As long as there is a majority composed of large and small capitalists and their dependents, together with those of the salaried and professional classes who are satisfied with the capitalistic kind of collectivism (_i.e._ while its progress is most brilliant), it is only necessary for the progressives to hold the balance of power in order to have everything their own way both against Socialism and reaction.

The powerful Socialist and revolutionary minority created in industrial communities by equal suffrage and a democratic form of government, _as long as it remains distinctly a minority_, is unable to injure the combined forces of capitalism, while it furnishes a useful and invaluable club by which the progressive capitalists can threaten and overwhelm the reactionaries.
In Great Britain, for example, the new collectivist movement of Messrs.
Churchill and Lloyd George, basing itself primarily on the support of the small capitalist class, which there as elsewhere constitutes a very large part (over a third) of the population, seeks also the support of a part of the non-propertied classes.

It cannot make them any plausible or honest promise of any equitable redistribution of income or of political power, but it can promise an increase of well-paid government employment, and it can guarantee that it will develop the industrial efficiency of all classes and allow them a certain share, if a lesser one, in the benefits of this policy.
If then "State Socialism," like the benevolent despotisms and oligarchies of history, sometimes offers the purely _material_ benefits which it brings in some measure to all classes, as a _substitute_ for democratic government, it also favors democracy in those places where the small capitalists and related classes form a majority of the community.

The purpose of the democratic policy, where it is adopted, is to stimulate new political interest in the "State Socialistic" program, and by increasing cautiously the political weight of the non-capitalists--without going far enough to give them any real or independent power--to check the reactionary element among the capitalists that tries to hold back the industrial and governmental organization the progressives have in view.

It was in order to shift the political balance of power that the reactionary Bismarck introduced universal suffrage in Germany, and the same motive is leading Premier Asquith, who is not radical, to add considerably to the political weight of the working classes in England, _i.e._ not to the point where they have any power whatever for their own purposes, but only to that point where their weight, added to that of the Liberals, counterbalances the Tories, and so automatically aids the former party.
The Liberals are giving Labor this almost valueless installment of democracy, just as they had previously granted instead such immediate and material benefits as we see in the recent British budgets, _as if_ they were concessions, only hiding the fact that _they would soon have conferred these benefits on the workers through their own self-interest, whether the workers had given them their political support or not_.
Mr.Lloyd George has said:-- "The workingman is no fool.