme military genius of his time, and were carving out a new empire in India, Australia, and Africa.

We need not drop back so far in history. When, shortly before the Second World War, I went to England, it was fashionable and very profitable to write about the decay of Britain. Some very good books were written on the subject, and they were being seriously discussed when this island people, alone, in a tremendous renaissance of national energy, won the Battle of Britain and saved the Western world from the danger of German domination. As generations of Spaniards, French, and Germans have learned, it is unwise to count the British out.

Yet an observer from Mars limiting his observations to the home islands would find reason to do so today. For the Britain of today resembles very little the Britain that, despite the long and, by the standards of that day, costly war in South Africa, greeted the twentieth century proudly confident.

Britain's old position as "the workshop of the world" has vanished. There are now two other Britains—two nations, that is, which depend largely on the production and export of manufactured goods to live. Both these nations, Germany and Japan, are the defeated enemies of World War II, and both of them were bidding for and getting a share of Britain's overseas trade before that war and, indeed, before World War I. The decline in Britain's economic strength did not begin in 1939.

The second world conflict, beginning only twenty-one years after the close of the first, accelerated the decline. Into World War II Britain poured both blood and treasure, just as she had in the earlier conflict. But 1914-18 had left her less of both. British casualties in World War II were smaller than in the first conflict, but the damage done to Britain's position in the world was much greater.

The differences between the Britain of 1939 and the Britain of 1945 affected much more than the international position of the country. A society had been grabbed, shaken, and nearly throttled by the giant hand of war. After that bright Sunday morning in September when the sirens sounded for the first time in earnest, things were never the same again.

I remember an evening in April 1939. It was sunny and warm, and the men and women came out of their offices and relaxed in the sunlight. The Germans were on the move in Europe, but along the Mall there was nothing more disturbing than the honk of taxi horns. London lay prosperous and sleek, assured and confident.

Six years later I came back from Germany. I had been in London much of the time during the war, but now I had been away for over a year, and I found the contrast between that September evening and the far-off evening in April impressive. It was not the bomb damage; there was more of that in Germany. But London and Londoners had broken their connection with the confident past. It was a shabbier, slower world, face to face with new realities.

The impact of the war on the average Briton was greater than on the average American because for long periods the Briton lived with it on terms of frighteningly personal intimacy. Americans went to war. The war came to the British. In the process an ordered society was shaken to its foundations, personal and national savings were swept away, the physical industrial system of the country was subjected to prolonged attack and then to a fierce national drive for increased industrial production. For close to six years the country was a fortress and then a staging area for military operations. By the end of the war and the dawn of an austere peace the nation was prepared psychologically for the other changes introduced by a radical change in political direction.

Mobilization of military and economic forces during the war was more complete in Britain than in any other combatant save possibly the Soviet Union. The result of immediate peril and the prospect of defeat, it began early in 1940. This mobilization was the start of the social changes that have been going on in Britain ever since.

The mingling of classes began. Diana, the rector's daughter, and Nigel, the squire's son, found themselves serving in the ranks with Harriet from Notting Hill and Joe from Islington. In the end, of course, Diana was commissioned in the Wrens and Nigel was a captain in a county regiment, largely but not entirely because of their superior education; however, their contacts with Harriet and Joe gave them a glimpse of a Britain they had not known about before.

Things changed at home, too. The rectory was loud with the voices of children evacuated from the slums of London or Coventry, and the squire spent his days farming as he never had before and his nights with the Home Guard. All over the country, men and women were giving up those jobs which were unnecessary in war and venturing into new fields. The assistant in the Mayfair dress shop found herself in a factory, the greens-keeper was in a shipyard.

