The Unfinished Programme of Democracy
Date: 2018-10-17T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Democracy; Social history

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Title: The Unfinished Programme of Democracy

Author: Richard Roberts

Release date: October 17, 2018 [eBook #58123]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNFINISHED PROGRAMME OF DEMOCRACY ***

THE
UNFINISHED
PROGRAMME OF
DEMOCRACY

BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Renascence of Faith

The Highroad to Christ

Christ and Ourselves

Personality and Nationality

The Church in the Commonwealth (New Commonwealth Books)

The Red Cap on the Cross

THE UNFINISHED PROGRAMME OF DEMOCRACY
BY
RICHARD ROBERTS

NEW YORK:
B. W. HUEBSCH
Mcmxx

To “Mine Own,”

N., P., D., and G.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER | | PAGE
I. | THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY | 9
II. | THE TESTS OF DEMOCRATIC PROGRESS | 39
III. | THE PECUNIARY STANDARD | 64
IV. | THE REDEMPTION OF WORK | 93
V. | THE ACHIEVEMENT OF LIBERTY | 131
VI. | THE PRACTICE OF FELLOWSHIP | 160
VII. | THE ORGANISATION OF GOVERNMENT | 210
VIII. | A DEMOCRATISED WORLD | 251
IX. | EDUCATION INTO DEMOCRACY | 295

PREFACE

THESE pages embody the attempt of a plain man to thread a way through the social confusion of our time. The book sets out with a profound faith in the validity of the democratic principle; and its object is to trace the path along which the logic of this principle appears to lead. No claim is made to expert knowledge of economics or political science; but the writer has endeavoured to acquaint himself with the recent literature of the subject and to understand the main currents of prevailing opinion and feeling.

Events are moving so rapidly at the present time that certain passages became impertinent before the book was finished. It is probable that before it finally leaves the writer’s hands, other passages may suffer in the same way. But the main drift of the argument remains unaffected.

No attempt has been made in the body of the book to discuss the methods by which the social and economic changes which are impending should be carried through. It has been assumed that in the English-speaking world, the traditional respect for constitutional processes would avail to prevent resort to what has come to be known as “direct action.” It is now clear that this assumption was ill-founded and that there is a considerable movement of opinion toward industrial or “direct” action. The writer would venture to state his conviction that recourse to this method would be unspeakably disastrous and would carry with it consequences which its present advocates cannot foresee. It will be no easy task to restore the normal constitutional and economic processes when once they have been scrapped in the pursuit of some immediate object; and it is as sure as anything can very well be that the first step in direct action will have to be followed by others and must end in a confusion out of which the forty years it took to deliver Israel out of Egypt would be all too short to extricate us.

At the same time it should in fairness be acknowledged that if organised labour decides to use this dubious weapon, it will be under great provocation. The tardiness of governments to fulfil their promises, their too obvious tenderness toward the vested interests, the blind and obstinate bourbonism of the privileged classes over against the new proletarian awakening—all these things combine to create a situation which labour may feel intolerable and may resolve to end by a summary process. It is indeed only the most resolute and speedy mobilisation of all the resources of practical goodwill and reasonableness that can avert a great catastrophe. Organised labour has proved itself to be neither vindictive nor unreasonable when it has been met with fair and square dealing; and if we are plunged into the chaos of a general strike or perhaps worse, the larger responsibility will rest with those who, possessed of power and privilege, either could or would not see that the clock had moved onward a great space—and, during the years of war, with great rapidity—and so were unwilling or unready to adapt themselves to the new circumstances.

One subject of fundamental importance is touched upon but incidentally in these pages—namely, the land. What is said herein concerning property in general applies with even more point to land; and the plea which is made for the standardisation of the price of staple commodities clearly leads to the public ownership of land, which is indeed on every ground the only reasonable solution of the land question. But adequate discussion of the matter would carry the argument of the book too far afield. In these pages, attention is primarily directed to the situation which has been created by modern industrialism.

The obligations of the writer to friends and writers are legion; it would be hopeless to enumerate them. Some items of this indebtedness may be inferred from the footnotes. The writer in particular regrets that Mr. Laski’s Authority in the Modern State did not fall into his hands sooner; but he is glad to find himself in substantial agreement with the argument and conclusions of that notable work.

Ty’n-y-coed,

Capel Curig,

North Wales.

July 15th, 1919.

Chapter I.
THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY

“What is democracy? Sometimes, it is the name for a form of government by which the ultimate control of the machinery of government is committed to a numerical majority of the community. Sometimes, and incorrectly, it is used to denote the numerical majority itself, the poor or the multitude existing in a state. Sometimes, and still more loosely, it is the name for a policy, directed exclusively or mainly to the advantage of the labouring class. Finally, in its broadest and deepest, most comprehensive and most interesting sense, democracy is the name for a certain general condition of society, having historic origins, springing from circumstances and the nature of things, not only involving the political doctrine of popular sovereignty but representing a cognate group of corresponding tendencies over the whole field of moral, social and even spiritual life within the democratic community.”—Lord Morley.

“I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of Democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.”—Walt Whitman.

“To be a democrat is not to decide on a certain form of human association, it is to learn how to live with other men.”—Mary P. Follett.

THE inherent logic of the democratic idea calls for a society which will provide for all its members those conditions of equal opportunity that are within human control. It denies all forms of special and exclusive privilege, and affirms the sovereignty of the common man.

In practice, however, democracy has gone no further than the achievement of a form of government; and in popular discussion the word has usually a connotation exclusively political. It is even yet but slowly becoming clear that a democratic form of government is no more than the bare framework of a democratic society; and democracy as we know it is justly open to the criticism that it has not seriously taken in hand the task of clothing the political skeleton with a body of living social flesh.

Modern democracy is, of course, historically very young; and it may be reasonably maintained that it is premature to speak of its failure to realise its full promise. Nevertheless, it is of some consequence that already that part of the democratic programme which has been achieved and put to the proof is being exposed to heavy fire of destructive criticism. During the past few years, we have become familiar with the idea of a world made safe for democracy; and in the minds of many people democracy (which in this connection means representative popular government) stands as a sort of ultimate good which it is impious to challenge or to criticise. Yet this democracy, for which the world has been presumably made safe at so great and sorrowful a price, is by some roundly declared to be radically unsafe for the world and a hindrance to social progress. The syndicalists, for instance, believe the democratic state to be no more than the citadel of bourgeois and plutocratic privilege, and have decreed its destruction, proposing to substitute for it a modified anarchism. Others, like Paul Bourget and Brunetiere, so far from finding it the sanctuary of the privileged, fear it as a source of anarchy and social confusion, and invite us to retrace our steps to happier days when authority being less diffused was more speedily and effectually exercised. Neither the syndicalist nor the authoritarian criticism is wholly baseless; yet it is true that in neither case does it arise from an inherent defect in the democratic principle. The one arises from the circumstance that political democracy still lacks its logical economic corollary; the other from the fact that democracy is not sustained by its proper ethical coefficient.

These, however, are not the only grounds for the increasing scepticism of the validity of democratic institutions. The democratic state, like its predecessors, has proved itself to be voracious of authority; and in the exercise of its presumed omnicompetency it has increasingly occupied itself with matters, which—both in respect of extent and content—it is incapable of handling adequately. It has become palpably impossible to submit all the concerns of government to parliamentary discussion; and in consequence there has been a tendency on the one hand to invest administrative departments with virtual legislative power, and on the other to convert representative assemblies into mere instruments for registering the decisions of the executive government. The recent proposal for the establishment of a permanent statutory National Industrial Council in England has been evoked by the palpable inability of Parliament to deal effectually with the problems of industrial production. Even before the War, it was becoming plain that the congestion of parliamentary business in England called for some drastic remedy if parliament was to be saved from futility and discredit. But here again, the failure has been due to no inherent defect in the democratic principle but rather to the fact that the unitary and absolutist doctrine and practice of the state has hindered the proper development of democracy.

In a word, the trouble with democracy is that there is not enough of it. The remedy for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Politically, it is still incomplete; its economic applications have yet to be made; and while we do lip service to its ethical presuppositions, they are far from being a rule of life. Yet lacking these things, democracy is condemned to arrest, and through arrest to decay.

Meantime the dynastic principle has fallen—has indeed fallen under circumstances which make its revival seem exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, if democracy suffers arrest at this point in its history, if the peoples fail to work out its logic, society may lapse into an anarchy out of which dynasticism or something like it may once more emerge. It is no hyperbole to speak of the crisis of democracy; and it is only to be saved as the democratic peoples set themselves earnestly to the business of strengthening its stakes and lengthening its cords.

I

Few British people of liberal mind are able to look back upon that period of their history which gathers around the Boer War without a certain humiliation. Professor L. T. Hobhouse ascribes the popular defection of the British people from the democratic principle and temper during that time to four causes: (a) the decay of profound and vivid religious belief; (b) the diffusion of a stream of German idealism “which has swelled the current of retrogression from the plain rationalistic way of looking at life and its problems,” and which has stimulated the growth of the doctrine of the absolute state and its imperialistic corollaries; (c) the career of Prince Bismarck, and (d) “by far the most potent intellectual support of the reaction ... the belief that physical science has given its verdict (for it came to this) in favour of violence against social justice.” This provides us with an instance (so plain that another were superfluous) of the inability of an unfulfilled democratic order to resist alien and hostile influences that may be “in the air,” and of its consequent perversion to ends which belie its own first principles. It is the permanent danger of democracy when it is not sustained and inspired by a generous moral impulse to be prostituted to undemocratic ends. “It is at best” (to quote Mr. Hobhouse again) “an instrument with which men who hold by the ideal of social justice and human progress can work; but when these ideals grow cold, it may, like other instruments, be turned to base uses.” Lord Morley, with a similar sensitiveness to the perils of democracy asks whether we mean by it “a doctrine or a force; constitutional parchment or a glorious evangel; perfected machinery for the wire-puller, the party-tactician, the spoils-man and the boss, or the high and stern ideals of a Mazzini or a Tolstoi.” It may, indeed, be reasonably held that worse has befallen it than Lord Morley’s fears. We have evidence how frequently democracy has in practice become the tool of strong and unscrupulous men and gangs of such men seeking selfish and corrupt ends; and how, for Lincoln’s famous formula, we have had government of the people by a well-to-do oligarchy in the interest of the privileged classes.

Nor have we any guarantee against this kind of degradation and degeneracy except in the perpetual reaffirmation and revitalising of the spiritual and moral grounds of democracy. It may indeed be possible to create political safeguards against the exploitation of the people and their government in the interest of individuals and classes; but there is no such safeguard against democracy, as it were, exploiting itself for undemocratic ends or sinking into undemocratic practices except in its continued education in the purposes for which it exists, in its extension into every region of life, and in its repeated solemn submission of itself to its principles and ideals. Until democracy becomes and is felt to be a personal and collective vocation, it is forever liable to corruption and apostasy. Democracy can only live and thrive while men remain sincerely and consciously democratic. Liberty and Equality are doubtful and precarious boons, and may—as they often have—become positive dangers without Fraternity. Democracy without its appropriate moral coefficient must be a vain and short-lived thing. So long as, while professing to give a fair field to every man, it does no more than provide an open field for the strong man, it will inevitably lead to the exploitation of the multitude and to the creation of new forms of privilege; and that in the main has been its recent history.

Not less than by the loss or the absence of moral impulse, is democracy endangered by ignorance or forgetfulness of what it exists for. Two words are usually taken to describe the characteristics of democracy, liberty and equality; and the atmosphere of a particular democracy depends upon whether it lays the larger emphasis on one or on the other of these. In England, for instance, the type is libertarian. The Briton has cared less for political equality than for what he calls freedom, the right of self-determination, the opportunity to live out his own life in his own way. He has been less doctrinaire than his French neighbours and has not been much troubled by the logical anomaly of an aristocracy so long as the aristocracy left him reasonable elbow-room. When the aristocracy was found to be obstructive, its pretensions were suitably abridged. In general, the idea of formal equality has played a less important part in England than it has in France or the United States. Democracy in the two latter countries is more specifically egalitarian. This difference is, however, mainly a difference of stress upon two aspects of the same thing, the egalitarian emphasis having to do with the formal status of the citizen, the libertarian with the personal independence which should belong to the status.

Yet the inadequate co-ordination of the two ideas may, and indeed does, lead to certain unhappy consequences. In Great Britain, an insufficient attention to equality has led to a too prolonged survival of the idea of a “governing class”; and social prestige still possesses an inordinate influence upon the distribution of political power. In France, on the other hand, an insufficient stress on liberty has tended to make Frenchmen étatistes. According to Emile Faguet, they are accustomed to submit to despotism and are eager in turn to practise it. They are liberals only when they are in a minority. In the United States, egalitarianism produces a kind of compulsory uniformitarianism. It is significant that, while in a state of war all nations are intolerant of dissent and free discussion, in the United States where the doctrine of political equality has reached its completest expression, dissent from the common view has been much more harshly treated than in any other belligerent country. The cardinal sin appears to be that of breaking the ranks. Liberty, according to Lord Acton, is “the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom, and opinion;” and if that be true, it does not necessarily follow that democracy is the home of liberty. An egalitarian democracy may indeed become the tomb of liberty. “Democracy,” says the same learned authority, “no less than monarchy or aristocracy sacrifices everything to maintain itself, and strives with an energy and a plausibility that kings and nobles cannot attain to override representation, to annul all the forces of resistance and deviation, and to secure by plebiscite, referendum, or caucus, free play for the will of the majority. The true democratic principle that none shall have power over the people is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to evade its power; the true democratic principle that the people shall not be made to do what it does not like, is taken to mean that it shall not be required to tolerate what it does not like. The true democratic principle that every man’s free-will shall be as unfettered as possible is taken to mean that the free will of the sovereign people shall be fettered in nothing.... Democracy claims to be not only supreme, without authority above, but absolute, without independence below, to be its own master and not a trustee. The old sovereigns of the world are exchanged for a new one, who may be flattered and deceived but whom it is impossible to corrupt or to resist; and to whom must be rendered the things that are Cæsar’s, and also the things that are God’s.” Democracy appeared in order to deliver the individual from a dehumanising subjection; but it may become a dehumanising tyranny itself. A sovereign people may become as harsh and merciless as a sovereign lord.

The democratic idea is the corollary of the doctrine of the equal intrinsic worth of every individual soul. The modern democratic movement has started from a recognition of this principle; and the principle is meaningless unless it implies the prescriptive right of the individual to self-determination. Lord Acton’s definition of liberty is inadequate because he approaches it from the standpoint of one who was in a permanent religious minority in his own country, and in a permanent intellectual minority in his church. Liberty is surely the assurance that a man may have full opportunity to live out his own life and to grow to the full stature of his manhood, to be true to himself through everything. This requires the recognition of real personal independence and a definite minimum of obligatory uniformity. In another connection, Acton insists that “liberty is not a means to a higher political end; it is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private life.” It is so frequently assumed that the function of government is the establishment and preservation of order that it is well to remember that it is a comparatively easy thing to secure some kind of order. The real difficulty is to establish and to secure liberty. We are far too ready to assume that liberty is capable of looking after itself and that the fragile plant which needs our solicitude is social order. But liberty stands in jeopardy every hour, not less in a democracy than in an autocracy. And in so far as a democracy, which was born of the craving for liberty fails to preserve and to extend liberty, it proves itself bankrupt.

And just as democracy is only made safe from corruption and subordination to undemocratic ends by repeated solemn affirmation of its moral and spiritual foundations, so it is only made safe from declining into absolutism and tyranny by constant return upon its metaphysical centre—the sanctity of the individual. In the modern world, the multitude is not in danger; our chief pre-occupation must be to save the individual from being swamped by the multitude. We are apt not to see the trees for the wood; we must be for ever reminding ourselves that the wood is made up of the trees. Democracy that tends to authority and uniformity is foreordained to decay; the democracy of life is one of freedom and infinite variety. Democracy has yet to solve the problem of setting the individual free without opening the door to individualism and anarchy.

II

It may be with some reason pleaded that the defects of modern democracy spring from the conditions under which it emerged as a historical fact. It has appeared with an aspect altogether too negative, as though the abolition of monarchy or aristocracy or any form of privilege were sufficient to bring it to birth. The democratic principle has implications which are not exhausted with the destruction of autocracy or aristocracy or even with the formal affirmation of popular sovereignty and the institution of a universal and equal franchise. Historically, democracy is the product, direct or indirect, of popular risings against political privilege whether vested in a person or in a class. Probably we should have to seek a still anterior cause in the power of economic exploitation which political power confers upon him who holds it. The mainspring of revolution is the sense of disinheritance rendered intolerable by injustice and exploitation and the consequent demand of the disinherited class for its appointed share in the common human inheritance of light and life. But the tragedy of revolution (despite the conventional historical judgment) is that it has never gone far enough. The records of revolution are filled chiefly with its negative and destructive performances because its impulse, not having been sustained by an adequate social vision, ran out before it completed its work or before it could swing on to the business of construction. It was too readily assumed that the one thing needful was to break down the one palpable disabling barrier of privilege. That done, the rest would follow; the golden age would at once materialise. But it has never done so. It was not perceived that the logic of revolution required and pointed to a sequel of positive and creative social action.

This was essentially Lamennais’ plea in 1831. A revolution, he told his fellow countrymen, is only the beginning of things. You have cleared the ground; upon that cleared ground, you have to raise the fabric of a living society. France did, indeed, already provide the instance of the danger of an uncompleted revolution. The political equality established by the Revolution of 1789, was intended to give a fair field to every man; but because it went no further, in effect it opened the door to the strong man. The strong man appeared presently in the person of Napoleon; and with Napoleon came the Empire and all that that episode cost Europe in blood and treasure. The same kind of miscarriage (in another region and on a larger scale) has befallen the wider historical development of the French Revolution. Because it was not seen that the “natural right” of property might no less than the “divine right” of noble birth become a source of disinheritance, the door was opened to a movement which in the nineteenth century produced a new type of privilege and a new manner of disinheritance. That Jack’s vote has been declared to be as good as his master’s has not saved Jack from an exploitation as real and burdensome as that under which his father groaned. But it is of a different kind. The older disability was chiefly agrarian; the new is industrial. The doctrine of political liberty (interpreted in the light of Adam Smith) received an economic translation in the doctrine of “laissez-faire”; and this combined, first, with the restrictions imposed upon the power of the territorial aristocracy, second, with the new commercial civilisation which began at the Industrial Revolution, and third, with the advantage with which the propertied classes, especially the rich merchant class, started in the new order, has brought about a new kind of disability. The common people have exchanged the old master for a new, a feudal aristocracy for an industrial plutocracy, land barons for trade barons; they have been released from agrarian serfdom only to be tied to the wheel of industrial wage-slavery. Political emancipation did not bring with it real freedom.

It was characteristic of Lamennais’ insight that he saw that political liberty without safeguards against economic exploitation would prove a vain thing. Writing to the working men of Paris in 1847, he said that, with them he “should demand that in accordance with justice and reason, the question should be gone into, how it is possible, in the distribution of the fruits of labour, to do away with the revolting anomalies which crush under their weight the most numerous portion of the human family.”[1] Emile Faguet justly observes that Lamennais saw that the coming enemy was “le pouvoir d’argent,” and that he did what he could to choke it off before it could establish itself. Nor was Lamennais alone in his sense of the inadequacy of political change to meet the needs of the common people. Robert Owen reached a similar conclusion, and, indeed, was so sceptical of the value of political action for social improvement that during one period of his life he preached outright to the working classes a doctrine of political indifferentism. The working-class movements which came into being early in the nineteenth century—the Co-operative Societies and the Trade Unions—originated in the need of countervailing the economic disadvantage under which the new order had placed the worker and which the endeavour to establish political equality and liberty had been powerless to prevent. The growth of Socialism and Syndicalism represents a revolt from a social order in which the privilege of noble birth has been superseded by the privilege of property, and the disinherited class has but suffered a new disinheritance.

1.  This view was shared by Mazzini, whose gospel was at many points identical with that of Lamennais. See The Duties of Man, ch. xi.

It is by now abundantly evident that the next stage in the evolution of democracy will consist of a movement of the proletarian masses to remove the economic disabilities under which they believe themselves to be suffering. The revolutionary movement in Europe is directed not only against the dynastic tradition but against the modern institution of private capitalism; and while the influences of change that have now overwhelmed Russia and Germany were afoot long before the war, it is not to be questioned that their liberation was due to the War. Beneath the outward calm of empire there was a seething mass of unrest; and once the crust of empire was cracked, this lava of human passion rushed through. The worker has come to believe that the origins of the war are to be traced to economic causes, direct products of the capitalist system of industry, which is also the source of his disabilities in times of peace; and whether in peace or in war, the worker has at last to pay the bill. It is not to the point here to discuss whether the premises from which the worker argues or the conclusions he has reached are valid or not. We are concerned only to note the state of the case at the present moment. We observe that the failure of dynastic imperialism has become the occasion of economic revolution; and in this circumstance we are to look for the clue to the course of the democratic movement in the immediate future.

The movement seems indeed to be historically due. The first great turning point in modern history was the Protestant Reformation with its insistence upon religious liberty as against ecclesiastical authority. The second turning point was the French Revolution, which was the first act in the drama of establishing political liberty as against the power of aristocracy. It may well turn out that the Russian Revolution marks the beginning of the third crisis in the modern period, the first act in the drama of economic emancipation. The Protestant Reformation affirmed the liberty of the layman against a privilege resting upon an alleged monopoly of the means of grace; the French Revolution affirmed the liberty of the citizen against privilege resting upon the fact of noble birth; the Revolution now in progress will affirm the liberty of the worker as against privilege resting upon the presumed rights of property. Perhaps we are about to realise the long delayed economic corollary of the French Revolution.

Several circumstances of war-experience have given a powerful stimulus to the movement for radical economic change. Before the war, men were still haunted by the fear that the revolutionary changes advocated by the more advanced spirits might turn out to be a transition from the frying pan into the fire. But the cynical readiness of the “big business” interests in all the belligerent countries to turn the nation’s necessity to their own advantage; and the now demonstrated incompetency and wastefulness of the system of private capitalist enterprise have served to remove from among the workers any lingering sense that the good of the nation is bound up with the existing industrial order. In Great Britain in particular the close industrial organisation required by the war has provided a revelation of hitherto unexplored and even unsuspected possibilities of production, proving “big” business to have been uncommonly bad business. The immense increase of output in all industries, through the proper co-ordination and standardisation of processes, the systematic use of scientific investigation, and the more adequate oversight of the physical condition of the workers has made it plain that private capitalism either would not or could not make proper use of the productive resources of the British people. For instance, the ignorant opposition of the average employer to the movement for reducing the hours of labour has convicted him of a stupid incapacity to handle men, especially in view of such findings as those recorded by Lord Henry Bentinck, who shows conclusively (from data drawn from the engineering, printing and textile trades) that “in every case in which experiments have been tried, the result in output has been favourable to a shortening of the working day.”[2]

2.  Contemporary Review, February, 1918.

Moreover, the war-time emphasis upon the idea of democracy has greatly stimulated the demand for its extension into the field of industry. This demand was assuming definite shape before the war; but what was at that time the propaganda of a comparatively small group has now become the faith of a multitude; and this faith is becoming more and more articulate as a demand for a socially intensive as well as geographically extensive application of the democratic principle. The argument runs in some such fashion as this. Broadly speaking, the democratic idea has three notes; first, the institution of those conditions of equal opportunity which are within human control; second, the participation of the community as a whole in the creation of these conditions, which means a universal franchise and equal ungraded partnership in affairs; and third, the absence of any privileged class which is able to impose its will upon the rest or any part of the rest. Some rough approximation to this state of things has been made in the political region; there it is accounted good and right. Why, then should not the same process be good and right in other regions of life? For instance, the greater part of a man’s life gathers around and is governed by his work; yet this democratic principle which is so estimable in politics is taboo in industry. To begin with, there is no such thing as a condition of equal opportunity in the industrial region. Certain antecedent advantages of birth, possession, and education have created a privileged class; and the rest are under a corresponding handicap. There was a time when the ranker could rise out of the ranks and make a field for himself; but in these days of trusts, combines, chain-stores and the like, the opportunity of the ranker to quit the ranks has dwindled almost to vanishing point. In the second place, industry is under class government. The persons engaged in it are divided into masters and servants, employers and employees; and the hired man has hardly a word to say in determining the conditions of his work. The only freedom he possesses lies in the choice of a master; and even this, under the régime of large corporations, is steadily disappearing. For the rest, he is confined to a choice between working under conditions imposed by the employer and not working at all, which means starvation. In industry there is a rule of privilege as real as that of the old territorial aristocracy; and the modern practice of investment has served to perpetuate this privilege within the bounds of a single class by the simple operation of the accident of birth, just as feudal landownership in another age became the foundation of aristocratic power. The one qualification which requires to be made here is that the concentration of large multitudes of workers in urban centres, as the result of the machine industry, has enabled the workers to join together in self-defence; and the Trade Union has to some extent mitigated the insolence of plutocratic power.

The argument, however, does not end here. It proceeds to the analysis of the causes of this privilege; and it finds it in the doctrine of property-rights. It would take us too far afield to trace this doctrine to its origins. Apparently the French thinkers who laid the train of the Revolution believed that the “natural right” of property was the necessary check upon the natural right of freedom; but they could not foresee the developments of the Industrial Revolution. Otherwise it is questionable whether they would have found the solution of their problem so easy. For it is not open to argument that the presumed sanctity of property rights has, under the conditions created by the Industrial Revolution furnished the foundation of the modern capitalist order and its corollaries. The capitalist owes his power to his possession of property in the shape of industrial plant or of money. Yet it is plain to anyone who analyses the position with any degree of realism that the mere possession of a number of things should no more entitle or enable an individual to lord it over his fellows than an inheritance of blue blood. Nevertheless, in point of cold fact, that is the present position; there is, however, a prospect that the divine right of property may presently go the same way as the divine right of kings.

But it will go not under the pressure of a theory. It will disappear under the strain of economic necessity. In England the proposal of a “levy on capital” has been widely and seriously discussed. It is asserted that it will be impossible to raise by taxation a revenue sufficient to pay the interest on the war debt after providing for indispensable national services; and there appears to be no way out of this impasse save by making a levy upon the accumulated wealth of the country. A levy equal to the debt would require to take something like two-fifths of the estimated total of the private capital. The methods by which this might be done do not now concern us; nor does it matter very much for our argument that the industrial and commercial magnates, and the ancien régime economists are declaiming vehemently against it. Even the fact that the levy may not be carried out in the form now advocated is not of great moment. What is important is that the serious discussion evoked by the proposal has shown that the traditional doctrine of property-rights is in liquidation. There has not been, so far as the present writer has been able to discover, any lifting-up of hands in horror at this suggestion of a sacrilegious invasion upon this ancient sanctity; the discussion has been conducted on the plane of expediency and utility. This marks a very considerable movement—for to many, the Reform Bill of 1831 looked like the end of the world, since it was (as a politician of the time said) “a maxim that every government which tends to separate property from constitutional government must be liable to perpetual revolution.”[3] Property was the chief cornerstone of the social structure; and even as late as 1888, Lord Acton wrote to Mr. Gladstone that he hears that “the skilled artisans of London are hostile to the clergy but not to property,” which latter circumstance he plainly regards as a sign of grace. Yet to-day, under the exigencies of public need, it is seriously discussed whether the state should not lay its hands on anything up to a half of the private wealth of the country.

3.  Quoted in Laski, Problems of Sovereignty, p. 70—note.

This is essentially a return to the view of a saner age. The mediæval doctrine was that right in property was not absolute, but that it was of the nature of a trust. This is the view that underlies the project of a levy. Professor Hobhouse draws a distinction between “property for use” and “property for power.” The right to possess property can hardly be denied. It is essential to a man’s freedom and growth that he should have absolute control over a certain number of things. But it should be restricted to what is necessary for personal freedom and growth. A man may have, that is, property for use but not for power. He may not have so much property as would enable him to control or virtually to own the life and labour of others. It is to some such doctrine of property as this that the mind of progressive labour is tending. Property is in prospect of socialisation; and perhaps only such socialised property will in future be available as capital. Under economic pressure, the doctrine of property is being ethicised; and to ethicise the doctrine is simply to declare property to be wholly subordinate to social ends.

The first step in modern democracy was the socialisation of political power; the second without which the first cannot be complete, will be the socialisation of economic power.

III

We should, however, be deluding ourselves if we suppose that radical economic change will of itself bring about the kind of world that we want. The miscarriage which has followed political revolution in the past may no less disastrously follow economic revolution. Economic change is of itself powerless to secure us from the appearance of new types of privilege; and there is not a little danger that the present tendencies of some advanced thought may lead to bureaucratic government. Between a proletarian bureaucracy and an industrial plutocracy there is little to choose; and the tyranny of the expert may become as galling as that of a despot. “In the socialistic presentment,” says Professor Hobhouse, “the expert sometimes looks strangely like the powers that be—in education for instance, a clergyman under a new title, in business that very captain of industry who at the outset was the socialist’s chief enemy. Be that as it may, as the expert comes to the front and efficiency becomes the watchword of administration, all that was human in socialism vanishes out of it. Its tenderness for the losers in the race, its protests against class-tyranny, its revolt against commercial materialism, all the sources of inspiration under which socialist leaders have faced poverty and prison, are gone like a dream and instead of them we have a conception of society as a perfect piece of machinery, pulled by wires radiating from a single centre, and all men are either experts or puppets. Humanity, Liberty, Justice are expunged from the banner and the single word efficiency replaces them.” This is, indeed, a sufficiently dismal prospect, for which it is hardly worth while to change our present state. It should be said, however, that this particular peril is greatly minimised by the current emphasis upon democratic control in industry. The danger remains real notwithstanding. Nor is it the only danger inherent in a purely economic change. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any economic change has elements of permanence, while it is only economic.

The word efficiency betrays the mind of the age which gave it its current connotation. It was a machine-governed mind; and mechanistic conceptions of life and progress are from the nature of the case unfriendly to the democratic spirit. The appearance of the “efficiency engineer” showed the low estate into which man had fallen—man made once a little lower than the angels but now treated as a little lower than the machine. The business of efficiency engineering was the closer subordination of the man to the machine by methods alleged to be scientific. Nothing could show more plainly than this does the absence of that broad humanism which is the very breath of democracy; and even the generous intention of the socialist ideal was vitiated by the mechanistic character of socialist doctrine. Statecraft itself became an affair of efficiency-engineering on a large scale; and the logic of the mechanistic habit of thought reached its fine flower in the merciless regimentation of the German people and the enthronement of the “Great God Gun.” From this pernicious heresy, we may hopefully expect that reflection on our war-experience may deliver us. Already there are manifest signs of a reaction to a healthier and kindlier conception of life and its meaning. The excessive and artificial centralisation of power in the State is being challenged by a demand for the revival of regional culture and such a redistribution of the functions of government as a recognition of the “region” would require.[4] The business of “unscrambling” the egg, will indeed be long and difficult; but it is clear that any advance in the essential humanities is bound up with a release of life from the artificial integrations forced upon it by the machine civilisation. Mr. Delisle Burns has shown us that the essential note of Greek life was its sociability;[5] and this is indeed a pole to which normal human nature ever swings true. But in the Greek city, sociability was vitiated and ultimately destroyed by the tragic schism of a slave-system; while in modern civilisation it has been poisoned by the dominion of the machine. The swamping of the “region” by the state has enfeebled the natural social bonds of a less sophisticated age; and somehow or other democracy must thread its way back to a simpler and more spontaneous sociability. For the artificial synthesis of “the individual and the state,” we must restore the natural order of “myself and my neighbours.”

4.  Upon this subject, see The Coming Polity, by Geddes and Branford. (Williams and Norgate.)

5.  In his Greek Ideals.

But we have travelled so far from the simple amenities of the “region” and our minds have become so sophisticated in artificial and mechanical modernity that our recovery must begin in something akin to a spiritual renewal, in a new perception of essential human values. Economic change will not deliver us from the mechanistic obsession; and we shall only be saved from the inherent dangers of economic change under present conditions by a fresh recognition of the central principle of democracy. That every soul has equal worth carries with it the corollary that personality must be conceived as an end in itself and not merely as a means. It is our quarrel with the Junker classes wherever we find them, that they deliberately relegate large masses of their fellowmen into a sub-human category. Democracy is the direct denial of this posture. It affirms on the contrary that every man has a prescriptive right to stand on his feet unashamed, and to have full opportunity to become the whole man he may be. It ascribes to him certain liberties and a certain inalienable status among his fellows; and the employer who regards his men as “hands” denies democracy as directly as does the autocrat who regards his subjects as serfs or cannonfodder. In other words, democracy requires a specific type of personal relationship between men; and perhaps, its troubles are chiefly due to the fact that while it preached liberty and equality with no uncertain sound, it neglected to lay a corresponding emphasis upon fraternity. In truth, democracy is beset more perilously and more persistently by the inward enemy than the foe without—the inner enemy that lurks in men’s souls. For though there be a democrat in every man, there is also a potential aristocrat. The ultimate battle-ground of the democratic ideal is in men’s hearts. After the external enemies of democracy are defeated on land and on sea, democracy will have to go on fighting for its life in our souls. In this as in all things else, “the kingdom of heaven is within you.”

The personal practice of democracy is comparatively simple, as its central doctrine is. The equal worth of souls does not of course imply equal capacity; nor does the fact of unequal natural capacity do away with the truth of equal worth. It simply indicates the kind of world we live in. It is a world in which capacity is the measure not of worth but of obligation; and the law of life is mutual service. In one of the very few political allusions which Jesus made, He stated this point with much plainness. “Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them and they that have authority over them are called ‘benefactors’” (as it was in the beginning, and has been ever since, when autocrats and their like have conceded to their subjects some fragment of the natural rights of which they have despoiled them and then have posed as “benefactors,” and when imperialists talk of conferring their peculiar Kultur on the “lesser breeds without the law”), “but,” said Jesus, “it shall not be so among you. He that is greatest among you, let him be the servant of all.” This is the authentic democratic spirit and the personal practice without which democracy cannot live.

It is not enough to pay lip service to democratic ideals—the sanctity of personality and the obligation of mutual service; or even to accept them in a spirit of pious sentimentalism. That kind of thing is already common enough. To the idealistic temper, we must attach the pragmatic habit, and translate our doctrines into concrete programmes of emancipation and co-operation. The city of God is not to be built with good intentions. Fraternity must be rendered into a polity. Yet even fraternity may perish in formality except it be sustained by a living brotherliness. It is the spirit that quickeneth. Democracy like every living thing must either grow or decay. If it stops at a political form or an economic scheme, then it must decline and die. It is only as its essential spirit captures our consciences and wills and its central principle is consistently and continuously applied that it can survive the perversity of our nature and the vicissitudes of history. It must become a crusade and a holy war.

Chapter II.
THE TESTS OF DEMOCRATIC PROGRESS

“The fundamental reform for which the times call is rather a reconsideration of the ends for which all civilised government exists, in a word, the return to a saner measure of social values.”—Lord Morley.

THE next stage in the realisation of the democratic ideal would appear to be tolerably clear. We are moving toward an extension of the democratic principle into the economic and industrial sphere; but is the movement governed by an understanding of the goal we have in view? Are we sure that our immediate policies are consistent with the “far gain” which we should seek? Or are we to regard progress purely as a somewhat blind experimental affair, largely beyond control? We are obviously moving—somewhere; the movement indeed promises to be an improvement. But are there any tests which can be applied to it in order that we may satisfy ourselves that the course we are on will land us safely in port?

I

Mr. Thorstein Veblen has rendered an important service to this generation by showing how the technology of the machine industry has invaded our minds and led us to an almost exclusive pre-occupation with processes. It is this intellectual bias which explains—at least in great part—our complete capitulation to the Darwinian hypothesis and accounts for the way in which we have pressed it out of its proper sphere to furnish clues in religion, history, and ethics—regions in which there are factors to be considered which are not included among the data of the doctrine of biological evolution. Here also is the explanation of the wide acceptance of the pragmatist philosophy. Pragmatism is indeed the characteristic philosophy of the machine-age; its postulate “that truth is what works” is clearly derived from the engine-shop, where efficiency is the only rule. Generally it may also be said that it is this mechanistic attention to processes which accounts for the importance and omnicompetency ascribed to the still juvenile science of psychology; and this is particularly true of the application of psychology and psychological method to the problems of sociology.

Psychology is the fruit of the application of the scientific method to mental processes; its subject matter consists of the observable phenomena of mind. Its application to sociology has produced an almost exclusive concentration on social functions; and while this has important uses, it does not furnish us with the clue we need to our sociological tasks. Mental functions, whether of the individual or of society, cannot be treated in the same way as chemical reactions. Chemical reactions are predetermined and invariable; human functions are dirigible. Those functions which ultimately govern and sustain human activity and determine human character are directed to more or less sharply recognised and chosen ends. It is indeed true that many of the processes which are concerned in the movement of life are, as Mr. Cooley has pointed out, unconscious and seemingly impersonal, such as those which account for the growth of tradition and the variations of language. Nevertheless, as Mr. Cooley himself very excellently shows in his illustration of the growth of a book in its author’s mind, even these unconscious and involuntary processes fall into line with a definitely fixed purpose of the mind.[6] The problem of sound social integration is not merely an affair of processes operating properly. For human powers may function, at least for a time, in a normal way even while they are being directed to mischievous and perverse ends. Modern Germany supplies an instance of unexampled attention to social processes; but it is not open to question that all this has been directed to a perverse and immoral end, and has (as the event has shown) culminated in catastrophe and confusion. Just so a man’s intellect may operate brilliantly; yet the man himself may be a thief. Psychology may claim that its business is a disinterested study of processes; and the claim is justly made. But the same claim cannot be made for sociology. The sociologist may indeed claim that he too is a scientist; and that his science like every other is empirical and not teleological. But the two claims are not parallel. Psychology deals with an opus operatum, the actual concrete mind as it is; whereas the assumption which underlies all sociology is that it is handling an opus operandum, a work still to be done, the production of a living and wholesome society. The teleological interest is necessarily supreme. This does not mean that sociology has not its empirical aspects; of course, it has; and these aspects are all important for the construction of a sound sociology. But we shall produce a mere torso of sociology if we suppose we can ignore the problem of ends. The relation of psychology to sociology is of much the same character as its relation to education or the relation of physiology to public health.

