To use a word which does not very well go with English ...

To use a word which does not very well go with English conditions, the bourgeois ascendency which the thirties seemed to promise was never fully achieved. The resistance of the gentry, entrenched in Parliament, the Church, the Universities, and the land, was too strong: their wealth too great, their way of life too attractive.

In the course of a generation or little more, the productive bourgeoisie had evolved, was tending at least to evolve, into a financial plutocracy, with a subordinate executive class: and the natural queue of development for the gentry was to become the administrators of a State and Empire which they could no longer claim to govern as of right, advisers and leaders of a people who they could no longer hope to rule.

The impulse was much the same, whether it sent young men, in the footsteps of Vincent Denison, to Whitechapel, or to Egypt and South Africa on Milner's staff. A second age of inquiry, recalling the investigations of the thirties, is setting in, and, as of old, literature begins to consult

the Blue Books.

A forgotten but remarkable novel, Gilbert's De Frofundis, is the link between Sybil and Alton Locke, and the literature of the Social Deposits so much in vogue in the Late Victorian years, of which in its day All Sorts and Conditions of Men was the most influential, Esther Waters is the classic example - The bleak logic of the Philosophic Radicals, that indeed we shall not find. Instead, we have a very much wider psychology, of the individual and of the community, than they had possessed; a greater range of observation; a saving doubt of the imposing generality.