The old, safe, quiet life of Britain ended. There were no more quiet evenings in the garden, no more leisurely teas in the working-class kitchen, no more visits to Wimbledon. People worked ten or twelve hours a day, and when they ate they ate strange dishes made of potatoes and carrots, and when they drank they drank weak beer and raw gin. These conditions were not universal. There were the shirkers in the safe hotels and the black markets. And, despite the bands playing "There'll Always Be an England" (a proposition that seemed highly doubtful in the summer of 1940) and despite the rolling oratory and defiance of Mr. Churchill, there was plenty of grousing. It was, they said in the ranks, "a hell of a way to run the bleedin' war"; or, as the suburban housewife remarked in the queue, "I really think they could get us some decent beef. How the children are to get along on this I cannot imagine."

They went on, though. They were bombed and strafed and shelled, they were hungry and tired. The casualty lists came in from Norway, France, the Middle East, Burma, Malaya. The machines in the factories were as strained as the workers. Then, finally, it was over and they had won. Only a minute number had ever thought they would be beaten. But they were not the same people who had gone dutifully to war in 1939. Nor was the world the same.

"Well, it's time to go home and pick up the pieces," said a major in Saxony in the summer of 1945. He, and thousands like him, found that the pieces just were not there any more. The economic drain of the war had made certain that Britons, far from enjoying the fruits of victory, would undergo further years of unrelenting toil in a scarred and shabby country.

People were restless. They had been unsettled not only by the impact of the war but by the glimpse of other societies. Not until the last two and a half years of the war, when the American Army and Air Force began to flood into Britain, did people become aware of the size, power, and mechanical ingenuity and efficiency of the people who were so inaccurately portrayed by Hollywood. Some saw in Russia's resistance to the Germans and her final sweeping victories proof that the Communist society could endure and triumph no less than those of the Western democracies. Many who understood what had happened to British power during the war were convinced that if the country was to retain its position in the world, it would have to seek new, adventurous methods in commerce and industry and new men and new policies in politics. This conviction was held by hundreds of thousands who had once voted Liberal or Conservative but who in the election of 1945 were to cast their votes for the Labor Party.

The political history of the immediate pre-war period offers a reason for this change. The defeats of 1940 and 1941 were a tremendous shock to Britons. During the war there was no time for lengthy official post-mortems on the alarming inadequacy of British arms in France in 1940 or in the first reverses in the western desert of Libya a year later. But the polemics of the left managed to convince a great many people that the blame lay with the pre-war Conservative governments of Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin. When in 1945 the chance came to revenge themselves on the Tories, even though Winston Churchill, who had opposed both Chamberlain and Baldwin, was the Conservatives' leader, millions took the chance and voted Labor into office.

The urge for change to meet changing conditions at home and new forces abroad was not universal. The people of the middle class had not yet fully understood what the war had done to Britain's economy and especially to that section of it which supported them. There was very strong opposition to the first post-war American loan in sections of this class, largely from people whose confidence had not been shaken by the cataclysm. The austerity imposed by Sir Stafford Cripps, the Socialist Chancellor of the Exchequer, was neither understood nor welcomed. The withdrawal from India was hotly opposed—and, it should be remembered, not purely on imperialist grounds. For two hundred years the middle class had provided the officers and civil servants who led and administered the Indian Army and the government of British India. As a class it knew a great deal more about India and the Indians than the union leaders and earnest young intellectuals of Mr. Attlee's government knew. The Socialist speakers and newspapers scoffed at "the toffy-nosed old ex-colonels" who predicted bloody and prolonged rioting between the Hindus and the Moslems once British power was withdrawn. The rioting began, and before it was over the bloodshed was greater than in all the British punitive actions from the Mutiny onward.

None of this generally Conservative opposition could halt or even check a Labor government that had been voted into power in 1945 with 393 seats in the House of Commons as opposed to 216 for the Conservatives and 12 for the Liberals. The Tories were out, the new day had dawned, and the Labor Party, in full control of the government for the first time in its history, set out to remake Britain.