6.  Charles Horton Cooley, Social Process, p. 16.

It is probable, moreover, that the obscuration of this question of ends has been helped by the modern acceptance of the doctrine of progress. This in its turn appears to be mainly due to the application of the principle of evolution to human affairs. We have supposed that because living nature shows a process of development, the life of man is also necessarily governed by a law of predestined progress, from worse to better, from the simple to the more complex. The result of this evolutionary view of human affairs has been to make the study of ends appear impertinent. The ends are already determined; why then trouble ourselves about them? It is true that we do not know whither this vis a tergo is propelling us; the only thing we can do, therefore, is to study the processes by which it works as we see them in operation in men’s minds, whether the single or the mass mind. We shall observe them, duly record them, and contemplate them in a spirit of detachment, without concerning ourselves overmuch with their destination. But it is now too late in the day to suppose that this attitude can be seriously maintained. The area of the margin of human freedom may be a subject of controversy; but it is impossible to take seriously the kind of determinism which denies the possibility of directing human action to deliberately chosen ends. The actual range of our control over our actions may be limited; but within those limits it is very real. And in any case it does not require to be very much to make the evolution hypothesis of very doubtful validity as an interpretation of the whole life of man.[7]

7.  For a concise statement of the philosophical argument against a doctrine of progress based upon biological evolution, see Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, pp. 105, 106.

Sociology must concern itself with ends; and it must do so at its own beginnings. If this means that it has to forfeit its claim to a strictly scientific status, so be it. There is no virtue in replying that the question of ends is an affair of speculation and hypothesis. That is indeed true; but it cannot be helped. We are compelled to speculate concerning ends since there is no other way of reaching a conception of them. And there is no harm in speculation so long as it starts from the soundest available premises, and its conclusions are not hardened into dogma. Sociology will hardly rise above an academic futility until it abandons its obsession to rank as a pure science and makes bold to define however tentatively the goal toward which social processes should be directed. Let it by all means make its surveys and collate its statistics unremittingly; but these things it ought to do and not to leave the other undone.

II

Yet it becomes plain, immediately we begin to discuss this question of ends, that if we exclude definitely religious considerations from the argument, we cannot indicate an end that has the character of a real end, that is, an absolute ultimacy. It is indeed questionable how far even the religious postulate directly provides the conception of an end, except to the comparatively small company of people who are strongly mystical by nature. The Shorter Catechism taught us that the chief end of man was to seek God and to glorify Him for ever, but to most of us this brings not information but bewilderment; and Mr. Kipling’s paradise where the painter “draws the thing as he sees it for the God of things as they are” is attractive but elusive. The truth appears to be that for the multitude of religiously disposed persons, the sense of God becomes effectual for conduct only as it dramatises itself in the form of a social vision or a personal relationship; and the ascendency of Jesus in the Christian tradition is explained by the power He has possessed of inviting that unreserved personal loyalty through which the sense of God assumes reality for common men. Such a phrase as “the glory of God” describes not our knowledge but our ignorance. All the content which can intelligibly be given to it is that there is an ideal end toward which we are called to move. This, however, does not mean that it is barren of immediate effect on conduct. We know that throughout history it has had the power to evoke a supreme disinterestedness in people who have been sensitive to it. It is, of course, akin to what Mr. Benjamin Kidd calls “the emotion of the ideal;” and it is related closely to the characteristic poetic anticipation and hope expressed in such passages as Tennyson’s in which he speaks of the “one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.”

But disinterestedness and “the emotion of the ideal,” while they are essential to any kind of healthy social existence afford but slender foundation for a positive social policy. No moral attitude or emotion will carry us far except it be evoked by an ideal which can dramatise itself in terms of a more or less achievable undertaking. We are therefore compelled to relinquish the hope of a definition of absolute social ends, and must be content with something more modest and manageable. We may at least attempt to indicate certain proximate social aims. Even if we cannot hopefully describe the ultimate goal of life, we may reasonably endeavour to answer the question—What do we want our social organisation to produce? Just what results are we to aim at? That some such discussion as this is involved in any fruitful handling of the question of social integration is clear from the fact that the conception of an aim is either implicit or explicit in all attempts to formulate a social polity ever since Aristotle defined the aim of the Republic as the promotion of the good life. But this definition, like Mill’s “greatest good of the greatest number” raises further questions—What is the nature of the good? What is the characteristic note and quality of the good life? This indeed takes us to the very centre of our problem; for at last the controversy between the militarist and the pacifist, the protectionist and the free-trader, the authoritarian and the libertarian, springs from differing conceptions of the good life. This is not to say that either party has worked out a reasoned conviction on the point. Both appear to start from certain instinctive acceptances, determined largely by temperamental variations,—which points to the need of a rigorously rationalistic exploration of this entire region. Mr. Graham Wallace speaks of “the organisation of happiness”; but as he himself perceives, he is speaking in paradox. It seems in any case improbable that our social aims can be defined in terms of an emotional state.

III

A good deal of confusion has been introduced into this subject by a tendency to regard society itself as an end. In much modern thought upon the matter, the individual is conceived as attaining his own end through his due contribution to the life of the group. The extreme development of this view is to be found in the German doctrine of the state, a doctrine which prevails in more or less perfection wherever the Hegelian philosophy has struck its roots.[8] On this view, the individual has neither function nor end which is not to be expressed in terms of his own personal subordination to the state. He is a cog in the wheel, and no more. The modern dogma of progress has reinforced this view to some extent; as has also the obsession of size, which is one of the by-products of our extended knowledge of the physical universe and which has had the effect of minimising the significance of the single life. But whatever the causes to which this view is attributable, its influence on sociological thought is beyond question. It has been assumed, with varying explicitness, that the supra-personal end which the individual is to serve is to be identified with the social group to which he belongs. It is his appointed purpose to minister to the happiness of the group or to increase its efficiency as a military or economic unit.

8.  The devout Hegelian who dislikes the Prussian doctrine of the state is nowadays at some pains to explain that Hegel’s view of the state does not cohere quite congruously with the rest of his philosophy.

(a) It may be urged against this view that the antithesis which it implies between the individual and the group is fallacious. For the group is composed of individuals and it cannot have a conscious end except in the minds of the individuals who compose it. There is a degree of truth in speaking of the “personality” of a group so long as the analogy is not pressed too far. A group may have a common thought and may unite in a collective act; but to say that a group has a definite “personality” of its own is to carry the process of abstraction too far. A group attains to consciousness only in the several minds of its members. Moreover social ends must take shape in individual lives. That the individual should serve a social end is true; it is equally true that the social aim must be achieved in the character and experience of individuals. For if they are not realised in persons, where shall they be realised? If our ultimate social aims do not become effective in the single life, they remain mere abstractions, existing only in a speculative thought and never reaching the point of actuality. But it serves us as little to insist on the converse of this view and to assert that the end of society is the individual. The truth would rather appear to be that the individual is to reach his own end in and through a society which it is his first business to create. Personal self-realisation and social integration will proceed pari passu. The individual and the group will find themselves in each other; the great soul and the great society will arrive together. But from the nature of the case, we must seek the clue to the character of right social aims through a study of personality, and of what is involved in its self-realisation.

(b) A further objection to this view is that it subordinates personality to aims that are limited and sectional. In practice it may make good Germans, but almost certainly it cannot make good men. While it is better for a man to serve the narrowest social group than to serve his self-regard, yet the exclusiveness of the social group as it is identified with the state or the nation is hostile to that increasing social integration which is implied in a self-consistent sociology. The current conceptions of the state and the nation must undergo some revision if they are to be made congruous with a fruitful social polity. The nation represents a stage in the social education of the race, in that discipline whereby the caveman grows into a citizenship of the world; and in no sense can the nation be ethically regarded as constituting an adequate end for the individual, except as the nation in its turn is consciously seeking its own end in the service of the whole.

It is true that men have in the past generally regarded the glory and the power of their particular group as an end which has the right to command their absolute devotion, and have believed that to suffer death in such a cause is the highest conceivable self-realisation. This does indeed represent a much higher ethical plane than that on which a man fights only for his own hand or the tiny circle of his blood kindred. But the fact that this loyalty to his group has had the power to evoke the highest possible sacrifice, does not prove that the glory and the power of the group provides a full and valid end for him as a man. In his character as German or Englishman, it may appear to provide him with an end to which he may properly submit himself without reserve; but it is questionable whether he can do so without some sacrifice of his possibilities and obligations as a man. The propaganda of Germanism produced very efficient and docile Germans; but the records of the war leave us little room to doubt that the process has had a mischievous effect upon their manhood. From the standpoint of an expanding society polity, education should produce individuals who are human before they are national. There is no system of national education which achieves this result; but the ultimate logic of the prevailing educational tradition as we see it in the German conduct of the war should provoke serious misgivings and minister to a change of heart in those persons who direct the policies of public education.

(c) It is worth observing in this connection that even in Germany the Germanic propaganda had to trick itself out in a pseudo-universal jargon. It had to say large-sounding things about a Kultur-mission to the world in order to validate itself in the eyes of the German people. The claim implied in the Kultur-mission as it was commonly expounded is so preposterous as to be self-refuting to a normal mind; but this systematic diffusion of the idea proves that man has reached a point where the power and wealth of a particular group is no longer able by itself to evoke an effectual response in the individuals who compose the group. The fact is that civilised mankind is slowly learning to think in universal terms. Its social grasp is already faintly embracing the whole world.

This circumstance tends to simplify the sociologist’s task very materially. While the application of the polity which he evolves will require to take account of the peculiar traditions and institutions of different groups, he will be free to work out his polity in terms which are independent of the present exclusive and conflicting aims of the groups which compose the world of man. He will state the ultimate problems of society in Germany in the same terms as he will state those in America; for he will necessarily be dealing with the one factor which is common to both. There cannot be a distinctive social science in Germany and another in America, differing from one another in essentials and both at the same time being true. There will be endless variety in the methods by which social principles are applied by different groups; for we cannot write off the past of a people and the institutions in which its history is embodied. Yet there can be no true sociology in England or in Germany unless its postulates are equally valid in America. In other words these postulates must be drawn from a disinterested study of personality. They will not concern themselves with the welfare of a particular group, in whatever terms that welfare may be defined. But they will be concerned with the good of the world of groups because they are derived from the one fact which is common to and underlies them all, and which, despite conflicting aims still binds human groups together in a permanent unity, namely, personality.

IV

The aims of our social polity must, therefore, be defined congruously with the nature of personality; and the corresponding social processes must validate themselves by bringing to those whom they affect, the sense of movement towards a real and recognisable personal good. It does not require that all the individuals composing a society should organise their common life with the conscious and deliberate aim of personal self-realisation; but it is certain that the processes of a genuine social integration will be accompanied by a certain growing emotional satisfaction in the persons concerned. It is generally assumed that this emotional satisfaction is to be described as happiness; but it is probably something deeper and more organic than the state which this word connotes. Professor Dewey says that “to find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key of happiness.”[9] This is, of course, true so far as it goes; but it is symptomatic of the inadequate analysis which this point generally receives. Obviously there are possibilities of self-realisation and personal satisfaction far beyond the attainment which Professor Dewey indicates in this sentence. We might, perhaps, find a better definition of the emotional state which we should require our process of social development to produce, in the New Testament use of the word joy. There the word is clearly associated with an emotional state consequent upon a sense of accomplishment or discovery. The golfer experiences it for a passing moment after a completely successful drive from the tee. The artist knows it more durably as he puts the finishing touch to what he believes to be his masterpiece. Gibbon had it (not without a large tincture of self-admiration) on the memorable evening on which he finished the “Decline and Fall.” It is the condition which is described by the word “fruition;”[10] the inward reaction evoked by the sense of arrival, of fulfilment, and of course—derivatively—of being surely on the way. It comes to a man when he knows he is on the road to personal completeness.

9.  Democracy and Education, p. 360.

10.  This word is so frequently mishandled that it is perhaps necessary to point out that it does not mean bearing fruit. It is derived from the Latin word fruor, I enjoy; and it describes an inward state.

Illustrative of the New Testament use of the word joy, the following passages may be cited: John ii. 30, “This my joy is made full” (spoken by John Baptist on hearing that Jesus was launched on the full tide of His ministry.) John xvi. 21, “... when she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a man is born unto the world.” Matt. xiii. 14, “In his joy, he goeth and selleth all that he hath” (the merchant man who has found the pearl of great price). Luke xv. 9, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.”

It is upon the question of what constitutes personal completeness that we have to reach some kind of conclusion if our sociological thinking is to be fruitful and if we are to have the proper tests to apply to our social programmes. Obviously the society we want to produce is one which will provide the conditions under which every man may rise to the full stature of his manhood. But what is the full-grown man? Apparently the only person in the modern world who has possessed a definite and vivid conception of the full-grown man is Nietzsche. But Nietzsche’s doctrine is ruled out by our democratic hypothesis. He has told us that mankind falls into two broad classes of master and slave, and though he recognises a considerable hierarchy of social grades, he sees, nevertheless, at the one end the ruling class, and at the other “the class of man who thrives best when he is looked after and closely observed, the man who is happy to serve not because he must, but because he is what he is, the man uncorrupted by political and religious lies concerning liberty, equality and fraternity, who is half conscious of the abyss which separates him from his superiors, and who is happiest when he is performing those acts which are not beyond his limitations.”[11] Obviously the only kind of society possible on the Nietzschean terms is an armed peace between supermen and “slave morality” for the rest. The will to power soon or late issues in anarchy. The strength of the position of Nietzsche lies in the theoretic justification it provides for the native human bias which leads to the quest of personal ascendency, and the struggle for possession. The result of this tendency has been the constant subordination and exploitation of the weak by the strong, and a ceaseless scrimmage among the strong in which the weak are the pawns; and if this struggle has not brought about the Nietzschean equilibrium, it is due, presumably, to the enervating influence of Christianity. Yet, here, in this self-regarding bias we have the original source of all our social chaos; but the disorder is not to be overcome by inhibiting this impulse. It is sometimes supposed that human nature is incurably and permanently self-regarding and anarchic; but this is not true. It is indeed true that human nature does take easily to the practice of self-assertion as against others; this is the penalty of our inheritance from the “ape and the tiger.” But it is mere folly to suppose that man has to carry this sorrowful entail in perpetuity. It is fastened on him largely by reason of the external circumstances of his life, a vicious social heredity which has put a premium upon power and pushfulness, and an atmosphere of competition in which capacity and cunning win the prize. It is, however, not impossible to communicate to men a social vision which is able to divert the natural energies of the human spirit into more generous channels. This, did they but know it, is the peculiar vocation of the preacher and the teacher.

11.  A. M. Ludovici, Nietszche, pp. 85f.

Mr. Bertrand Russell has recently laid just emphasis upon the supremacy of impulse in determining human conduct; and has pointed out the distinction between impulses which make for life and those which make for death. William Blake had a somewhat similar view. What Blake in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” calls energy appears to be that vital stress which expresses itself in our impulses, and which in the form of “poetic” energy is the source of creative art. In Blake’s psychology, this energy only works out healthily and fruitfully when it is co-ordinated on the one side with Reason and on the other by Desire; and he traces our human troubles to an undue ascendency of one or other of these two balancing principles. When Reason prevails over Desire, it imposes disastrous restraint upon energy; but when the tables are turned, the ascendency of Desire leads to the “vegetated life.” Blake’s analysis has much to commend it; and it appears to supply the necessary complement to Mr. Russell’s. For our impulses, whether they make for life or death are the same impulses—the difference in their result springing from a difference in their direction, and in the conditions under which they operate.

The old psychological analysis of the mind into will, intellect, affections, and so forth has served its turn; and for purposes of social building we must betake ourselves rather to an analysis of Blake’s energy or Mr. Russell’s impulses. M. Bergson has shown us how the “elan vitale” has in the course of its onward march split up again and again, and in so doing has set afoot new lines of development and variation; and we have for result the infinite wealth of plant and animal form which fills the earth. The primitive urge of life was seemingly a bundle of tendencies, which were released, one at this point, and another at that, under the stress of the circumstances encountered on the way. In the same way the energy, the vital stress of personality is an organic complex of impulses, each of which has released and shaped itself conformably to the conditions in which the human spirit has found itself in the process of growth. In this complex of impulses, it is possible to discern three main strands:

1. The Impulse of Self-preservation. This has to do with the desire and purpose to maintain life; and its primitive form was determined by the necessity of procuring food, clothing and shelter. Its characteristic activity was that of discovering and adapting the means which were available to the end of sustaining life; and out of this grew agriculture, weaving, housebuilding and a range of operations which grew in number and elaboration as the requirements of life increased. Here is the origin of what Mr. Veblen has called the Instinct of Workmanship.

2. The Impulse of Reproduction. This in its elemental form expresses itself in the begetting of children. But as man became more familiar with the objects round about him, in the course of handling them for the ends of self-preservation, this impulse became associated with the instinct of workmanship, and man began to attempt to reproduce himself in other media than his flesh. He came to do certain work which was not required by the exigencies of his physical subsistence; and this work he did—as it were—for the joy of doing it. He attempted to express himself upon such materials as were capable of receiving his impress; and his delight in his handicraft became the beginning of Art. Presently he learnt to set line and colour and sound in combinations that pleased him, and in which he was conscious of the joy of fatherhood. This is the Instinct of Creativeness. It is not always perceived that there is a very profound distinction to be drawn between the workmanlike and the creative activities. Miss Helen Marot appears to assume (in her book The Creative Impulse in Industry), that a democratic form of co-operation, and an understanding of industrial processes will satisfy the creative instinct in industry. It is difficult to see how this can happen under the conditions of the modern large-scale machine industry. Miss Marot rightly insists that the creative impulse is not merely an affair of individual self-expression. Nevertheless, it is only possible to a group when the group is comparatively small, and every member is in active touch with the whole process. The instinct of workmanship is of a routine productive character, the instinct of creativeness is original and reproductive. Nothing on this earth can make our highly specialised machine processes into opportunities of self-expression. This, however, does not mean that the machine industry has no place in the future social order.

3. The Impulse of Association.—Man has always lived with men; and there is perhaps nothing so distinctive of human nature as its faculty for association. We are so made that we only find ourselves and each other as we live together in societies, that we only find ourselves as we find one another. The exchanges of love and friendship, the riches of fellowship—these are the most fruitful experiences of life. “We are members of one another”; and are fulfilled in each other. Our mutual need has released in us the Instinct of Sociability.

The weakness of this kind of analysis is that it appears to untwine threads that cannot be untwined in practice and never are separated in experience. Human instincts do not operate independently; they blend into each other continuously and inextricably in countless ways. We have seen how the reproductive impulse fused with the instinct of workmanship into an impulse toward creative art. But the debt has been repaid in the introduction of requirements of beauty into the exercise of workmanship. In the era of craftsmanship, the two impulses were very intimately blended, workmanship and creativeness going hand in hand in the erection of stately minsters, or in the making of harness for the squire’s horses. It is due to the development of the machine that these two impulses have been so widely parted in our time, to the immense injury of both; and it is one of the tasks, perhaps the chief of the tasks, facing us in the future to restore them to something of their old-time intimacy. Of this restoration, the great modern prophet is William Morris, who saw hope neither for the worker nor for the artist except in a closer association of industry with beauty, and who laid the foundation of this revived association by his own pioneer work as a house-decorator. This does not require, as some suppose, the scrapping of the machine industry, even though that were possible; it only requires that we understand the true place of the machine industry and put it there. Similarly, the instinct of sociability coalesced with those of workmanship and creativeness. The signal instance of this combination is to be found in the spirit of the mediæval Guilds; but there are other instances in plenty. Most of the great human achievements in thought, religion and art, have had a social origin, in schools of philosophers and prophets, in groups of artists and the like, and conversely new departures in thought, religion and art have become the foci of new groups.

Of all this the moral would seem to be that we must treat the energy of personality, its characteristic outgoing, as a single undivided indivisible stream; yet we must recognise it also as a stream containing a certain range of ingredients. Therefore, what we shall require of our ideal society is that it shall generate an atmosphere and an environment in which the constituent ingredients of personal energy shall find opportunity of full, co-ordinated and parallel development. It will be a society in which the instinct of workmanship, creativeness and sociability will grow side by side and hand in hand toward “the perfect man, of the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

Of this society then, we may say, that its marks will be that first every man shall have the opportunity of a secure and sufficient physical subsistence, second, that its work will press upward to the plane of art, and that its sociability will grow into vital and purposeful fellowship. By these tests we shall judge the soundness of democratic progress.

Our analysis has hitherto taken account only of the common man without reference to natural divergencies of genius or capacity. Professor Geddes has lately been emphasising Comte’s doctrine of history as an interplay of the temporal and spiritual powers, and his classification of the four Social types—Chiefs, People, Emotionals and Intellectuals. Mr. Arnold Bennett found men on the Clyde sorting themselves out into Organisers, Workers, Energisers and Initiators, which classification, as Professor Geddes justly points out, corresponds closely to Comte’s. These types, however, reduce themselves to two, namely those chiefly animated by the impulse of action, and those chiefly animated by the impulse of reflection. Of course, these types shade off imperceptibly into one another, because the impulses which give them their peculiar colour are native to and present in universal human nature. And while it is certain that nature will see to it that mankind will be delivered from the doom of a dead uniformity, it is nevertheless necessary that we should aim at the full development of both the active and reflective impulses in every man. Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets! Hitherto, we have considered man as actuated mainly by the impulse of action; but the release and development of the impulse of reflection is essential to the growth of society. For the experience which is the sequel of action is condemned to sterility except it be reflected upon. Reflection upon experience is the appointed guide of further action. We must, therefore, add to our tests of sound democratic progress, a fourth, namely, that it shall be of a kind to stimulate and encourage reflection. It must, that is, include a method of education whereby every man shall as far as possible become capable of independent thought and sound judgment.

Out of all this emerges immediately one certain conclusion. The kind of society which encourages creative self-expression, independent judgment and a living expanding fellowship must necessarily be conceived and created in freedom. For to these essential human impulses, freedom is the very breath of life. The initial problem of sociology is, therefore, the achievement of freedom; upon that foundation, and that only, can it build for eternity.

Chapter III.
THE PECUNIARY STANDARD

“The deeper cause of the oppression of the factory operative and of the terrible degradation and pauperisation of the agricultural labourer, was not the mere fact that machines were invented which multiplied the efficiency of labour, but the previous monopolisation, in the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, of the land and of education. The great change then took place in the current philosophy of life, which made the whole of the governing classes of England, with exceptions practically negligible, accept with avidity the idea merely more clearly formulated by political economists, that the highest duty of man was to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market.”

Patrick Geddes.

I

THE saying that “man shall not live by bread alone” has been in familiar circulation so long and on authority so good that it is remarkable how slightly it has affected the general conduct of life. Bread and the things symbolised by bread in the saying are and must remain the first care of men, but they are first only in the sense of being preliminary, the necessary conditions of the main and supreme business of life. Yet modern civilisation as a whole has shown no manifest sign of a conception of life which requires that the chief interest and energy of men should be directed to ends of a higher order than that of maintaining physical existence. This fact is to some extent obscured from us by the elaborate development of commercial organisation, so that multitudes of men are engaged in enterprises and vocations apparently so removed from the actual business of clothing, feeding and housing other men that they are not aware of being connected with it at all. Yet the entire structure of commerce rests upon the requirement that certain primary physical needs of men must be met. That men shall be fed, clothed, sheltered, provided with heat and light,—here is the source of commerce. Around these primary needs certain other demands have gathered—for elaboration in food and clothing, comfort in the home, and the like; and a multitude of commercial activities of a secondary kind have been set afoot and added to the sufficiently complex business of providing society with the first necessities of life. This secondary life of commerce is mainly parasitical and feeds upon the other, and its vitality depends as much upon the success with which demands are ingeniously created as upon the power to produce the supply profitably. Added to this vast business of production is an enormous machinery of distribution; and in these or in financial operations, originally derived from them but now largely controlling them, we are all more or less directly engaged. There are a few professional occupations which remain outside this classification, which (to use Carlyle’s phrase) “are boarded and lodged on the industry” of the community to which they belong,—the doctor, the clergyman, the lawyer, the teacher, the actor, the artist, the journalist; yet so strong and imperious is the commercial tradition that the non-productive vocations are required to justify their existence by providing the inspiration, the health, the recreation and the knowledge necessary to the effectual and prosperous working of the economic machine. Society seems (outside the “leisure class”) feverishly engaged in keeping itself alive.

Yet if its only purpose were to keep itself alive, it would not need to be so busy. But to the first impulse of production and exchange has been added another interest, that of making profit and accumulating wealth. In the process of exchange the opportunity was found of securing a margin of personal advantage; and gradually this margin of personal advantage has become the chief incentive to commercial enterprise. It does not belong to our purpose to trace the history of this change; it is enough that we should observe the fact that the profit-seeking motive has become the real driving force of modern commerce, and that historical circumstances, such as the introduction of large scale processes, the world-wide ramifications of commerce through improved facilities of travel and transportation, the invention of the telephone and the telegraph, the growth of trusts, combines, and monopolies have made possible fabulous increments and accumulations of profit.[12]

12.  For an analysis of the process by which simple barter has grown into the modern intricate system of commerce, with its fine flower in “big finance,” see Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship, chap. V., VI., VIII. More summarily in Geddes and Slater, Ideas at War, Chap. III., IV., V. For a useful analysis of the current commercial organisation see Cole, Self-Government in Industry, pp. 178, 179.

The effect of this upon a generation habituated to the profit-making temper has been to set up the multi-millionaire as the type of perfection toward which aspiring youth should be encouraged to strive. We go into business not to feed and clothe each other, but to make money; and since from the nature of the case only comparatively few of us have the capacity and the opportunity to become commercial supermen, the rest of us remain in business to feed and clothe ourselves, or (as we say) to “make a living.” Commerce, which owes its origin to social need, has almost wholly lost the social motive. If we are not making money ourselves, we hire ourselves out as the money-making tools of others; and while some of us aim at larger profits, the rest of us hope for larger wages. The economic motive is universal, and it expresses itself exclusively in the pecuniary standard. “The Almighty Dollar” is more than a gratuitous exercise in satire, it describes the spirit of an age.

Much has been heard since the war began of the profiteer, on both sides of the Atlantic, and on both sides of the quarrel. But the profiteer is not a phenomenon peculiar to war-time. Like the poor, he is always with us; the war has but served to reveal him more vividly in his proper character. His peculiar crime is that he makes the extremity of his country the opportunity of private gain. But what he does in time of war, he does no less sedulously in time of peace. His sin takes a deeper dye in war-time because the national need is greater, and his opportunity is much enlarged. Yet the story of how “big business” has endeavoured, and has largely succeeded in the endeavour to control the legislative machinery of the nations in its own interests in normal times, is a very deplorable and shameful chapter in modern history. It is, of course, no new thing that legislatures should show themselves tender to economic interests; there is even yet no legislature in the world which is not more careful of the rights of property than of the welfare of men—except, perhaps, in Russia. By a curious paradox, those who most jealously guarded the sanctities of property, were once the implacable critics of commercial enterprise, but that phase has passed away. Landed aristocracies, no less than bourgeois manufacturers, have been so seduced by the lure of large and swift gain that the old line of demarcation has disappeared; and the doctrine of property rights has been invoked to secure the sanctity of the capitalist system of industry. The “governing classes” in Europe and America, who to-day are the economically powerful, have become an unholy alliance which exploits the state in the interests of trade. It is not the English brewers and publicans only who say, “our trade, our politics,” though these particular people may be the only ones who have the effrontery to say so in public. It is always the profiteer’s cry; and whenever in the past a piece of social legislation has been introduced in England, he raises the scare cry that “capital will leave the country,” which simply means that he esteems his profits more highly than he does his country. He is the author of the inspiring doctrine that “trade follows the flag”; which prostitutes national idealism to the sordid business of profiteering; and so deeply has this poison entered into our life that Christian missions to the non-Christian world are frequently commended on the ground that they do pioneering work for the trader.

All this is, of course, trite and commonplace; and ever since the early part of the nineteenth century there has been a continuous and increasing note of protest against the modern commercial doctrine of competitive profit-making. It must, however, be admitted that the protest has not gained much headway against the evil; on the contrary the evil has, during this same period, grown by leaps and bounds, so that the earlier twentieth century witnessed its supreme achievements. Mr. John D. Rockefeller is the tragical culmination of the process in our generation; and there is no reason to suppose that he is the last, or greatest figure of the line of Crœsus. Nor will the subordination of life to the business of pecuniary gain be effectually stayed until we seriously take in hand the profiteering ideology which governs all our thought and conduct. The main ingredient in the social heredity of this generation is the profit-making impulse; that is the atmosphere which it has breathed and which constitutes its habitual universe of discourse. Art and religion alike have been infected with the spirit; the current repute of an artist is fixed by the prices which his pictures command; and the prosperity of a Christian congregation is judged by its statistical returns. It is required of education that it shall minister primarily to commercial efficiency; and the outcry against the study of the classics, and the demand for a more exclusively scientific and technical education reflect the essentially commercial orientation of our educational outlook. It is, perhaps, the most deplorable aspect of this latter tendency that it so often becomes vocal in persons whose academic training should have provided them with a more discriminating view of life. Even in the universities, which should be the impregnable citadels of spiritual idealism, there is an inclination to capitulate to the monstrous and deadly doctrine that the end of national life is commercial supremacy.

Commerce originated in social need and should be a social service; nor indeed has its perversion to profit-making prevented it from rendering substantial services to society. Apart from its provision of the necessities of life, many of its inventions have added much to the wealth of life independently of their immediate purposes. The unique facilities for travel which we moderns enjoy owe their origins in the first instance to the demand for better commercial transport. Stephenson’s first locomotive was intended to haul coal trucks. The increasing socialisation of life in our time owes much to the economic motive that has popularised the telegraph and the telephone; and the supreme achievement of Mr. Henry Ford is not a miracle of standardised production, but the contribution which his car has made to the socialisation of the farmer’s life. Our knowledge of the earth’s surface and its peoples, and through this, one of the foundations of the coming internationalism, we owe greatly to the enterprise of the trader. For a hundred great services beyond its ministry to the elementary human needs of food and clothing, we are debtors to commerce and to those merchant venturers in many ages who laid its broad modern foundations. Yet just because we acknowledge a manifest debt even to profiteering commercial enterprise, it is the more necessary that we should assail its modern ascendency over life, and its own perversion to individual aims, and point out the havoc which its more modern developments have wrought. It would be foolish and undiscriminating to say that it is the sole source of our social confusion, but it is simple truth to say that it has become its chief direct occasion; and the result is to be traced to the circumstances which have changed commerce from its essential function as a great social service to a scramble for private gain. The restoration of commerce to its own proper place and office is bound up with a recovery of a true view of life as a whole, with a new understanding of those things other and greater than bread by which it is ordained that men shall live.

II

The paramountcy of the economic motive is no modern phenomenon, and it would be a mistake to identify it exclusively with the modern commercial civilisation. Its modern beginnings are no doubt to be found in the appearance of the small merchant class in the era of craftsmanship; and the difference between him and the merchant prince of the twentieth century is mainly a difference of scale—this difference being chiefly due to the high mobility of property when it assumes the form of money, and the increased facilities for mobilising it through the development of the credit system and the improvement in the means of communication. The fundamental impulses and instincts which determine the social order are broadly identical throughout history. That is why Marx’ economic interpretation of history is probably the most luminous and fruitful clue to the course of human affairs that historical study has yet yielded to us. We are not justified in assuming (as some have done) that it is the only valid clue; still less are those disciples of Marx justified who have developed his theory of historical interpretation into the metaphysical dogma of economic determinism. That economic factors have controlled the general drift of human affairs in the past does not necessarily mean that they are predestined to do so in perpetuity.

Yet even those who most vehemently denounce the existing profit-making organisation of society are still obsessed by the notion that social transformation is chiefly an affair of economic revolution. Their thought appears to run wholly within the economic circle. It is in some respects the strangest paradox of modern times that the Russian people with their long and unique tradition of spirituality should have been so completely captured (to all appearance) by the doctrinaire materialism of the Marxian school and have accepted the view that the Kingdom of Heaven comes by a proletarian capture of economic power. The circumstance is, of course, capable of explanation, for in Russia, as elsewhere, political power has gone with economic power; and the Russian revolutionary knew what the Frenchman of 1789 did not know, namely, that no political revolution could be complete or permanent which was not an economic revolution at the same time. That, therefore, the Russian revolution should have been primarily economic is not strange—since Marx had lived and written in the interval between 1789 and 1917; but it remains a somewhat singular fact that the spiritual idealism of Feodor Dostoievsky and Lyof Tolstoi have been so little manifest during these last surprising months. This preoccupation with economic change is characteristic of the attitude of those everywhere who are most urgent in their endeavour after social transformation. The advocates of the National Guild Movement are never weary of reiterating that political power belongs to those who wield economic power, and of urging that the workers should make themselves masters of the economic resources of society as the necessary preliminary of laying hold of the political power.[13] This may be a sound counsel of immediate strategy; but it is full of disaster if it is treated as a permanent principle of social practice. For it leaves us still within the vicious circle where the purely economic interests are paramount. Whensoever we consent to the statement that the one thing needful to society is a more equitable distribution of the wealth which its industry produces, we are still within the same hopeless universe of discourse. A more equitable distribution of wealth is needed; so much is obvious. But having secured it, what then? Will the City of God then come down from heaven? Or are we content with the hope of a redeemed society which goes no farther than a vision of a community of healthy and contented animals? It is certain that, so long as our thought of social regeneration moves chiefly within the existing framework of wealth production and wealth distribution, our effort will create a range of new social problems of an acute and probably less soluble kind. That we should labour to humanise and to socialise the existing commercial and industrial organisation goes without saying; but there is no certainty that after we have done so, the same economic pre-occupation will not still fill our minds. It is not enough to work for change that only transfers the power to produce and to enjoy wealth from the hands of a small minority to those of the great majority. That is indeed only change, and not necessarily progress. There will be fewer people with more butter on their bread than they need; and fewer people with less than they need; and that will be something gained. But it does not necessarily follow that we will not still be chiefly concerned about bread and butter, and whatever elaborations upon that simple theme that our enlarged resources may tempt us to seek.

13.  This is not to be taken as meaning that the National Guild Movement is destitute of a spiritual outlook. On the contrary, see, for instance, the last chapter of S. G. Hobson’s Guild Principles in War and Peace.

This is not in any sense an argument for spending less energy upon the urgent task of accomplishing the radical economic changes which social well-being plainly requires; it is rather a renewed plea that we should ask ourselves whether we are moving conformably with a vision of man and life as a whole. Whether we rank as reformists or revolutionists we should endeavour to see the evils we hate and the manner and matter of the remedy in the light of a philosophy of comprehensive and coherent human good. The scheme of social insurance established in Great Britain before the war was a response to a definite social need; but it is now no longer open to question, that both in respect of its content, and the method of its institution, its promoters failed to appreciate the precise nature and conditions of the need; and the final solution of the problem which evoked the measure has been confused and retarded. And generally, so long as we think exclusively of social advance in economic terms, out of relation to their context in life, we are subordinating the greater thing to the lesser, and are in continual danger of postponing the greater thing into an impossible future. We become and remain virtual opportunists (even though we call ourselves revolutionaries!), only moving spasmodically and incoherently within the very circle of institutions and tendencies which have wrought our present confusion, until we have gained that social perspective in which the economic requirements of life take their proper place.

Properly understood, this place is a relatively humble one. In our analysis of personality in the previous chapter, four major instincts were defined. The first, the instinct of self-preservation has to do with the maintenance of physical life; the second, the third and the fourth, as they appear in their full development, are mainly concerned with the spiritual expression of life. The first is the necessary basis of the other three—the foundation, as it were, upon which they build; but the real significance and joy of life are associated predominantly with the impulses of creativeness, sociability, and reflection. Now, the economic business of life has to do almost exclusively with the instinct of self-preservation; its function ends with the provision of the conditions and materials of a wholesome physical existence. Yet to-day, the economic interests absorb virtually the whole of life; the ultimate interests of life—that range of things which we may broadly call spiritual, if they are not subordinated to and absorbed in the economic motive, are consigned to the odds and ends of time which we are able to spare from the sovereign business of making a fortune or making a living. The distinctive human interests of religion, thought, art, and recreation are no more than occasional alternatives which enable us to some extent to repair the wear and tear of the ceaseless economic drive. The real revolution we need is the general conviction that to put it roughly—as the kitchen is to the home, so the economic interest is to the rest of life. The kitchen is indispensable to the home; and there are exceptional persons to whom it is the most important part of the home. Yet it is no more than a strictly subordinate part of the home. When we have finished with the business of procuring and eating bread, then the real business of life begins. It is indeed necessary that the kitchen should be in tune with home, and that the work of producing and distributing the primary necessities of life should be organised so as to be consistent with the spiritual realisation of life. We can, of course, no longer admit a dualism of material and spiritual; for the spiritual may and must infuse the material and subordinate it to its own ends. To-day the material has made the spiritual ancillary to itself; and the soul is the drudge of the body. The radical problem of the future is how to reverse this position and to enthrone the spiritual.

What the spiritual realisation of life implies we can no more than dimly guess. We may speak of love and art; but the potentialities of social and creative achievement in human nature have yet to be explored. A material civilisation has largely kept mankind in a state of arrested development on every side save that which has to do with the conditions of its physical life. Psychology is busily, though not yet very successfully, explaining that hidden world of life which lies beyond the frontiers of consciousness; there are (and this is virtually all we can say) vast possibilities and powers latent within us of which we have only occasional and indistinct intimations. We have tested the power and the range of those endowments of which we are already aware; and the triumphs of art and science show how nobly and richly our nature is equipped. Nevertheless, all that art and science have yet accomplished are but the promise of that glory that is still to be. But the full release of all our powers—known and unknown—is contingent upon a social setting more richly human, that is to say, more spiritual in temper, and outlook, than mankind has hitherto known. This social setting will come when we make up our minds to break the tyranny of the economic motive and to deliver life from the infamous despotism of things. No man knows to what heights of creative achievement and personal self-realisation we may not attain when once the economic preoccupation which swallows our best energies is dissipated, and we are free to become all that we have it in us to be, when powers of fellowship and creation now inert and unknown are awakened in us, and we press on to those peaks of attainment of which prophets have spoken and which angels have desired to see.

