lecture I have the privilege of meeting foreign visitors to Britain and discussing social questions with them, they seem to me to take a very favourable view of British institutions, They like the way Britain lives, but I always want to correct them on one point, and that is when they talk' of Britain's social order as if it were aristocratic and rather old fashioned, being divided into an hereditary governing class and the "common people," into rich and poor, with an unbridged gulf between them.
That is certainly not how it seems to us nowadays and I do not think it is true.
I admit that some of the old English aristocracy survives and that, in each generation, it produces men of first rate ability and character.
That still happens in other European countries besides England.
The fact remains that the real power in Britain is the wage and salary earning class. In Britain nearly 90 per cent. of our 44,000,000 citizens live in households with a weekly income between £2 and £8 a week.
They are neither. very rich nor very poor, but their average standard of life is probably a little higher than in many continental countries and they keep it up by the money they earn as workers in industry, commerce and the professions. There are about 18,000,000 such workers; the rest are their dependents (ie. wives, children and old persons).
In a few lowly paid occupations like agriculture and the manufacture of clothing, minimum wages are legally fixed by Joint Boards or Councils set up by the Government, but, for the most part, the State does not interfere. Overseas readers will at once ask: "What about British Trade Unions, labour disputes and strikes?"
T can only say that in each of the last ten years the amount of time and money lost in industrial conflicts has not amounted to more than the cost of an extra half-day's holiday. Most people, nowadays, hold the view that trade unions are an asset to Britain. They are a steadying rather than a disruptive force. They help to keep up the level of wages to a decent standard, not only for their 4,700,000 trade union members, but for a wider range of workers,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.