No one in Britain could plead ignorance of what the Labor Party was about to do. Since 1918 it had been committed to extensive nationalization of industry and redistribution of income. Moreover, it came to power at a moment when the old patterns of industrial power and political alignments had been ruptured by war and when voters other than those who habitually voted Labor were acknowledging the need for change.

The 1945 policy statement of the Labor Party was called "Let Us Face the Future." It dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's in Labor's program.

The statement began with a good word for freedom, always highly esteemed by political parties seeking power. But it added an interesting comment. "There are certain so-called freedoms that Labor will not tolerate; freedom to exploit other people; freedom to pay poor wages and to push up prices for selfish profits; freedom to deprive the people of the means of living full, happy, healthy lives."

The statement went on to promise full employment, to be achieved through the nationalization of industry; the fullest use of national resources; higher wages; social services and insurance; a new tax policy; and planned investment. There was to be extensive replanning of the national economic effort and a "firm constructive government hand on our whole productive machinery." The Labor Party's ultimate purpose at home was "the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain—free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public spirited, its material resources organized in the services of the British people."

In 1948 Harold Laski, the Labor Party's ideological mentor, said in the course of the Fabian Society Lectures that the party was "trying to transform a profoundly bourgeois society, mainly composed of what Bagehot called 'deferential' citizens, allergic to theory because long centuries of success have trained it to distrust of philosophic speculation, and acquiescent in the empiricist's dogma that somehow something is bound to turn up, a society, moreover, in which all the major criteria of social values have been imposed by a long indoctrination for whose aid all the power of church and school, of press and cinema, have been very skillfully mobilized; we have got to transform this bourgeois society into a socialist society, with foundations not less secure than those it seeks to renovate."

Doubtless these ominous words failed to penetrate into the clubs and boardrooms that were the sanctums of the former ruling class. But it was hardly necessary that they should. The businessmen and the Conservative politicians understood Harold Laski's objectives.

Nationalization of industry is the most widely advertised economic result of Labor policies between 1945 and 1951. In assessing its effect on the changes in Britain since 1939, we must remember that neither was it so new nor is it so extensive as Americans believe. The British Broadcasting Corporation was created as a public corporation as long ago as 1927. Today most manufacturing in Britain remains in the control of private enterprise.

Between 1945 and 1951, however, the Labor government's policy of nationalization created corporations that today operate or control industries or services. In two industries, steel and road transport, the trend toward nationalization has been reversed. But the following list shows the extent of nationalization in Britain today.

Coal: The Coal Industry Nationalization Act received the Royal Assent in May of 1946, and on January 1, 1947, the assets of the industry were vested in the National Coal Board appointed by the Minister of Fuel and Power and responsible for the management of the industry. For a century coal was king in Britain, and British coal dominated the world market until 1910. Coal production is around 225,000,000 tons annually—the peak was reached in 1913 with 287,000,000 tons—and the industry employs just over 700,000 people.

Gas: Under the Gas Act of 1948 the gas industry was brought under public ownership and control on May 1, 1949. The national body is the Gas Council, also appointed by the Minister of Fuel and Power. The council consists of a full-time chairman and deputy chairman and the twelve chairmen of the area boards.

Electricity: The Central Electricity Authority in April 1948 took over the assets of former municipal and private electricity supply systems throughout Great Britain with the exception of the area already served by the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, another public corporation. But the industry had long been moving toward nationalization. As early as 1919 the Electricity Commissioners were established to supervise the industry and promote voluntary reorganization. The industry is a big one, employing approximately 200,000 people, and production in 1954 was over 72,800,000,000 kilowatts.

Banking: The Bank of England, Britain's central bank, was established in 1694 by Act of Parliament. Its entire capital stock was acquired by the government under the Bank of England Act of 1946. As the central bank, the Bank of England is the banker to the government, its agent in important financial operations, and the central note-issuing authority.