III

The task before us, therefore, is the deliverance of life from the ascendency of the economic motive; and at bottom this means the redemption of commerce from the obsession of profit-making. In other words, commerce must be conceived and conducted as a social service. It is true that in the early days of modern commercialism, the principle of competition was regarded as the heaven-sent panacea for human ills. Men became dithyrambic about laissez-faire, and though they perforce admitted that the growth of the commercial system had caused certain glaring evils, yet they maintained that these were no more than the inevitable accidents of a process of readjustment. Let the system only work out its inherent logic to the end, and there will be a golden age for everybody. The system has had a fair trial; and so far from achieving the results confidently predicted by its advocates, it has failed hopelessly to provide even a tolerably secure and sufficient subsistence for the great mass of men. It is indeed difficult to see how it could be otherwise or how those who uphold it could have expected a different result. There is no doubt that the system has stimulated the production of wealth; and this its protagonists accurately foresaw; but they apparently supposed that the distribution of wealth would look after itself. It had indeed done so, in a fashion which has deprived the mass of toilers of that security of physical subsistence which is a necessary condition of liberty and of the liberation of the spiritual impulses. So far from adequately fulfilling the elementary services of providing men with a steady and reasonable supply of the necessities of life, it has made life itself insecure and precarious.

How this situation has come about may be stated summarily in a few words: (a) The pursuit of profit tends to lower the cost of production, while it raises the price of the product. Chief among the costs of production is the payment of labour,—that is to say, wages. The result of this tendency is to depress the income of the worker and at the same time to raise his expenditure and since there is no limit fixed at either end the standard of life is in constant danger of being lowered beneath the point of reasonable subsistence. It often happens that wages show an increase over given periods of time; but it is an increase of money-wages and not of real wages; since the period of wage-increase is generally also a period of a disproportionate increase in the price of commodities. Some check has been placed upon the decrease of wages by Trade Union action; but this is offset by the partial elimination of competition in the markets through the growth of Trusts and Combines, and the consequent upward tendency of prices.

(b) This insecurity is accentuated by the fact that the maintenance of profits frequently require a check upon productivity in order to tighten the market by reducing the supply of commodities. It is estimated that in America this interference with production has kept productivity down anywhere between twenty-five and fifty per cent. below its possible maximum. This obstruction is effected by such devices as the diminution of working hours, dismissal of workmen, and periodic stoppages of work.

(c) A further element of insecurity is to be found in the circumstance that labour is itself treated as a commodity, subject to market fluctuations, its price governed by the relation of supply to demand, like any other commodity. In order to prevent an undue rise in the price of labour, the industrial system has evolved a reserve of labour, commonly called unemployment. In normal times, there is in every trade a chronic margin—varying in amount—of unemployed men; and no man knows when his turn may come to fall into the reserve. It naturally happens that the less efficient man goes first—the man least equipped to face the demoralising effects of unemployment. The result is that he degenerates into an unemployable and swells the volume of the human driftwood of our social order.

(d) Insecurity arises also from the unquestioned and unchallenged authority of the owners or representatives of the invested capital, against whose verdicts there is no appeal. The worker is at the absolute mercy of the master or the foreman; and he can usually find work only at the sacrifice of his freedom. Should he display any signs of restiveness and be dismissed, the growth of Trusts and Employers’ Associations has made it possible to deny him employment within the area over which such bodies exercise control.

This takes no account of the dehumanising and despiritualising effects of the machine industry under the conditions of the profit system. That is an aggravation of the situation which must be considered in another connection. Here we are concerned to note the failure of commerce under a profit system to provide the conditions of security of life for the mass of men. And not the least disastrous consequence of this failure is the deep social schism it has engendered. It has created the criminal antithesis of great wealth and great poverty in great cities, and the virtually open warfare between capital and labour. The investor and the employer are bent on larger dividends upon the outlay of capital; the worker is seeking a larger return upon his outlay of labour. In the struggle the worker is at a disadvantage. For while capital and labour, the producers, are fighting, the casualties of the struggle are chiefly among the consumers. But the consumers are mostly composed of the labourer and the tenement-dweller, that is to say, the working-class itself. So that the worker in the struggle is divided against himself. If he is successful in his struggle for higher wages, the advantage is lost through the increased price of commodities; for the employer pays the higher wages out of higher prices. In the issue, the worker is caught in the vicious circle of a continuous struggle against himself, which to dependence and insecurity adds an unending confusion.

No question is here raised as to the legitimacy of profit; we are concerned only to point out the consequences of a system which permits an unlimited expansion of profits; and it should be clear that the redemption of commerce and its restoration to the status of the social service it should be, are to be wrought first by imposing a limit upon profit-making.

This requires two measures:

First, the production and distribution of the necessities of life should be definitely placed outside the sphere of competition. The British Labour Party in its memorandum on reconstruction, proposes that the coal-supply shall be so organised that the ordinary householder shall be able to have his coal delivered at his door, at a uniform price all over the country and all through the year—just as he buys postage stamps. But the principle should be extended to all the essential commodities. Flour, milk, coal, meat, wool, cotton and their immediate derivatives should be withdrawn from the circle of competitive commerce, and be no more subject to the fluctuations of a market manipulated in the interest of profit-making than the water-supply is. There is no reason why the supply of these primary articles should not be so regulated as to bear a reasonably constant proportion to the demand. For those who argue that this would dislocate the customary economic processes, a two-fold answer may be returned. First, that the customary economic processes deserve to be dislocated; and second, that the only possible justification of the customary economic processes is derived from an economic theory which is no longer relevant to the facts of life. In point of actual fact, the standardisation of prices has become in recent years increasingly common—the elimination of competition by the formation of trusts and combines has had the result of fixing prices with a considerable rigidity; and during the war, it has been done on a very large scale. In neither case is it suggested by any one that it has had a deleterious effect upon commerce. In this proposal for the standardisation of prices, there is nothing new; it is simply a revival of the mediæval custom of the justum pretium—according to which buyers and sellers and market authorities together determined a price for each commodity which should be equally fair to the producer and the consumer; and a return to this practice—with such modifications as modern conditions require—is opposed only by those who still hold to the curious illusion that Adam Smith spoke the last word upon this subject.[14]

14.  Revelations of after-war profiteering in Great Britain and America are creating a definite demand for standardisation of prices. And if we are to have Wages Boards, why not Prices Boards?

Second: A limit should be placed upon profits, dividends, incomes and fortunes. This may be done by taxation, inheritance duties and other devices already familiar to the managers of public finance. We should agree to make it cease to be worth anyone’s while to exploit the public, by fixing rigid bounds to the accumulation of private wealth; and this we may do with a good conscience. For all wealth is socially produced; and the society which produces it has the first claim upon it. This is a position which can be challenged only by those who still hold that the possession of property confers upon its possessors a “divine right” to take the lion’s share of the wealth produced by the industry of the whole community.

It will be maintained that measures of this kind will take away the incentive to industry and commercial progress. But it may be pointed out in reply that the economic end of British life so far from being disastrously undermined by wholesale interference with economic laws during the war, seems to have been in a rather healthier condition than it had ever known previously. Profits were limited; prices were standardised; the old competitive basis was largely suspended. Virtually all those incentives of self-regard and gain which we have been told were essential to economic development were put out of business. Yet production reached an unprecedented point, both in quality and in amount. Another incentive was indeed operative; but this incentive was not of the personal kind. The peril of the nation in the great hazard of war evoked a social solidarity which proved a more powerful incentive to industry than the self-regarding instincts ever provided. This is our sufficient answer to those who still hold to the cynical superstition that the only motives on which we can rely in dealing with human nature are those of selfishness. What is needed to stimulate effort and devotion is the sense of direct participation in a great social task; and there is no reason to suppose that the systematic education of a couple of generations may not make this same social idealism the normal driving force of national effort. It is no doubt true that, as things are, only such a challenge to patriotic feeling as war brings, could achieve such a result; but it is our business to discover the stimuli which will make this same intensity of devotion a permanent fact.

But, it may be said, the economic conditions of wartime are abnormal, and economic “laws” must be disregarded in the stress of national crisis. This is, of course, partly true and partly untrue. So far as production is concerned, the only change that war requires is greater speed and greater volume; the difference is one of degree and not at all of kind. It is only in the region of finance that war-time conditions work havoc with economic “laws”; and the experience of war-time has taught us the useful lesson that these “laws” have no permanent character. They are on the contrary contingent and derivative affairs, being no more than general statements concerning economic tendencies which are set afoot and sustained by the ways in which men habitually act. If men could be induced to act differently, then we should require to formulate a new set of “laws.” The greatest revelation of the war in many respects is the tremendous achievement of industrial production in Great Britain under the influence of a social emotion, and without any of the common incentives of personal advantage. It may be conceded that this social emotion was to some extent stimulated by a group antagonism, but in the main it was the love of and the desire to preserve—in spite of its faults—that particular social synthesis described as British that lay behind this great performance. And once more let it be repeated that the peril of war is not the only organ of social vision.

It is not pretended that commerce will be redeemed automatically by placing a limitation upon the profit-motive; but without such a limitation, it cannot be redeemed at all. It must enter into our scheme to provide means of kindling the social vision which will transform commerce into a social service; and this implies certain changes of temper and method in the system of education. There is no reason why we should not come to regard the business of feeding and clothing the people as much a department of the public service as that of educating or that of providing them with water or the time of day, or of transmitting their correspondence; and there is no reason for supposing that a right education will not provide in time as effectual a spur to patriotism as the peril of war.

IV

It is, however, not enough to standardise the cost of living and to impose a limit upon profits; for we have still no adequate guarantee against a lowering of the standard of life. It does not necessarily follow that the surplus profits will go to the raising of wages, or that standardised prices will make for a sufficient living. It is necessary to define a minimum standard of life. The demand for a minimum wage is a beginning in this direction, but under the profit system, the minimum wage defined as a money-wage is something of a snare. For so long as prices tend to fly upward, no minimum wage can effectually prevent a depression of the standard of life. It is only as we succeed in fixing a minimum “real wage” which takes account of the cost of living that we approach a satisfactory estimate. But, again, under the present system—the relation of supply to demand in the labour market will render even a minimum “real wage” exceedingly precarious.

The only satisfactory solution of this difficulty is to dissolve the connection between work and wages. The assumption that men will not work unless they must is not true; but it is the truth that while men are compelled to work by the coercion of fear—whether of hunger or of punishment—they will not do the most or the best work of which they are capable. That workmen nowadays are apt to do as little as they can for as much as they can get is not to be disputed; and organised labour combines with its demand for larger wages another demand for fewer working hours, and under certain conditions imposes restrictions on output. But this is simply the answer in kind which labour returns to capital. It is the vicious sequel of a vicious system. Capital buys in the cheapest and sells in the dearest market; and labour having been brought up in the same school does the same thing. If capital tries to extort as much as it can out of labour, it is not to be wondered at that labour should take a hand in the game.

We have to recognise that the best workmanship requires two conditions; first—that the worker shall have a direct interest in the thing he produces, second, that he shall enjoy the freedom which comes from a sense of guaranteed security. To the former we shall have to return at a later stage in the argument. Concerning the latter, we have seen how the present system exposes the worker to a grave and vexatious insecurity. It is stupid to suppose that men will habitually put their best into their work under such conditions as these. The whole system is intrinsically demoralising to all whom it touches. It is demoralising to the employer because he comes to regard the worker as a mere “hand,” a tool; and that is a frame of mind which saps his own manhood. It is demoralising to the worker because it treats his physical energy as a thing to be bought and sold at a price, the highest price he can extort; and since a man’s labour is actually inseparable from his person, it reduces him to a condition of servility, which, within a certain limit, is as real as that of a chattel slave. He has neither independence nor security. Over against this state of things, we must affirm that a man’s subsistence shall be guaranteed to him as a customary practice, in good weather and in bad, in sickness and in health, in work or unemployment. The British Labour Party’s proposal of a national minimum standard of life universally enforced is certainly one of the cornerstones of a wholesome social order. The cynic will probably say that this will be the paradise of the slacker; and no doubt there would be some persons base enough to evade their share of productive labour. But we can count upon the public opinion of a society in which freedom has created a new sense of social obligation and a new quality of fellowship, to make a slacker’s life not worth living. It may very fairly be doubted whether at the worst the slacker who remained incorrigible would constitute so great a tragedy—either in number or in kind—or constitute so clear evidence of the bankruptcy of a system as do the innumerable and increasing derelicts of the present industrial order.

These three measures, the standardisation of the cost of living, the limitation of profits, the institution of a minimum standard of life are necessary to the redemption of commerce. For to redeem commerce, we must in the first instance, take away from it the power and the opportunity of exploiting life for the ends of private gain. But this process secures another result. It ensures for the mass of the people a reasonable security and sufficiency of physical subsistence, so that the pre-occupation with self-preservation need no longer arrest their spiritual development. We establish the foundations of freedom—freedom from fear, from anxiety, from the autocracy of the employer or his agent—and confer upon the ordinary man a new status, in which we may with good hope expect to find him susceptible to a social vision powerful to evoke his devotion and to bring his will into captivity to its obedience. Commerce and industry will then no longer be a vast scramble of competition and exploitation, but a generous social co-operation.

Chapter IV.
THE REDEMPTION OF WORK.

“And the men of labour spent their strength in daily struggling for breath to maintain the vital strength they laboured with. So living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.”—Daniel Defoe.

“And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all men understood that the beauty of holiness must be in labour as well as in rest. Nay! more, if it may be, in labour; in our strength rather than in our weakness; and in the choice of what we shall work for through the six days and may know to be good at their evening time, than in the choice of what we pray for on the seventh, of reward and repose. With the multitude that keep holiday we may perhaps sometimes vainly have gone up to the House of the Lord and vainly there have asked for what we fancied would be mercy; but for the few who labour as their Lord would have them, the mercy needs no seeking, and their wide home no hallowing. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow them all the days of their life, and they shall dwell in the House of the Lord for ever.”—John Ruskin.

THE clue to the approaching change in the social order is to be found in the mind of organised labour. What organised labour is resolved to achieve, that it will achieve soon or late. Hitherto we have been concerned in these pages with an enquiry, more or less speculative, into the conditions and measures required for a wholesome social evolution. How far does the present tendency of organised labour correspond with the general lines of progress which our enquiry has so far constrained us to define? It will not be necessary, in order to answer this question, to survey the whole field of labour policy. For our present purpose we may neglect on the one hand the conservative element in the labour movement, and the extreme revolutionary element on the other. This does not imply a judgment on either; it simply means that we shall reach a safer judgment upon the direction in which labour is minded to go by considering the central mass of the movement; and of this central mass it may be affirmed with some assurance that its best mind has received a more coherent and detailed interpretation in Great Britain than elsewhere. We shall, therefore, consider the general tendency of the progressive elements in the British Labour Movement. It will not be necessary to raise the question of ways and means at this point. It is a question upon which strong views are held on both sides—whether labour is to attain its goal by political or industrial action, by gradual approach or by some catastrophic method such as the general strike. But the question of method does not arise at this point; our present object is to examine so far as we may the goal which organised labour is pursuing.

I

The Trade Union movement originated in the necessity to provide some remedy for “the helplessness in which since the industrial revolution, the individual workman stood in relation to the capitalist employer and still more in relation to the joint-stock company and the national combine or trust.” In this initial stage it was governed by what Mr. Sidney Webb has called the “Doctrine of Vested Interests,” and it was chiefly concerned with securing those concessions and safe-guards which constitute the “Trade Union Conditions” to the suspension of which British Labour consented for the period of the war. These conditions affected the rate of wages, the length of working day, overtime, night work, Sunday duty, mealtimes, holidays, and included a countless multitude of details affecting processes, machines, the employment of boys and girls, the limitation of output, and other related subjects—the whole being an inconceivably intricate patchwork of concessions and advantages gained as the result of innumerable local skirmishes and negotiations. The policy at this stage may be properly described as one of “nibbling” at the enemies’ lines, of raiding his trenches as opportunity offered or need required; and it is a commonplace what large and substantial advantages these operations have yielded to the workers as a whole, whether unionists or not. But it was not possible that these piece-meal tactics should continue to be the chief weapon of a growing, highly organised movement which was gaining a kind of self-consciousness and a common mind; and gradually out of the experience of the Unions grew the “Doctrine of the Common Rule.” The main emphasis has now shifted from the local and sectional problem to that of establishing and maintaining a Standard Rate of Wages and a normal Working Day. This change is naturally marked by the appearance of a large scale strategy in place of the local and occasional tactics of the earlier stage; and the earlier type of labour leader is rapidly disappearing in favour of persons who are able to bring some gifts of statesmanship to the problems of labour. This is not to say that the earlier doctrine has been abandoned; rather it has been supplemented and overshadowed by the new orientation.

But a situation has recently arisen which will probably bring about the permanent and general supremacy of the Common Rule doctrine. The urgencies of war-production made it desirable and necessary that the achievements of the earlier unionism should be suspended; and all the intricate machinery of safeguards and restrictions was willingly laid on one side for the period of the war. But it is now evident that even with the best will in the world, this restoration, as it was originally guaranteed, has become impracticable. Events in industry have moved so rapidly that it is impossible to retrace our steps to the ante-bellum period and to pick up the lines of life where we dropped them in 1914. At first sight it would appear that this result proved that the whole achievement of the earlier union activity had been of a peculiarly fragile and slender kind. Yet, despite this circumstance, the British Trade Unions have grown considerably during the war, this growth being doubtless due to the increasing sense that only a strong corporate movement of the workers will be able to establish for them the necessary conditions of a secure and independent life, and in particular such improvements in their position, in respect of wages and other matters, as they have been able to gain during the war. It now seems likely that the outcome of the situation created by the impossibility of restoring the status quo ante, and the increase of Trade Union strength, will be the general acceptance of the Doctrine of the Common Rule and a programme based upon it; and the demand for the Restoration of Trade Union Conditions may take the form of a demand for certain general standards of life and labour. Already, it is fairly evident that the least that labour will demand will be what Mr. Sidney Webb calls “the New Industrial Charter” in which there are five articles: (i.) the prevention of unemployment; (ii.) the maintenance of standard rates of wages; (iii.) a “constitution” for factory and industry, i.e. the introduction of a measure of democratic control over the conditions of work; (iv.) no limitation of output; (v.) freedom for every worker.[15] The “charter” as it stands, represents a minimum demand; it certainly does not run to revolutionary excess and contemplates no organic change in the existing framework of the industrial order. With its probable economic effects we are not now concerned, but it is important to notice the emphasis which it lays upon the standing of the worker. The charter aims to give him security against unemployment, a share in the control of the conditions under which he works, and freedom from the autocratic dictation of employer or foreman, and from the coercion of necessity. Even this moderate measure would undoubtedly bring a great accession of independence to the ordinary worker. Further, this charter applies to all workers, not to unionists alone; for once the Standard Rate and the Normal Day are conceded, the old invidious necessity of making war upon non-unionists disappears; and with it, to the great good of all concerned, the demoralising custom of imposing restrictions upon output.

15.  The whole position is discussed in its relation both to the employer and to the worker in Mr. Webb’s brochure: The Restoration of Trade Union Conditions. Since these passages were written, the increased demands here foreshadowed have been definitely made.

II

This “charter” will not be granted without a struggle. The greed and amour propre of some employers, and the stupidity of others, will interpose great obstacles to its institution. The great growing strength of organised labour, however, guarantees a comparatively early capitulation of the intransigent employers.[16] But it would be a mistake to suppose that this is all that is implied in the present temper of labour. A good deal of what labour is looking to has not yet reached the stage of articulation, but it is impossible to misapprehend the general direction in which it is moving. The socialist propaganda, even if it has not always been as prolific of conversions as its promoters desired, has been a singularly potent instrument of education, and if the workers as a whole have not accepted the conclusions of the socialist, it is most certain that they have been profoundly moved by his premises. Probably more than any other influence it has stimulated the spirit of revolt against a permanent division of society by a line of economic privilege; and it has encouraged a very real insurgency against the idea, so comforting to the fortunate classes, that it is the duty of all persons to be content in that station of life into which Providence has been pleased to call them. While the rich believed that their duty to their less fortunate neighbours was an affair of charity, the Socialist had taught the poor to cry for justice. The chief achievement of the Socialist movement up to this time lies less in the acceptance of its doctrines than in the new sense of right which it has succeeded in awakening, even in many to whom the very term socialism still represents a dangerous and forbidding spectre. And it is this sense of right, the refusal to accept as permanent and just a state of exploitation, with the demand for economic freedom and independence, which is working as an irresistible leaven in the mind of the worker-mass of our time; often indeed, inarticulately enough, but in the minds of the better educated and most thoughtful workers, beginning to express itself in specific requirements which far outstrip Mr. Sidney Webb’s conservative interpretation of the present need.

16.  Since these paragraphs were written, a National Industrial Conference convened by the British Government, and composed of equal numbers of employers’ and workers’ representatives, has reported unanimously in favour of a universal minimum wage and a universal maximum week.

The Socialism popularly advocated during the last half-century, is, however, not likely to capture the working-class of to-day. The movement for the nationalisation of the means of production and distribution—especially of the primary necessities of life—has indeed gained strength during the war; and the public ownership doctrine of orthodox socialism is in no danger of being discarded, though it may be modified in the extent of its application. But the orthodox socialist plan of vesting economic and industrial control in the state will not survive the war. The modern doctrine of the state reached its apogee during the war; it is already in process of rapid discredit. This is chiefly due to the revelation of the logic of state-absolutism, which the German performance in the war has yielded; and we are likely to witness a strong reaction from the doctrine of the sovereign omni-competent state in the coming generation. Moreover, in England the working of the Munitions Act has proved that the state may be as harsh and troublesome an employer as a private individual or a corporation; and the workers are not minded to emancipate themselves from the plutocracy to hand themselves over to a bureaucracy.

But how is public ownership to be made practicable without slate control? The experiences of war-time have revealed a possible solution of the difficulty. The Garton Foundation and the Whitley Committee, the former a private, the latter a parliamentary body, and neither committed to “labour” views, have been led by the study of industrial conditions in war-time to advocate introduction of democratic control into industry, and experiments in democratic control which have been made, have plainly demonstrated its practicability and its economic value. In the woollen trades that centre upon Bradford, in Yorkshire, various troubles interfered with the output of cloth. Early in 1916 the War Office requisitioned the output of the factories for the production of khaki, blankets, and other war-material; and a little later the Government purchased all the available wool on the market. The distribution of this wool to the factories was left by the Army Contracts Department to a Board of Control which it established for the whole industry. “The allocation,” says a recent account of the matter, “is carried out by means of a series of rationing committees. There are district rationing committees of spinners, of manufacturers, and a joint rationing committee on which the Trade Unions are represented. These committees ascertain all the facts about an individual firm’s consumption of wool, and the kind and quality of machinery that has been used. From these data the rations are arranged for the several mills of the district, while the Government committee settles the rations for the several districts. It is an extraordinarily interesting example of an industry regulating its life on a principle of equity instead of leaving the fortune of different mills and the fortunes of thousands of workmen’s homes to the blind scramble of the market.” It is of interest further to observe concerning this experiment that when the Government requisitioned the mills, it established a method of payment which eliminated profit-making, and the spinner and the manufacturer became virtually government servants. This is worth remembering when it is urged that the incentive of profit is essential to industrial development, especially in view of the conspicuous success of the experiment. More to our immediate point, however, is that this is a definite experiment in democratic control, for the organisation in which the ultimate control of the woollen industry was vested is composed of thirty-three members, eleven each being appointed by the Government, the Employers’ Associations, and by the Trade Unions.

The experiment in the woollen trades goes farther than the measure of democratic control suggested by Mr. Sidney Webb in his charter. For he contemplates no more than a democratic control of the actual conditions of work, while the control of raw material is vested in the Board of Control of the woollen industries. Mr. Webb’s suggestion is for “workshop committees or shop stewards” in every establishment having more than twenty operators, to whom the employer should be required to communicate at least one week prior to their adoption any proposed new rules, and also any proposed changes in wage-rates, piece-work prices, allowances, deductions, hours of labour, meal-times, methods of working and conditions affecting the comfort of the workshop.[17] Mr. Webb himself would probably like a good deal more than this; but in his brochure, he frankly writes as one who believes that “the most hopeful evolution of society ... lies always in making the best rather than the worst out of what we find at the moment to hand.” But in point of fact, very considerable extensions of the principle are already being canvassed; and it is unlikely that organised labour will be long content with the timid bid for a share of industrial control which Mr. Webb’s proposal represents. It is symptomatic of the present tendency that in the Building Trades a movement initiated by Mr. Malcolm Sparkes, a London Master Builder, looking toward the formation of an Industrial Parliament for the building trades, has already been the subject of serious discussion both by the employers’ associations, and the trade unions concerned. Mr. Sparkes suggests that the Parliament should be composed of twenty members appointed by the National Association Building Trades Council, and twenty appointed by the Federation of Building Trades Employers, and that it should meet regularly for constructive, and not at all for arbitral or conciliatory purposes. To this parliament would be remitted such matters as the regularisation of wages, unemployment, technical training and apprenticeship, publicity, and the investigation of possible lines of trade improvement. But obviously such a parliament as Mr. Sparkes suggests could have vitality and authority only as it stood at the top of a hierarchy of analogous bodies all the way up, through provincial and district councils, from the committee of the single shop.

17.  The Restoration of Trade Union Conditions, p. 95.

The principle of democratic control in industry has come to stay; together with the doctrine of public ownership it will probably fix the accepted social policy of progressive labour. Already, indeed, this combination is to be found in the British Labour Party’s memorandum on “Labour and the Social Order.” The Party “demands the progressive elimination from the control of industry of the private capitalist, individual or joint-stock.” It stands “unhesitatingly for the national ownership and administration of the Railways and Canals, and their union, along with Harbours and Roads, and the Posts and Telegraphs ... in a united national service of Communication and Transport, to be worked, unhampered by capitalist, private and purely local interests, and with a steadily increasing participation of the organised workers in the management, both central and local, exclusively for the common good.” And again, the Party “demands the immediate nationalisation of mines, the extraction of coal and iron being worked as a public service, with a steadily increasing participation in the management, both central and local, of the various grades of persons employed.” It is no exaggeration to say that the principle of democratic control in industry, especially under the conditions within which the British Labour Party contemplates it, carries with it an entire change in the status of the worker. For when we remember that with democratic control in industry, the British Labour Party demands a universal application of the policy “of the National Minimum, affording complete security against destitution, in sickness and in health, in good times and bad alike, to every member of the community of whatever age or sex,” it is evident that we have the two requirements of that necessary revolution in the worker’s standing which is the corner-stone of a worthy social order. The worker is no longer dependent, a pawn in the game of production, an employed wage-earner, a “hand;” he has become a partner, possessing both the freedom and the responsibility of partnership. And it is no less evident that a great stride has been taken in the direction of separating work from the means of subsistence and abolishing “wagery.”

III

There can be little doubt that the principle of public ownership with democratic control has received a great impulse from the able advocacy of what has come to be known as Guild-Socialism. The work guild in this connection is something more than a reminiscence of the mediæval institution; the present movement has quite definite affinities with its historical precursor, notably in the principle of combining all the members of a craft in co-operation. But the “national” guild goes beyond its forbear in two respects—in the fact of being national where the older institution was local, and in the account it necessarily takes of the more complex and specialised character of modern industry. “A national guild,” says Mr. S. G. Hobson, “is a combination of all the labour of every kind, administrative, executive, productive, in any particular industry. It includes those who work with their brains and those who contribute labour power. Administration, skilled and unskilled labour—every one who can work—are all entitled to membership.” This body of people will lease from the community the right and the means to carry on the industry with which it is concerned, always providing that it shall be under conditions which safeguard the interests of all the people in respect of the products of the industry.

In the eyes of the guildsman, the “original sin” of the existing industrial system is production for profit. In his Guild Principles in Peace and War, Mr. S. G. Hobson puts side by side (inter alia) the following figures, (the particular year to which they belong is not given):

| Iron and Steel | Railway
| Industries. | Construction.
Net output | £30,948,100 | £17,103,100
Persons employed | 262,225 | 241,520
Net output per person | £118 | £71
Average wage per person | £67 | £67

Here are revealed two facts of great interest. The first is that in railway construction, which is chiefly for need and use, the disparity between the average output and the average wage per person is only four pounds, whereas the iron and steel industries, where production is for profit, the disparity is as high as fifty-one pounds. Railway construction represents output in locomotives, rolling-stock and so forth which the railway companies make for their own use; whereas the products of the iron and steel industries are destined for the market. Where product is for profit, the excess of average output over the average wage is more than twelve times as great as where the production is for use. This is connected with the fact that the iron and steel industries are chiefly concerned with the provision of dividends, whereas in railway construction there is no such direct necessity.

The second fact of importance is that in both cases the average wage is the same. This is the result of two circumstances—first, the commodity-theory of labour, according to which labour-power is regarded as a measureable marketable affair, subject to the law of supply and demand and separate from the personality of the worker; and second, that reserve of labour commonly called unemployment, the existence of which tends to moderate the fluctuations of the labour market. It is in the interests of capital that there should be a permanent margin of unemployment in order that the price of labour should not become excessive at any time by reason of its scarcity.

In the past, the maintenance of the unemployed was, so far as their own members were affected, assumed altogether by the Trade Unions; but by the provisions of the National Insurance Act this has partly been laid upon the employer and upon the community as a whole. But, says the guildsman, since the existence of a reserve of labour seems under present conditions inseparable from the conduct of the industry; and since further, it is impossible to secure that under no conditions there will not be some margin of unemployment, the charge for the maintenance of the reserve of labour should be made to fall on the industry itself. This, however, immediately destroys the commodity-theory of labour. Under such an arrangement, the worker will be regarded not as a potential vendor of so much labour-power, subject to the law of supply and demand, and liable to lose his subsistence and that of his family by the chances of the market, but as a regular member of a society which provides a financial reserve for the purpose of maintaining him when he falls into the labour reserve. So once more, we see the status of the worker transformed. He ceases to be a “hand,” and becomes a partner.

The “national guild” is really no more than the systematic development of this idea of partnership; and because it insists that this partnership shall be real and not fictitious, it rejects all schemes of democratic control in industry which (like the Garton Foundation and the Whitley schemes) still retain the commodity-theory of labour, and all schemes of profit-sharing which is the voluntary bounty of the employer. The guildsman holds that the worker has a direct interest in the thing produced apart from his hire, and that his contribution in the way of labour entitles him to a partnership in the industry as real as that of his employer, and much more real than that of the investor who does no more than rake in his dividends. To this principle of partnership, there is, of course, no logical end but the elimination of the private employer, whether an individual or a company, and the combination of the administrative, executive and productive labour in a given industry in some such way as is contemplated in the “national guild.”

Under these conditions, production for profit will be subordinated increasingly to production for need and use. Industry will be organised no longer in the interests of capital, but in those of the community; and the profits that may accrue will go to the community. The conduct of the industry will be vested in a hierarchy of representative bodies which will consist of persons chosen to act on behalf of the various departments of production and administration; and these bodies will range all the way up from the small shop council to the national council. The guildsmen extend their vision further to a combination of national councils, which will become the economic parliament of the nation, empowered to handle its commercial and industrial affairs and leaving the legislature to occupy itself with those aspects of public life such as education, health, art, local government and so forth which are now so grievously neglected and subordinated to the exigencies of the commercial life of the nation.[18]

18.  The proposed National Industrial Council recommended by the recent National Industrial Conference is plainly an instalment of the National Guild Council.

That roughly is the guild theory. Its great advantage is that while it eliminates competitive profit-making, it also avoids through its emphasis upon democratic control, the danger of excessive centralisation and bureaucratic control inherent in state socialism. On the other hand it does not fall into the syndicalist error of antagonism to the state. It is not without interest to point out here (in anticipation of later discussion) that the national guild reflects on the economic side the current tendency in political philosophy towards a doctrine of the state which regards it as multi-cellular in nature, and would make it federalistic in practice, in contrast with the emphasis of the last generation upon its unitary and absolutist character. It would appear that sovereignty is destined to be distributed among a series of democratic functional controls.

The pressure of events has already validated many of the contentions of the guildsman. We have seen how in the case of the woollen industries the Government has initiated the practice of treating employers as its own paid servants, has recognised the principle of democratic control, has assumed the purchase and control of raw materials, and has superseded production for profit by production for use; we have here all the essentials of a national guild save one; and that one thing needful is the short step from government control to public ownership. Naturally the end of the war will bring some reaction from the position thus achieved; yet it is impossible not to believe that the need to increase the aggregate normal productivity of the nation, imposed by the financial burdens of the war, will ultimately compel a further development of these wartime tendencies. Certainly we have in the British Labour Party some guarantee that this movement will continue. Its memorandum on reconstruction virtually presupposes where it does not explicitly affirm the underlying principles of the guild-movement. “Standing as it does for the Democratic Control of Industry, the Labour Party would think twice before it sanctioned any abandonment of the present profitable centralisation of purchase of raw materials; of the present carefully organised ‘rationing,’ by joint committees of the trades concerned, of the several establishments with the materials they require; of the present elaborate system of ‘costing’ and public audit of manufacturers’ accounts, so as to stop the waste heretofore caused by the mechanical inefficiency of the more backward firms, of the present salutary publicity of manufacturing processes and expenses thus ensured; and on the information thus obtained (in order never again to revert to the old-time profiteering) of the present rigid fixing, for standardised products, of maximum prices at the factory, at the warehouse of the wholesale trader, and in the retail shop.”

IV

“The question,” the Memorandum continues, “of the retail prices of household commodities is emphatically the most practical of all political issues to the woman elector. The male politicians have too long neglected the grievances of the small household, which is the prey of every profiteering combination.” And this brings us to the answer to our question how far the present orientation of labour satisfies the conditions we have laid down as necessary to worthy social progress. The rigid fixing of the retail prices of household commodities,—the primary necessities of life—plainly substitutes the principle of production for need and use for that of production for profit; and while this of itself does not eliminate the profiteer altogether, it tends so to limit the area of exploitation as to bring the small household, which is after all the unit of society, within reasonable distance of a healthy security of material circumstance. Moreover, the principle of the National Minimum virtually dissolves the connection between work and the means of subsistence, so that the worker gains security of maintenance and a large accession of freedom and independence. Still further, the principle of democratic control brings to every worker complete immunity from exploitation by those upon whom an antecedent economic advantage has conferred power and enables him to graduate to the dignity and responsibility of partnership.

But what then? Having achieved this new status, it is certain that he will not be satisfied. For the thing that is stirring in the mind and heart of organised labour to-day is something much deeper than a desire for a more satisfactory physical life or for economic independence. Labour is indeed unable to make articulate more than the margin of the new desire of which it is aware; but the phenomenon which we have called “labour unrest” properly understood, is the result of a craving, imperious and not to be denied, for a larger life. Of this larger life the worker instinctively feels that economic security and independence are the indispensable pre-requisites. According to the measure of his intelligence and insight, he is aiming for these things. That is the inwardness of the present stirrings of organised labour. The worker knows that while he is compelled to hire himself out at a price in order to provide himself and his children with bread, under conditions which make a sufficiency of bread permanently uncertain, and which virtually deny him the opportunity of being anything more—from his first working day to his last—than the tool of interests from which he is powerless to detach himself, he can never become the man he might be or experience the joy of life which his intuitions declare to be his rightful inheritance. The greater part of life, and especially of the worker’s life, is an unredeemed and unexplored tract; and the possibilities hidden in those regions beyond, eye hath not seen neither hath ear heard. But dimly and indistinctly the worker has caught glimpses of this promised land and he has set his face that way. But he has justly perceived that between him and the promised land lies the “great divide” of economic disinheritance with all that it entails of insecurity and bondage. To-day he has come so far as to be in the very act of crossing this divide. That he does not discern clearly what manner of life awaits him in his promised land is no wonder; for none of us know, since as yet none of us have tasted save only in brief and transitory moments the rare quality of the fellowship and the creative urge which belong to the life of spiritual freedom. The British Labour Party speaks of “the promotion of music, literature, fine art, which have been under capitalism so grossly neglected, and upon which, so the Labour Party holds, any real development of civilisation fundamentally depends.” This is a hint of the “milk and honey” of the promised land, and it is only in hints we can speak until we have entered upon our inheritance of spiritual life, and have begun to explore its untold riches. But the road into that land is the road of economic freedom and independence; and that is the road which organised labour is making to-day. It has discovered that “society, like the individual, does not live by bread alone,—does not exist only for perpetual wealth production.” If it makes bread and produces wealth, it is only that men may live, and living may together strive to achieve the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

It is a fair conjecture concerning the results of this general movement, that it will ultimately assign to the economic interests of life their own proper secondary place. With the gradual disappearance of private profit and wages will pass the present ascendancy of the economic motive over the whole of life. It is significant of the intrinsic impulse of this movement that the promoters of the national guild movement should contemplate the separation of the conduct and control of the commercial and industrial elements of national life from the business of the national legislature, so that that body may attend to things other and greater than bread. This does not mean that the economic aspects of life will lose their proper importance; it simply means that they will be deprived of their present paramountcy; and how much that means for the right kind of social progress, for the development of a completely human order of life, it is impossible to do more than fancy. But it will be a great day when men awaken to the fact that the centre of gravity of life is not in the body but in the mind.

V

To have transformed the status of the worker is, however, only a part of the problem of work. An industrial democracy may conceivably be no better than a glorified capitalist, a national profit-making concern. But this keeps us still within the vicious circle of economic domination, with the dangers of degeneration greatly increased. For in place of individuals exploiting individuals, we should have nations endeavouring to exploit nations—with two certain consequences, war and a reaction to competitive individualism; and our last state would be worse than the first. Our complete emancipation from the economic motive requires not only a new status for the worker but a new doctrine of work. Industry must no more be conceived as a means of national wealth than of individual wealth.

The true doctrine of work is present in germ in the British Labour Party’s formula of “workers whether by hand or by brain.” The inclusion in one category of the industrial and professional classes should exert a very profound influence upon the popular attitude to manual labour. Much of the traditional habit of looking upon manual labour as being intrinsically inferior to brain work is due to a stupid lack of discrimination. For skilled labour often requires as nice a co-ordination of mind and hand, and as sensitive a nervous organisation as the most recondite surgery. The competent engineer is in no sense the mental inferior of the accountant; probably the engineer has on the whole the more highly organised mind; yet the engineer is popularly assigned to a relatively lower social rating. The conventional social divisions of those who work are entirely absurd and seem chiefly to depend upon the clothes one wears. That toil is regarded as inferior which cannot be performed without soiling clothes of a more or less ceremonial cut.

