The Political Ideas of Contemporary Tory Democracy

The most significant political phenomena of post-war Britain are the emergence of the Labor party and the slow extinction of the Liberal party. The Labor party has emerged as the expression of a demand on the part of the wage-earners for an alteration of the basis of property. The Liberal party has suffered an eclipse because its historic mission has been achieved. The rising industrial classes which it represented for a century have now arrived. Whatever difference may still exist between the interests that were heretofore represented primarily by the Liberal party and those that were represented by the Tory party shrinks into insignificance as compared with the common interests of all the dominant elements against the radical demands of Labor. Thus Toryism and Labor alone will apparently share between them the future destinies of Britain. One will offer largely a brief for the claims of the past; the other will present in the main the demands of the future. The traditional British two-party alignment promises henceforth to be a struggle between Toryism and Labor, and to be marked by the intensity and animosity characteristic of a political division that comes dangerously near to being a clash of economic classes.