Transport: On January 1, 1948, under the Transport Act passed in the preceding year, most of Britain's inland transport system came under public ownership. Nationalization embraced the railways and the hotels, road-transport interests, docks and steamships owned by the railways, most of the canals, and London's passenger-transport system. The public authority then established was the British Transport Commission. Originally the Commission appointed six executive bodies to run various parts of the system: the Railway Executive, the Road Transport Executive, the Road Passenger Executive, the Hotel Executive, the London Transport Executive, and the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive. This generous proliferation of authority affected an industry that employs nearly 2,000,000 workers.

Transport was one of the nationalized industries whose organization was altered by the Conservatives when they returned to power in 1951. Believing that "competition gives a better service than monopoly," the Tories passed the Transport Act of 1953. This returned highway freight-haulage to private enterprise and aimed at greater efficiency on the railroads through the encouragement of competition between the various regions, such as the Southern Region or the Western Region, into which the national system had been divided. The act also abolished all the neat but rather inefficient executives except the Road Passenger Executive, which had been abolished, unmourned save by a few civil servants, in 1952, and the London Transport Executive, which was retained.

Airways: British governments since the twenties have been involved in civil aviation. Imperial Airways received a government grant of £1,000,000 as early as 1924. By 1939 the Conservative government had established the British Overseas Airways Corporation by Act of Parliament. In 1946 the Labor government, under the Civil Aviation Act, set up two additional public corporations: British European Airways and British South American Airways. The latter was merged with BOAC in 1949.

Communications: The government took control of Cable and Wireless Ltd., the principal overseas telegraph service, on January 1, 1947. Thus, the Post Office now operates overseas telecommunications from the United Kingdom and, of course, all internal telephonic and telegraphic systems.

These were the most important milestones on the Labor Party's progress toward nationalization. Viewed dispassionately, they were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. There had been a trend toward nationalization in electricity for some years. Objective investigators had suggested nationalization to aid the failing coal-mining industry, and during the war (1942) the Coalition government had assumed full control of the industry's operations although private ownership retained control of the mines.

We should avoid, too, the impression, popular among the uninformed in the United States and even in Britain, that nationalization meant that the workers took over management of the industries concerned. There was no invasion of boardrooms by working-men in cloth caps. On the contrary, employees protested that nationalization did not affect the management of industries, and such protests were backed by facts. In 1951, after six years of Labor Party rule, trade-union representation among the full-time members of the boards of the nationalized industries was a little under 20 per cent, and among the part-time members the percentage was just below 15 per cent. Five boards had no trade-union representation.

The nationalization program of the Labor government between 1945 and 1951 nevertheless marked an important change in the structure of British society. The financial and economic control of some of the nation's most important industries was transferred from private to public hands. The capitalist system that had served Britain so well found its horizons limited in important fields.

There is now no important political movement in Britain to undo the work of the Labor government in the fields mentioned above. But as long as a generation survives which knew these industries under private control, harsh and persistent criticism will persist. Some of it is just. The standard of efficiency and comfort on British railroads, for instance, has deterioriated since pre-war days. But in many instances the critics are attacking aspects of the nationalized industries which are the result not of nationalization itself but of the gradual wearing out of much of the nation's industrial plant. Two wars, a long depression, and a prolonged period of economic austerity during which only the most important improvements and construction could be financed have had their effect. Both British industry and the transport system upon which it rests—railroads, ports, highways—need immediate improvement and new construction.

Nationalization, however, was only one means of altering the bases of British society. The historian of the future may consider that the tremendous extension of government responsibility for social welfare was a more important factor in the evolution of Britain. The Welfare State has been a target for critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Its admitted cost, its supposed inefficiency are denounced. British critics, however, avoid a cardinal point. The Welfare State is in Britain to stay. No government relying on the electorate for office is going to dismantle it.

This is not a reference book, but we had better be sure of what we mean by the British "Welfare State" as we consider its effect on the society it serves.