But when once it is realised that the work of the physician or the clergyman is different only in kind and not in social worth from the work of the machinist or the farm-labourer, we shall have a more reasonable basis for classification; and though it is true that the minister (being no more immune from the pressure of social atmosphere than other men) has not been unmindful of his stipend or the doctor of his fee, yet both callings have preserved enough of the ideal of disinterested social service to pass on something of the same impulse into occupations which the common mind regards solely as means of livelihood. This indeed, must be the first element in our doctrine of work. It must be regarded primarily as a social service. John Ruskin long ago tried to teach us that in every nation there were four great intellectual professions: the soldier’s, to defend it; the pastor’s, to teach it; the lawyer’s, to establish justice in it; and the merchant’s, to provide for it; and it was, he added, the duty of each of these on due occasion to die for it. What was novel in Ruskin’s doctrine was that there was a due occasion on which a merchant should die for his country. But why should we stop at the merchant? There is no reason why this principle should not be extended to every kind of labour essential to the life of the nation. At least there should be nothing inconceivable in the idea that every member of the community should develop the same degree and quality of social devotion. And (let it be repeated once more) the industrial records of this time of war do make this expectation into something more than a chimæra. The splendid social devotion which the emergency of war has discovered and released should and could be made a permanent asset. It is entirely a question of the right kind of education.

If the impending revolution in the worker’s status brings with it (as it should) a sense of genuine partnership, its natural sequel should be a growing consciousness of participation in a great social task. Every man would come to look upon his job as an integral and indispensable part of the common service. This would add a new interest and worth even to the purely mechanical tasks which the growth of large-scale production has so greatly multiplied. It would be no more than a partial solution of the entire problem involved in routine mechanical toil; but it would go a great way towards mitigating its inevitable dreariness, and it would certainly bring with it a quality of personal satisfaction in work which working for a living at a job in which one’s sole interest is one’s hire cannot possibly afford.

VI

Yet neither the habit of regarding work as participation in a social task nor the element of comradeship which we may reasonably expect to grow out of such a way of conceiving work, nor yet the amelioration of the purely external conditions of modern industrial production, can possibly be accepted as furnishing a final solution of the problem of work. It is probable that under existing conditions, some such changes as these are all we can hope for over large areas of industrial life; perhaps, indeed, without a general recognition of the real social significance of large scale production, the best we can ever do will consist of further modification of industrial conditions along these lines. Yet all this does virtually nothing to make work a means of worthy self-expression.

The high degree of specialisation which has followed the introduction and improvement of industrial machinery, confines large multitudes of people to occupations which consist of repeating the same small routine operation all day and every day; and the mentally benumbing and demoralising consequences of this type of work is one of the commonplaces of social observation. Not the least of the social services of Trade Unionism is that it has furnished to men occupied in purely mechanical work an interest which has helped to keep their minds alive. It is rarely recognised how inevitably certain of our graver social evils are connected with the devitalising influences of modern industrial conditions. Undoubtedly one of the most powerful causes of the deadly grip of the drink traffic upon society is the opportunity it provides of reaction from the depressing and deadening round of the shop. The saloon strikes a kind of psychological balance with the factory. The well-meaning persons who suppose that open spaces, museums, art galleries, and the like will furnish effectual off-sets to the public house, overlook the fact that the peculiar depression to which the factory worker is subjected demands a relief more vivid and more violent than these more refined avenues of diversion offer. Temperance reformers have greatly neglected this aspect of their problem; and prohibition without any accompanying provision for the healthy equilibration of human energies is likely to have consequences that may astonish and perhaps confound its advocates.

But the remedy for this and the other penalties which society has to pay for its industrial system is not to be found in the abandonment of large-scale processes and reversion to an earlier fashion of production. Machinery certainly supplanted a more human, kindlier way of life; and not even the extensive factory legislation which has tempered the worst excesses of the new way, has compensated for the passing of the amenities of the older system. We have, however, to count upon the permanence and the still further extension of large-scale processes. Obviously it is not intrinsically an evil thing, potentially it is an asset of incalculable value to society. Even its monotonies have their uses; for a certain amount of routine work is good for every man. It is only evil when it is excessive. The disadvantages which belong to large-scale production are on the whole incidental, and owe their origin chiefly to laissez faire and the economic motive. Once this vicious connection is dissolved and production for need and use becomes the general rule, the very proficiency of our large-scale processes will liberate a great volume of human energy for the pursuit of the spiritual ends of life.

For the elimination of the profit-interest, and the regulation of production on the basis of calculated demand, will at once lead to a very considerable diminution in the number of working hours. It is questionable whether, with industrial processes properly organised, it would be necessary for any man to spend more than four hours a day in the actual production of necessities. This refers, of course, to the strictly mechanical departments of production. In agriculture, which depends upon seasons and weather conditions, it is obvious that a standardised day is impracticable. Moreover, agriculture is an avocation which has its own peculiar compensations. It is carried on in the open-air and has elements of variety and change to which the industrial worker is a stranger. Yet, even in agriculture the great extension of mechanical and labour-saving instruments should go far to mitigate the acknowledged disadvantages of the life. The evils attaching to the work of the farmer and his labourer are, however, largely extrinsic. It is the dullness and monotony of his spare hours that weigh most heavily upon him.[19] With the industrial, it is different. He does not lack opportunity of social life in so much as he lives normally in large populous centres; but the atonic condition to which he is reduced by the circumstances of his work, renders him incapable of creating and enjoying the best kind of fellowship. He is either too weary for any kind of fellowship and sits at home reading the newspaper, and then to bed; or he turns in his need of compensating excitement to the questionable atmosphere of the public-house. A small minority of tougher mental and nervous fibre will cultivate an allotment or seek diversion in books or sport; but the majority have neither inclination nor energy for any active pursuits. The remedy for this trouble lies in the drastic shortening of the working day for all men who are engaged in the mechanical process of production. With the increasing application of science to industry, under conditions of production for use, it is impossible to say how short the necessary working day may become. And if it became the rule, as it probably should, that no member of society should be exempt from a share in the work of maintaining its natural life and so take his part in mechanical production, there is no reason why the indispensable mechanical toil expected of the individual should not be reduced to a very low point indeed.

19.  The present wholly inadequate remuneration of the agricultural labourer does not come under discussion here, as the argument assumes that the principle of the national minimum is accepted. This assumption is the more reasonable in view of the fact that in England a minimum wage for agricultural labourers has been fixed and is to operate for five years.

If in addition men are trained from childhood to take the view that this toil is a necessary social task, and therefore, intrinsically noble and honourable, the whole atmosphere in which it is discharged would be organically changed. To-day, the prevailing note of speed and competition reduces the place and sense of comradeship to very narrow limits. The general attitude of antagonism between capital and labour infects the air, and not only makes co-operation between the administrative and productive functions impossible, but introduces a subtle poison of disintegration into the mutual relations of the operatives. The only comradeship which appears to exist is that which is created by the need under present conditions of safeguarding class interests. When men of all classes have been brought up to regard a certain amount of mechanical toil as an honourable obligation to the society to which they belong, they will naturally accept their share in the common task and bring themselves to it in a spirit of comradeship.

VII

But it is useless to suppose that we have done all that is needed when we have thus relieved the irksomeness of the day’s work. Indeed, we have (if we leave it at that) only created a great peril—the peril of deterioration which always attends unused or ill-used leisure. “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do;” and the antidote to idleness lies in providing things to do that unoccupied hands will turn to do with readiness. Yet it were fatal to regard this as a problem of utilising spare time. We have indeed a greater and worthier task on hand; and the drastic shortening of the statutory working day provides us with our opportunity.

Genuine social progress and content is, as we have seen, to be achieved only under conditions where men have the opportunity, and are trained in the exercise of the instinct of creativeness. For the great majority of men, the means of this self-expression must be found in some sort of manual activity. It must take the form of work. Perhaps the solution lies in the principle of “one man, two trades”; of which one shall be some part of the mechanical toil involved in social upkeep, and the other a craft in which a man may exercise and express something of his own independent mind. Possibly we may distinguish the two types of occupation as utility-trades and vocations, the one necessary quality of the latter being that men should be able to put their whole souls into their tasks; and in so far as these tasks are of a direct productive kind, since they are not tasks of mere utility, they may fitly be tasks of beauty as well. We require something of the nature of a revival of the older type of craftsmanship in which the æsthetic faculties found room for expression; and in the matter of clothing and house-furniture and decoration there is ample room for the development of a revived craftsmanship where use will go hand in hand with beauty. It should plainly be an organic part of educational policy to provide for the early laying of the foundations of original and creative craftsmanship. In any wise system of education, the period of adolescence should be marked by a very definite differentiation of vocational training (without neglecting the other elements of a generous education). Aptitudes should be watched for; and the growth of the youth should be stimulated along the lines of his natural inclinations. Especially should any signs of independent and original creative power be encouraged. Change of this sort can, of course be brought about only gradually; but it should be faced seriously if society is ever to be emancipated from its baleful subjection to the economic motive.

That we find it difficult to believe that any change along these lines is possible is due chiefly to a lack of acquaintance with any other conditions than those which exist to-day. But William Morris and John Ruskin found no difficulty in believing that men would work “for the joy of the working,” provided that they had work to do which had in it the elements of joy. It was so that they worked themselves; and the substance of their teaching was a plea that work should be made once more a delight by being raised to the plane of art—that is to say, that it might become the avenue of independent creative self-expression. It would doubtless take several generations before this doctrine could be established as a habit of mind and society organised conformably to it, but it is no cheap speculation which foresees, arising out of a progressive liberation and discipline of the creative instincts of a community, a new birth of art. The creative urge would, like the sun, shoot out coronas of flaming achievement; art itself might climb to a plane it has never hitherto known and break out in directions which we in our present state of spiritual purblindness cannot anticipate. At least, it is something to be remembered that those days in England in which industry was alive with a fine craftsmanship and a generous comradeship, were also the days which produced the finest monuments of English art.

VIII

The organisation of society upon lines of this kind would be a protracted and difficult task; and here one is concerned more with the definition of a tendency rather than the precise measures necessary to make it effective. Obviously there must be large exceptions to any rule of life in any vital and developing social order. But the reduction of mechanical toil to the lowest practicable point, and a generous development of the idea and practice of the vocational life seem to be essential. And the general principle which we desire for mechanical tasks of production should be applied in other regions, as for instance in the distributive trades and in those occupations which are concerned with the disposal of waste. The increasing emphasis on hygiene has led to the multiplication of a number of “waste-occupations,” the street-cleaner, the drain-man, the garbage-man and so forth. Within this region we have every right to expect so large an extension of scientific and mechanical methods of dealing with the waste products of life as to make some at least of these occupations wholly superfluous. This type of occupation has meantime, the very undesirable and injurious effect of relegating those who are engaged in it to a condition of much social inferiority; and this is the more unjust, insomuch as the health of the community depends so greatly upon its being faithfully performed. It was a happy inspiration to clothe the New York street-cleaners in white; and it should have a sacramental suggestion for their fellow citizens. For we are familiar with a word which describes a multitude “arrayed in white garments.” The innovation established a point of contact between urban cleanliness and holiness; and it is within this cycle of social judgment that the waste occupations should be placed. We should then take more kindly to the only equitable solution of the problem presented by this class of work, namely that it should be shared out and that all the members of the community should be liable to be called out in companies, as they are now for jury service, to do their part of this indispensable work. This brings the waste occupations into the same category as the productive trades; in point of fact, it is there they really belong. There can be no intrinsic difference of worth between the work of providing for the needs of society and the work of disposing of its waste. For without either of these, society cannot live.

The only class for which there should be no room in a healthy social order is the social parasite. It is to this class that the “idle rich” belong, the people who neither toil nor spin yet fare sumptuously every day at the expense of the labour of others. To this class also belongs the large “flunkey” class—butlers, footmen, door-openers, and other uniformed persons who are arrayed in fine apparel doing little things for us that we ought to do for ourselves. It is just neither to these persons nor to society that they should be allowed to continue in careers of such complete uselessness. So far as Europe is concerned this class has already largely disappeared, for the Army or industry has swallowed it up; and it is not likely ever to re-emerge on the pre-war scale. We must add also to this parasitic class those who are engaged in luxury trades—with the caveat that it is exceedingly difficult to draw a strict frontier line between necessity and luxury on the one hand, and on the other, between luxury and the thing that may minister to the legitimate comfort, the health, the beauty and the general enrichment of life. But there are some things so palpably on the wrong side of the line that there should be no difficulty in identifying them. It is a subject worth some reflection here that the war is teaching us to do without many things which we had come to regard as necessities. It is a sad commentary upon the civilisation we had produced, that it left us with a hunger which we endeavoured to appease by an elaboration of the fringes of life. We had gradually accumulated a range of comforts and conveniences, and not a few superfluities, which had come to be regarded as indispensable. But the war has taught us how few things are after all needful. We have all the materials of joyful life when we have food to eat, a home to live in, freedom and congenial work, comradeship and love. And unless these become more and more the sure possession of all, our social progress is no more than a laborious sham.

Chapter V.
THE ACHIEVEMENT OF FREEDOM.

“When we say that one animal is higher than another, we mean that it is more able to control its own destiny. Progress is just this: Increase in Freedom.”—Stewart McDowall.

“Ne vous laissez pas tromper par de vaines paroles. Plusieurs chercheront a vous persuader que vous êtes vraiment libres, parce qu’ils auront écrit sur une feuille de papier le mot de liberté et l’auront affiché à tous les carrefours.

La liberté n’est pas un placard qu’on lit au coin de la rue. Elle est une puissance vivante qu’on sent en soi et autour de soi, le génie protecteur du foyer domestique, la garantie des droits sociaux, et le premier de ces droits.

La liberté luira sur vous quand, a force de courage et de persévérance, vous vous serez affranchis de toutes ces servitudes.”

Lamennais.

I

POLITICAL and religious freedom cannot be complete without the winning of economic freedom. That economic dependence cuts the nerve of all freedom needs no proof; the history of landownership is full of instances—even in recent times—of the coercion of dependants in matters of opinion and religious observance. So long as one man’s subsistence depends upon the will of another, it is foolish to suppose that he can in any real sense be free; and it is to be counted for righteousness to the Trade Unions that by binding the workers together, they have been able to resist encroachments on the part of the vested interests upon liberty of thought and conscience. Nevertheless, while the present acceptances of the industrial order prevail, the worker still lacks that liberty of the person without which the liberty of the mind, the crown and safeguard of all liberty, can never be more than partial. It is true that the serf was tied to the land in a way in which the modern worker is not tied to his job. Yet the difference is more apparent than real; for the worker has obtained this freedom at the cost of that security of subsistence which the serf did undoubtedly to some extent enjoy. The worker may also choose his master as the serf could not; but it is nevertheless the choice of a master, a man who dictates the terms and conditions of employment, except in so far as the principle of collective bargaining has succeeded in entering in and modifying the magisterial power of the employer. Freedom of thought and conscience is a vain thing except a man be able to translate thought into act and to obey the injunctions of his conscience; and so long as a system, industrial or other, imposes restrictions upon a man’s control of his own person, he does not possess that mobility with which his own personal growth and his ultimate social efficiency are organically bound up. To complete our heritage of freedom, it is essential that the worker should receive a guarantee of economic security. His mind and his conscience mud be delivered from the fear of starvation; for to-day it is only at the risk of exposing himself and his children to hunger that he is able to assert his liberty within the industrial region.[20]

20.  Upon the broader effects of the economic factor of property rights upon liberty, see pp. 246f.

It is further to be noted that industrial conditions circumscribe the mind in another more subtle and probably more dangerous way; for a man may assert—and indeed men have often done so—his liberty of thought, and so save his mind even at the risk of starvation. The evolution of the machine industry has been in a direction which continually decreases the activity of the mind. It requires no more than habituation to a routine process which makes no demand for initiative and independent judgment on the part of the worker. This is apt to lead to a mental inertia which accords well with that bondage of the person which the wage system entails; and this is no doubt the reason (at least in great part) of the general apathy of large masses of the workers in the past to progressive industrial movements. And so long as there is ample and easy opportunity for those parts of the physical and nervous organism which have laid inert through the working day to strike a balance of expenditure with the rest—in the drinking-shop or elsewhere—there seems to be no reason why a large proportion of the workers should not sink into a permanent helot class. We are apt to forget that the progressive elements of the labour movement have not hitherto constituted or represented by a great deal the total mass of the working population; and there has been a real menace to the growth of liberty involved in the possibility that the apathetic elements of the working class might be hardened into a virtual serfdom. For the presence in any society of a permanently unprivileged and disabled element which is condemned in perpetuity to do its menial work is the undoing not only of liberty, but at last of the society itself.

The problem of liberty resolves itself therefore into that of the liberty of the mind. The coming achievement of economic independence is due largely to the circumstance that the Trade Unions have afforded a sanctuary for intellectual freedom against the danger of encroachment upon it by the system of private capital and the conditions of the machine industry.[21] It must, however, be remembered that the freedom of the mind is dependent on factors other than external; and chiefly upon the capacity to use mind in coherent and purposeful ways. A mind capable of such use will not long remain bound. This aspect of the problem belongs properly to the sphere of education; and it is in that setting only that it can be profitably handled. At this point our concern is with the external conditions of mental freedom.

21.  It is worth noticing that on the other hand, the growth of the machine industry has itself indirectly co-operated in this process. “It follows as a consequence of the large and increasing requirements enforced by the machine technology that the period of preliminary training is necessarily longer, and the schooling demanded for general preparation grows unremittingly more exacting. So that, apart from all question of humanitarian sentiment or of popular fitness for democratic citizenship, it has become a matter of economic expediency, simply as a proposition in technological efficiency at large, to enforce the exemption of children from industrial employment until a later date and to extend their effective school age appreciably beyond what would once have been sufficient to meet all the commonplace requirements of skilled workmanship.” (Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship, p. 309.) This educational process has had consequences beyond those immediately sought. The quickening and enlargement of mind which have followed even the very inadequate education hitherto provided in the common schools, have made a very considerable contribution to the movement for economic emancipation.

II

Lord Acton’s definition of liberty, already quoted, as “the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influence of authority, custom and opinion,” suggests that the test of the quality and measure of liberty in a particular community, lies in its attitude to and its treatment of dissent—or to put it in another way, its treatment of minorities. And it is plainly true that the freedom of the mind is a pure fiction except it be freedom to dissent from the common acceptances of the community. Speaking generally, the common tendency is toward the suppression of dissent especially if it be of a radical type, in all kinds of communities, democratic or otherwise. In some cases, the suppression is dictated by the obvious requirements of an authoritarian polity, in which case it is systematic and deliberate; but this is on the whole less dangerous than the informal and unorganised suppression or opposition which springs out of the mental inertia of the multitude, the lethargy which is bred of hatred of change, and especially out of the prejudice which is easily and successfully generated in the minds of the ignorant by those whose interests would be imperilled by change. It is only by a recognition of the social significance and value of dissent, and the important part it has played in historical progress, that we are likely to reach a proper understanding of the true democratic attitude to it. In the history of religion, it is plain that dissent has almost always proved to be the organ of advance, and if not of advance, at least of a saner balance of religious faith and practice; and it may be said with not a little assurance that whether in church or state, the dissent that has gained a reasonable following has been evoked by the need of vindicating some natural right or emphasising some truth or fact of experience which was neglected or obscured in the traditional syntheses. It may still further be stated, that whereas dissent has been denounced by its contemporaries as disruptive and hostile to social solidarity, it has in point of fact been the product of a larger social vision than that current in the existing conventions. Dissent has usually been created by the desire to broaden the basis of human fellowship.

This will be seen by an appeal to the mental outlook of the dissenter. Of course every dissenting movement has been hampered and prejudiced, and its ideals muddied by the adhesion to it of temperamental rebels, and the type of crank which gathers around any standard of revolt, just as the opposition to dissent has been degraded by its readiness to accept the help of “lewd fellows of the baser sort.” But when one penetrates to the core of the movement in the mind of its chief exponents we find ourselves in a peculiarly pure and stimulating air. The great historical rebels have almost invariably been actuated by a social passion.

Some day perhaps a competent student may give us a work upon the psychology of the rebel. That there is something typical about the mentality of the great rebels may be gathered even from a cursory reading of a few obvious biographies. There is usually an abnormal mental sensitiveness combined with great physical restlessness, a keen craving for comradeship, combined with fondness for solitude and lonely meditation, a vivid perception of present evils together with a passion for a future which should restore some ancient simplicity, a tendency—once the first step in revolt has been taken,—to broaden the rebellious front to include other issues, a frequent admixture of integrity of character with a certain irregularity of conduct. Yet this is only the psychological basis; and the real differentia of the true rebel lies in the character of the occasion which crystallises his mental make-up into a definite course of action.

Disraeli used to speak of the “two nations” which inhabited England. These were the privileged people and the disinherited. But that is a phenomenon peculiar neither to England nor to the modern world. It is the great permanent line which divides the human race from top to bottom into two classes. We belong either to the exploiting race or the exploited, are either top dogs or under-dogs. The Greek cities with all their emphasis upon freedom yet thought of it as the prerogative of the few. “There were vague beginnings of a new ideal in Athens, but even in Athens personal liberty such as is now connected with the word ‘democracy’ was confined to a very small percentage of the population.”[22] The remainder were women and slaves upon whose subordination the entire social order rested. The line of division has not always been political or economic. In our own time the acute sense of disinheritance has been the main-spring of the feminist movement. In religion especially the cleavage has been conspicuous. The Reformation controversy about the layman’s rights to receive the chalice in the Sacrament was at bottom a repudiation of the tradition of a privileged caste; and every considerable reformation of religion has involved a challenge to priestcraft on the part of a disinherited laity.

22.  G. D. Burns, Greek Ideals, p. 76.

It is the clear perception of this circumstance—the subordination of that mass which we commonly designate “the people,” the appeal of a disinherited class, of “the army of workers,” as Lord Morley said, “who make the most painful sacrifices for the continuous nutrition of the social organisation,” which constitutes the decisive factor in shaping the rebel’s mind and course of life. It sometimes happens that a combination of circumstances throws the need of the disinherited into sharp relief, and the ensuing ferment creates the leader ad hoc, as it were. The disintegration of the old feudal bonds in England liberated the social discontent which roused John Ball and made him the inspirer of the Peasants’ Revolt. Dr. Lindsay in his History of the Reformation tells us of the existence of an active and wide-spread evangelical piety in Germany long before the Reformation, and it was the sharp contrast between the spiritual hunger of the people and the barren externality and corruption of mediæval ecclesiasticism, at last brought to a head by Tetzel’s peddling of indulgences, that precipitated Luther’s crisis and with it the Reformation. The crisis in the early development of Kansas undoubtedly marked a stage in John Brown’s development. But whether we may be able or not to trace decisive occasions of this kind in the life of the rebel, the common mark of the rebel mind is a passion for the common people. It has been said of Rousseau that “it was because he had seen the wrongs of the poor not from without but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as one of their own company, that he by and by brought such fire to the attack of the old order and changed the blank practice of the older philosophers into a deadly affair of ball and shell.” Similarly Professor Dowden says of Shelley that “it was the sufferings of the industrious poor that especially claimed his sympathy; and he thought of publishing for them a series of popular songs which should inspire them with heart and hope.”[23] Tolstoi, according to Romain Rolland, had for the labouring people a “strange affection, absolutely genuine,” which his repeated disillusionments were powerless to shake. Sometimes, as in the case of Glendower, Mazzini and “nationalist” rebels generally, it is not the case of a disinherited class but of an oppressed nation which shapes the rebel’s course. The great rebel in every case is made by the lure of the disinherited.

23.  Dowden, Life of Shelley, p. 437. The “Songs and Poems for the Men of England,” were published in 1819, after Shelley’s death.

But it is not only compassion for the disinherited which moves the rebel, but a profound faith in their power to work out their own salvation. The appeal to the people has been of the essence of rebel policy. The Peasants’ Revolt in England was stimulated by John Ball’s doggerel verse, which was specially intended to stir discontent. “Wyclif,” says John Richard Green, “appealed, and the appeal is memorable as the first of such a kind in our history, to England at large. With an amazing industry, he issued tract after tract in the tongue of the people itself.” He wrote “in the rough, clear homely English” of the ploughman and trader of his day. The Tractarians of a later date were only imitating their great Oxford precursor when they went distributing their tracts from door to door. But Wyclif did not confine his popular appeal to tracts. His order of “poor preachers,” “whose coarse sermons and long russet dress moved the laughter of the clergy, formed a priceless organisation for the diffusion of their master’s teaching.” John Brown addressed his propaganda at an early stage to the negro; and it is hardly doubtful that his hopes chiefly centred at last upon a general rising of negroes in support of his campaign. Long before, John Hus had carried his appeal to the Bohemian people, as Arnauld of Port Royal, convicted of Jansenism at the Sorbonne, designed to place his case before the French. Pascal’s Provincial Letters were deliberately composed as an appeal from the ecclesiastics to the public. The great emphasis upon public preaching during the Reformation was derived from this same faith in the efficacy of popular appeal. It is sufficiently well known to need no further remark than the reminder that in this way the rebel has made important contributions to the literary as well as the social and religious history of his people.

The paradox of the rebel, then, is this, that while he has been assailed as a subverter of social order, his own driving force has been a social sense quicker and broader than that of his orthodox contemporaries. He attacked the existing social organisation only to break down walls that hindered fellowship. He heard the call of the disinherited and it became in his heart a call to lead them into that heritage of opportunity of which they were cheated by the cupidity and cunning of the great. He assailed the Bastilles of constituted authority, and battered hoary institutions that people might—at this point or that—come into their own. He sought to fling out wide the frontiers of privilege that the poor and the outcast might come into a world of larger life.

Mr. Wells has recently told us that “from the first dawn of the human story” man has been “pursuing the boundary of his possible community.” But the prime agent of this pursuit has been the dissenter. Dissent has proved itself to be the growing point of society. Yet the dissenter has been stoned and hanged by his contemporaries. Must it ever be so? Is there no conceivable social order in which it shall be unnecessary to treat the moral pioneer as a criminal? As yet we have not achieved it. Our limit hitherto has been a kind of toleration rather grudgingly accorded so long as the dissenter does not disturb us over much. But no society will ever be truly free until it has reached the point not only of frank toleration but of the serious encouragement of dissenting opinion. For dissent is after all only a manifestation of the “elan vitale” of a living society; and it should be greeted with a cheer. A society incapable of dissent or of tolerating it has entered upon its last phase.

III

The problem of dissent, however, goes deeper than the realm of opinion. Dissenting opinion would not trouble Israel so long as it remained pure opinion. The difficulty begins when opinion is translated into action. William James said that a belief always discharges itself in an act; and this supplies us with a convenient working distinction between a belief and an opinion. But this brings us into a region where other forces begin to operate, and particularly that inner constraint to act in obedience to one’s belief which we call conscience. From the days when Plato spoke of his [Greek: daimôn] to ours, the dissenter has always claimed that he acted because he “could do no other.” He submitted to what he believed to be the instance of a moral order from which he could not appeal. His contemporaries either derided his conscience or charged him with hypocrisy; but it is worth some consideration that the contemporary judgment was reversed in almost every case.

It is essential that we should attempt to work out the problem of the relation of conscience to the achievement of liberty in view of the extreme danger which lurks in the recent contemptuous criticism of the conscientious objector. “The duty of obeying conscience at all hazards” (to quote Newman), is valid only so long as we agree with Newman that conscience is “the aboriginal vicar of Christ,” that is to say, that it is the inner embodiment of an irrevocable and infrangible moral order. This does not, of course, imply that every “conscientious objector” interprets the moral order rightly, but simply that it is, as and in so far as he sees it, the moral order for him. His judgment may be fallacious; but what is in question is not so much the soundness of his judgment as the sincerity of his conviction; and we are rather apt to forget that moral sincerity is a greater asset to society than a logical correctitude. It is difficult to see how any one who takes a “religious” view of the world can escape this conviction. Even Lord Morley, who speaks of “the higher expediencies” where a religious believer might speak of an ultimate moral order, reaches the judgment that this is a region in which no man ought to compromise. It is on this account singular that the most drastic criticism of the conscientious objector, both in England and America, has come from ministers of religion; and it is more singular still that this severity of criticism should have chiefly come from ministers of the non-authoritarian churches which were born out of the struggle for the rights of conscience.

When Gladstone challenged English Catholics to say how they would act in the event of a collision between the commands of the Queen and the Pope, the greatest of modern English Catholics took up the gage and gave answer. “It is my rule,” said Newman, “both to obey the one and to obey the other; but that there is no rule in this world without exceptions; and that if either the Pope or the Queen demanded of me an ‘Absolute Obedience,’ he or she would be transgressing the laws of human nature and human society. I give an absolute obedience to neither. Further, if ever this double allegiance pulled me in contrary ways which in this age of the world I think it never will, then I should decide according to the particular case, which is beyond all rule and must be decided on its own merits. I should look to see what theologians could do for me, what the Bishops and Clergy around me, what my confessor, what my friends whom I revered, and if, after all, I could not take their view of the matter, then I must rule myself by my own judgment and my own conscience.”[24] He then goes on to insist upon “the duty of obeying our conscience at all hazards” and supports his view by an appeal to weighty Roman authorities. “Certainly,” he concluded, “if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please—still to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”[25]

24.  Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p. 69. (New York, 1875.)

25.  Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p. 86. For a luminous discussion of this episode see H. J. Laski, Studies in the Problems of Sovereignty, pp. 121f.

Forty years before this English controversy, a great French Catholic found himself in this dilemma. No man had more consistently maintained the duty of submission to the Pope than Lamennais. His hard fight for religious liberty in France was precisely for the right of the Catholic to render the Pope a full and undivided allegiance in all matters relating to the content and practice of faith. But a time came when the Pope came to exact from Lamennais a submission he was unable to make. As he would not allow the state to have jurisdiction in the spiritual sphere, so he denied to the Pope jurisdiction in the civil. The Pope would not consent to this modification of his claim to authority and demanded of Lamennais an unqualified submission. Whereupon Lamennais replied, “Most Holy Father, a word from your Holiness is always enough for me, not only to obey it in all that religion ordains but to comply with it in all that conscience allows.”[26] “Outside the Church,” he wrote to the Countess de Senfft, “in the strictly temporal order, and more particularly in that which touches the affairs of my country, I do not recognise any authority which has the right to impose an opinion upon me or to dictate my conduct. I say it emphatically, in that sphere which is not that of the spiritual power, I will never renounce my independence as a man; nor will I, for thought or action, ever take counsel but of my conscience and my reason.”[27] In this course, Lamennais followed the judgment of Cardinal Jacobatus, in what Newman calls his “authoritative work upon councils.” “If it were doubtful whether a precept (of the Pope) be a sin or not, we must determine thus: that if he to whom the precept is addressed has a conscientious sense that it is a sin and injustice; first, it is his duty to put off that sense; but if he cannot nor conform himself to the judgment of the Pope, in that case it is his duty to follow his own private conscience, and patiently to bear it if the Pope punishes him.”[28]

26.  Boutard, Lamennais, sa via et ses doctrines II., p. 382.

27.  Ibid, II., p. 370.

28.  Quoted in Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p. 85. Nevertheless, when Lamennais followed the instances of his conscience, Pope Gregory XVI. in the Bull Mirari vos took occasion to describe “liberty of conscience” as “cette maxime absurde et erronée,” “cette pernicieuse erreur,” “cette liberté funeste.”

At first sight there appears to be no real analogy between the case of the conscientious objector to war, as we have recently known him, and that propounded by Newman. Newman postulates a conflict of loyalties to two societies whose requirements are at a given point antagonistic, before invoking the arbitrament of conscience. The conscientious objector is conceived as setting his own private judgment against the will of the only society to which he owes allegiance. That is, at least, how it looks on the surface. But in point of fact, the conscientious objector as a rule bases his action on the ground of loyalty to a certain view of human relationships, that is to say, to a social ideal; and in the case of a man like Stephen Hobhouse whose social idealism has been validated by a unique realism of self-renunciation and sacrifice, it would be idle to deny that the conflict of loyalties was very concrete and authentic. The Socialist conscientious objector who sees in the International, if not the city of God, at least its threshold, and who does not conceive himself absolved from his loyalty to it even though the German socialists betrayed it, is moved by no personal eccentricity, but by a real social emotion. A sympathetic study of the conscientious objector brings him according to his measure into the same category as the historical leaders of dissenting movements. The decisive moral surrenders which quicken and ennoble life are acts of obedience to a social vision; and the only really moral attitude to men who make these surrenders, however variously they may make them, is that of the dedication of a recent volume—“To all who are fighting for conscience’ sake, whether in the trenches or in prison.”[29] It is well for the community that it should have those within it who are ready to endure obloquy and imprisonment rather than be guilty of what is to them a moral apostasy.

29.  Dr. Orchard’s fine The Outlook for Religion.

The conscientious objector—whatever the subject matter of his dissent—has always been an exasperating figure to his orthodox contemporaries. This is, of course, largely due to the inertia and the dislike of dissent which settle upon middle-aged communities; but at the present time it is probable that the impatience with the conscientious objector springs from other and more respectable sources. Yet by a curious paradox the two principal sources are logically antithetical.

The first is the circumstance that the mental habit of this generation has been profoundly affected by the supremacy of the machine. Its characteristic intellectual achievement is the pragmatist philosophy; and as much in religion and sociology as in the physical sciences its main pre-occupation is with processes. It requires efficiency for immediate concrete objects rather more than faithfulness to what seems to be remote and imponderable abstractions. Conscientious objection is irritating because it is so palpably futile, and indeed so vexatiously obstructive of the business in hand. Not only does it not work, it actually hinders the work in which the multitude is engaged. It puts the machine out of gear; in a supreme emergency when all hands should be at the pumps, the conscientious objector puts us to the trouble of putting him in irons. That is obviously—and naturally—how the case looks. The gulf between the conscientious objector and common opinion is made by a difference of emphasis upon principle and process. The conscientious objector—being perhaps a sort of reversion to a less sophisticated age—puts the process to the test of principle and finds them incompatible. Common opinion, in the exercise of a presumably more realistic judgment says, “This is the only process available; let us make the best use of it we can, and take the risk of coming to terms with principles afterwards, if that be necessary.” The one hitches his wagon to a star; the other hitches it to anything that is going his way. Upon the merits of this kind of controversy, contemporary judgments are notoriously unsafe; unfortunately, none of us will be living at the time when it will be possible to say with assurance who was in this case the true realist after all. Meantime, the conscientious objector, however despised, may help us to a healthier balance between ultimate principle and immediate process than any of us have had this many a day.

But along with the mechanistic habit of thought, there is a survival of the Hegelian idealism which has been chiefly responsible for the modern apothesis of the national state. It is not the Prussian only who has affirmed the sovereignty and omnicompetency of the state and its right to undivided obedience; but being more mechanically and remorselessly logical than his neighbours, he has carried the doctrine to a more definite point. But it seems to be generally assumed in all popular political thinking that our loyalty to the state should be not only first but absolute over all the other loyalties of life. In our day this view has received, particularly in democratic communities, a subtle and plausible reinforcement from the growing emphasis upon the fact of social solidarity with its implication that the consensus of the community fixes the norm of conduct. A man’s conscience should reflect the collective conscience of the society. Moreover, the egalitarian populates of republican democracy are construed to require a uniformity of conduct no less complete than that demanded by the political theory of autocracy; and the unpardonable sin is to break the ranks. “The true democratic principle,” says Lord Acton, “that every man’s free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing.”[30] Democracy which has sloughed the archaism of aristocracy has yet to outgrow the Austinian doctrine of sovereignty if it is not to be in danger of ceasing to be the sanctuary and becoming the grave of liberty, and with liberty of much else beside. When it no longer tolerates the nonconformist and the moral pioneer, “its doom is writ;” for once more let it be repeated that historically dissent of this type has always proved to be the growing point of society.

30.  Lord Acton, The History of Liberty.

This is not a plea for the conscientious objector but for democracy. Newman said that if the Pope spoke against conscience, “he would commit a suicidal act. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet.” The authority of the Pope is not shaken because he concedes to conscience the liberty of dissent; rather it is confirmed. Even more so do the stability and growth of democracy depend upon its recognition of the inviolability of the individual conscience; for democracy cannot live except its roots be deep struck in the moral nature of man. The ultimate battleground of democracy is in men’s hearts; and its appeal must at last ever be to men’s consciences. But the appeal to conscience has no meaning unless conscience be free; and when democracy constrains men’s consciences it is writing off its own spiritual charter. Even in time of war it is safer for democracy to let a hundred shirkers go scot-free rather than run the risk of penalising an honest conscience. For by its affirmation of the sovereignty of conscience it reinforces the consciences of all its members and wins the deeper loyalty of those who are constrained to dissent from its policy on particular issues.

IV

The growth of the democratic ideal is bound up with the acceptance of the freedom of the mind in all its consequences—even at the risk of some disorder; and the difficulty which political democracy is apt even in normal times to find in conforming to this view is due to the fact that it has not yet perceived the logic of its own first principles. This in its turn is at least to some extent to be accounted for by the survival in democracies of mediæval conceptions of authority. We do not need to take into account those doctrines of authority which are begotten of the divine right of kings and are now clearly at their last gasp. The divine right of kings is, however, assumed to have fallen upon democratic governments; and though they may not exercise authority for the same ends as an autocrat of the old style, yet they conceive of it as operating in the same way. Theoretically, authority in democracies is exercised in the interests of social justice; but we still suppose that the discipline of social justice must be imposed upon men from without.

Apparently the assumption underlying the authoritarian position is that human nature is incurably anarchic, that it is its instinctive tendency to be wayward and disruptive, and that there is no remedy for this state of things except that of putting it in a cage, of surrounding it with a fine mesh of arrests, checks and restraints. This view may owe something of its modern strength to the theological doctrine of the total depravity of human nature—a dogma no longer held by sane people. We know that if we do hold a doctrine of original sin it must be held together with the no less true doctrine of original goodness. But the authoritarian is theologically orthodox; man to him is a born rebel, a natural anarchist; he holds that he is organically antisocial; and there is therefore nothing to do with him but to treat him like a wild animal and put him behind bars. It is of course possible to subdue anarchy in this way, and to produce some kind of order—for a time. But it should be observed that what happens is that liberty is not so much disciplined as denied; and as it appears to be the inherent, and incurable tendency of authority to feed upon itself and to grow fat, the natural consequence is the progressive destruction of liberty. The historical reaction from the excess of authority is a violent revulsion to wild and bloody anarchy; and over against authority, the only hope of liberty is to divide and to keep it divided.

