that was at the basis of it. Furthermore, with this class as with the "new" middle class, it has become merely a question of income. For property without control is again a contradiction in terms. These people really have no property, although they and others think they do. What they have is a right to a certain income. They are nothing but rentiers, annuitants, either of public or private corporations. They are ready at any time to, and do, exchange their supposed property for more formal annuities and other rentés.
Robbed of its economic independence, deprived of the control of its property and of the opportunity of individual enterprise, it has no other aspirations except to preserve its comforts, its incomes. If it has any ideals at all, its ideals may be said to be just the reverse of the old bourgeois middle class. By the very nature of its way of managing its affairs the propriety, effectiveness, and, above all, the necessity of socialization, is brought home to it. Furthermore, being minority stockholders, the members of this class naturally look upon the general government, the social organization as a whole, as the protector of its rights against the unscrupulous methods and the rapaciousness of the big capitalistic sharks. It is true their ideas in this respect are not those of the revolutionary proletariat, it is not the social organization of work that they dream of, but the social organization of the distribution of gain. By a curious mental process they fill the old forms of their ideology, according to which the State was merely a policeman, with an entirely new substance by extending the police powers to fields which would have horrified their fathers had they lived to see the thing. The ideology of this class, like that of the new middle class, is a curious mixture of old and new ideas, but one thing is clear in the midst of all this confusion, that its antagonism to socialism is not a matter of principle but of convenience.
Hence the "breaking up of ideals," the great changes in the ideology of capitalistic society which we have already noted. Hence, also, the so many different forms of "social-