The system is much more extensive than most Americans realize. The government is now responsible through either central or local authorities for services that include subsistence for the needy, education and health services for all, housing, employment insurance, the care of the aged or the handicapped, the feeding of mothers and infants, sickness, maternity, and industrial-injury benefits, widows' and retirement pensions, and family allowances.

The modern John Bull can be born, cared for as an infant, educated, employed, hospitalized and treated, and pensioned at the expense of the state and ultimately of himself through his contributions. This is the extreme, and it arouses pious horror among those of conservative mind in Britain as well as in the United States.

Again, as in the case of the nationalization of industry, we find that much of the legislation that established the Welfare State did not spring from the bulging brows of Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord Beveridge, or Aneurin Bevan, but is the latest step in an evolutionary process. National Insurance is the logical outgrowth of the Poor Relief Act of 1601, before there were Englishmen in America, and the contributory principle on which all later measures in this field have been based first appeared in the National Health Insurance Scheme of 1912.

The present system is big and it is expensive. The national and local governments are spending about £2,267,000,000 a year (about $6,347,600,000) on social services for the Welfare State, and the expenditure by the Exchequer on social services amounts to over a quarter of the total.

Yet, as this is Britain where established custom dies hard, voluntary social services supplement the state services. There are literally hundreds of them, ranging from those providing general social service, such as the National Council of Social Service, through specialized organizations, such as Doctor Barnado's Homes for homeless children and the National Association for Mental Health, to religious groups such as the Church of England Children's Society and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. The existence and vigor of these voluntary organizations testifies to the wrongness of the assumption that all social work in Britain today is in the hands of soulless civil servants.

Of all the actions taken to extend social services under the Labor government, by far the most novel and controversial was the establishment of the National Health Service, which came into being on July 5, 1948. The object of the National Health Service Act was "to promote the establishment in England and Wales [other acts for Scotland and Northern Ireland came into force simultaneously] of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people of England and Wales and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness, and for that purpose to provide or secure the effective provision of services."

Before we consider what the service does, let us think of those it was designed to help. The British working class up to 1945 suffered to a considerable degree from lack of proper medical and dental care. Doctors and dentists were expensive, and in addition there was a definite psychological resistance to placing oneself in their care. Health and medicine were not popularized in Britain, as they were in the United States; among the poor there was still a tendency to consider discussion of these subjects as ill-mannered.

There has been some change since the war, but not much. Britons of all classes were surprised, and some of them a little disgusted, by the clinical descriptions of President Eisenhower's illness in American newspapers. But the National Health Service has done much to reduce the old reluctance to visit the doctor or the dentist because of the expense.

Three subsequent acts in 1949, 1951, and 1952 have modified the scheme slightly and have provided for charges for some services. But the National Health Service is otherwise free and available according to medical need. Its availability is not dependent on contribution to National Insurance.

What does the service do? The Ministry of Health is directly responsible for all hospital and specialist services on a national basis, the mental-health functions of the old Board of Control, research work on the prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of illness, the public-health laboratory service, a blood-transfusion service.

These broad general headings cover an enormous organization, the basis of which is the General Practitioner Services, which covers the medical attention given to individuals by doctors and dentists of their own choice from among those enrolled in the service. About 24,000 or nearly all of the general practitioners in Britain are part of the service. Of approximately 10,000 dentists in England and Wales, about 9,500 are in the service.

Again, costs are high. For six years Labor and Conservative administrations have sought to keep the net total annual cost of the National Health Service to just over £400,000,000 or $1,120,000,000. To limit the drain on the Exchequer it was found necessary to charge for prescription forms, dentures, and spectacles. Like any welfare scheme, the National Health Service invited malingerers and imaginary invalids who cost the doctors—and the state—time and money.

I asked a young doctor in the West Country what he thought of the scheme. "Well, I don't know if it has contributed much to the health of my bank statement," he said, "but it has contributed to the health of the folk around here. People are healthier because they don't wait until they're desperately ill to see a doctor. And the care of children has improved tremendously. Perhaps this might have come naturally under the old system. I don't know. But it's here now, and we're a healthier lot."