As a matter of fact in democratic communities, there is a curious discrepancy between theory and practice; and—somewhat unusually—our practice is better than our theory. The mediæval doctrine of authority still haunts our political and social thinking; but there are few people in a democratic community who behave themselves only when and because there is a policeman about. The whole structure of law (of which the policeman is the symbol) rests upon the proposition that it is possible to define and to enforce those moral obligations which are essential to the cohesion and the order of the community, those things which members of a society must do or abstain from doing if the society is to hold together at all. Law does not do more than state the lowest common terms of social duty. It does not cover “the whole duty of man.” The maximum of legal obligation is the minimum of moral obligation. That is why the law does not touch ordinary folk—except, of course, in formal adjustments of affairs of business or property. In the region of personal conduct, law is for decent folk in normal times a pure irrelevancy. We not only keep the law but we to some degree transcend it, and we do so without thinking about it. The policeman has no terrors for us because we do not approach his frontiers; and he has terrors only for the wilful social misfit whose native anarchy is still untamed. Law, that is, imposes the discipline of social justice only upon the exceptional case, the individual who is contemptuous or negligent of his social duty. Upon the great majority of people it is imposed from within—sometimes indeed by the fear of public opinion, but chiefly by a more or less effective social sense. We are free from the law not because we take care not to break it, but because a higher principle has lifted us outside and beyond its bounds. Our righteousness truly exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees, that is, of the legal mind; and that is because a higher principle of righteousness is at work within us. This higher principle of righteousness is of course no other than our own independent and energised sense of social obligation. The degree to which it is effectual may and does vary in different persons; but it is not to be questioned that democracy exists because of the increasing efficiency of the inward sense of social obligation in its members. Its further development is contingent upon the measure in which this inner constraint supersedes coercive machinery as the organ of social justice.

It is, of course, better for men to live under law than in anarchy. What we have to understand concerning law and its machinery is that it is a stage in the evolution of social order and in our education into true freedom. At the same time it must not be forgotten that the law itself may become a real hindrance to this process. Just because law is a definition of obligation, it tends to be regarded as fixing the outmost limits of social duty; and whatsoever we do beyond these limits ranks as work of supererogation. That is bad enough; but worse may happen. One may suppose that outside these limits, any kind of conduct is admissible; and law, despite its intention, may therefore arrest the growth of the social sense. The social sense, that is, is expected to operate up to frontier line defined by the law; beyond that point, it is not called upon to act. We require to introduce into men’s minds a different conception of law from that popularly current. It is the office of the law to make itself superfluous; and its administration requires not a superstitious veneration of its majesty or a pedantic respect for its letter, but humanity and common sense. The law is overmuch conceived as our gaoler; properly understood, it is, as St. Paul said of the Mosaic Law, our “schoolmaster.” But so long as we talk about “vindicating” the law more than reclaiming the offender—as the legal mind is apt to do—so long will men tend to regard the law not as a stepping-stone to higher things, but as an irksome restraint; and while we indulge in tall talk about the majesty of the law, we make law-abidingness “the law and the prophets,” and jeopardise our chance of effecting that increasing enfranchisement of the social sense in which alone is the hope of the democratic ideal.

The further development of the democratic principle and the achievement of a genuine freedom would appear to be contingent upon the growth of the interior discipline of social justice with a consequent diminution in the influence of exterior legal sanctions. If society is to be regarded as in any sense truly organic, and if consequently its vitality is to be measured by its capacity for variation, it is plain that it must be released from the tendency to uniformity which is entailed in a “reign of law.” Augustine’s definition of liberty is pertinent here—Love God and do as you please, and translated out of the idiom of religion into that of sociology (which is like unto it) the rule runs: Love your neighbour and do as you please. Authoritarianism makes inevitably for regimentation; and while it may in this way repress the waywardness of individualism, it does so at the expense of that precious thing, individuality. The task of democracy is that of destroying individualism and of cultivating individuality. Liberty is the condition in which a man may be true to himself through everything, and may live out the logic of his own distinctive spiritual endowments. But because personality is essentially social, a man cannot be true to himself until he is in a true sense delivered from himself. An effectual social discipline is a necessary condition of a real liberty. It is not a check upon liberty but its indispensable concomitant. Without it, liberty overshoots its bolt and destroys itself.

But this relation is a mutual one. Not only does a social conscience safeguard and discipline liberty; but its own mating with liberty works for its liberation. We have seen how the influence of legalistic preconceptions tends to arrest the growth of the social conscience; how the school of law may become the prison of legalism. The social conscience is something more than a moral critic or invigilator; it has the quality of a creative energy; and once it is “free from the law,” it is for ever trying to outdo itself. It is indeed only an adventurous social conscience of this kind that will avail to overcome those distinctions of class which constitute the immemorial and multiform schism of our race. We have to work not only for the socialisation of liberty but also for the liberation of our social instincts; and this is to be done by an equal mating of liberty and the social conscience. This is, in the main, the office of the teacher and the preacher, but meantime a great deal is to be done by a systematic effort to multiply and develop those social contacts which already exist either actually or potentially.

The final reason for this mating is not merely to make room for dissent in the community. That, indeed, is only an incidental thing which serves to test the quality and extent of the community’s freedom. Freedom is necessary because it is the only condition under which creative self-expression becomes really possible. The human spirit must have independence and initiative if it is to be its whole self. It was not made for regimentation; it was made for a distinctive life of its own. But its very constitution tells us that if it is to attain to a fruitful freedom, it must achieve something besides freedom. The motto of a democracy resolute to live out the full implicates of its first principles must not be freedom alone, but freedom and fellowship.

Chapter VI.
THE PRACTICE OF FELLOWSHIP.

“We are members one of another.”—St. Paul.

“Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do on earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them; and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, and each one of you part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth from the earth shall wane.

“Therefore I bid you not to dwell in hell but in heaven; or while ye must, upon earth, which is part of heaven, and forsooth no foul part.”—William Morris, The Dream of John Ball.”

“Sans d’égalité donc, point d’unité; sans liberté point d’égalité; mais point de liberté non plus sans des devoirs mutuels volontairement accomplis, c’est-a-dire accomplis par la volonté se portant d’elle-même et sans contrainte a tout ce qui produit l’union entre les êtres égaux; autrement chacun n’aurait d’autre règle que son intérêt, sa passion. Et du conflit de tant de passions, de tant d’intérêts opposés naîtraient aussitôt, avec la guerre, la servitude et la tyrannie. Or, l’obéissance libre au devoir est une obéissance d’amour; liberté lorsque l’amour s’affaiblit, la liberté décline même proportion. A la place de l’union volontaire et morale, dont il est le principle, la force, loi des brutes, opére une union purement matérielle.”—Lamennais, Affaires de Rome.

IT is usually assumed that the distinctively social end of life begins “after business hours.” There is, we say, “no room for sentiment in business,”—which is part of the intolerable price we pay for our subjection to the economic motive. In business the presumption is that we are all competitors; when business is over we are prepared to be friends. The formality and the insincerity of much social intercourse in our time—not to speak of its utter fruitlessness for any healthy human good—has its origins largely in the banishment of fellowship from the “business end” of life. This is not to say that there is not a great deal of wholesome human intercourse in modern life or that there are not genuine friendships between business competitors and between principals and subordinates in industry; but it is generally true that we conceive of commerce and industry as admitting of no extensive exercise of the humanities; and for this habit of mind we are punished by a deep impoverishment of life.

There is a sense in which the struggle for liberty may be regarded as being essentially a struggle to broaden the basis of human fellowship; and it is undoubtedly true that forms of privilege are the most prolific causes of social schism. No community possesses the conditions of real fellowship while it is (as modern communities are) divided into topdogs and underdogs, whether the topdogs be aristocrats or plutocrats, and the underdogs be serfs or wage-slaves. For the poison of privilege is apt to permeate the whole body; and an exploited class may itself be composed of exploiters. In our day the quest and the possession of pecuniary advantage has so grievously muddied the springs of fellowship that we live in a chronic temper of mutual suspicion and distrust. We do not constitute living societies; we are but collections of individuals who live together because we must, and come no nearer to each other than is necessary for the indispensable common operations of life. Lord Morley has pointed out that the business of the Irish Land League lay as much in adjusting feuds among its own members as in carrying on their common feud against the landlords. Within small circles there is, of course, much genuine friendly exchange and co-operation; there are holiday occasions when good temper and good fellowship rule; but for the rest, we chiefly live under jungle law.

It is essential to the creation of a living society that we should recognise that the principle of fellowship is a condition of the highest fruitfulness of human effort in every part of life. But fellowship in this connection means something more than the casual and superficial camaraderie of one’s leisure hours. It must be translated into concrete policies and into organised and sustained co-operation. In this sense its application to industry is one of the first conditions of its restoration in other regions and in other senses. Indeed, it may be regarded as the natural complement of that change in the worker’s status which we have seen to be impending. Free men will flow into fellowship as the cistern to the river; and the “democratic control” of industry is the name we give to the practice of fellowship in industry which is the clear sequel to the doctrine of partnership.

Mr. Sidney Webb, as we have seen, advocates the grant of a “constitution” to industry; but this proposal suffers from the inherent defect of the well-meaning experiments in co-partnership and profit-sharing of which there have been not a few in recent years. This defect is that all alike preserve the line of privilege. The benefits are granted as concessions from above; and generally as incentives to greater assiduity. There can be no objection to the granting of concessions from above so long as those who are above come down and stand on the same footing as those below. But so long as a vestige of the old differentiation of superior and inferior, of master and servant remains, not all the nominal co-partnership and profit-sharing in the world can satisfy the conditions of real partnership. While for instance the administrative and executive branches of an industry remain out of the sphere of co-partnership, the partnership is a polite fiction; and it is only by the passing of all the departments of an industry, administrative as well as operative, into the control of all who carry them on, that democratic conditions can be established. The theory of partnership implies an actual interest in and an actual control over all the divisions of an industry; and, while this does not imply that direction and leadership and the powers of discipline will not still be vested in individuals, these individuals will owe their position not to any antecedent privilege but to the will and consent of the workers as a whole.

On the surface there seems to be a danger lest such an arrangement may lead to an exclusive and particular fellowship within separate industries and therefore may militate against the larger fellowship of the community, a fellowship, that is, of producers against consumers. But it is not contemplated that the control of the workers—whether operative or administrative—shall be absolute over their industry. That will in turn be subject to the will of the commonwealth as a whole—this superior authority being made effective by such devices as the control of raw material. This particular danger may, however, be very easily exaggerated. After all, every producer is a consumer; and the co-operative societies have shown that it is possible to create a very fruitful fellowship of consumer and producer. Moreover, this is a danger which we imagine largely because we argue from existing conditions. It will be greatly diminished as the economic motive ceases to exercise its withering influence upon men.

But it stands to reason that men will do better and more faithful work under conditions which give them a direct interest in and control over their work. Both the quantity and quality of work suffer to-day because nothing is left to the worker’s sense of honour and responsibility. It is only a more or less irksome necessity to which the worker goes apathetically and from which he turns with relief. But convert it into a social task in which fellowship may be actually realised in a genuine participation in control, where management is an affair of common counsel and not of autocratic fiats, where the ideal of public service has superseded the purpose of private gain, and you set free potentialities both of quality and quantity of workmanship of which under the present demoralising conditions it is not possible to form a conception.

Clearly the reality of fellowship in industry must be validated by making every position of greater responsibility open to every worker; and appointment to such positions should be by choice of the workers. That the workers may be trusted to make good appointments is demonstrated by the sagacity which has generally been manifested in the selection of their Union leaders; and this is a far more certain guarantee of effective management than the present system which often assigns incompetent men to important positions on grounds of kinship or “influence.” It further goes without saying that a genuine partnership implies the right of withdrawal. A man must be free to choose his work and the place where he works. Freedom is of the very essence of fellowship. Anything of the nature of coercion or conscription would be deadly to the spirit which it is desired to create.

II

Naturally a living society will require a living fellowship in the ordering of its public affairs; and it is true that the arrest and corruption of democracy—wheresoever those ills have befallen it—are due more to the ignorance and the indifference of the mass of the people in respect of their common affairs than to any other single cause. This is ever the opportunity of the demagogue and the spoilsman. Where there is no vision, said the ancient scribe, the people perish; but the people perish no less certainly where there is no common thought. The mental indolence and inertia of the public and the incompetency of public criticism is the danger of the statesman, and the very life of the carpet-bagging politician. The extent of this ignorance and apathy—beyond the narrow limits where our pockets are concerned—is appalling. Especially in regard to the external relationships of their respective states, the common people have lived in the past in great darkness, and as the war has shown, in the shadow of death. If the masses of the European peoples had been in 1914, as well-informed concerning their neighbours as they are to-day (and this does not say very much), the war might well have never happened; and it is well that we should remember that the democratic control of foreign policy, of which we justly hope much, will prove a vain thing without systematic education of the people in the matters which are gathered up in the expression “foreign policy.”

And, indeed, the main root of indifference is ignorance; for we are vitally interested in nothing of which we do not know something. It is to education that we must look for our main remedy. Some gleams of light have indeed already begun to pierce our darkness. We have commenced to educate school children in the rudiments of civic obligation; and there is no reason why history and geography should not be taught, not as at present to stimulate national pride or commercial efficiency, but to generate a sympathetic and comprehensive outlook upon human relationships. To this subject we shall need to turn in more detail presently; here all we need is to premise that the stimulation and mobilisation of common thought requires an education which shall equip the citizen with a system of knowledge and ideas which will enable him to respond to the challenge of the problems of common life and approach them with intelligence and sympathy. No one who is familiar with the proceedings of parliaments and congresses will require proof of the existence of this need.

But this is no more than a beginning. To education must be added the opportunity of free and unfettered discussion. Every manner of embargo or restraint on thought must be removed. When a Cambridge don once said that morning chapel should be compulsory on the ground that if there were no compulsory religion there would be no religion at all, Thirlwall, afterwards Bishop of St. David’s, replied that the distinction was too subtle for his apprehension. No less does restraint upon thought lead to the destruction of thought. Yet thought, just because it is free, requires some method of test and correction; and this is supplied by discussion. In this region especially is fellowship the necessary co-efficient of freedom. At present the comparative paucity of opportunities of systematic discussion, outside small circles and coteries, has led to that lack of mental independence to which the modern press owes its ordinate power. The pathetic, not to say tragic, readiness of the multitude to follow any demagogue in the press who shouts loudly enough is a manifest sign of dangerous mental incompetency. The Northcliffes and the Hearsts owe their influence to the incapacity of the multitude to think for itself; and no multitude will ever be able to think which does not acquire the habit of thinking together.

It is impossible to estimate the value of the New England Town Meeting as an organ of discipline in common thought; and some such focus of public discussion there should be in every community. Nowadays the community elects a board or a council and relegates the function of discussion to this body, and so far as its local affairs are concerned goes to sleep until the next election, except perhaps for a small minority chiefly composed of hostile critics. This elected body rarely reaches a plane of initiative and leadership in thought even within the narrow province committed to its care. Its discussions chiefly gather around minor points of administration; rarely do they reveal any degree of constructive originality. Yet the public spirit which is the life of a community needs continual stimulus; and this stimulus is dependent on discussion. It is a frequent, almost a constant complaint against municipal bodies that they are composed of persons who have axes of their own to grind, or who, though they are not personally corrupt, are promoting the advantage of particular interests. There is no way out of this difficulty save by the creation of community centres for regular and free public discussion. Those who are charged with the conduct of public affairs—whether local or national—should be open to continuous and reasoned popular criticism for which an election allows no opportunity.

The rapid extension of the public Forum in America takes to some extent the place once filled by the Town Meeting; but its outlook is too general and its constitution too casual to enable it to discharge the functions of the latter. Yet it has a very important office to fill; and in many respects it is the most promising object in the outlook for democracy in America. As yet it is too dependent upon the platform; and questions do not form an adequate alternative to reasoned discussion. These are, however, defects which will be remedied as the movement develops. It is not at all improbable that the churches may find a way of recovering their social usefulness by the promotion of the Forum method. Dr. Kirsopp Lake has a theory that just as the sacramental stage of religion has passed, so now the “sermon” stage is passing, and we are entering upon the “discussion” stage. It may be so. Certainly no human concern so stands in need of vigorous and radical discussion as does religion; and now that it becomes increasingly evident that the day is wholly gone when religion could be cultivated as an isolated interest unrelated to the secular concerns of life, it will be of untold advantage to the church and to society, in the interests of truth and right thinking, that the free discussion of religion and public affairs in the closest possible relation to one another should be seriously fostered. Neither religion nor any view of the world which does not touch life at every point is likely to survive in an age which is slowly learning the unity of all life. In modern England, the Trade Union branches have in many cases proved to be educational centres of the utmost value; but even more than the Trade Unions has the Socialist propaganda, with its challenge to discussion, proved a fruitful organ of common thought on public affairs.

When we pass from the plane of local to that of national interests we find a state of things which provokes wonder that any shred of democracy has survived it. The system of political parties has its roots in human nature; and we are never likely to outlive it. The quip that we are all born either little Liberals or little Conservatives has beneath it the fact of a profound and perhaps permanent difference of temperament. There are those—and probably will always be—who take less kindly to change than others; and in this difference there will always be ample room and occasion for discussion and criticism. It is also well to remember that the conflict of sincerely held opinion is one of the most fruitful forms of co-operation in the search for truth. But there are few existing lines of party division which reflect a genuine cleavage of conviction. The present opposition of Republican and Democrat in America seems to have only a distant connection with that profound division of opinion in which the opposition first originated. In Great Britain, Liberal and Conservative have stood ideally for the two necessary principles of freedom and order, progress and stability; but the party conflict has raged chiefly in recent times around the question of power. It has been a duel of the “ins” and “outs.” There are, of course, Liberals like Lord Morley, and Conservatives like Lord Hugh Cecil, whose political attachments rest upon deep and reasoned conviction; but reasoned conviction is not the main subject of interest in the Whips’ offices. The final judgment upon the nature of the party struggle is to be sought in the practical business of electioneering. Direct corruption is on the whole rare in democratic countries; but the organisation of the party vote—whether in England or America—is a wholly scandalous and deplorable business. The practice of canvassing for votes, attended frequently with intimidation and generally with a good deal of insincere cajoling, the easily made and easily forgotten electioneering promises, the frantic shepherding of sluggish voters to the polling booth,—these things show how little substance of conviction and thought there is in the modern political game. Canvassing is sometimes defended as a method of political education; occasionally in competent hands it no doubt is so; but anyone who is acquainted with electioneering methods knows that the education is merely incidental to securing the promise of a vote. Canvassing would conceivably serve a useful purpose if the attempt to extract the promise of a vote were declared to be in fact what it is in spirit—a violation of the Ballot Act. It is questionable, however, how long the practice of canvassing would survive this curtailment. And in addition to this, all inducements to drag unwilling and indifferent citizens to the poll should be made illegal. Democracy is not necessarily government by the mob. It is rather government by the intelligent and the interested; and the remedy for popular apathy here, as elsewhere, is proper education.

The two-party system of Great Britain, and in the United States, may in time be replaced by the group system as it prevails on the continent of Europe.[31] The group system is subject to the evils and the disadvantages attending the two-party system; but it has the distinct advantage of making possible a larger range and variety of criticism. Nevertheless, whether under the two-party or group conditions, it is doubtful whether the present territorial arrangement of representation can ever secure a truly democratic government. The territorial arrangement is derived from a period which long antedates the railroad; and improved means of communication have created national groups with specialised but ultra-local interests, and for the purposes of democratic government the Labour Union (for instance) is as important a unit as the county. It is absurd that the only way in which the specific interests of organised labour can be represented in the House of Commons is by putting Labour candidates in competition with Liberals and Conservatives in mixed constituencies. Some alleviation of this anomaly may be found in the plan of proportional representation; but this does not fully provide for the necessity of securing direct and adequate representation of functional and cultural associations in the councils of the nation. It is an anachronism that to-day the mind of the nation should be gathered solely on a geographical basis, when the actual living mind of the nation increasingly resides in the various groups into which men form themselves on the basis of interests that are no longer determined by local considerations. The representation of non-territorial constituencies in the councils of the nation raises the question of the nature of the state which must be considered separately.

31.  The results of the last General Election in England seem to bear out this anticipation.

Freedom and fulness of discussion is the very breath of life to popular institutions, and wheresoever any problem or range of problems is withdrawn from public discussion, there is a virtual denial of the democratic principle. When, for instance, and in particular, foreign policy is conducted behind closed doors, a control over the destinies of the people is vested in individuals or in a class of individuals which is as real and as monstrous as that of an autocrat; and democracy is denied in its most sensitive and critical part. It is true that the practice of secret diplomacy has survived because nations have been too little concerned about their external affairs; and no plausible arguments about “delicate situations” and the like could resist for a moment the insistence of an intelligent democracy upon the management of its own affairs. If democracy is to survive at all, it must make up its mind speedily that the principle of its inner life shall not be denied in its outer. But if democracy is to have a mind at all, it must learn to use the mind it has; and the chief stimulus to this end would be the multiplication of centres of discussion. This would be materially helped if government departments were required to produce not only ponderous blue-books which only bewilder the common man, and official documents intelligible only to the expert, but popular accounts, published regularly, of their proceedings. The press should be used far more extensively for this purpose; and even the children of the public schools should be provided with appropriate graded summaries of the acts of the national government. Then on the basis of this material for discussion, the social debating society, the reading circle, the Forum and all such groups would become the living and increasing springs of democracy.

In speaking of education we are far too apt to confine the word to the education of children; but what may be done in the education of adults and at the same time in the stimulation of fellowship in thought, is well shown by the achievement of the Workers’ Educational Association in England. The education of the working class is an idea which dates back to the social and political ferment of the early nineteenth century—the earliest expression being the Mechanics’ Institute movement. This was followed by the Working Men’s College movement under Frederick Denison Maurice and his friends. Then came the educational experiments, first of the Rochdale Pioneers in 1840, and then of the Co-operative Societies, out of which grew ultimately the University Extension movement. The existing Worker’s Educational Association originated in an alliance of the educational activities of the Co-operative, Trade Union and University Extension movements. It was based upon “the vital principle that there could be no complete education of working people unless it was a result of the combination of working men and women and scholars, respectively experts in demand and supply.” It is certain—and the war has provided many instances of it—that this alliance of worker and scholar has done much to break down the partition wall of class prejudice; and the “tutorial class” has in particular been a very fruitful agent of fellowship and education. “The days of the W.E.A.” (as it is called) says Mr. Alfred Mansbridge, its devoted and able secretary, “have been few so far; but it has already demonstrated the soundness of its theories—to take one instance alone—by the development of the University Tutorial Class movement which conforms in method to that of Plato so far as question and answer developed in discussion are concerned. In England alone over eight thousand men and women have passed through these courses which are organised in connection with every University and University College. If it were not for the clear demonstration of experience, it would seem fatuous to expect that men and women who have undergone no educational training other than that provided in the few years of attendance at the elementary school would be willing to attend classes for three years, and in some cases for as many as seven or eight years. It must be remembered that the discipline of the class though self-imposed is severe. No absence is allowed for other than unavoidable causes. Moreover, their purpose is the acquisition of knowledge as assisting the fulfilment of an educational ideal which is conceived not in the interests of the individual but in the interests of citizenship. The level of intellectual achievement testified to by many eminent educationists is such as to warrant the Board of Education in making a regulation to the effect that ‘the instruction must aim at reaching within the limits of the subject covered, the standard of University work in honours.’”[32] While the emphasis in this account is laid chiefly upon the educational aspects of the movement those who are acquainted with its working lay much stress upon the part which the practice and realisation of fellowship play in it.[33] The sense of common quest is at once a source and a result of the movement: and it is not open to any question that the W.E.A. is one of the most powerful organs of the new democracy now existing. Alongside the W.E.A. in Great Britain is also the Adult School movement, which chiefly under the auspices of the Society of Friends is doing much similar, though not so severe work. It gathers together every Sunday morning in all parts of the country thousands of working men and women in its many hundred schools to study not only “the principles of the life and teaching of Jesus, but the manifold and perplexing problems of national and international life.” In such fruitful activities as these will the mind and the temper of the coming democracy be created. These men and women are learning the practice of freedom and fellowship in thought, which is the fundamental democratic method.

32.  Contemporary Review, June, 1918.

33.  An interesting sign of where the members of the W.E.A. themselves feel the essence of the movement to lie is seen in the inscription on a memorial cross erected in the Parish Church of Lambeth, London, in memory of three tutors of the W.E.A.:

“In memory of

Philip Anthony Brown, 1886-1915.

Alfred Edward Bland, 1881-1916.

Arthur Charleswood Turner, 1881-1918.

Tutors of the Workers’ Educational Association. They lived for Fellowship in England and died for it in France.”

The Challenge, July 19th, 1918.

III

Now that we have come to acknowledge not only that Jack’s vote is as good as his master’s, but that Jill’s vote is as good as Jack’s, we have laid the train of a further change in the relations of men and women. For just as surely as the worker has discovered that political equality does not of necessity remove economic disability, and is now beginning to demand economic emancipation, so also women will pass on from the acquisition of political equality to a demand for economic equality. Indeed, the demand is already being made. The war has served to reveal the arbitrary and illusory character of the assumptions which closed certain occupations to women. We know that the number of occupations for which women are temperamentally or physically unfitted is comparatively small. There are obvious reasons for believing that some few trades will remain permanently undesirable for women; but the immediate fact that confronts us is that the traditional line of demarcation has been swept away under the stress of war needs; and that we shall have to work out in the school of experience a new classification of occupations more consonant with the new facts.

Some years ago there was much discussion in England concerning a high legal decision that a woman was not a “person” within the meaning of a certain Act of Parliament. This was symptomatic of a general survival of the view which assigned women to a slightly sub-human class; and the vitality of this view is still more considerable than many hopeful minds are willing to think. Yet it is only when we have educated ourselves into the conception of woman which attributes to her a distinct personality of her own, with an end in and for herself, and with all the rights and privileges, the freedom and the independence appertaining to it, that we shall approach the problem of the relations of men and women from a genuinely democratic standpoint. Woman is commonly regarded as having a function rather than an individual end. It is her part to preserve the race. Her peculiar vocation is child-bearing. It cannot, however, be affirmed with too much emphasis that the perpetuation of the race is no more the task of woman than of man. The heavier end of the physical burden of race-preservation certainly falls upon the woman; but this fact does not indicate that this is the purpose for which she exists. Her traditional assignment to this role, and the consequent limitation of her circle of experience and interest, the virtual incarceration of the great majority of women to the “home,” and the denial to them of any real participation in the larger concerns of the common life, must cease if social existence is to achieve the balance necessary to stable and healthy progress.

The preservation of the race can be left to look after itself. Race-suicide only becomes a peril when the relations of men and women become perverted and unnatural as they commonly do in our present social order. When at one end of society, the bringing up of families entails an economic burden too heavy to be borne, and at the other, the hedonism which accompanies excessive wealth tends to a sensuality which refuses to accept the natural risks and to pay the natural price of the sex-relation, a poisonous arrest is unavoidably laid upon the normal operation of the sex-instincts. The most easily perverted endowment of human nature is sex, and it cannot retain a balanced and healthy functioning under disordered conditions of life. The incessant discussion of marriage and divorce misses the point largely because it ignores the background of the problem. While we regard the physical distinction of sex as the primary fact to be considered in relation to woman, and still cling to the obsession so dear to bourgeois respectability that her business is motherhood and “her place is the home,” so long, that is, as we regard her life and its purpose as dependent upon man, so long will judgment be deflected from its true pole at its very source. Wholesome and free men and women will continue to fall in love with one another and will want to have children of each other, where to-day because their relations are unwholesome and unequal, they tend only to seek possession of one another, without any disposition (not to speak of eagerness) to welcome the fruit of their union; and too often with the deliberate intention of preventing the fruitage. For the disorder which leads to this confusion of the sex-relation, the first remedy is to establish the independence of the woman.

The problem of marriage will remain acute—and, indeed, ultimately insoluble—until the contracting parties enter it upon the basis of an equal partnership. The conception of marriage as a “career” for women has done much to destroy the only conditions under which marriage can ever be successful. The freedom and spontaneity of the relation between men and women is made impossible by those calculations of position and wealth which the career theory of marriage requires. While it is nominally the case that no woman is compelled to marry, it is actually the fact that many women—in the bourgeois classes, most women—are so brought up that marriage becomes their only escape from indigence. The fact of woman’s independence should be made concrete and real by requiring that every woman shall be self-supporting, that is to say, that she shall share in the necessary industrial processes of the community or do some work of acknowledged social worth. Naturally the latter category includes the bearing and upbringing of children; for than this there is no work more fundamental or of greater social worth. This requires the economic independence of the mother; and since the social reconstruction postulated in these pages, involves in some form or other the establishment of an universal minimum standard, the mother will not only be economically independent but will also be released from the harassing task of bringing up a growing family upon a stationary income.

It will be argued against such proposals as these that they endanger the sanctity of the family. But this criticism possesses neither grace nor force in a generation which has permitted industrial conditions to prevail which have virtually destroyed the home-life of the working-classes. The only assumption on which it is safe to proceed in dealing with this question is that anything entitled to be called a “home life” is quite exceptional among large masses of the population. Both the physical setting of the home—the house—and the economic condition of its members rob the home of that quality of sanctuary and base which is of the essence of a genuine home. Our problem is to recreate the home, the setting of that social group of man, woman and child, which we call the family, and which is the natural nucleus of the commonwealth, and the moral gymnasium where the young should best learn the arts of fellowship. The housing question has its own importance in the problem; but of infinitely more importance to the recovery of home life is the establishment of the economic independence of the woman. So long as custom and necessity place her in a position of dependence on the man, so long will she be denied the freedom which is essential to perfect comradeship. Her present status denies the equality which is necessary to fellowship; and much of the unhappiness of modern marriage is due to the intelligible chafing of women against the conditions which dependence and inferiority of status impose upon her. That many married people succeed in overcoming this initial handicap is true; but that is due to certain qualities in themselves and does not in the least alter the fact that where marital relations go awry the evil is largely in the conditions which govern those relations in our present social order.

The relaxing of marriage ties is no remedy; it is only a relief to persons of incompatible tempers. Both the advocates and the opponents of greater facilities for divorce seem to argue their case out of all relation to the existing social environment of marriage. The evils for which a remedy is sought in easier divorce are not to be found in the nature of the marriage relation but in the conventional and legal status of women.[34] While the social and economic sources of the trouble are left untouched, no amount of Catholic emphasis upon the sacramental character of marriage is going to stay the demand for the greater dissolubility of a tie which existing conditions do much to make difficult and frequently intolerable. Even under the best conditions, the mutual adjustments of the man and woman in married life are not easy; but when one party enters the relation in a position of more or less explicitly acknowledged dependence and inferiority, there are seeds of ineradicable trouble.

34.  This does not imply that the present writer does not recognise the need of some extension of the grounds of divorce in Great Britain. It simply means that he thinks that the problem cannot be rightly approached until the economic independence of women has been established.

It is not for a moment argued that the establishment of the economic independence of woman is a cure for all the ills that afflict the family. But this is fundamental; and we shall simply be beating the air so long as we do not accept this principle. For it is the only method which holds a promise of restoring the life of the home. At the same time, it is no less necessary that the woman being by reason of her motherhood economically independent should not be regarded as the economic handmaid of the state. If the endowment of motherhood is only a provision for increasing the economic and military human material of the community, then we are better without it. For the poison which vitiates our life will return to it at its most delicate and sensitive point. To regard the marriage relation simply as the means of supplying a constant stream of military and economic units for the state is to deny the spiritual nature of man at its very source, and to reimpose on ourselves the deadly incubus of materialism. This is the danger which the Eugenics movement threatens us with. To introduce the principle of selective breeding into human relations may result in a community of persons, healthy, vigorous and efficient for economic and military purposes; but we are learning how little physical heredity has to do with the ultimate purpose of life. In so far as Eugenics will lead to greater precautions against the propagation of diseased and mentally and physically degenerate persons, and quickens a greater vigilance and a more insistent demand for sound minds and sound bodies in those about to give themselves in marriage, it brings a necessary and valuable reinforcement to the influences that make for human welfare. But when it goes beyond this point, it becomes a danger to the spiritual conception of life and society. What we must insist upon is that marriage shall be a partnership, deliberately entered into by two equal persons, economically independent of each other, attracted to each other by that physical and temperamental affinity which we call love; and that we shall import into the relationship no extraneous notions of state-service or of race-preservation which may interfere with the freedom and spontaneity of the relation thus established. The bearing of children may be a service to the nation; but no child is well-born who is not born simply of the joyful mutual selfgiving of man and woman.

Yet it may be held that the partnership is an affair so momentous that none should be permitted to enter it so precipitately as the marriage laws of the United States allow. Some degree of deliberation should be insisted upon before legal recognition of the union is granted. The demand for greater facilities for divorce is probably not unconnected with the extreme facility with which persons can enter upon the marriage relationship.

But the establishment of right relations between the sexes must begin before the period when men and women have reached the condition of personal independence. It should be plain that the sense of sex-difference which emerges in adolescence should not be allowed to develop in the unregulated and capricious manner in which our false modesty compels it to develop to-day. The processes of initiation into the mysteries of sex should begin sufficiently early to avert so far as possible the danger of its being discoloured and perverted by the undue obtrusion of its sense-accompaniments. There is no real reason why the frank comradeship of boys and girls should not be maintained through adolescence into youth, but the criminal negligence which we have shown concerning the means by which sex-knowledge is communicated to growing children has succeeded in creating a gulf between men and women which persists more or less permanently and constitutes the most obstinate difficulty in the way of perfect freedom of fellowship between men and women. It is no exaggeration to say that the attitude of most men to women is poisoned—perhaps beyond perfect recovery at any time—by the conditions under which as boys they received their first intimations of the nature of the sex-relation. A good deal has already been done to pave the way of change in this matter; and an increasing number of parents are assuming the responsibility of communicating this knowledge to their children. But there is still unfortunately a great mass of unhealthy prudery to be overcome before rational dealing with this problem becomes anything like universal.

The problem of the fellowship of men and women, however, extends beyond the institution of marriage. Now that the enfranchisement of women is opening up the question of their availability and qualification for national legislatures, we are confronted with a very large possibility of change in the tone and temper of government. Much nonsense is talked about the psychological differences between men and women; and of this nonsense, the emptiest is that which assumes that women are dominated by sentiment and emotion, while men are guided by reason. An unprejudiced observer, watching deliberative gatherings of men over any space of time would certainly arrive at the conclusion that the occasions on which they acted upon purely rational grounds were rare and exceptional; and it has been the experience of the present writer that in deliberative groups of men and women the women are on the whole more likely to display a dispassionate rationality in arriving at their judgments than the men. It is a region in which broad generalisations are bound to be unsound; and the progress of the higher education of women is undoubtedly obliterating any patent difference of mental operation between men and women. At the same time, there are certain differences which are embedded in the physical structure of sex and which may be therefore permanent; but so far from disqualifying women from a share in government, those very differences entitle them to it. Quite apart from the fact that the problems of food and clothing in their incidence on the home are of peculiar importance to women, and that the woman’s point of view should always be represented in discussion of the large-scale problems of production and distribution, the mind of woman brings a check and balance to the operations of the male mind which they very acutely need. There can, for instance, be no question that the male mind tends to an inordinate faith in force and coercive processes; and while it would hardly be correct to say that the female mind possesses an antithetic bias of a reasoned kind, it does normally display a certain hesitancy to apply the closure of compulsion which the too ready real-politik of a purely male assembly is prone to adopt when it sets out to translate its emotions into enactments. The truth of the matter, in fine, is this—that because humanity is bi-sexual, its affairs cannot be reasonably and fruitfully determined save through the common counsels of men and women. We have already made a beginning in the admission of women to the councils of the community. A woman has sat in the Congress of the United States; women have long been at home in British municipal bodies, and their right to a place in Parliament has been acknowledged. It is only a matter of time when the logic of the enfranchisement of women will reach its inevitable conclusion in their admission to all public deliberative bodies on equal terms with men. They have a contribution to bring to the corporate direction of affairs without which the nations can no longer do; and the fact that as a class they may take some time to become habituated to the mechanics of legislation is an argument for hastening their complete admission to it.

There were those who in the “militant” stage of the “Votes for Women” campaign foretold that the economic class-war would presently be superseded or complicated by a sex-war; and some women there were whose utterances undoubtedly pointed in that direction. For the time, however, this danger has dropped over the horizon. The war has evoked a community of suffering in which men and women alike have shared too deeply, and in which their mutual need has been too overwhelming to make the notion of a sex-war even thinkable to-day. But we should be rejoicing prematurely if we supposed that all possible sources of sex-antagonism have disappeared. The political enfranchisement of women certainly removes one source; but the new industrial complications caused by the entry of women into occupations which have hitherto been a male monopoly, and in which their employment has been fully justified by the character of their workmanship may, when the transition to peaceful life is being made, breed grievances and troubles in which the line of cleavage will be determined by the sex-factor. But if we assume the establishment of the “national minimum,” applicable to men and women alike, and therefore securing the economic independence of women, we shall have robbed this prospective danger of much of its substance. For the rest, there seems to be no reason why women should not be freely permitted to engage in occupations for which they are competent, on equal terms with men; and the comradeship of men and women in the control and the operation of industrial processes would do much to fix the now dominant sex-interest in its proper place in life. The primacy of the sex-interest in determining the relations of men and women works definitely toward the retention of women in a subordinate, parasitic and exploited position, and while this lasts, we shall still have with us the seeds of sex-antagonism. All this does not overlook the fact that there are kinds of work for which women are physically unsuited, and that there are times in the life of the married woman when she should be exempted from all manual work save of the lightest sort. But these problems are in essence present even in the working conditions of men. All men are not suited for all classes of work; and there are few men whose work is not occasionally interrupted by sickness. What is needed in the case of women is simply a further application of those principles of selection and accommodation which already operate in every industry. Unless some such position as this is frankly accepted, we may be presently confronted with a new militancy and a new sabotage at the hands of women who have tasted the experience of economic independence and are unwilling to surrender it to a convention of inequality which they claim their own war-time performance has permanently discredited.

