"It is marked by a readiness to grant favours or conveniences to the citizen if he will give up some part of his old independence..."

We live in a very strange time, of which the main mark is that things are being altered and perverted so rapidly that what was the worst abuse yesterday is a comparatively mild anomaly today...the ignorant discontent of the rich against things like taxation begins to have a sort of shadowy excuse, not through any particular change of their own benighted intellects for the better, but by the extraordinary change in the science of taxation for the worse. A man who has always regarded himself as a Coriolanus hardening his heart against the sentimentalism of the Poor Rates finds himself in his old age a kind of Tribune of the People against the tyranny of the Insurance Act....Even illiterate plutocracy can sometimes be right by instinct as compared with more political monomaniacs and fidgetty prigs...

...our social reformers to-day have everywhere the same attitude, both rightly and wrongly. It is marked by a readiness to grant favours or conveniences to the citizen if he will give up some part of his old independence...

-April 12, 1913, Illustrated London News