GREAT BRITAIN: The Flattened Aristocrats

The man who blueprinted the Welfare State, 72-year-old Lord Beveridge, last week surveyed the brave new world of womb-to-tomb security and sadly reported: there has been "too much leveling down."

Addressing himself to "My dear Posterity" in a talk over Britain's BBC, Beveridge complained: "The baronial hall with its troops of servants laying coal fires in every room is giving place to rows of council houses each with radiators and a television aerial ... It is not possible for anyone, however hard and well he works, to enjoy the kind of income or to make the savings for old age that were easy when I was a young man."

What worried His Lordship most was how to find the "right natural leaders" in what he called an "economically flattened" society. "In the old days," he said, "when individual wealth could pass on to one's children, much of the leadership of the country was determined automatically. Just from where, in our classless collection of men & women, leadership will come ... I do not know.

"Somehow," sighed Lord Beveridge (himself the son of an untitled Indian civil servant), "we have to carry on the aristocratic tradition ... without the aristocrats."