IV

Difficult as the realisation of a perfect fellowship between men and women may be, it presents a problem comparatively easy of solution by the side of that entailed in the division of a community by a colour-line. In itself the colour-line is not insuperable; its difficulty lies in its symbolical character as representing a difference and an inferiority of tradition and history. The chief difficulty in the United States arises out of the memory of the former slavery of the negro population; and the consequent persistence of a prejudice against according equal treatment to a class regarded as, if not sub-human, at least permanently inferior in capacity. It is useless to press the assumption that a necessary physical aversion must always separate the white from the black, in the face of the existence of a vast number of palpably cross-bred persons in the community. This does not, of course, mean that mixed marriages should be encouraged or regarded as normal. The problems raised by miscegenation are much too difficult to permit us to remove the colour-line by the off-hand method of race-fusion. The fusion of two races separated from one another not only by the memory of two centuries of slavery but by unnumbered centuries of widely different culture, would probably create more problems than it solved. The colour-line would be superseded by a multiplicity of shade-lines; and confusion would be worse confounded. It is probable that the level of the more advanced race would be depressed more than that of the more backward race would be raised. Houston Chamberlain is probably right (in spite of his capacity for being so frequently and so colossally wrong) in holding that the finest racial types are produced by the fusion of two peoples not too widely separated in physical and historical character, followed by close inbreeding. The gulf between black and white in America and South Africa is far too deep, as yet at least, to make the removal of the colour-line by fusion a subject of hopeful discussion.

But equally the solution is not to be found in segregation—certainly so far as these two countries are concerned. The admixture of the black and the white elements in the population has gone much too far to make segregation a practical proposition. It would, moreover, have the distinct disadvantage of stereotyping two different types of cultural development within the same commonwealth and of consequently endangering its unity by setting up the possibility of rivalry and antagonism. In any two-race community the ideal must be to secure so far as may be possible a substantial identity of outlook and culture; and this is to be done not by segregation, but by contact.

But it is just this “contact” that is denied to the negro race both in America and South Africa. The races are really segregated as effectually as though they lived in separate reservations; they live in quite different cultural “climates.” The negro though no longer a chattel-slave yet constitutes a servile class; the duties assigned to him in the community are essentially of a menial kind. It is characteristic of his position in America that the higher ranks of military command are closed to him; and while a woman has made her way to Congress, there is as yet no negro congressman; the idea is still barely thinkable. Yet no community has thrived permanently which permitted a helot class to exist within itself; and the position of the negro—now that education is quickening his mind to the sense of class-disinheritance and race-consciousness—may become a grave menace to the inner harmony of the Republic.

The logic of Lincoln’s proclamation has yet to be worked out in the minds of white Americans. To abolish slavery is not indeed to make a black man white; nor does it at once equip him for the responsibilities of freedom. But it does confer citizenship upon him; and the gift of citizenship should be validated by two things; first, by a frank and generous recognition of equality of standing, and second, by a thorough-going policy of education. Perhaps the former was more than could be justly expected. Just as the slave was ill-equipped for freedom, so the white man could hardly rise at once to the plane of regarding the negro as his free and equal brother. But it is a fair criticism of the public treatment of the negro that he has not been supplied with the opportunity of rising to his white brother’s plane of culture. There have been voluntary philanthropic efforts in this direction, but this work should not have been left to the precarious chances of charity. Just because negro emancipation was a public act, the full cultural education of the negro was a public responsibility.

By reason of this failure on the part of the white man, the negro has not advanced to such a point as two generations of liberty would seemingly entitle us to expert. He has inevitably retained much of the mentality and many of the habits of his servitude; and these are effectual bars to that type of social contact which the negro’s growth requires. That there is no inherent impossibility in educating the negro up to the average plane of the Anglo-Saxon has been proved in a multitude of instances; and people who are devoid of race-prejudice find no difficulty in establishing frank and fruitful fellowship with educated coloured persons.

America and Great Britain in her dominions and dependencies have to face the logic of their democratic ideals by a sustained resolution to provide the opportunity to their coloured fellow-citizens to reach their own plane of culture. As things are they deny their democratic professions by permitting their race prejudices to consign their coloured fellow-citizens to a condition of permanent social inferiority. If they wish to be democratic in fact and not merely in name, they will need to be true to the implications of their democracy through everything, even through the physical repugnances which the personal habits of backward races are apt to evoke. The colour problem was created for this generation by its forbears—by those who sold and owned slaves and those who established colonies in distant countries. But though the problem is not of our making, we cannot absolve ourselves from the moral responsibility which it lays upon us; and it is only by means of an inveterate good-will that we shall discharge this responsibility. Such a good-will must rest upon the truth—however unpalatable to our prejudices it may be—that the black man whether in New York or in Cape Town is equally with ourselves endowed with the human differentia of personality, and that he is morally entitled to all the rights of life and light and liberty that we claim for personality. With this truth must be accepted the task imposed upon us by our superior advantages (which like our responsibilities we owe to our fathers), to raise the more backward races with whom we live to a plane on which there can be free and enriching fellowship between them and ourselves. We cannot hopefully go on to make the world safe for a principle of common life which our present habits show that we do not believe in at home.

V

However complete and well-organised the provision may be against destitution in any society, it can never prevent the distress which ensues upon the accidents of life, sickness and sorrow, loneliness and old age—these we shall not wholly escape even in our earthly paradise. We may indeed lessen the occasions of sickness and of premature death by a wiser and more scientific ordering of the physical setting of life and of personal habit; but no ingenuity or skill can overcome the inevitable brokenness of life in a world of time. But this very circumstance provides fellowship with the opportunity to do its most perfect work.

And real fellowship will be possible for the simple reason that “charity” will be superfluous. In modern life, the material destitution of large numbers of people has necessitated the organisation of relief on a large scale, both public and private; and while the charitable impulse is intrinsically admirable, the conditions under which it has come to be exercised have in effect widened the gulf between the rich and the poor. On the one hand the rich have contracted the habit of condescending patronage; and the poor have fallen into a habit of cunning obsequiousness. In self-defence the rich have built up a machinery of investigation and distribution which has had three disastrous results: first, it has set up the monstrous and unfair test of deservingness,—“the deserving poor” is a phrase in which the well-to-do have forever crystallised their pharisaism; second, it has set a premium upon the petty tactics of evasion and deceit among the poor, and upon a corresponding cunning and astuteness in those entrusted with the business of investigation; and third, it has eliminated from charity the one element which could make it tolerable and preserve the grace which should properly go with it—namely, friendly contact. For the most part, the relief of destitution through charitable organisations, has—because it eliminates the direct personal touch between need and supply—produced and aggravated a deep and deplorable social schism.

Nor is the case any better with the public organisation of poor relief. The English poor-law has been so completely discredited and is so near dissolution that it is hardly necessary to discuss it here. It is more impersonal in its operations than a charity organisation society; but its most evil consequence is that it has so worked as to attach a stigma to honest poverty—for the person who has received poor-relief is denied the rights of citizenship. Old age has fortunately been provided for in Great Britain in the only worthy way, by a grant of state-pensions, though the actual amount of the pension is pitifully inadequate. Yet the fact of the provision indicates a distinct advance in the sense of public justice. But we shall not make much more progress until we realise that the pauper like the plutocrat is a social product; and that such destitution as prevails to-day is due less to personal perversity than to a vicious social order. No one is so foolishly hopeful as to suppose that even the most radical social change will eliminate the prodigal and the spendthrift and the sensualist. Nevertheless, it is no longer open to question that a revolution in economic conditions would do much to remove the auxiliary causes of pauperising excess.

But the chief evil which attends our method of dealing with poverty is that it has tended to perpetuate a pauper class. Whether in the relief work of religious and charitable societies, or in the administration of public relief, we have been chiefly governed by the fact of an immediate need. We have lived in the fond hope that if the present corner could be turned, something might transpire to save the recipient of relief from another crisis; and not even the obvious fact that the crisis is chronic in the case of multitudes has shaken us out of our preoccupation with symptoms into an investigation of causes. In one of the supplementary reports of the British Poor-Law Commission, it was stated that the investigation of the cases of applicants to whom “out-door” relief was denied (the alternative being to go into the “house”), showed that only in one instance where such persons had been helped by religious organisations was there any attempt to place the person concerned on an independent economic footing. This is symptomatic of the ineptitude of our common thought about the poor. We appear to accept the fact of their dependence as chronic and incurable; and by the process of “doles” we aggravate this dependence and turn it into what we suppose it to be.

This same ineptitude has pursued society in its dealings with another class—the criminal. Criminologists do not nowadays assume the existence of a natural criminal class; but our way of treating criminals has created such a class. Both for the pauper and the criminal we require a new diagnosis. Instead of treating the pauper as an incurable social parasite we should regard him as a personal inefficient; and rather than put a premium upon his inefficiency by a continual gratuitous relief of his necessities, we should impose some discipline which may lead to personal efficiency and an ordered habit of life. As for the criminal, he is a social inefficient; and his treatment should include some provision for his training in the sense and arts of social responsibility. It is a practical recognition of this need that constitutes the contribution which men like Messrs. Thomas Mott Osborne and Homer Lane are making to the solution of a difficult problem. That some plan of temporary segregation is necessary in the treatment of the inefficient—whether personal or social—is not open to question; but the poorhouse and the prison, as we know them, only aggravate the evil which they are intended to cure.

Our increasing attention to the problem of the social misfit at an earlier stage—through the new study and treatment of mentally deficient children—will considerably reduce the proportions both of pauperism and crime. We are a long way from Samuel Butler’s vision of the time when the liar will be sent to hospital and the sick person to jail; nevertheless, the point of Butler’s extravaganza is becoming recognised in the double fact that a good deal of disease is due to preventable causes, the disregard of which is already treated as a legal offence; and that much of the delinquency that prevails originates in pathological conditions rather than in moral depravity. Especially are we on hopeful lines when we take the mentally deficient child and regard him as the subject of medical rather than of legal treatment. And we shall go yet farther when we realise that though we cannot and dare not eliminate the factor of personal responsibility, yet our social misfits are the products of our social disorder, and it is seen that while justice requires that a man shall pay the penalty of his sins, yet the same justice requires that the society which produced the sinner shall feel a corporate responsibility for his restoration. And restoration is indeed the very centre of our problem in dealing with the social misfit. For our task with the pauper and the criminal is that of making each capable of entering freely and vitally into the fellowship of free men.

Yet when we have dealt with the social misfit there will remain, life being what it is, a number of people in every community for whom the burden of life has proved too heavy or whose lives are clouded by sickness or loneliness or death. “The poor,” said Jesus, “ye have always with you.” He did not mean that we need always have physically destitute people with us; He knew better, as we know better. But the smoking flax and the bruised reed we shall ever have with us; and no society can afford to despise a ministry of comfort. Indeed, fellowship will lack its native grace if it fails to produce an unfailing stream of sympathy and consolation to the distressed. Here will be the test of the vitality of our fellowship. For our ideal of fellowship may become hardened in organisation; and personal spontaneity may be lost in a routine habit of life. And to whatever else we may be able to give an organised and official form, it is at least sure that when the ministry of comfort and help loses the touch of personal directness and spontaneity, it is from henceforth a dead and useless thing.

VII

Up to this point we have considered the more general problems of fellowship in the community as a whole; we have still to consider some of the questions raised by the more particular associations which form themselves within the community, and in which by far the largest measure of the community’s vitality resides. F. W. Maitland, in an interesting passage, reviews the endless variety of social forms in which men group themselves together. He speaks of “churches, and even the mediæval church, one and catholic, religious houses and mendicant orders, nonconforming bodies, a presbyterian system, universities, old and new, the village community, which Germanists have revealed to us, the manor in its growth and decay, the township, the New England town, the counties and hundreds, the chartered boroughs, the guild in all its manifold varieties, the Inns of Court, the merchant adventurers, the militant “companies” of English condottieri who, returning home, help to make the word “company” popular among us: the trading companies, the companies that became colonies, the companies that make war, the friendly societies, the Trade Unions, the clubs, the group that meets at Lloyd’s Coffee House, the group that becomes the Stock Exchange, and so on even to the one man company, the Standard Oil Trust, and the South Australian statutes for communistic villages.” The prevailing political philosophy of our time has stated its problem almost wholly in terms of an abstract state over against an abstract individual; and one of the most heartening signs of the invasion of political thought and practice by a more healthy humanism is the growing recognition of these many-coloured nucleations of life. There are important and difficult questions bearing upon their political and legal status, but these are only to be answered by a frank acknowledgment that groupings of this kind come into being because they meet a real need and answer to certain facts of life and human nature. No political philosophy is likely to stand the racket of historical experience which does not stand upon the assumption that these associations have a real and inherent right to form themselves, to exist, to thrive and to multiply; for it is in groups that are voluntarily formed around a living interest that the most significant and important part of our life is lived. To the more direct political implications of this type of association we shall turn at a later point; here we are concerned only to emphasise the need and the right of such bodies to live, and their importance for the preservation of the balance of life, and therefore, of stable social progress. Their real importance may be seen from the circumstance that the struggle for religious liberty in England, which has historically been the spring of civil and political liberty, was a struggle not for the liberty of the individual but of the small voluntarily associated group.

These voluntarily associated groups will form themselves around any interest of sufficient importance; and, as we have seen, they are of the most various character and raise the most various questions concerning their relation to the commonwealth.[35] This is a subject still in the earlier stages of exploration and likely to be of increasing importance for our political and social philosophies, especially as it comes to be recognised that for the most part the groups which are here spoken of represent interests and needs more vital to human nature than the accidental aggregations represented by political states. It may, moreover, be held that the multiplication of such groups within the commonwealth, insomuch as they bear upon real interests of life, is much to be encouraged; and the commonwealth which knows what is good for its people will impose no restrictions upon their power and readiness to form themselves into combinations of this kind. And indeed, however absolute the authority of the state, it cannot prevent the formation of voluntary associations. If it be not permitted to form these associations openly, they will be formed secretly; and the secret society is the undoing of commonwealths.

35.  The commonest and the oldest type of freely associated group within the commonwealth is of course the Church, and on this point the reader may be referred to the present writer’s book The Church in the Commonwealth.

As a matter of fact, the state has always been apprehensive and suspicious of combinations of any kind within its own bounds and has endeavoured either to repress them or to establish the principle that they exist only on sufferance. But no attempts at repression when they are directed at associations that represent real human concerns have been permanently successful. The repeal in 1824 of the British Acts against combination, intended chiefly to frustrate industrial unions, whether of employers or of workers, is typical of the fate of such legislation. These Acts went against the actual facts of the human situation and naturally proved disastrous. It is in this region of industrial combinations that we have the best modern illustration of the spontaneity and inevitability of voluntary human association. In the Guild period it was broadly true that Capital and Labour being in the same hands had interests which were identical; but when power-driven machinery separated Capital from Labour and lodged them in different hands, and as the rift widened through the operation of laissez-faire, and the interests of Capital and Labour became antagonistic, it was natural that the capitalists and the workers should severally combine in defence of their interests. The state prayed a plague on both their houses at that time, being equally afraid of both; later, the state became more complaisant to the powerful owning classes; and looked askance only at the workers’ unions—an attitude which led to a very material strengthening of the latter. This schism of Capital and Labour dominates the present social situation, and it is at this time, even more than the state, the gravest hindrance to the natural activities of social energy. Its disintegrating and antisocial effect is plain far outside the region where the immediate issue lies, and it is questionable whether an organic social life is possible until the antagonism is overcome. Something has been done to mitigate the worst asperities of this unsatisfactory position by welfare work, copartnership, profit-sharing; and still more will be done by the introduction of measures of joint control of the conditions of industry. But the fact still remains that this antithesis and separation of capital and labour is artificial and unnatural, as it is also essentially undemocratic. For power goes with ownership under the conditions imposed by the current doctrine of property; and concessions and benefits which are granted as from the voluntary bounty of the employer (however worldly wise they actually are in their intention) involve an assumption of patronage which the present temper of the workers makes entirely unreal and obsolete. The danger of social disruption lies in this quarter; and so long as the present tension remains, it tends to retard the free and varied expressions of fellowship in which a living society should abound. Society divided into two camps, with interests radically divergent, is condemned to a state of tension which is hostile to the free ferment of association natural to men; and this despite all well-meaning efforts to reconcile the conflicting interests by compromises which leave the framework of the schism untouched. So that we have come to this—that it is not only the traditional attitude of the state which is hostile to the free efflorescence of social groups but the actual condition of society under the present industrial system. A state of war, even of suppressed war, makes for a forced fellowship of partisans, and not for the free fellowship of partners. It is in the interests of the genuine socialisation of life that it is demanded that this social schism of capital and labour should be overcome; and there is but one way of overcoming it, namely the logical democratic way of putting the capital and the power it wields in the hands of those who labour. Towards this goal the first step has been taken in the movement toward democratic control in industry; and from this it is inevitable that the worker should proceed to demand control not only of production, but, as Mr. Cole says, also of the product, its sale and exchange; and, finally of investments. The free variegated expression and embodiment of the natural society-forming instincts of mankind are not possible in a community where one class is in a position to impose its will upon another. A state of conflict tends inevitably to a kind of flattening regimentation within the conflicting bodies; and regimentation whether deliberate or unconscious is an obstruction to the free flow of life. There is all the difference in the world between an organised society and a society that is essentially organic. An organised society makes for uniformity; an organic society will express itself in an endless number and variety of social forms.

If the state only knew it, its security lies in the encouragement of voluntary associations of all types; and even if it finds it difficult to rise to the plane of encouragement, it should at least achieve an attitude of toleration. For it is the only safeguard against the inevitable conflict of loyalties which is bound to arise when the state attempts to legislate for individuals in matters which touch the question of moral obligation. Indeed, during the war, we have seen the state in a somewhat lame and half-hearted way endeavouring to escape some of the consequences of its own legislation by having recourse to a recognition of the small group. It was bound by the sheer nature of the falls to acknowledge the existence of conscientious objection to war; and it proposed to acknowledge the genuineness of an individual conscientious objection to war if the person in question was a member of a religious society, the doctrines of which contained a testimony against war. It was assumed that if a man belonged to the Society of Friends, it constituted respectable evidence that his objection to participation in war was sincere. In this particular case, the test proved hopelessly inadequate; but it does at least indicate the condition under which the unity of the state can best be preserved. It is plainly impossible for the state to avoid conflict with the individual conscience so long as it lacks the means of determining whether a conscientious scruple is merely a personal idiosyncrasy or arises from a reasoned and socially authenticated view of life. By recognising the right of the members of a small group which has demonstrated its social worth to live their life out in their own way, it saves itself from a dangerous conflict with the individual conscience; while, on the other hand, as the individual conscience is safe-guarded from an anarchic eccentricity by the discipline of a freely chosen social environment, the state has the assurance that it is dealing with a genuine manifestation of moral life which must at all costs be respected. The small voluntary associated group is the saving middle term between the state and the individual. It is not likely, of course, that it will prove efficacious without exception in solving the problems involved in the relations of the individual and the state; but it would do much to mitigate the dangerous possibilities of the present practice.[36]

36.  This chapter pretends to do no more than discuss at large those questions of fellowship which directly abut upon the public affairs of democracies. The promotion of fellowship in general opens up a large range of subjects which would not fall easily within the scope of this book.

No discussion of the practice of fellowship can, for instance, be complete which does not take account of the actual and potential social ministry of play and recreation. But this matter involves questions with which the present writer is without competency to deal. It would require an extended treatment of the social reactions of sport, amateur and professional, the revival of folk-dancing and the maypole, the multiplication of play-centres for children and of open spaces; of the drama and the public provision of music—and of other matters. The subject is large and important enough for systematic discussion in a separate volume by someone capable of handling it.

Chapter VII.
THE ORGANISATION OF GOVERNMENT.

“The people of England were then, as they are now, called upon to make Government strong. They thought it a great deal better to make it wise and honest.”—Burke.

“We may need and we may be moving towards a new conception of the state, and more especially a new conception of sovereignty.... We may have to regard every state, not only the federal state proper, but also the state which professes to be unitary, as in its nature federal. We may have to recognise that sovereignty is not single and indivisible, but multiple and multicellular.”—Ernest Barker.

“We find the true man only through group organisation. The potentialities of the individual remain potentialities until they are released by group life. Man discovers his true nature, gains his true freedom only through the group. Group organisation must be the new method of politics, because the modes by which the individual can be brought forth and made effective are the modes of practical politics.”—Mary P. Follett.

THE war has given the coup de grace to the Sovereign State. It was on its last legs before the war. It is certain that Mr. Combes’ affirmation of state absolutism during the debates on the disestablishment of the Catholic Church in France, was the last serious stand of this doctrine in democratic communities. In England the doctrine was never securely rooted; certainly it has not gained an unquestioned ascendency over political thought for any considerable period of time; and the exploit of Austinian legalism which (in the Scottish Churches’ case) denied to a church the right to govern itself had virtually to be annulled by a special Act of Parliament. During the war the claim of the State upon the individual has naturally attained a point which in normal times would have been unthinkable; but this was confessedly the result of an emergency and not a rule for ordinary conditions of life. The German performance during the war has revealed the logic of state-absolutism in far too vivid a fashion for any of the somewhat turgid exaltation of the state by academic people in the days previous to the war to survive on any terms. To rebut the doctrine of state-absolutism at this time would be merely to flog a dead horse.

But long before the war the absolutist theory was being undermined. In the region of law and political theory the criticism of F. W. Maitland, Nevill Figgis, Duguit, and others had raised a very definite challenge to the doctrine of state-omnicompetency. But of much greater influence in the actual business of modifying the current conception of the state was the growing tendency to form independent foci of authority within the commonwealth. One obvious case of the kind is the institution of the Bank Clearing House which represents the last stage in the process by which the business of exchange has passed from the state into the hands of an independent body which exercises in its own sphere an authority which is hardly to be resisted; and the present movement for the amalgamation of large banking concerns makes it not impossible that should the banking interest come into collision with the State, there would be a very exciting tug-of-war. The medical profession took up an attitude of organised opposition to the State in the matter of the British Health Insurance Act; and other professional associations are to-day so highly organised that in the event of a collision with the State, it is at least doubtful how the issue would be decided. In the case of the Taff Vale decision which rendered a Trade Union liable to prosecution for illegal action by its members, so threatening a protest ensued that the legal decision had virtually to be reversed by special legislation; and the growing solidarity of organised labour again creates a problem of state authority which is not easily soluble, and which (it is not inconceivable) may at last have to be solved by a trial of strength.[37] It is no longer possible to assume that the philosophy of government can be stated in terms of the state and the individual; it will have to take increasing account of the relation of the state to the powerful voluntary organisations of citizens within the state—organisations which, because they are voluntary, may exercise a more powerful influence upon their members than the state can possibly do. On the economic side this tendency toward the breaking up and the distribution of centralised authority among functional and professional groups, takes the form of Guild Socialism; and, while Syndicalism has not yet succeeded in gaining a wide footing in Europe, its challenge to the state has added a good deal to the minimising influences already afoot. It is worth while observing that these independent organisations are already so powerful that the British Government found it advisable to administer its National Insurance Act through Labour Unions and Friendly Societies.

37.  Since these words were written, they have received very clear confirmation in the recent activities of the “Triple Alliance.”

But it is not the growth of powerful organisations within the Commonwealth alone that is making for the disintegration of state-sovereignty. We are living in a period when great international bodies are coming into being, and while most of these are at present of a cultural and professional type, it is evident that one at least is of a character which involves a very profound challenge to the sovereignty of the national state. The Socialist International has not been destroyed by the war; it has only been interrupted; and if the signs are not wholly misleading, we may look for a steady and wide extension of the international proletarian movement. In 1914 it proved too immature to resist the pressure of nationalism, but it is likely that in the future it will increasingly arm itself against a like collapse. As yet it is only in the case of the Socialist International that there is a direct challenge to the national state; but it would require considerable hardihood to deny the possibility that other international professional and functional associations may find themselves at variance with the constituted authorities of national states. For instance, the problem of hygiene is becoming more and more an international affair; and it is no unthinkable thing that a medical international may find itself at odds with the state authorities just as the British Medical Association found itself in conflict with its own national Government. One has only to add in this connection that the project of a League of Nations will require an abdication of the claim to absolute sovereignty on the part of the states constituting it.[38]

38.  This cession of sovereignty may be hidden by a formal camouflage; but there can be no real League of Nations without it.

So that both from within and without, the march of events is disintegrating the dogma of state-sovereignty. The traditional political acceptances are rapidly becoming obsolete. In the main this would appear to be due to the new situation created by the swift development of the means of communication during the last century. The territorial factor in the delimitation of states and in their own internal economy, has ceased to have the importance it possessed in days when distance set sharp limits to the intercourse of men. Those days are now past; and national frontiers and county boundaries are being gradually effaced by steam, and the sea has been bridged by the electric current and the aeroplane.

II

The problem created in this way is not in its essence a new one. Since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the conflict between the national state and the church—whether conceived as an independent association within the commonwealth or as an international society—has provided some of the most significant passages of political history. The struggle for religious freedom in England (which in the event proved the spring of other liberties) was essentially a struggle to secure the right of voluntary religious associations to determine their own religious life and practices; and while the legal decision in the Scottish Churches’ case was a revival of the Austinian doctrine of state-sovereignty, and an assertion on the part of the state of its own right to sit in judgment upon the religious proceedings of a church, the ensuing situation proved so impossible (as has already been pointed out) that the legal decision had to be annulled by a special piece of legislation. Since that decision most of the “free” churches in England have taken steps to safeguard themselves against similar intrusions on the part of the state. In the present situation, however, such security cannot be absolute since the state still has something to say to the legal instruments under which the churches hold their temporalities. But the entire episode shows how clear is the British sense that the omnicompetency of the state does not extend into the sphere of religious life and practice; and the “Life and Liberty” movement in the Established Church of England is an indication that the control of the state even over a state church is not beyond challenge.

The success with which the independent religious association has established its right to live in the face of the state is probably due to the circumstance that the region in which it claimed freedom was strictly defined; and it may be argued that the state has been on the whole more successful in resisting the claims of the church as an international society because those claims were allowed to enter regions in which the church’s competency could be reasonably denied. The case of Lamennais’ illustrates the point. Lamennais began life as a fervent monarchist and Catholic. He held strongly to the doctrine of the “two societies,” the temporal and the spiritual of which the King and the Pope respectively were the heads.[39] These two societies were distinct and within their own sphere, independent of each other. But when the monarchy encroached upon the freedom of the spiritual society, Lamennais broke with it, and when later the papacy insisted upon a withdrawal of his opinion that it had no rights outside the spiritual sphere, he broke with the papacy also. He acknowledged the existence of a borderland in which the interests of both were commingled—“that undiscovered country,” as Lord Acton has put it, “where church and state are parted”; but the broad configurations of the frontier were plain enough. For the most part the relations of church and state as institutional authorities have consisted of assaults and intrigues and forays in this “no man’s land”; and it has not been historically to the advantage of either. And the whole history of this conflict in France and out of it points to the moral that without some clear definition of function, the relation of the state to other associations within and without itself must be one of continual conflict—that is to say, of course, so long as the state and the other associations speak in terms of right and authority. Granted a measure of good-will, the task of delimiting frontiers should not be insuperable; but if a church or a labour union insists on its rights while the state insists upon its authority, the natural result will be confusion.

39.  “Toute declaration qui supposerait de mon part, meme implicitement, l’abandon de la doctrine traditionelle de deux societés distinctes, independante chacune dans son ordre, serait non pas un acte de vertu, mais un acte coupable. La conscience ne le permet pas—.” This was Lamennais’ reply to a papal demand for retractation in 1833. See Boutard, Lamennais II., 387.

III

At the same time that these independent nucleations of authority are increasingly afoot within the body politic, we observe in recent times a seemingly opposite tendency to impute competency to the state in regions where hitherto its writ was not supposed to run. To a purist political philosophy, the function of the state is broadly twofold—the preservation of domestic order and the safeguarding of national interests with reference to other nations. But it has latterly more and more stretched out its tabernacle to cover other matters; even going so far as to assume that a positive and comprehensive culture of national life came legitimately within its domain. That this should be so in a dynastic state like the German is easily understood; for the security and pretensions of the dynasty are dependent upon an intense development of human and material resources for military defence and offence. But even where such particularist designs have not been so obtrusively present, the state has tended more and more to absorb into itself the control and organisation of national life in all its important phases. It has, for instance, taken upon its shoulders almost the entire burden of public education; it has conspicuously concentrated its thought and wisdom upon measures designed to increase the material prosperity of the nation—though in point of fact this has worked out chiefly as the prosperity of a few favourably situated persons. The care of the destitute, old age pensions, health and unemployment insurance have been included within its competency; and its apparently insatiable absorbent proclivity is drawing into its capacious hands the control and operation of the means of communication, the postal service, the railways, telegraph and telephones. Plainly this extension of its office has been accompanied by a large and indefinite increment of authority.

For this movement, two circumstances appear to be accountable. Of these the first is the growth of an ill-defined and only partially understood sense of collective responsibility for the well-being of the social whole. Old Age Pensions, for instance, appear to constitute the proper alternative to the precarious charity or the degrading “poor relief” to which a less self-respecting social past committed the industrial veteran. The means of communication similarly appear to a reasonably educated community to be a public service rather than a gold-mine for private individuals or concerns. The second circumstance is the prestige which accrued to the state from the reaction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the bankrupt individualism of the preceding generations. In their recoil from the anarchy of laissez faire and industrial competition men sought sanctuary in the state; and in the event the state gained a repute for competency which led to a facile transference to it of all those interests that appear to bear materially upon the life of the community as a whole. But without prejudice to the question of public ownership, it may be observed that while the impulse which led to this regard for the state was natural and admirable, it had the effect of concentrating in the state a volume of power which was entirely ominous to the liberties of the individual. Indeed, it may be said without much hesitation that the logic of state-absolutism was revealed by the Germans only in time to save their neighbours from the like tragedy of incontinent subjection to the state. And the sense of personal responsibility was in danger of atrophy under the pleasing and soporific influence of the popular idea that the state was a sort of fairy god-mother who could be trusted to step in and make good individual derelictions and delinquencies—which frame of mind accorded well with the related drift towards unquestioning submission to the state.

IV

In democratic communities the sovereignty of the state is a residuum left over from the period of dynastic government; and though the divine right of kings is obsolete, we have not yet out-grown the derivative dogma of the divine right of governments. There still gathers around the state an odour of sanctity; and in minds that have a turn for abstraction it is apt to take shape as a sacrosanct objective reality. But soon or late the democratic peoples will have to look upon the state with a cold and business-like realism if they are to be delivered from the dangers that lurk in all quasi-religious and sentimental abasement to conventional idols. It is just this vague political devoutness that makes it easy for the common people to be stampeded into invidious commercial and military enterprises by statesmen schooled in a tradition either frankly dynastic or still deriving its main presuppositions from the dynastic period. There is no security for democracy except in a persistent posture of criticism towards its institutions; and there is no immediate hope of a sane restoration of our somewhat shattered fortunes except as we strip the halo away from the state and discuss it dispassionately in terms of its functions.

Its police responsibilities remain with it as a matter of course, so long as human nature needs policing; and it must provisionally remain the organ of the community in its intercourse across its frontiers. With this latter we are not for the moment concerned; what falls to be considered is the problem of the state’s function in respect of, first, the present tendency to form extraneous and independent (and on occasion conceivably hostile and intractable) centres of authority, and second, the recent process of investing the state with a sort of proprietorship and pastorate at large. Summarily it may be said that the office of the state in respect of these two developments is that it should be on the one hand the clearing house of the increasing functional and professional associations among which its ancient sovereignty is being distributed, and on the other, the trustee of the public in the matter of producing and distributing the goods that are essential to life. The state of the case and the course of events indicate a doctrine of public ownership with democratic functional control, with the necessary machinery for the due co-ordination of the centres of control.

It seems a fairly safe risk to say that the movement toward the public ownership of a certain range of utilities will suffer no abatement with the passing of time. That the means of communication should be public property should be as axiomatic as that a man’s nervous system should belong to himself; and no serious question can be raised as to the certainty of ultimate common proprietorship in this region. With respect to the means of production the case is less clear; but it is a fair assumption, that if a reasonable security of the maintenance of life and health is to be achieved, there must be an increasing public ownership of the sources of raw material and of the means of production so far as the essential commodities are concerned. That there is a range of industrial production beyond this limit which is quite legitimate but which is nevertheless not a matter of universal concern is obvious; and it seems very questionable whether it is the business of the state to do more than to secure that the conditions under which these industries are conducted are of a piece with those obtaining in the primary industries. Objects of differential and selective interest do not appear to enter into the province of the state; it has to do only with those for which the demand is universal because they correspond to a general need. It is a question (as has been previously suggested) whether in this region of production it should not be the general rule that every member of the community should share; in which case there would be ample time and occasion for the production of the secondary and more selective goods for life. There is nothing in this argument which should be construed into a suggestion that the things called in this connection secondary are unimportant. On the contrary they are very important; and with the cultural development of society their importance is likely to grow. The production of books and objects of æsthetic interest is likely to be stimulated very materially by any advance in the right sort of education. But (with the exception of a very narrow margin) these are probably things which are not suitably and fruitfully produced except as they are free from central regulation.

Within the limits so indicated, therefore, the trend of affairs is rightly in the direction of public ownership—in which case we shall require an organ in which this ownership shall be vested. For this purpose the state is already to hand, and is indeed, already assuming the office. Its first domestic office will consequently be that of a public trustee. But this raises the question whether the trustee is to be manager as well.

It is of course plain that the trust would be a pure fiction if some measure of control in the disposition of the property were not implied in it. Certainly the last word in such matters should belong to the state. This, however, appears to bring us back to that very doctrine of sovereignty from which, on our premises, it is our business to escape; and, indeed, if we have no different sort of state organisation in mind from that now current we should be starting out on a new cycle of authoritarianism, were we to vest in the state so much authority. But already the specifications of a new type of state-structure are being indicated by the course of events.

V

It is of some significance at this point to observe that of the functional associations within the commonwealth to which reference has been made, the most powerful are those which are concerned with the production of the primary commodities, and the means of their distribution. This is no doubt chiefly due to the fact that these associations represent the most numerous sections of the community. Coal miners, engineers, transport workers, clothing makers—it is among these classes that the movement toward combination has been most effectual. One notable exception—namely, agricultural workers—is to be observed here, the significance of which exception will come up for discussion presently. It does not, however, affect the general run of the present argument. The constitution and activity of the labour unions are sufficiently well known to require no exposition here—the main point to be emphasised being that here within the commonwealth are large, growing and powerful groups formed around a particular interest; and that this interest is deemed to be vital is evident from the steady growth of the groups. But we may further infer that the existence of these groups is due chiefly to the fact that the particular interest which concerns them was not effectually regarded in the councils of the commonwealth at large. The interests of the workers were presumably neglected to such a degree that the class concerned deemed it necessary to organise itself in order to safeguard and to enforce these interests. Indeed on the workers’ showing the case was even worse. They argued that not only were their peculiar interests neglected by the existing powers, but that these powers were weighted in favour of those against whom more specifically the worker had to defend his interests. The formation and growth of the Non-partisan League in America is a recent instance of a class nucleation under the pressure of circumstances largely parallel to those here outlined.

The interests here discussed are of an economic kind, but they are vital and essential. It is to be observed, however, that these particular associations are not confined either to the worker or to interests purely economic. Reference has already been made to the Bank Clearing House. This is an instance of the formation of a powerful group to promote the common interests of its members, though in this case its formation was less due to the neglect of those interests by the state than to the fact that the interests concerned have become so extensive in range and so complex in character that the state was palpably incompetent to handle them profitably. In certain cases where the state has assumed liabilities of this kind (as in railway control) experience has not in the long run endorsed the competency of the state for the job. That, however, is less to the point than that we should observe the tendency to form voluntary associations for the protection and promotion of presumably necessary interests, and in some cases assuming (as in the case of the Bank Clearing House) a kind of police authority within its own field. Besides these economic and financial associations, there are also large and powerful professional associations which exist likewise to promote certain special interests. The British Medical Association affords an instance of such association; and here again we have an association which in the exercise of its office also assumes a function of discipline. Just as the Bank Clearing House can put a recalcitrant bank out of business, so the British Medical Association can “unfrock” a doctor who has offended against the professional code. It is true that the excommunicated culprit may in either case appeal to the civil courts for redress; but the rarity of such appeals shows how nearly complete is the authority exercised by these professional associations within their own province. With certain modifications the same general rule obtains in Teachers’ Unions, the Bar, the Co-operative Societies, Churches and other voluntary associations of persons, that gather around the nucleus of a special interest. The case is not so plain in regard to societies of a specially cultural character which do not so directly abut upon the general conduct of life, though the place of the Universities, Academies of Art, Author’s Associations and the like, in the total scheme of social life, makes it impossible to exclude them from consideration in any discussion which looks to the integration of all the legitimate interests of life in an organic full-growing social whole.

Such integration must, from the nature of the case, be a long and tedious process; and the difficulties involved in its extension to such distant and shadowy regions as Art and Authorship may be left for solution until they become more imminent. It is in any case doubtful whether the interests involved in these and similar cases are such as would be served by any formal connection with the machinery of government, except as regards certain narrow legal points (e.g. copyright). This is also true of the Churches whose sole point of contact with the State is in the matter of their temporalities. Fortunately for the moment the task need not take account of these remoter complexities; and it will be a matter for legitimate argument how far associations of a cultural kind are to enter into the organisation of government, when those associations which are already abutting on the province of the state and shearing it of some of its powers have been successfully co-ordinated in a scheme of political management.