The opposition view was put by an elderly doctor in London who opined that so great was the pressure on the ordinary general practitioner from "humbugs" that he never got a chance to do a thorough job on the seriously ill. The hospitals, he added, were crowded with people who "don't belong there" and who occupied beds needed by the really sick.

This controversy, like those over the nationalization of industry, will continue. Again there seems little prospect that any government will modify in any important way the basic provisions of the National Health Service Act.

In company with the National Insurance, which applies its sickness, unemployment, maternity, and widows' benefits to everyone over school-leaving age, and the National Assistance Board, with its responsibility for the care of those unable to maintain themselves, the National Health Service has established the Welfare State in Britain. Another important function has been largely taken out of the hands of private individuals and delivered to the state.

What effect did the nationalization of industry and the establishment of the Welfare State have on British society? Obviously, the first removed from the control of the moneyed and propertied classes certain powers over the economic functioning of Britain. The second, because of its cost, made certain that the heavy tax rates introduced during and just before World War II would continue. These taxes were paid principally by the middle class, which, at the outset, refused in many instances to use the National Health Service.

The effect was a leveling one. The dominant class was stripped, on one hand, of some of its power to control a large section of the national economy, although, as we have seen, it managed to retain its direction of the nationalized industries. At the same time this class found that it must continue to pay year by year a high proportion of its earned income for the state's care of its less prosperous fellows. The decline in the influence, prosperity, and prestige of the old middle class was definitely accelerated by these two bold advances toward socialism.

From the standpoint of the prestige of this class in Britain and, frankly, of the usefulness of many of its members to the state, the withdrawal of British rule from India and Burma and the steps elsewhere toward the liquidation of the Empire were blows as grievous as the creation of the Welfare State and the nationalization of some industries.

Americans should realize that to Britons the Empire was not simply a place to work and get rich. The people who did the Empire's work usually retired with only their pensions and a conviction (which is not much help when you need a new overcoat) that they had done their duty.

The propaganda of India and Pakistan and of their well-wishers in the United States has obscured for Americans the grand dimensions of the British achievement in India. For a hundred and ninety years, between Plassy in 1757 and the withdrawal in 1947, British rule brought peace and justice to peoples hitherto sorely oppressed by irresponsible tyrants, many of whom were corrupt and decadent. The British stamped out thuggee and suttee, ended the interminable little wars, introduced justice, and labored to build the highways, railroads, and canals that form the skeletons of independent India and Pakistan. All this was done by a handful of British officials and white troops in the midst of the subcontinents millions.

Parenthetically, it might be remembered that when the British Indian army, which served with the British Army in India, existed, and when the Royal Navy had the strength and facilities to take it where it was needed, there was peace between Suez and Singapore.

The British are proud rather than defensive about their record in India. Even the anti-colonialists of the Labor Party note that free India and Pakistan operate under British political and legal forms. Most of them, even those who knew the country well, regarded withdrawal as inevitable after World War II. But it will take more proof than Mr. Nehru is prepared to offer to convince many Britons with roots in India that the people are happier, that justice is universal, that corruption is declining.

This attitude galls the Indians and their friends, who never liked the British much. But in the great days of empire the British didn't care about being liked. This is a significant difference between the American and British approaches to responsibility and leadership in international affairs. The American visitor abroad worries about whether he and his country are liked by the French or the Egyptians or the Indonesians. The Briton, when the Empire's sun was at the zenith, never gave a damn. What he wanted was respect, which he regarded as about as much as a representative of a powerful nation could win from the nationals of a less powerful nation under economic, political, or military obligation.

