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New Haven, Connecticut,

June 4, 1920.

EVERYDAY AMERICANS

EVERYDAY AMERICANS

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IN England there developed long ago, perhaps as far back as the days of Shakespeare, who was aristocratic in his tastes and democratic in his sympathies, a curious political animal called the radical-conservative. The radical-conservative, as Lord Fitzmaurice once said, is a man who would have been a radical outright if radicals had not been dissenters; by which he clearly meant that the species agreed with radical principles, but objected to radicals because they did not have good manners, seldom played cricket, and never belonged to the best clubs. Therefore the radical-conservative stays in his own more congenial class while working for social justice toward all other classes. He is willing to vote with the conservative party in return for concessions in labor laws, inheritance taxes, or the safeguarding of public health.

Thence arises the curious circumstance, most mystifying to foreigners, that a good share of the really progressive legislation in Great Britain of the last half-century has been led by young gentlemen from Oxford and Cambridge who have no more intention of becoming part of the proletariate than of leaving off their collars and going without baths. Bismarck was an out-and-out conservative who for his own nefarious ends furthered what a Rhode Island Republican or an Ulster Tory would call radical measures. But Lord Robert Cecil in our own day is a convinced aristocrat, as befits a son of Lord Salisbury, who is more sincerely effective than many Liberals in various movements which we are accustomed to call reform.