VI

At this point it is important to bear in mind two things. First of all, the real interests which go to make up the sum of our life are precisely those which lead us to form ourselves into associations independent of the state. Indeed, the particular interest which binds a given individual to the state is generally fortuitous in its origin and largely imaginary in character. A man chances to be born into a certain geographical area, and in the great majority of cases that circumstance fixes his state affiliation for his entire life. An emigrant may transfer his affiliation to another state; but his case is exceptional. Moreover, the nature of the interests which bind him to the state is of a dubiously sentimental and imaginary order. This is not the place to discuss the significance of that temper of attachment to a particular political unity which is called patriotism; but it would appear to have comparatively little to do with any essential purpose of life. This must not be taken to mean that patriotism is to be decried as an evil or a futile thing. On the contrary, in so far as it represents a feeling of loyalty to a social group, it is admirable and of great value. Its value is, however, compromised by the invidious and divisive colour which it habitually appears to wear; and its historical uses—which chiefly consist in its exploitation by astute statesmen—constitute a record which is hardly flattering to human intelligence. In the main it plays comparatively little part in the sum total of the ordinary man’s life; and indeed it is hardly ever heard of in normal times until it is played up by politicians who want a national backing for a selfish enterprise at the expense of some other community. Its chief significance seems to be that it provides a reserve of sentimental devotion which may be drawn upon without limit in the cause of national prestige or national defence. Outside war-time, the state appears to touch the ordinary man’s life directly only when it requires him to pay the expenses of its upkeep or when he provokes the attention of the police. But on the other hand, when a man joins a Trade Union or a religious society it is because the new association bears some sort of vital and immediate relation to his life. The most authentic interests of life are those which move men to join together voluntarily for their defence and promotion; and for the purpose of social development, the associations that grow in this fashion are at least of no less importance to the common run of men than the state. It is no longer tolerable, therefore, that in the general management of the affairs of a community these associations should be virtually ignored in deference to a doctrine which presupposes that the state and the individual are the sole terms of political theory and practice, and that such associations exist within the commonwealth only on sufferance of the state.

Second, it has some bearing upon our present argument that these associations may conceivably come at any time into conflict with the interests of the social whole. A trade union may, for instance, make claims which are incongruous with the well-being of the general public; churches have been known to claim advantages which are inconsistent with the freedom and welfare of other religious societies. With the multiplication of societies within the commonwealth, and especially in view of the prospective great increase of strength in the case of trade unions, it is entirely essential that such bodies should be required directly to participate in the responsibility of promoting the general social good. They should—in their character of associations charging themselves with certain vital though particular interests—be introduced into the official management of public affairs. So long as they live more or less isolated and unco-ordinated lives they remain in danger of becoming antisocial in effect; and the only remedy is to provide for them a clearing-house in the conduct of which they are directly implicated; and once more, the state is already to hand and its machinery should be so ordered as to enable it to discharge this office.

Theoretically our movement is away from the “amoeba” conception of the national state, which regards it as an independent unicellular affair with the central state organisation as its nucleus, to a conception of it as multicellular, and finding a practical unity in the contribution of all its cells to the activity of a common brain. This may be bad biology but that is no argument against its political soundness.

A difficult question arises when we come to consider what associations are entitled to this treatment; and it is plain that no association which cannot prove a genuine social worth has a claim for recognition. Some associations are powerful enough to claim and to receive recognition without formal scrutiny of their credentials; but their power is itself a presumptive proof that they correspond to a real social need; and in the early stages of state-reconstruction, it will be naturally such associations as can validate their claims by the volume of authority with which they make them that will enter into the arrangement. For the rest, we shall have to take the risk of being able to cross the bridges when we come to them.

VII

Discontent with the existing method of assembling the machinery of government has been growing rapidly in recent years. The progress of the proportional representation movement is the measure of this discontent; and it is difficult to conceive any valid objection to the scheme on the part of those who desire to give to the personnel of the governing body a more genuinely representative character than it possesses at present. At the same time, the transferable vote does not and from the nature of the case cannot secure a completely representative government—at any rate while we continue to elect parliamentary representatives on a territorial basis.

We shall no doubt continue to elect representatives on a territorial basis, for it would appear to be the only effectual method of representing the chief interests which all individuals in the commonwealth have in common, namely their interests as consumers (or enjoyers). But the territorial unit is more or less arbitrary in definition, and it does not coincide with the other interests that make up the business of life. And these other interests have assumed a commanding importance in the conduct of the business of life in recent times. Reference was made in a previous paragraph to the fact that the one great industry which was not adequately organised was agriculture. The reason for this circumstance is to be found in the greater difficulty which the farmers and the farm workers have had in getting together. The other great industries are located in urban areas where facilities of communication and meeting are comparatively easy. The result of facilitating communication among the farmers is already evident. The Non-partisan League was brought to birth by the Ford car and the rural telephone. It is true that the farm-workers still lack the opportunity of easy assembly; but what has happened in the case of the farmers has the peculiar interest of being a graphic and simple object lesson in the processes which have transformed modern life. Our present political methods and acceptances date back to the period before the railroad; and not only in politics, but in ethics and religion, we have yet to take on the task of revising our traditional concepts in the light of the vast transformation wrought by the swift advance in methods of communication. The main result is that there are very few men who do not belong to professional and trade organisations which stretch out beyond their county boundaries, and there is a growing number to whom these ultra-territorial associations are more vital and significant than the local association of citizens in which the accident of their habitat places them. The new fact for the problem of government consists in the actual existence and multiplication of these professional and vocational constituencies; and it is evident that that representative government is unworthy the name which does not represent these large embodiments of living opinion and interest.

If for the moment then, we consider the economic aspects of the life of the community alone, it is evident that two main sources of representation have to be provided for—the consumer and the producer; and every man should have a vote in each capacity. The defect of the Soviet organisation in Russia is that, as it is at present constituted, it appears to provide the consumer with no direct representation. The Russian Soviet is a council of workers. But it is evident that the provision supply, carriage and distribution of commodities to a village is the concern of the whole village independently of the share which the villagers may have in the actual production of these commodities. So that the consumer qua consumer must be represented. The physician and the teacher[40] may not be producers in a strict and direct sense; but they are directly interested in the problem of consumption and are interested in it in the same way as the village blacksmith and the shoemaker. Moreover, there are problems of sanitation and road-keeping in which they are all also equally concerned. The village and the city ward are therefore proper units of representation. But they still remain only one type of unit. The agricultural labourers who live in the village may be members of a labour union which charges itself with the oversight of the conditions of the agricultural labourer’s work. The physician will also be a member of an association which is concerned with the special interests of his profession. Here then we have another type of unit. For our present purpose we are concerned with these units only as they are industrial and productive.

40.  Of course there may be physicians’ and teachers’ soviets; but they will operate provincially rather than parochially, while the village soviet would appear usually to consist of peasants.

In Russia the problem of representing these “professional” or “industrial” constituencies has been solved with greater ease than is likely to be the case elsewhere. In many cases the owners of industrial plants have been expropriated and a “shop-council” is in control. This shop-council sees to it that none but members of the labour union concerned are employed in the shop; it is free to hire what expert help it requires to carry on production; and in general it rules the roost. But it is an elected body, and it forms the cell-unit out of which, through a hierarchy of local and provincial bodies, the All-Russian Congress of Soviets is at last constituted. Naturally this scheme is not yet in universal operation. Some employers are still tolerated to remain in possession, and a single rule has not yet been established in the tenure of land. But that is the general principle; and while it must necessarily admit in practice of all sorts of exceptions, there is no clear reason why it should not become effective throughout Russia.

But this simplicity is not likely to obtain elsewhere. The forcible immediate expropriation of the employer is not a probable contingency in England or America so far as one may judge from present signs. But this need constitute no insuperable obstacle to the institution of shop-councils such as for instance have been set up in the woollen trades at Bradford. And just as in this instance, the shop-council would be generally the unit out of which an ascending scale of superior bodies would be formed, reaching at last to what the Russians call the “supreme council of public economy.” The outline of such an organisation is to be found already in Mr. Malcolm Sparkes’ scheme (referred to in another chapter) of a “national industrial parliament”; and all that need be added to the plan is that this industrial parliament should be recognised as the actual legislative body within its own sphere, subject to the review and veto of a final body which would be charged with the oversight of all the interests of the commonwealth.[41]

41.  This “National Industrial Parliament” has come very near taking practical form in the proposal of the recent National Industrial Conference for a “National Industrial Council” in England.

Still confining ourselves to the economic interests, we should find it necessary to secure that the labour unions shall find effective representation in the legislative organisation; and so long as private ownership of industrial plant is permitted, the same thing is true of employers’ associations as well. But it is plain that while industry is subject to this antagonism of interests within itself, it is not likely to minister to the public interest as effectually as we have a right to require of it. Ultimately we shall be compelled to establish the doctrine that industrial production is a community-interest and to institute the principle of national Guilds as the ground plan of industrial organisation. Some approach to this plan has been made during the war in the interests of increased productivity; and the situation consequent upon the war in the belligerent countries is likely to aggravate rather than abate the acuteness of the problem of productivity. On this account it would be a grave misfortune if industry were permitted to relapse into its pre-war inefficiency. Thorstein Veblen, in a shrewd analysis of the working of the capitalistic system in America, estimates that it “lowers the actual output of the country’s industry by something near fifty per cent. of its ordinary capacity when fully employed.” “But” he adds, “it is at the same time plain enough that this, in the larger sense, untoward discrepancy between productive capacity and current productive output can readily be corrected, in some appreciable degree at least, by any sufficient authority that shall undertake to control the country’s industrial forces without regard to pecuniary profit and loss. Any authority competent to take over the control and regulate the conduct of the community’s industry with a view to maximum output as counted by weight and tale, rather than by net aggregate price income over price cost can readily effect an appreciable increase in the effectual productive capacity.... The several belligerent nations of Europe are showing that it can be done, and they are also showing that they are all aware, and have always been aware, that the conduct of industry on business principles is incompetent to bring the largest practical output of goods and service; incompetent to such a degree indeed as not to be tolerable in a season of desperate need when the nation requires the full use of its productive forces, equipment and man power, regardless of the pecuniary claims of individuals.”[42] The course of events seem to point to the institution of the “sufficient authority” which Professor Veblen indicates. It is clear that this authority must be of a character to ignore the exigencies of the profit-system, and to operate with an eye single to the welfare of the community; in which case, soon or late, there must be eliminated from it those who would desire to turn it to a personal or sectional advantage. Or at least their possible advantage from industry shall be so rigorously abridged as to make it cease to be worth their while to rig the business in such a way as to retard or otherwise to interfere with output. But, inasmuch as this rigging has been done in the past chiefly at the expense of the workers, they in their turn armed themselves for defence, by joining into unions. With the elimination of the private profit motive from industry, the character of the trade union as a fighting body would largely if not wholly lapse; and the need for its direct representation in industrial control would cease to be urgent or even important. Especially would this be true when a minimum standard of life had been fixed and universally applied. The union would merge into the guild which would include not the operatives alone but the entire effective personnel of the industry. Out of these guilds, themselves functioning through a hierarchy of bodies from the single shop upward, would be formed the national industrial parliament which would be the effectual economic authority of the community.

42.  Thorstein Veblen. The Nature of Peace, pp. 173, 174.

VIII

That this in its turn should be subject to a still higher court goes without saying. For in this capacity our industrial parliament represents the community only as producing. The general interests of the common man who has to eat, drink, clothe himself, find a roof over his head, marry, bring up children, are not subordinate to his interest as a producer; nor are they covered by a parliament which supervises the productive interests alone.[43] The standard of life must be fixed by the common will of the community; and it will be the business of the industrial parliament to see that the volume, quality and conditions of production shall correspond to this standard; and somewhere there must be a body which also sees to it that the industrial parliament is discharging its task efficiently. It must even be in a position to veto the acts of the industrial parliament should that course become necessary; and this position could be secured by vesting the purchase and control of raw material in the hands of this superior body. At the same time it is evident that there are functions which this superior body is not efficient to discharge simply on the ground of its being representative of the general consumer. The problems of education and public health, for instance, are highly specialised affairs which a purely representative assembly on the traditional lines has proved itself incompetent to handle—and it is notorious how both education and national hygiene have had their development governed and deflected from its proper course by the too great ascendency of trade and business interests in the legislature. Just as the industrial affairs of the community are committed to the charge of those who are directly engaged in them, so the education of the country should be in the hands of a self-governing body of teachers, and the public health to a self-governing medical association—in both cases the personnel being regarded as members of a public service serving under standardised conditions, and their representative and executive body being like the guild parliament answerable to the supreme national assembly.

43.  It has been suggested that associations of Consumers, e.g. the Co-operative Societies, should be represented in the National Industrial Parliament.

It would be palpably beyond the province of this writing to do more than thus roughly indicate the general direction in which the organisation of government should and is likely to go; and there are conspicuous questions—such as national finance and the administration of law—which would enter deeply into a detailed discussion but have here to be passed by with no more than this cursory mention. It is now desired only to emphasise the fact that the actual conditions of modern life have made the existing legislative machinery obsolete, and that moreover they point to the nature of the changes which are required to make the machinery to fit the facts of the case. Summarily, therefore, it may be said that there are two types of social unit which must be recognised, the one being of the geographical, the other of the vocational order. Somewhere these two sources of representation must meet in a supreme common assembly; and the picture which passes through the mind—say in England—is of a joint house of county and municipal representatives chosen by way of ward and village and district councils, and of representatives of accredited national industrial and professional associations. Yet, insomuch as this process of delegation would make the sense of connection between the individual citizen and the supreme assembly somewhat weak and faint, it would appear to be necessary to provide for some measure of direct popular representation in the assembly. So that we should have a house drawing its personnel from three sources—from the people directly, and by delegation from the two types of social constituency, local and functional. In this body would be vested the supreme and final control of national affairs; and to this body the Guild-parliament and other departmental bodies would render account of their stewardship. It is only in some such way as this that remedy is to be found for a state of things, in which, apart from paid experts in administrative departments, the vital interests of industry, education and national health are committed to a body to which the chances of a general election may return not one single person competent to speak to these matters at first hand.

IX

It is not necessary to extend this discussion into further detail since we are concerned only to indicate a direction rather than to describe a finished product. It may, moreover, be justly questioned whether the business of government can range to any fruitful purpose beyond the common economic, hygienic and educational concerns of the community, and such derivative and concomitant operations as they require for their effectual conduct. In any case it would appear that the remaining interests of life abut on the legitimate province of government only at minor and somewhat special points. These particular interests are for the most part of the “spiritual” order—religious and cultural; and from the nature of the case it were best to leave them to go their own way in peace so long as they may not equitably be charged with encroaching upon the general welfare. Such matters as the property of a religious society or an author’s copyright represent the kind of point at which the spiritual interests come into some sort of relation with the state; and these are essentially matters in the state-regulation of which the chief care should be to avoid anything that may interfere with independence and freedom of thought.

For when all is said and done, it is in this particular region that we must look for the actual and characteristic fruits of a democratic order. The real wealth of a community consists in the capacity it possesses and acquires for activity of a creative kind; its true riches are “the riches of the mind.” And in a sense we may say that the business of government is to set the house-keeping machinery moving so smoothly and efficiently that there will be real wayleave for the spiritual business of life. Just as the best physical condition of a man is that in which he is least aware of his body, so the best government is that which makes the governed least conscious of its operation. Here as elsewhere, magna ars celare artem. But is there any guarantee that such a state-organisation as is here pleaded for will be any more friendly to freedom of thought than the existing type? So far as the traditional state is concerned, it regards freedom of thought largely as a concession which is not quite congruous with the postulates upon which it habitually acts. Freedom of thought has been wrested from the state by main force; and then only with the understood proviso that the state is empowered on due occasion to withdraw the concession. The habit of free thought has however become so ingrained in the idea of democratic progress that there is now only one due occasion on which the state can interfere with it with any prospect of success—that is, in the event of war. Still from the standpoint of the state, freedom of thought is a regrettable, though, as things are, unavoidable defect in its machinery. It interferes sadly with the uniformitarian programme of the typical governmental mind. But this grudging toleration of freedom of thought is an inheritance from the dynastic period when it was necessary to have a population easily mobilisable for whatever adventure the dynast might plan, or whatever necessity of defence might be laid on him. The dynastic tradition required a regimentated people; and we have outgrown the dynastic tradition without discarding all its characteristic modes of working. This is in part to be accounted for by the fact that the continued existence of dynastic pretensions and the consequent danger of dynastic adventures of a predatory kind has necessitated the survival of dynastic ideas and practices as a measure of insurance even in communities that have discarded the dynastic principle. There will be no secure freedom of thought anywhere so long as the world contains any powerful survival of the dynastic tradition.

Latterly the dynastic tradition has (for patent reasons) been the enemy; but it is not unlikely that the downfall of the dynastic tradition may do no more than clear the decks for another more recent predatory institution, not less ominous for human well-being, which may secure the reversion of all the stock-in-trade and goodwill of its predecessor in the matter of national prestige and honour and the like. This is that commercial imperialism which has already insinuated itself into the folds of whatever mantle the dynastic tradition is still able to wear—so much so that it is popularly believed to be impossible to define the frontier at which dynastic pretensions end and commercial chauvinism begins. In any case it is sure that as the dynastic institution falls into desuetude, this commercial imperialism will make a strenuous effort to step into its shoes and arm itself with its weapons. There may be some difference between the person who seeks to gobble up the face of the earth and his brother who seeks to gobble up the markets of the earth. But for practical purposes they belong to the same class and will use the same methods. The nations will be persuaded to maintain sufficient military establishments to protect national capital when it is sent upon profitable adventures beyond the frontier; and the prospect of national prosperity and jealousy for national prestige will be worked for all that they are worth in support of these projects. With the net result that the attention of the state will be chiefly directed in the future as in the past to the furtherance of particularist national interests, and the consequent need of centralised power in the state for the easy regimentation of the people in case of emergency will remain as a permanent arrest on democratic development. And all this is the more tragic in that the “national” interests alleged to be engaged are in point of fact the interests only of the capitalist class. The rest of the nation stands to gain nothing material from these operations.

This latter danger can, however, be dealt with by the simple expedient of declaring that the capital goes out of the country at its own risk. It is, anyhow, preposterous to assume that capital has any inherent right to seek national protection when it travels abroad on private ventures of its own. That should be as clear as daylight; and its recognition would remove one of the main sources of international trouble. But it would also release the community from a good deal of the present wasteful and distracting preoccupation with the business incidental to the chances of international trouble, and leave it free to concern itself with the more vital matters of its inner life. And most of all, with the passing of the dynastic danger, this refusal to under-write the risks of profit-seeking capitalistic adventures abroad would remove the chief reason for that residual embargo on utter freedom of thought which must exist in a community which has to be held in readiness for swift regimentation. Men will never be wholly free until the possibility of war has disappeared from the earth.

With the diminution of the chances of international friction, the urgency of domestic uniformity will in great part disappear; and democratic life may be counted upon to express itself in a free and unlimited variation of thought and interest. At the same time it is obvious that the present doctrine of property-rights within the community entails a serious limitation upon the freedom of the mind. Notice has already been taken of the effect of the property-privilege as it operates in the hands of the capitalist employer upon the freedom of the worker; but the hindrance to freedom ranges far beyond this region. In domestic legislation, the rights of property have virtually been “the law and the prophets”; and modern states have shown themselves more jealous for the defence of vested interests than the culture of the national life. It may be indeed that they have not perceived that these two things were different, not to say opposed. But how far these vested interests enter into the counsels of the state is evident from the fact that it has tended to treat any doctrine which assails them as criminal; and crimes against property are almost invariably treated with greater severity than crimes against the person. While these class rights are still recognised as entitled to the corporate protection of the community, there will be a region within which freedom of thought will be still frowned upon and so far as may be denied. The sun is too high in the heavens to permit of persecution save in sporadic cases; and it would seem that this is the last ditch in which privilege is still entrenched in its retreat before the advance of freedom. Lese-majesté has ceased to be a dangerous crime; the heretic in religion enjoys his heresies unmolested; and the accident of noble birth has ceased to confer a privilege. The “divine rights” of property will presently go the way of the divine right of kings; and then democracy will have all its enemies under its feet, unless there may be lurking beyond the frontier some unforeseen and unforeseeable enemy. Yet this enemy too the spirit of democracy may be trusted to subdue.

Entire freedom of thought is contingent upon the ultimate disappearance of all forms of special and exclusive privilege, whether it appertains to monarchy, aristocracy or property; and freedom of thought is still tolerated grudgingly because government is contaminated by a survival of habits of thought derived from the doctrine of special inherent and sacred rights. The type of government pleaded for in these pages is one which assumes that no special interest shall have precedence over the good of the social whole, and which requires that every separate interest shall be subordinated to and co-ordinated into a general scheme of social welfare. The rights of property will be subject to such curtailment as the common good requires. And since therefore the main causes of existing limitations on freedom of thought will have disappeared, there seems to be no reason why this type of government should at any time take it upon itself to repress or to control thought. To this statement one exception may require to be made parenthetically, namely, that the continuance of sources of international trouble that may eventuate in war will probably necessitate occasional interference with freedom of thought and action. This matter we shall consider in more detail presently. Meantime, it is not rash to believe that in a state of the type here indicated, there will not only be any disposition to set bounds upon independent thought but a definite tendency to encourage it. It may conceivably come to conceive of national “prestige” in terms of perfect and untrammelled intellectual freedom.

Three conditions seem to be necessary to such an end. The first has to do with national education the aim of which should be to make every individual capable of thinking for himself and imparting to him a social vision which will discipline and fructify his thought. To this matter also we shall need to return at a later point.

The second condition is the provision of opportunities of free public discussion. To this subject some reference has already been made; and nothing more extended need now be added, save only, perhaps, the thought that the encouragement of free public discussion is the proper safeguard against the vagaries and dangers of a suppressed and inarticulate dissent. Let the new thing be brought into the Agora as it was in old Athens; and the daylight will declare whether it be gold or stubble.

The third condition is the full and unconditional recognition of the right of association,—the only proviso being that no association shall have private or occult or undeclared purposes. A strong tendency to the formation of social groups of various kinds, political, cultural, religious, recreational, should be hailed as a sign of life in the community. And even if the association be formed for the promulgation of the view of a dissenting minority, it should be as frankly encouraged as any other. For no view ever gains a considerable following which does not embody some fact or truth of experience which is necessary to the wholeness of life.

Chapter VIII.
A DEMOCRATIC WORLD.[44]

“We believe in association—which is but the reduction to action of our faith in one sole God, and one sole law, and one sole aim—as the only means we possess of realising the truth; as the method of progress; the path leading towards perfection. The highest possible degree of human progress will correspond to the discovery and application of the vastest formula of association.

We believe, therefore, in the Holy Alliance of the Peoples as the vastest formula of association possible in our epoch;—in the liberty and equality of the peoples without which no true association can exist; in nationality, which is the conscience of the peoples, and which, by assigning to them their part in the work of association, their function in humanity, constitutes their mission upon earth, that is to say, their individuality, without which neither liberty nor equality is possible; in the sacred Fatherland, cradle of nationality, altar and worship of the individuals of which each people is composed.

And, as we believe in humanity as the sole interpreter of the law of God, so do we believe in the people of every state as the sole master, sole sovereign, and sole interpreter of the law of humanity, which governs every national mission. We believe in the people, one and indivisible, recognising neither castes nor privileges, neither proletariat nor aristocracy, whether landed or financial; but simply an aggregate of faculties and forces consecrated to the well-being of all, to the administration of the common substance and possession, the terrestrial globe.”—

Mazzini.

44.  This chapter was written some time before the League of Nations plan adopted at the Peace Conference was issued. It is, in spite of a few points which might require modification, allowed to stand as it was written, since the general course of the argument still appears to be sound, especially as it raises points in relation to which the official scheme will most certainly require great changes.

“Come, read the meaning of the deep!

The use of winds and waters learn!

’Tis not to make the mother weep

For sons that never will return.

’Tis not to make the nations show
Contempt for all whom seas divide;
’Tis not to pamper war and woe
Nor feed traditionary pride;

It is to knit with loving life
The interests of land to land,
To join in far-seen fellowship
The tropic and the polar strand.

And more, for Knowledge crowns the gain
Of intercourse with other souls,
And wisdom travels not in vain
The plunging spaces of the poles.

O may our voice have power to say
How soon the wrecking discords cease,
When every wandering wave is gay
With golden argosies of peace.”

—George Meredith.

DEMOCRACY can only thrive in a democratic setting; and while any powerful remnants of the dynastic tradition survive in the world, it is unlikely that democracy will be able to reach the full term of its own development. For the dynastic tradition is from the nature of the case of an incurably predatory character; and democracy will be arrested in its self-realisation by so much of the dynastic habit of thought and way of life as it may be necessary to retain in order to gain immunity from attack. It has been one of the commonplaces of the Great War that the democratic countries have been compelled to defend themselves against Prussianism by adopting the familiar Prussian methods of repression and regimentation. And what the war has actually provoked is always potentially present. So long as there are dynastic nations with highly centralised and omnicompetent authority and consequently in a more or less advanced state of preparation for military enterprise, it is not to be expected that their democratic neighbours will leave themselves at their mercy; and the common democratic rights of freedom—whether of the person or of thought—have to be so far permanently subject to curtailment and even entire suspension in the event of war. It is easy to say that once the danger is past, the former liberties will be automatically restored; but it does not so work out in actual fact. For authority is ever loth to relinquish any advantage it has gained; and there are always parties in every community who either on selfish or academic grounds are favourable to the curtailment of democratic rights. The restoration of these rights has commonly to be effected against the opposition of parties interested in their curtailment. It is a matter of common knowledge that powerful interests are already at work, for instance, to secure that the hard-won privileges of the Trade Unions shall not be restored to them; and we may expect to find very considerable and dangerous opposition to the re-establishment of those civil liberties which were suspended “for the duration of the war.” It is not likely, however, that this opposition can be long maintained. But it is certain that it will be some time after the close of the war before the domestic liberties of the democratic countries will be restored to the point which they had reached at the beginning of the war; and by so much democratic advance will have been retarded.

I

So that the development of the democratic principle requires the cessation of war and of preparedness for war. And this to begin with requires the disappearance of the dynastic tradition. But will the disappearance of the dynastic tradition necessarily carry with it the abolition of that preoccupation with national “prestige” and the like out of which it has always drawn its strength? The dynasty may vanish; but nationalism may remain; and the catchwords of national prestige and national honour may conceivably become a menace to peace and therefore to freedom as real as the dynastic tradition.

And at the present time there is, as has been previously shown, a very real possibility that the disappearance of the dynastic tradition may leave the door open to another type of predatory nationalism no less injurious to the cause of democracy. This is that “commercial imperialism” to which reference has already been made. The impression has been deeply made upon this generation that the accumulation of wealth constitutes the primary business of the community. It should aim to become the richest, wealthiest nation. It is not generally perceived that the distribution of this wealth is of a character which robs it of any right to be regarded as a “national” interest. It is the interest only of a comparatively small class within the nation. Yet so sedulously has this illusion of national prosperity been cultivated, and so feeble is the faculty of discrimination in the multitude, that it will yet be possible for commercial adventurers to invoke and receive national endorsement of their projects even to the extent of a guarantee of military support in case of need. The surplus capital of a nation will seek avenues of activity beyond its frontiers and it will move heaven and earth to secure that the nation shall be committed to the business of protecting it when it goes abroad. And it will do this by fostering the illusion that in some mysterious way its profitable foreign excursions bring prosperity to the home community. A moment’s reflection should be sufficient to show that operations of this kind will bring to no nation any compensation that is even remotely commensurate with the cost of guaranteeing them.

Nor is it for their foreign adventures alone that these particular interests will work up national pride and prejudice. They look upon the home market with the same avid eye as the foreign; and it is an affair of common knowledge that they have not hesitated to inflame national feeling in order to secure invidious protective tariffs against other nations. “Keep out the foreigner” is always an effective battlecry; it bears a certain immediate and obvious plausibility to the untutored and uncritical mind. The argument for free trade labours under the disadvantage of not possessing this kind of effective simplicity. Except in cases where free trade has been tried and is supported by experience, the argument for it has to lean upon postulates which are not so easily demonstrable to the crowd and which do not lend themselves to glib catchwords such as the protectionists delight in. It is easy for instance, to show that the prosperity of a particular industry depends upon its security against a foreign competition which apparently starts with the superior advantage of cheap labour; and a case may be fairly made for the protection of a young and struggling industry from unequal competition. The protectionist, however, extends his argument to cover all industry; his concern is not for the growth of a struggling industry but for a monopoly of the home markets—what time he is also actively invading foreign markets. The free trader has in reply to show that a protective tariff is a stranglehold upon all industry. Because, for instance, it renders the capitalist producer immune from foreign competition, it reduces the necessity on his part to improve methods of production; and in so much as his care is for his profits rather than the real development of industry for the good of the social whole, he will tend to remain content with obsolete and antiquated methods of production so long as improvement is not essential to the maintenance of profits. Moreover, it works in the direction of compelling the industries of the nation to utilise the raw materials available within its own borders even though these be inferior in quality to those obtainable elsewhere, with the result that the national industries are seriously handicapped in competition in foreign markets, even in some cases in the home markets. The problem of clothing oneself in the United States of America is a sufficient illustration of the fantastic illusion that a protective tariff makes for the common good. The tariff on woollen goods may be useful to the owners of the woollen industries in America; but the advantage is gained at the expense of the whole people, including the very operatives in woollen mills.

This is, however, not the place to state the whole case as between protection and free trade. Chiefly it is to our point here to emphasise the fact that the advocates of a protective tariff belong mainly to the capitalist class; and that they will plead for a protective tariff on the ground of national prosperity, and that national pride and prejudice will be invoked in support of the argument. They will be careful to abstain from calling undue attention to the point that a protective tariff will discriminate in favour of the classes that are already sufficiently prosperous, and their popular argument will have much to say about the high wages of the worker. “Make the foreigner pay” was the battlecry of the Chamberlainite fiscal reformer in England; and what the foreigner pays we all enjoy together. It sounds fair enough; until it is seen that by no chance whatsoever does the foreigner pay anything. He may lose something in the diminution of his trade; but he pays nothing. The payment is made by the domestic consumer in the higher prices which immediately prevail in respect of “protected” commodities; and this higher price brings an advantage to whom? To the worker? Not at all, if the capitalist can help it. Will the worker get higher wages? Only if he is strong enough to demand it. The empty hypocrisy of this talk about national prosperity should be evident from the fact that the very people who are interested in high prices are those who are equally interested in lowering wages. The increase of the wage rate during the war has not automatically or proportionately followed the rise in prices; it has always to be wrested by main force from those whose interest lies in keeping prices high and wages low. Under a protectionist régime, wages are rarely high enough to compensate for the higher cost of living, and the more dependent a country is upon importation from abroad, the truer is this statement. It is only in countries like the United States of America where the natural resources are large and more or less easily available that protection can effect any substantial appearance of social prosperity, and even in these cases it is scarcely doubtful that the general prosperity would be greatly increased by the removal of a protective tariff. The dividends upon invested capital would no doubt be lower; but the general level of material well-being would be appreciably raised.

Democracy must make up its mind upon this point. It must turn a cold and critical eye upon all plausible talk about national prosperity and ask whether this prosperity is in fact the thing it professes to be. National wealth is so inequitably distributed that the production of wealth as a national concern is a polity pour rire. Protection and commercial imperialism are devices which work in the interests of the already prosperous classes, a very small minority of the community. This is not to say that there are not advocates of protective tariffs who sincerely believe all they say so fluently about “national” prosperity; of these good people it is not the disinterestedness that is to be called into question but the intelligence. But it as sure as anything can very well be that if a statutory limit were set upon profits, incomes and fortunes, we should hear very little about protective tariffs and the need of protecting commercial interests “in partibus infidelibus.” To say that this would immediately crush the incentive to the commercial and industrial enterprise of the nation would be an unworthy reflection upon the patriotism of those who are at present directing the enterprise. In any case the point which is coming up for the decision of democratic communities is whether they are going to identify themselves with, and commit themselves to, the support of enterprises which primarily serve the interests of a class already well enough provided for and which can bring no advantage to the people at large commensurate with the risk involved in endorsing them. With the crumbling of the dynastic tradition, the one substantial cause still outstanding of international misunderstanding is commercial rivalry; but this commercial rivalry is in no sense a rivalry between peoples; it is purely a rivalry between the capitalist interests in the different countries. Are the democracies still prepared to suffer arrest of their own development by retaining a sort of potential war-footing in the interests of what are after all mainly class-adventures?[45]

45.  The proposal to establish an International Labour Standard will, of course, do something to rob the protectionist argument of the force it borrows from playing up the “dumping” of goods produced by underpaid foreign labour.

But it may be urged that even in the event of the elimination of this type of commercial rivalry, the national feeling would still remain—intrinsically and without the adventitious aid of dynastic or commercial interests—a permanent ground of separation and possible dissension between peoples, even democratic peoples. We are told that there is such a thing as national “honour” which is a sacred trust and which the nation must be prepared to defend against all comers. It may be seriously questioned whether this conception of national “honour” is not an archaism which has lapped over from the age when men still talked of gambling debts as “debts of honour” and gentlemen adjusted their differences by means of “affairs of honour.” It should be evident that no nation has any kind of honour which is subject to real offence save at its own hands, or which can be forfeited save by its own act; and a nation in anything like a mature stage of ethical development should be (in a memorable phrase) “too proud to fight” merely because its amour propre had been pricked by some ill-behaved urchin among the nations. No self-respecting citizen resorts to fisticuffs in order to avenge an insult; and the more self-respecting he is the more effectual is the interior constraint which forbids him to act in that way. And it is equally inconceivable that a self-respecting nation should think it worth while to assert itself in a retaliatory way against what after all can amount to no more than rudeness or impertinence. It is true that there is a good deal of residual superstition in this particular region which is apt to magnify out of all proportion the significance of such improprieties as disrespect to the flag; but a little good humoured realism is all the antidote that is required. Such things as these have no real meaning except where symbolic and formal punctilio still takes precedence over the actualities of life. For the rest, the only possible sources of offence to national honour lies in the region where national honour travels abroad in the persons of official and unofficial individuals of that nation. But at this time of day, it is inconceivable that any issues should arise in this region which are not capable of easy and friendly adjustment. In point of fact, that is what usually happens. Apologies are made; a formula is adopted; and the affair blows over. It will occur to the cynical that in recent times the point of honour has been chiefly insisted upon on such occasions as the pursuit seemed likely to eventuate in some material advantage; in any case the point of honour survives only as an affair of statesmen and diplomats and provokes no more than a languid interest in the remainder of the nation, which has more pressing concerns on hand. National “honour” seems on the whole to be but a frill left over from the day in which the divine right of kings was still a live dogma.

In the fact of nationality itself there is nothing which necessarily tends to a breach of the peace. We know that it represents no fact of organic inheritance which is bound to perpetuate divisions of an unfriendly or unneighbourly kind between peoples. There is no modern “nation” which can claim homogeneity of racial origin, of language, of religion. It describes a political unity within which a people by the simple process of living together has developed and is continuing to develop a particular way of life and quality of culture. The peculiar colour of national life is due of course to some extent to its geographical location, to the circumstances of its history, and to its natural resources, but national unity is achieved in the evolution of a common tradition and a common culture. Nor is it possible to fix any real bounds to the growth of a nation. It is a historical commonplace how the small primitive groupings of man have steadily grown in extent until we have reached the stage of vast aggregations of polyglot peoples comprehended under a single national name—like the British Empire and the United States. The “nation” possesses no fixity, and national feeling undergoes continual change and modification as the result of changing circumstances. There are many like the present writer whose early schooling left them with the impression that there was a necessary and permanent antagonism of interest between the British and French; but since then the Entente Cordiale and other momentous happenings have completely banished that hoary tradition from the British mind. It is, moreover, not open to question that the increase and improvement of means of communication have done much to dispel the ignorance from which national prejudice and international suspicion drew their strength. The biological judgment upon nationality is pertinent to this point: “All the most important agencies producing the divergent modification of the nations are human products and can be altered.”[46] These agencies are presumably the factors which constitute what Mr. Benjamin Kidd called social heredity; and he has shown with great force how possible it is to “impose the elements of a new social heredity” on a whole people and to change its character accordingly.[47] The sum of the matter is that nationality is a fluid and changing entity; and its intrinsic nature and its history appear to point to the conclusion that it is a necessary stage in the evolution of human society, by which the caveman is to become at last a citizen of the world. There is nothing to justify the expectation that present national characters and national frontiers will remain as permanent factors in the life of the world.

46.  Chalmers Mitchell, Evolution and the War, p. 90.

47.  Benjamin Kidd, The Science of Power, p. 305.

This does not mean that the world will not continue to be organised on the basis of nationality; it means only that the present national divisions are not permanent. The law of natural variation will operate in producing diversity in the complexion and culture of communities; and the race will contain to the end an infinite variety of social types. Indeed as the dynastic imperial tradition decays, the tendency to induce uniformity among the peoples brought under a common rule will disappear; and the free play of variation will probably be more evident in the future than it has been, at least in the near past. The emphasis upon the rights of small nations and the disruption of Russia and of the Dual Monarchy into their constituent nations both alike indicate that we shall have a considerable accentuation of distinctive national types in the years ahead of us. But this is not in any sense a matter for misgiving; for the larger the variety of typical national cultures, the more varied and rich will the life of the race become. As Lord Bryce said in the early days of the war, the world was already too uniform and was becoming more uniform every day; and a reaction from uniformity is a sign of renewed life.

At the same time it must not be forgotten that without some balancing principle there are dangers inherent in nationality. It has been justly observed that nationality is an admirable thing when it is being struggled for, but that once achieved it is apt to become a peril. The passion for nationality may overshoot its mark. National self-consciousness may breed national self-conceit; and out of this temper especially under the conditions of modern commerce may grow the spirit of aggression. It is useless to hide this fact from ourselves; the recent history of Italy gives ample demonstration of it. The Italy of Garibaldi was hardly recognisable in the Italy of the Tripoli adventure. It is therefore necessary that the nations that have come to new birth in the world-travail of these last five years, should be preserved from the danger of becoming aggressive at the expense of their neighbours, and in this necessity is contained in little the entire problem of international integration which is likely to occupy the minds of statesmen and political thinkers in the coming century. At the same time the ultimate security of the peace which is necessary to the progress of the democratic principle must lie not in external safeguards and checks but in the increasing democratisation of national life. The elimination of those residual predatory interests which still dog the steps of democracy and are still able to pervert it to their own ends may be helped by the creation of international machinery which will limit the area of their opportunities; but it depends most of all upon the progressive disappearance of class and sectional privileges within the nations. For privilege is always predatory; and so long as there still remain privileged classes within the nations no international machinery of adjustment and restraint can do more than preserve a highly precarious equilibrium between conflicting interests.