"We ran that district with three officials, some Indian civil servants, the police, and their white officers, and we ran it damned well," an official recalled. "There were some troops up the line, but we never needed them. When we made a decision or gave a judgment, we adhered to it. We made no distinction between Moslem and Hindu. There was justice and peace. No, of course they weren't free. They weren't ready to govern themselves. And d'you think they'd have traded those conditions for freedom and communal rioting?"

I asked the official the population of the district.

"Three, three and a half million," he said.

The loss of India and Burma under the first Socialist administration and the consequent decline of British power thus constituted a severe psychological shock to the middle class that had ruled Britain during the last century of British administration in India. Later we shall see the difference it made in Britain's international position vis-À-vis the Soviet Union. Here we are concerned with the effect upon British society at home.

That society contains thousands of men and women who knew and served the Empire and who bitterly resent its liquidation. Usually inarticulate and no match for the bright young men of the New Statesmen, they can be goaded into wrath. Gilbert Harding, a television entertainer who has become a national celebrity, found this out. Mr. Harding referred on television to the "chinless idiots" who made that "evil thing," the British Empire. The reaction was immediate and bitter. Mr. Harding was abused in the editorial and letter columns of the newspapers in phrases as ugly as any he had used. There are, it appeared, many who glory in the Empire and in the Commonwealth that has evolved from the old colonies.

Nationalization, the creation of the Welfare State, the withdrawal from India—these were major events that changed the face and manner of Britain. But the effect of the change in British life was evident, too, in the way men lived. The austerity preached by Sir Stafford Cripps may have been necessary if the nation was to overcome the effects of the war. But continued rationing, the queues outside the shops, the shortages of coal, the persistently high taxation all combined to change the life of the middle class. Slowly they realized that the sacrifices and dangers of the war years were not going to be repaid. There was no brave new world. Instead, there was the old world looking much more shabby than ever before.

"You see," people would say, explaining some new restriction, some new retreat before economic pressure, "we won the war." It was a bitter jest in the long, drab period between 1945 and 1950.

There was plenty of grumbling, some of it bitterly humorous. Lord Wavell, surveying a glittering audience at a royal command performance at Covent Garden Opera House, was told by a friend that the scene reminded him of pre-war days. "The only difference," the great soldier replied, "is that tomorrow we'll be doing our own washing up."

There was, of course, a good deal of snobbery in the middle-class attitude toward the Socialist government and what it was doing. The Conservatives and the dwindling band of Liberals just could not believe that the Socialists were equipped to carry out such vast changes in British life. They noted with sardonic humor the failures in Socialist policy. They found the Labor ministers ineffectual and diffident compared to their own leaders. "We had X and his wife to dinner last week," the wife of an industrialist told me in 1948. "What a pathetic little man! And in such an important post, too. Really, I looked at him sitting there and thought of Winston and Anthony, and Duff, and I felt like crying."

It was during this period that the Labor Party lost the support, temporarily at least, of many of the Conservatives and Liberals who had voted for it in 1945. The reasons for the shift are difficult to ascertain. Certainly many people were affronted by nationalization, especially when it directly affected their interests (though many of them had voted for Labor expecting such changes). The continuation of high taxation, which seemed permanent after the start of rearmament in 1950, alienated others. The ineffectual way in which the Labor government seemed to be handling many of its problems, particularly the coal shortage, affected the political opinions of many. "Damn it, we live on an island made of coal," said one civil servant who had voted for Labor in 1945. "It's monstrous to have a coal crisis. What are they playing at?"

In one field the Labor government won the grudging respect of the Tories: its approach to the problem presented to the West by the aggression of Soviet Russia. Mr. Attlee's dry, precise refutations of Soviet policy might be a weak substitute for Churchill's thundering oratory, but the nation found a paladin in the squat, rolling figure of Ernest Bevin.

Bevin had spent much of his life fighting British communists for the control of the unions. Entering the rarefied atmosphere of international affairs at the top as Foreign Secretary, he brought to his new task the blunt tongue and quick insight he had employed so successfully in the old. Between 1945 and 1950, when the British Labor Party was at the top of its power, Russian Communism was on the march in Europe. It had no tougher opponent than this Englishman.

