Mr. Stanley Baldwin has joined Ogden L. Mills as an advocate of lost causes. In a speech to the school children of England he appealed to them not to join either the Communists or the Fascists, for in that case there would be no alternative but civil war for England. With as much tearfulness as an English squire of the old school can manage, he implores them to stick to democracy and the English way of government, which he obviously thinks is the most nearly perfect system ever devised by the mind of man.

One is sorry for Mr. Baldwin; for the man is obviously sincere in his plea for the maintenance of traditional forms; and there can be but little doubt that it is a losing battle that he is waging. The forces of democracy and constitutionalism are very plainly on the wane in every country in the world. It is a vast movement that swings away from an ideal that has dominated European life since the Council of Constance, the idea of liberty as the most worthwhile and important goal toward which mankind should struggle. Only temporarily interrupted by the triumph of the forces of royal absolutism, in the nineteenth century the idea of liberty became the great intellectual motivating force in economic as well as political and social life.

But what men want now is not freedom but security; and security is precisely what is most lacking, and is precisely what Mr. Baldwin's type of government can not and will not guarantee. In face of this it is inevitable that some movement such as Fascism or Communism, in which the individual is completely subjugated to the state, and in which he becomes an integral part of it, should spring up. In return for unquestioning devotion, the state assumes many of his problems, notably the responsibility of feeding him.

This movement is so broad and general in scope that there is no reason for assuming that it's effects will not be felt with increasing strength in England. That Mr. Baldwin and his party do not recognize this is likely to be eventually disastrous for them, for instead of harnessing and guiding this force for their benefit as they might do if they possessed sufficient foresight, they are merely exhausting themselves in battling the inevitable. When a class loses the power of adapting itself to a changing environment it will disappear just as surely as did the dinosaurs of another world. NEMO.