20 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



And in this state of war the central figure has 

 been none other than that of Demos himself as 

 the victim of it. The leaders of the proletariat as 

 they gradually took in the details of the position 

 have not been slow to interpret it to the masses in 

 their own version. Every textbook of economics in 

 the West, it was said, presented the same picture of the 

 toil-stained millions. In the struggle of the world the 

 overlords of the capitalist age of force took all they 

 were able to hold as the wages of capacity. And the 

 millions of the wage-earners were scaled down to the 

 minimum condition of existence upon which the great 

 beast of the proletariat would consent to reproduce 

 its useful kind. That has been the rendering. 



But the masses of the West have been themselves, 

 and in their own right, and no less than the over- 

 lords of capital, the inheritors of the spirit of the ages 

 of fight and conquest out of which the West has 

 come. Gradually as they have drunk in with their 

 new-born political consciousness the position thus 

 explained to them, a new spirit passed over the 

 West of the like of which and of the significance 

 of which the world has had no previous experience. 

 Firmly and consciously the hand of the working 

 multitude has stiffened on the levers of supreme 

 power which they have come to grasp under the 

 forms of Democracy in the West. 