The Russians recognized him as a prime enemy. In Moscow in 1946 and 1947 the Soviet press denounced and assailed Bevin as hotly as they did any other Western figure. Indeed, the whole Labor government was vilified almost daily. The reason for this savage onslaught on the earnest and industrious Marxists of the British government was obvious. Stalin and his lieutenants had been talking about socialism for decades. Here was a regime that might make it work without throwing hundreds of thousands into labor camps and allowing millions to starve. The anxiety of the rulers of Russia can be compared to that of the proprietors of a black market who learn that an honest shop is going into business across the street.

So this sturdy proletarian, Ernest Bevin, became one of the champions of the West in the cold war and was praised by Conservatives and Liberals. The left wing of his own Labor Party provided most of the criticism. Still cherishing the illusion that the Russians could be induced to drop their hostility to the West through "frank and open exchanges," Bevin's comrades led by Aneurin Bevan attacked his policies and especially his desire to maintain the Anglo-American alliance.

Those who cheered loudest, the people of the upper middle class who detested Russia, were the ones who, in the end, suffered most from the cold war. Britain's rearmament, under the impact of the Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Blockade, and, finally, the attack on South Korea, was a costly business. It began soon after the great expansion of social services had created the Welfare State. Taxes, already high, rose further.

In thousands of middle-class homes the decline from the old pre-war standards continued. The maidservant gave way to the "daily" who came in once or twice a week to help with the cleaning. The savings for old age were diverted to the rising costs of keeping the boys at school. In a hundred pathetic ways, the middle class strove to maintain its standards under the burden of taxation in a Britain it neither liked nor understood.

But to balance this gradual depression of one class there was the expansion of another. The victory of the Labor Party in 1945 encouraged the working class of the nation to seek a richer, fuller life. It opened vistas of a new existence and greater opportunities. It created confidence.

Traveling to Cardiff in September 1945, I talked with a miner's wife, a huge woman who spoke in the singsong accents of the mining valleys of South Wales. She dandled a plump baby on her knee and talked of what life would be like now. "My Dai's not going down the mine like his dad," she told me. "Now that we have our government, he can be anything he wants, do anything."

British society, despite its fixed barriers between class and class, has always enjoyed considerable mobility. In the past the country gentry and the aristocracy had surrendered power to the merchants and the industrialists. Now the urban working class that had served the merchants and the industrialists believed it had wrested control from its masters. Labor's election victory seemed to prove it.

This breaking down of the old relationship between the classes was a matter of deep concern to many, and their concern went deeper than partisan political feeling. Repeatedly one was told that the worst thing Labor had done was to create class feeling, to encourage class antagonisms in a country that until then had never been affected by them. This was only a half-truth. The class antagonism had been there, all right, but the middle class now was belatedly the victim of the bitterness that a hundred years of slum housing, poor food, and lack of opportunity had created among some but not all of the working class. I write "not all" because there were members of that class who were as disturbed by the growth of class antagonism as any retired colonel in his club. They felt instinctively that the unity of Britain was being sapped by the emergence of a powerful and militant socialist group whose object was change. Most of them had voted for change. But the British are a conservative people. They accept change within the framework of familiar institutions. Extensive reconstruction may go on behind the faÇade, but the faÇade must remain untouched.

The hope and confidence born of Labor's victory, however, had a long-term effect upon British society. It encouraged those who had dreamed, like the miner's wife, of a better life for their children. Ambitious mothers aimed higher than a few years of school and a factory job for their sons. Young men who had won commissions during the war decided to remain in the Army or the Navy or the Air Force now that the old barriers were falling and the right accent and the right private income did not matter so much as it once had.

By 1950 the economic and social forces that were to create the Britain of today were in full motion. Paradoxically, the British electorate was moving slightly to the right.

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