III

Upon this whole subject there is little to be said which is not already perfectly clear to those who have given it any serious thought. Two courses are open, and only two, to modern democracies. They may choose to retain the traditional dogmas of national sovereignty and “honour,” and the current acceptances of the business system, or they may resolve upon a break with the past. The consequences of the first choice are perfectly evident from the state into which the world has been brought by its operation in the near past. It implies the retention of a privileged class with interests to be defended at home and abroad; it will work out in competitive commerce and as a natural corollary in competitive armaments. And competitive armaments soon or late mean war. It has already been pointed out how the doctrine of military “preparedness” must inevitably retard and arrest the realisation of democratic liberty within the nation, but it must farther be recognised that any general retention of military establishments, under the conditions of modern industry, must eventuate in the total destruction of democracy and civilisation. The other choice means a deliberate and progressive attempt to organise the intercourse of nations upon a basis of reciprocity and co-operation. Even though the consequences of such an attempt may be at present uncertain and problematical, it may at least be asserted that they cannot be worse than those which have so tragically ensued from the former tradition.

Indeed, we have already come to a state of the world in which the former tradition has long ceased to correspond to actuality. So long as the means of communication remained elementary and slow, it was possible for nations to live more or less independent lives and it was in their interest to become self-sufficing and self-contained. They were sufficiently far from one another to meet only in the event of border brawls or of predatory excursions on a large scale on the part of a strong neighbour against a weaker. But with the modern development of the means of communication a policy of isolation has become utterly impossible. The world has become a neighbourhood; and national interests are inextricably intertwined. When President Wilson said in 1916 that the European War was the last great war out of participation in which it would be possible for the United States to remain, he was speaking with this particular circumstance in mind; and not even his foresight was sufficient at that time to see that the day of isolation was already over. In six months, the United States was engulfed in the bloody maelstrom. The policy of national isolation is obsolete; and the persons who advocate military preparedness and protective tariffs are “back numbers.” These atavistic policies are no longer possible except at the cost of the incalculable impoverishment of the nation which adopts them. The nation that shuts others out also shuts itself in and will slowly perish from an inbreeding mind and an ingrowing energy. For the barrier against mutual confidence and goodwill which is military preparedness, and the barrier against reciprocal trade, which is a protective tariff, hinder much more than the exchanges of friendship and trade. They hinder that exchange of spiritual, intellectual and cultural goods which are on any radical analysis more essential to a people’s growth and wealth than its trade.

Even as things are, those barriers are not sufficient to prevent a certain mutuality in trade and in culture. Neither the German tariff could keep Sheffield steel out of Germany, nor does the United States tariff keep Bradford cloth out of America, and in the region of intellectual and cultural interests the commerce has attained in recent times a considerable briskness. But in the present state of the world, why should a nation still cling to the illusion that it is a source of strength to be self-contained? It is simply silly to continue to live on homemade goods and homemade ideas when one’s neighbours are ready to supply those which they are in a position to produce better than ourselves, and to supply them freely on a basis of fair exchange; and it is no compensation for the consumption of second-rate goods that it helps to increase the bank balance of a few of one’s countrymen, especially when these few countrymen who are thus profited can out of their profits procure the superior foreign article which they put out of the reach of the rest.

The organisation of the world upon a basis of international reciprocity becomes a necessity by reason of the proximity into which modern means of communication have thrown the peoples. The process is indeed already afoot and in spite of hindrances will inevitably grow in power and range; and we are only anticipating events when we set out to organise the nations on a foundation of mutuality. The process is, however, not without its difficulties; and the conditions which are necessary in order to create a league of nations bound together by a principle of reciprocity may be passed in brief review.

IV

First of all it is necessary that the last vestige of imperial dominion should disappear. A nation which is held unwillingly within a particular political unity should be emancipated and be set up in independence. Real reciprocity is only possible on a foundation of common freedom, and it is a pre-requisite of any scheme of world federation that any so-called “subject” nation which puts in a claim to independence should have its claim conceded at sight. The whole conception of reciprocity is denied when a nation is dragged into the scheme at the tail of another. At the same time it should be made clear that an independence thus recognised does not carry with it the prerogative of a sovereignty of the traditional kind. Independence is to mean autonomy in domestic affairs but not independent action in external affairs. Reciprocity implies joint action in matters of international interest; and in so much as the working of a reciprocal scheme implies the power of authoritative action by some superior joint council, it is clear that there must be a cession of such portion of national sovereignty as is implied in the joint transaction of international affairs. Nor is this to be a rule merely for the lesser or the newly emancipated nations. Clearly it must be a rule for all nations great or small which enter into the arrangement. It is supposed that the nations will be found unready to make this surrender; in which case it is in no need of demonstration that a League of Nations is impossible save only for the purely negative business of adjusting difficulties and settling disputes. That indeed were a great gain, even though from the nature of the case it would in all probability be only temporary. Nations still boasting sovereignty would soon or late be tempted to take matters into their own hands in the event of adjustments and settlements which proved unsatisfactory. But in point of fact there is no difficulty at all about this cession of sovereignty except in the minds of incurable jingoes or legal doctrinaires. The thing has been done and is in practice on a large scale already. That vast unity called the United States of America became and remains possible only because independent states have voluntarily ceded certain elements of their sovereignty to a federal authority; and there is no objection other than that of chauvinistic prejudice or of academic theory which could effectually prevent the creation of a United States of Europe on the same basis and a greatly extended United States of America as well.

But it requires to be emphasised at this point that we need less a league of nations than a league of peoples; and if it be alleged that this is a distinction which implies no real difference, the answer must be made that the difference is indeed deep and vital. Sir Rabindranath Tagore has lately criticised the idea of the nation on the ground that it is the organisation of a people in the interests of its material welfare and power;[48] and insomuch as the nation finds its focus in the sovereign state, its effect is separative and divisive. A league of nations in the Western World would tend to be a league of states, of governments; and the psychological inheritance of such a league would tend to an undue preoccupation with schemes and policies rather than the broader matters of human intercourse. It is inconceivable that a league of nations will be able to divest itself from the characteristic stock-in-trade of the specialist in “foreign affairs,” since it would naturally be engineered by statesmen schooled in the traditional order. No league has any chance of permanence which does not break wholly with the current conventions of international business; and the only hope of such a break lies in the direct selection by the people of the various countries of their own representatives on the council of the league. The league must be democratically controlled; and that with as much direct democratic power as such expedients as proportional representation and recall can secure. The foreign offices of Europe are so incurably steeped in an evil tradition that the less they have to do with any future league the better. The secrecy, the intrigue, the diplomatic finesse in which they have been expert are incongruous with the democratic principle; and it is necessary in the interest of international understanding that they should be put out of commission with all decent haste. The kind of domestic organisation for foreign business which a league of nations requires differs toto coelo from the existing institution; and it will have to be built from the bottom up.

48.  See Atlantic Monthly, March, 1917, p. 291.

A league of peoples requires plain dealing in the open; but there is nothing gained even then if there be no public apprehension of the nature of the business in hand. Hitherto, the common man has displayed but a flickering interest in the external affairs of his country; and this vast and important region has been left the monopoly of a comparatively small coterie of people who have made the shunning of publicity a fine art. This circumstance is bound up with the fact that speaking generally these persons have consistently belonged to the prosperous classes; and the conventions of the diplomatic tradition have made it a preserve of people possessing considerable independent incomes. It is needless to observe how inevitably the whole service must be vitiated by this anti-democratic discrimination. The established system is secured by employing in it only those whose upbringing and education have instilled into them the spirit of class superiority and ascendency. The Foreign Offices of Europe have from the nature of the case been the breeding ground of jingoism and chauvinism. The principle of democratic control in foreign affairs, both by the public discussion of international business and by the thorough democratisation of Foreign Offices is a sine qua non not alone of democracy at home but of any such league of peoples as may be established.

It follows as a corollary that there should be a systematic education of the people in foreign affairs. Popular ignorance would nullify any advantage which accrued from the democratisation of the control and the conduct of international business. For the control and conduct would under such conditions pass back into the hands of specialists and experts and interested parties. This popular education does not fail to be considered in detail at this point. But it may be questioned whether it can be effectively sustained unless in some form or another foreign relations can be made a permanent issue of domestic politics. Perhaps we may come to the point of instituting the popular election of the persons in whom the responsibility of foreign business shall be vested. At the present time it is only rarely, and then but in a subordinate way, that questions of foreign policy enter into the issues of an election; and until some means is devised of educating the public mind in the subject-matter of foreign relations, this condition will continue.

V

It is, however, likely that the force of circumstances may expedite this process of education. The articles of the coming peace are guaranteed to contain a provision for general disarmament; and so far as Europe is concerned, this will be a work of necessity and not of supererogation. Professor Delbrück, for instance, has come to acknowledge that the “derided notions” of disarmament, hitherto “entertained only by persons of no account,” are likely to be raised to “the position of the ruling principle of our time.”[49] His conversion is due to the fact that the war will leave the belligerents of Europe in a financial position which will not only make the increase of armaments impossible, but will require the very drastic reduction of their military establishments. The only danger to the process of disarmament lies in the circumstance that two of the belligerent powers, the United States and Japan, have been so little crippled by the war that they are in a position and may get into the mood to maintain large armaments. It is useless to obscure from ourselves the further circumstance that these two powers that are in a position to afford large military establishments look upon one another with a considerable measure of suspicion despite their recent association upon the same side in the war, and the formal professions of mutual good-will that have latterly been made. It must be borne in mind that Japan is still mainly dynastic in government and consequently imperialistic in spirit, that its economic development seems to require an expansion of marketing opportunities, and that its over-population will stimulate emigration. In these matters there is plenty of inflammable stuff; and we should be guilty of not facing the facts of the case, did we not perceive that by reason of the attraction which Western America has for the Japanese emigrant, and of the peculiar interest which America has taken in the welfare of China, situations of very great peril may arise between Japan and the United States. It is upon such a state of the case that the argument for universal military service in America will be based; and indeed must be based; as it is inconceivable that any American in his senses should apprehend any danger from the other side of the Atlantic. The certain democratisation of Europe and the virtual certainty of the impossibility on financial grounds of any considerable war-like enterprise on the part of the European nations make the contingency of a Transatlantic war unthinkable at the present time, or indeed at any future time. This, of course, pre-supposes that the causes of friction likely to arise from the national underwriting of private foreign investments will be removed by a common understanding that the private ventures of capital abroad are made at its own risk.

49.  Prüssische Jahrbucher (November, 1917).

The possible strain of the situation between the United States and Japan is, however, already alleviated to some extent by the prospect of a democratic movement in the latter country. Japan can in any case hardly expect to keep its institutions intact if it enters into reciprocal relations with democratic communities. Now, for the first time, a commoner is premier of Japan; and the widespread social discontent is likely to stimulate the tendency to popularise the machinery of government. It is probably too much to expect in the present state of Japanese education, that the veneration in which the dynasty is held will speedily disappear. Yet after the swift and dramatic disappearance of “divine rights” in Germany, it is not wise to assume that historical processes of this type are necessarily slow.

Apart, however, from the possible causes of friction between the United States and Japan, there seems to be little insuperable difficulty in reaching an international understanding concerning disarmament.[50] Upon such an understanding, the whole future of the projected League of Nations hangs. The League will be no more than an empty shell if the constituent nations still continue to go about with loaded fire-arms. Yet even if the League itself were not to come into existence immediately the economic necessity of disarmament would of itself suffice to change international relationships very profoundly. Reduction in armaments will involve a revolution in foreign policy. For the two things go together. A particular kind of foreign policy requires a corresponding scale of armaments; and the state of a nation’s armaments very materially affects the objects and the tone of its foreign policy. In a word the reduction of armaments would compel the nations in some sort to moralise their mutual relations. The old basis of ambition-cum-fear backed by force will have to be displaced by a practice of plain dealing and mutual understanding. Since the nations cannot afford to fight one another for some time to come, there is nothing for it but that they learn to behave themselves properly toward each other. After a while it is permissible to hope that they would not want to fight each other.

50.  This statement does not seem quite so true now as when it was written, in view of the provisions of the Peace Treaty.

VI

But if disarmament is likely to compel a new type of international dealing, it is plain that there must be some kind of international clearing house. We have gone past the stage at which one nation can transact a bargain with another which will not affect the interests of a third party. The shrinkage of the world has thrown the nations too closely together for any of them to suppose that they can determine their policies in isolation and carry them through piece-meal with this one and that, without reference to the rest. Preferential trade agreements, for instance, are not merely an affair of the contrasting parties; they affect all the nations. And it is impossible any longer—in the absence of force majeure—to establish relations of that kind without the consent of the rest of the world. The case for an international clearing house is indeed at this time of day irresistible.

Moreover, the immediate stress of the food-situation throughout the world is certain to require some such organ for the co-ordination and the distribution of the available food-supply. It seems likely that the supply of food for the world will be for some years inadequate to the need without careful distribution; and it will require the most careful organisation and rationing of what food there is if the people of some parts of the world are to escape very great and protracted hardship. For this, a clearing house is necessary. Fortunately we have the foundations of this organisation already laid—on the one hand in the machinery of international distribution created by Mr. Hoover, and on the other in Mr. David Lubin’s far-seeing institution of an international bureau for the survey of the world’s grain resources. From a central organisation of this kind the world will need to receive its food for some time to come.

Nor is the problem of food the only urgent matter of this kind. There will be presently a very great demand for the raw material of industrial production. In the past, raw material has been provided by means of private ventures of all kinds on a competitive basis. Any reversion to such a chaotic and uncoordinated method of providing raw material would be attended by consequences of a most disastrous kind. There would be no guarantee of equitable distribution among the nations; with the result that those unfavourably placed in the matter of capital or credit, would be put in a position of permanent and increasing economic dependence and disability. If the nations now released from ancient tyrannies are to be set upon their feet, it is plain that they must receive supplies of raw material as nearly adequate for their need as possible. Otherwise we may create a number of pauper nations. In addition to this fact, there is also the danger that the private exploitation of the sources of raw material would tend to the subjugation of backward peoples whose lands chanced to be rich in such material. It is an old and a shameful story how the need of civilisation for raw material has led to the laceration and impoverishment of the native population of (say) Africa; and it is necessary that the conscience of the world should refuse to tolerate the system of concessions and the like which made this criminality possible. On both grounds—the need of industrial production among the civilised people, and the rights of the undeveloped peoples—a system of the joint international quest and distribution of raw material is requisite.

This international rationing of raw material may seem a drastic and impracticable proposal; but any consideration of its alternatives must drive us to the conclusion that we cannot escape some experiment however inadequate in this direction. In the present state of the world, the balance is so overwhelmingly in favour of the strong nations that any perpetuation of the private and competitive quest of raw materials will simply lead to a struggle of great commercial imperialisms in which the victims will be the weak nations. Just as the unprivileged classes within the nation have been the victims of the great industrial powers, the weaker nations which start with a handicap in the struggle will be disabled in perpetuity and will be squeezed between their stronger neighbours. It is difficult to see that the economic dependence and subjection of one nation to another differs appreciably in its consequences to the people at large from that political dependence and subjection to destroy which the European war was undertaken and fought at so terrific a cost.

VII

The necessity and the logic of the case leads us therefore, to expect the creation of an international organisation which shall have certain positive functions in addition to the negative task of mitigating the causes of international friction and the adjustment of differences. The hope of the permanence of the League lies in its positive activities rather than in its purely negative offices. Moreover, the just rationing of food and raw material would of itself so considerably diminish the possibility of international misunderstanding, that we may look to the extension of the positive and integrative functions of the League while the need of purely mediatorial activity would naturally decrease. Nor have we exhausted the matters in which the need of the nations requires action and organisation of a constructive and positive kind. At the present time it is plain that some of the peoples newly liberated are not in a position to conduct their affairs without outside assistance. Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia, for instance, must be guided and protected for some time to come; and while the peoples of these countries might choose to be placed under the wing of one or other of the existing “great” powers, it is not open to argument that such a connection should be under an arrangement which secured the accountability of the protecting power to an international body. If Great Britain becomes foster-mother to Palestine, or France to Syria, the agreement should be so formulated that this relationship is always subject to revision at the hands of the League of Peoples. The case with the native populations in the former German colonies is still more clear. Africa, in especial, has suffered unspeakable things from the imperialistic rivalries of the European nations; and its whole future development is bound up with a guarantee that its territory and its peoples shall be immune from invasion and exploitation at the hands of nations with selfish purposes. This again points to the institution of a system of international tutelage and supervision. It goes without saying, of course, that any such international action should consist not only of protection and tutelage, but of education into self-government. The question as to the mode in which this international supervision should be exercised is secondary. The proposal that it should be made effective by means of international commissions is met with the objection that international commissions have proved to be a failure in practice. In some cases this is doubtless true; but it is not the whole truth. The Danube Commission and the Postal Union furnish examples of successful management by international commission. But there is no need to mix up the question of international supervision with the method of rendering it effective. There appears to be no inconsistency in maintaining that the method of international commission would be most fruitful in some instances, while the method of devolving the work upon a single nation suitably placed for doing it would be more advantageous in other cases. In those instances, where a weak or backward people is capable of appreciating the alternatives, there is no reason why the choice should not be left to the people themselves.

One of the further consequences of the contraction of the world is that health has become an international question. The days when a plague could be confined to a city are over.[51] The recent spread of the so-called “Spanish” influenza is an instance which proves how indissolubly bound together the world has come to be. And the system of national quarantines has to be superseded by an international organ for the localisation and the extirpation of diseases which like the bubonic and the pneumonic plagues are capable of easy and destructive diffusion; and for the removal of those conditions of filth and insanitation in any part of the world to which these scourges owe their origin. It is likely, moreover, that the great increase in pulmonary and venereal diseases as by-products of the war require international handling if their worst consequences are to be averted.

51.  If, indeed, there ever were any such days. In 1665, the Great Plague was brought from London to Eyam, a little Derbyshire town, in a parcel of cloth consigned to the local tailor!

It will also belong to the proposed international body to oversee and improve the facilities for travel and transport. Obviously this is largely a question of keeping the seas an open highway for traffic. The phrase “the freedom of the seas” has a special connotation in current discussions which is apt to obscure the real point at issue. The claim made by the German Government for the establishment of the “freedom of the seas” seemed and was intended to imply that British naval supremacy had constituted a hindrance to sea-borne trade in normal times. No one with any historical knowledge would be able to consent to that judgment. British naval supremacy has been in no sense a limitation upon the “freedom of the seas” in times of peace. The seas have always been free in modern times; and so far from its having been restricted by British naval supremacy, a good case may be made out for the contrary view. The safety of the high seas is possibly more connected with the efficiency of the British navy than a superficial judgment might allow. The freedom of the seas only comes in question in war time; and if we are minded to eliminate war from the world the whole problem loses its relevancy anyhow, except in so far that some measure of police surveillance may continue to be necessary. In the meantime it should be remembered that the insular position of Great Britain has created the necessity in past times for a strong navy in order to secure the freedom of the seas for its own commerce; but it is not to be maintained for a moment that it has in recent times used its supremacy to limit the freedom of other commerce. Even if the policing of the high seas should be placed by the international authority in the hands of Great Britain, its past record shows that it may be trusted; and in any case its own interest in the free and unimpeded passage of commerce upon the seas is a guarantee that it would discharge its office effectually.

Still, it is probably not desirable that the control of the seas should be devolved upon a single power. The universal interests of the nations in the franchise of the ocean highways make it necessary that their protection be an international obligation. This part of the problem should, however, present no insuperable difficulty. In practice the high seas are to all intents and purposes already neutralised. Our difficulties arise when we come to the question of narrow inter-ocean waterways. The most conspicuous, though perhaps not the most important, case of this type, is the water connecting the Black and the Ægean Seas; and the obvious solution lies in the permanent neutralisation of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles. There is no difficulty involved in the institution of an international commission to carry this project into effect. This particular outlet affects so many nations that it is intolerable that it should remain the particular property of a single nation; and the only possible alternative is this of neutralisation under international commission. The straits of Gibraltar present a different though a no more difficult problem. With the development of modern ordnance, the military and political importance of the Rock of Gibraltar has virtually disappeared; and its value is chiefly that of a naval base and coaling station. It is difficult to see what purpose under modern conditions the retention of a kind of British sovereignty in the Straits serves. In the days when the route to India had to be protected, it was of course another story; and there is really no reason why the Straits of Gibraltar—as well as all other narrow waterways—should not be neutralised in perpetuity under international guarantee. The experience of the present war in the matter of submarine attacks on merchant ships in the Mediterranean showed how ineffectual any guardianship of the Straits is likely to be in the future; and the same thing is true of all waterways which are not sufficiently narrow to be swiftly barred against entrance by submarine craft.

The most thorny part of this problem lies in the question of the two great inter-ocean canals, Suez and Panama. These two passages are now held by single powers though they are governed in such a way as to give virtual equality of use to the seacraft of all nations. Apart from the profits which accrue to the possessing nations from the charges upon traffic, it is difficult to see what advantage the arrangement possesses. It is in the interest of the possessing nations to encourage the general use of the canals, so much so, indeed, that it has been found expedient by the United States to renounce the idea of preferential treatment to its own shipping in the Panama Canal. Probably not much would be immediately gained by the neutralisation of these canals, though it is likely that the pressure of circumstances may lead to such an event at a later time. Nevertheless, any international authority would find it necessary to secure that craft of all nations should have free and equal access to the canals at all times.

But the facilitation of international traffic is not an affair of the water only. It is no less essential that the great trunk railroads should be effectually co-ordinated. The British project of an “all-red route” round the world is an instance of the kind of co-ordination that is required. The Interstate Railroad Commission of the United States supplies the idea at another angle. The convenient international transport of persons and commodities, the regulation of time-schedules, of fares and freights, is surely part of the subject matter of a League of Nations. It has long been seen that the roads of a nation are its arteries and veins; and the provision of cheap and easy transit for persons and things may well become one of the most potent factors in the cohesive energy of a League of Nations.

Enough has already been said upon the conditions of international trade which are requisite to the project of a League of Peoples. Invidious protective tariffs, “favoured nation” clauses, preferential arrangements of any kind must work injuriously to the process of integration. That these devices are also injurious to the nations which utilise them is of less moment to us at this point than their effect in creating rivalry and antagonism. To secure a genuine and universal reciprocity in trade should be one of the aims of the league, as it will also be one of the primary conditions of its consolidation and growth.

VIII

But may not this concentration of authority in the hands of an international body create a kind of super-state? In any case this danger is very remote at the present time; but it is no less necessary that at its inception conditions should be agreed upon which will safeguard it from such a tendency. This might be done in one of two ways. It might, for instance, be ordained that the machinery of the League should not be unitary, but that the commissions requisite for various purposes should be independently appointed by the contracting nations and derive their mandate directly from them; and in the event of overlapping, the commissions concerned might adjust the matter by joint session. The other alternative is that there should be a supreme international authority, but that it should be subject to a “Barrier Act.”[52] This would provide that the power and the enactments of the authority should be perpetually subject to the revision of the contracting parties; and it would be impossible for the international body to take any material step outside the limits of its mandate and consequently to extend its sphere of authority without the general consent of the nations concerned. Perhaps both these conditions are necessary—the direct appointment of commissions and the Barrier Act; and in any case a general agreement should be reached beforehand as to the limits and nature of the functions to be vested in the international body. It is plain, of course, that in any event the League must stand upon consent. It will be a voluntary association of free peoples; and its maintenance will depend upon the impossibility of its ever accruing any authority sufficient to prevent the withdrawal of any nation which might be so minded. It is questionable whether once the League had come into operation, any nation could afford to withdraw; but no power should be veiled in it to coerce a nation to remain in the League against its will. The basis of free and voluntary association is the only guarantee of genuine and fruitful solidarity.

52.  The Barrier Act was a Presbyterian device against hasty innovation. “Every proposal which contemplates a material change in the constitution of the Church or in its laws respecting doctrine, discipline, government, or worship, after being considered and accepted by the Synod, must be sent down to Presbyteries for their approval or disapproval, before it can become the law of the Church.” (The Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church of England, p. 50.) Just so, the Federal Amendment to the Constitution of the United States relative to prohibition had to be referred to the several states for endorsement before final ratification.

This, however, raises the question of whether the League should be armed with powers to enforce its decisions. That it should be endowed with a definite judicial authority goes without saying; but is it to be supported by a police organisation? In the present state of opinion it appears likely that some kind of international police force will be attached to the League; but there are some reasons for doubting whether such a provision is necessary or likely to be useful. In this connection the interesting point has been raised that the Constitution of the United States established a court to adjudicate upon disputes between the States, with no provision of force to compel a State to accept the Court’s decision, but depending upon public opinion alone to validate the judgment. Had there been any attempt on the part of those who framed the Constitution to invest the federal authority with power to coerce a recalcitrant state, it is likely that the Union would never have come into existence; but the Union was founded and survived despite the absence of coercive sanctions, and the venture of faith has been vindicated by the growth and unity of the American people.[53] There is a real danger lest the institution of a police force at the disposal of the League might prove a disruptive factor; and the question should be carefully canvassed before a decision is reached. In any case it is safe to say that it should be the business of the League to work towards the ultimate elimination of coercive sanctions.

53.  Technically, in the Civil War, force was used to prevent the secession of the South; but what the North really fought for was the abolition of slavery.

But meantime is there any method by which the League could effectually deal with recalcitrant nations other than direct physical compulsion? A good deal has been said about the use of economic boycott; but it requires some casuistry to distinguish successfully between military coercion and economic boycott. Certainly in intention both devices come within the same category, and in result they may work out in curiously identical fashion. Constraint by starvation bears in effect a strong family resemblance to constraint by destructive force majeure. At the same time it is evident that a nation which chooses to put itself “in contumaciam” must in some way or another pay the penalty of its offence. The Bank Clearing House deals with an offending and impenitent member by the simple process of exclusion. In the League of Nations, a nation in the same position should be dealt with in the same fashion; it should understand that its persistency in the offending attitude carries with it exclusion from the comity of nations. It should, that is, be compelled to accept the responsibility of imposing the punishment upon itself. It has put itself outside the pale; and no injustice is involved in accepting its deed at its obvious face value and letting it remain where it has chosen to place itself until such time as it elects to think better of its action. It is doubtful whether any constituent nation would think it worth while to indulge in a contumacy which automatically led to excommunication.

It would take us too far afield from our purpose to discuss the details of the organisation required by a League of Nations. Questions of constitution and representation, the problems involved in the adhesion to the League of vast composite aggregates like the British Empire, and of the place of some of the minute independent states that still remain in the world,—these and many more matters will have to be faced in the institution of the League. Here, however, it has been our business merely to point out that some such device as a League of Peoples is entirely necessary to the further development of the democratic principle, and to pass in brief review certain of the conditions which the League must satisfy, and certain of the functions it must assume, if it is to be consistent with and helpful to the realisation of the ideal of democracy. A League to enforce peace may be no more than the Holy Alliance redivivus, an unholy alliance in defence of the status quo.[54] What is needed is a League to guarantee freedom and to promote fellowship, and given such a League peace will largely look after itself. It is not sufficiently recognised that to make peace an object in itself is to condemn the world to virtual stagnation. The only peace, like the only happiness which is permanent, is that which is a bye-product. Permanent peace will come from a voluntary association of peoples co-operating on a basis of reciprocity; and such a consummation is not so far off as it would at fist sight appear. The reciprocity which has been established between the Allied peoples in the war will have to be continued long after the war. Their needs are so vast that they will only escape death and want by close co-operation. Moreover, the agreement of the Allies reported in the press as these pages are written to send food to their late enemies, is an asset of the utmost importance to the creation of the League. And once the League is properly afoot, we may live in the hope of the day which William Blake foretold:

“In my exchanges, every land shall walk,
And mine in every land;
Mutual shall build Jerusalem,
Both heart in heart, and hand in hand.”

54.  It is hardly possible to resist the remark at this point that the League as fashioned in Paris bears a strong family likeness to the Holy Alliance, and so far behaves uncommonly like it,—e.g., towards Russia and Hungary.

Chapter IX.
EDUCATION INTO DEMOCRACY.

“Education teaches in what social welfare consists. It is of first importance to you that your sons should be taught what are the ruling principles and beliefs which guide the lives of their fellowmen in their own times and in their own country; what the moral, social and political programme of their nation is; what the spirit of the legislation by which their deeds will have to be judged; what degree of progress Humanity has already attained and that which it has yet to attain. And it is important to you that they should feel themselves from their earliest years, united in the spirit of equality and of love for a common aim, with the millions of brothers that God has given them.”—Mazzini.

I

“IT was,” says Mr. Benjamin Kidd, “with a well-founded instinct that William II. of Germany, on his accession turned to the elementary school teachers of his country when he aimed to impose the elements of a new social heredity on the whole German people.” It is impossible at this time of day not to go far in agreement with Mr. Kidd when he tells us that it is not so much what is born in a man as what he is born into that shapes his life. The most powerful formative influence in the shaping of character and outlook is “social heredity,” “imposed on the young at an early age and under conditions of emotion.”[55] This judgment is no longer a matter of speculation. Dr. Stanley Hall’s work upon the phenomena of adolescence has made it clear that the plastic and absorbent stuff of youth will inevitably take its abiding shape and colour from the cultural setting in which it finds itself. The advocates of sectarian education in the famous English controversy about the Balfour Acts were, from their own point of view, speaking within the universe of the soundest possible psychology when they insisted that in religious education “atmosphere” was paramount. It was a piece of very astute observation on the part of the ancient Jews that led to the practice of bringing their twelve-year-old boys to Jerusalem for the Passover ceremonies. All the early training was crystallised into a definite direction of life by the induction of the youth at his most sensitive moment into the highly charged emotional atmosphere of the Holy City at the great festival of national remembrance and hope. He went there a boy; he returned home a Jew.

55.  Benjamin Kidd, The Science of Power, p. 305.

Again and again in the course of this examination of the conditions of democratic evolution, we have had reason to look to education for a solution of many fundamental matters. It is indeed no longer possible to overlook the absolute primacy of the school in any progressive democratic polity; and if the foundations of the coming democratic commonwealth are to be well and truly laid, they must be laid around about the child. Our present purpose does not require that we should consider the actual machinery of the education proper to democratic development—that is a matter for the educator. Our business here and now is to consider the broad general characters of such an education.

It is a commonplace that needs no labouring that modern education suffers many things from the “dead hand.” The tradition of the “grammar school” which aimed at opening the field of knowledge by a training in letters is still with us, despite the fact that we have become familiarised in recent years with a rounder and fuller conception of education. We have been told again and again that the business of education is to produce good citizens, to promote the growth of moral character, and so forth; and slowly this emphasis has made some headway in the minds of educational officials. But the whole implication of this conception of education is far from being realised, even by those who are actively engaged in the work of education. A disproportionate pre-occupation with “letters” and knowledge still remains to betray our bondage to traditional ideas; and this in spite of the fact that popular education has in recent years received a very definite orientation through the demand for industrial efficiency. But as yet there has not been—save in the region of what is called “technical education”—any serious and sustained effort to co-ordinate the whole subject matter of education to this particular end. “Technical” education appears in the scheme not as an integral or organic part of the process as a whole, but as a somewhat arbitrary and unrelated annex to the last stage of the process.

To this demand that education should minister to industrial efficiency we shall have reason to return presently. Here we are concerned only with the fact that though this demand has been fairly general and insistent, it has not succeeded in shaking the hold of tradition upon the method of the educational process. Popular education still consists in the main of variations upon and extensions of the three R’s; and though the experts have discussed widely and in detail the ways and means of directing the educational processes to given ends, the solutions have not yet arrived in any very substantial way in the schools.

Roughly, our popular education is still governed by the idea of equipping the young person with such a quantum of knowledge as he may be supposed to require in order to make a living and gain some sort of settled place in life. It has become more and more possible in recent times for boys and girls who show unusual aptitudes to proceed to the higher branches of learning; but in the main our thought of popular education has been coloured by a pernicious doctrine of “minimums.” We have asked how little education can be given consistently with the need of the individual and the society in which he lives; and the opposition which meets any endeavour to raise the “school leaving age” proves quite conclusively that we have not generally advanced beyond the stage of regarding that education as best which is soonest done with. For this the economic strain of life is partly accountable; it is desirable that the boys and girls should be wage-earning as speedily as possible; but even more responsible for this state of things is a general ignorance concerning the meaning and purpose of education. Indeed, few of those who are now parents have reason to recall with any profound interest or gratitude the days when they were receiving an alleged education. Something in the nature of a systematic campaign of education in the interests of education would seem to be necessary if the popular indifference is to be removed to any good purpose.

It has indeed to be remembered that popular education is still in its infancy; and the prejudice it has to overcome is the result of the inevitable failures of its experimental stages. When it is recalled that elementary education in England was until 1870 in the hands of voluntary agencies, and that only since that date has education become universally accessible, it is perhaps remarkable that education should have made as much headway as it has made; and much of our criticism of current educational methods tends to overlook what is under the circumstances the real magnitude of the achievement in education. At the same time it is plain that our educational methods are in need of much sustained radical criticism if our purposes in education are to be saved from mis-carriage.

II

But most of all do we require to clear our minds concerning the goal we are seeking through education. It is true, as Professor Dewey has pointed out, that it is not possible to define an end for education; for in a profound sense, education has no end. A true education will be that which fits an individual to go on learning to the end of his life. The aim of education is more education. At the same time this education will not be for its own sake, or for the learning it helps the scholar to acquire. Here again Dr. Dewey helps us by reminding us that one aim of education is social efficiency. Plainly and beyond peradventure no education will serve a democracy which does not produce socially efficient persons.

But this word efficiency has become discredited by its recent use. We have heard something of efficiency engineers who have tried to reduce human faculty into mathematical formulæ for the purpose of speeding up and suitably supplementing the mechanical processes of industry. It amounts to no more than a systematic endeavour to fit the human agent to the machine so as to get more out of the machine. The result for the life of the human agent as a whole is hardly taken into account. And even if this myth of efficiency engineering has met the fate it deserved, its very appearance and name are symptomatic of the general direction of popular thought upon the main business of a community. Nor is this confined to the classes that are interested in getting the utmost out of the worker, or to the unreflecting public. The British National Union of Teachers at its Annual Conference in 1916 declared that “this great war, with its terrible wastage of human life and material has brought into bold relief the economic potentialities of the child. As never before, the nation now realises that efficient men and women are the best permanent capital the state possesses.”[56] So that the business of education is to develop the economic potentialities of the child in order to provide capital for the state. It does not appear that the child has any rights in the matter at all. He is to be trained in order to become “the best permanent capital” of the state. It is to be hoped that two more years of war have brought a more fruitful vision to the National Union of Teachers.

56.  Quoted in the Public (N.Y.), July 6th, 1918.

Yet the word efficiency is worth keeping, for it embodies the true conception of educational aim so long as it is rightly interpreted; and industrial efficiency must be allowed to enter into our interpretation of it. Industrial efficiency gains its preponderant emphasis in recent discussion because we are still in the toils of the disastrous illusion that the national ideal is national wealth. We think of the nation’s well-being in terms of its financial prosperity; and naturally we tend to subordinate all our social processes to this end. But the result of this tendency will be to create not a society, but a wealth-producing machine; and those human possibilities in which the final wealth of life lies, will have to fight a doubtful battle for their very existence, and at best can gain no more than a precarious foothold in the interstices of the money-making organisation.

From this bias education must be delivered—at whatever cost; and a doctrine of social efficiency enunciated which will be comprehensive enough to satisfy the requirements of the single mind and the social whole at the same time. In point of fact, these requirements are virtually identical, for that which makes a full man makes also for a full fellowship. The individual is to find himself in precisely those things which enable him to contribute his due to society. We need, therefore, to enquire somewhat broadly into the nature of the things in which the individual shall render his due to the commonality. We shall then be in a position to state in general terms what we should look to the educational process to provide.

Professor Dewey has laid down in this connection a principle of the utmost importance. He affirms that “we may produce in schools a projection in type of the society we should like to realise.”[57] If we are to train the young for social life, the proper method is to surround them in childhood, so far as that may be, with the conditions of the ideal social life toward which we look. The school should be the societas perfecta in miniature. This naturally requires a very considerable departure in tone from the conditions which still prevail. The pontifical and authoritarian tradition of the mediæval school is still with us; and an attention is devoted to problems of discipline and order which is disproportionate to the real business of preparing for life in a democratic commonwealth, and is to a great extent from an angle and in a spirit alien to the purpose in hand. A considerable breach in this system has already been made by the new emphasis upon the value of self-determination in education from the earliest stages; but the relaxation of the traditional canons of discipline does not carry us far enough. Self-determination must be recognised not only as an individual right but as a group responsibility; and the practice of popular self-government should begin in the schools. It is symptomatic of the present tendency among educators of a liberal and radical type that in the prospectus of a school soon to be established, it is laid down that the internal government “shall be increasingly democratic, scholars and teachers sharing both legislation and administration,” and that the external government shall be vested in a council, representing the trustees, the faculty and the scholars. This is a sane and fruitful method of initiating boys and girls into the larger responsibilities of social life. Already the plan has been adopted in some existing schools with a considerable measure of success; and if the school is to be the organ of a genuine training in social efficiency, we need a wide extension of this method.

57.  Democracy and Education, p. 370.

But beyond this discipline in self-government, the school has to undertake the fitting of the child for other kinds of social contribution.

(a) He must be trained to contribute his share to the supply of the physical needs of the community. Obviously, in a school, the direct and complete application of this principle is impossible. It is laid down in the prospectus before referred to that “all must share, teacher and scholar alike, in the labour that lies at the basis of human life and unites all men through their common need”; and it is ordained that “the kitchen, the crafts-room and the garden shall rank equally with the classroom.” It is proposed to give the scholars “direct experience of agricultural processes and the preparation of the main articles of food, spinning, weaving, dyeing, sewing, carpentry, building, pottery, printing and any other crafts directly contributing to the life of the community.” Naturally, no child is required to become expert in all these occupations; but his training in them will presently serve to reveal his special aptitudes and to determine his own personal choice.

It is not contemplated in this particular experiment that machinery will be introduced to any considerable extent; and while it is stated that machinery will not be excluded, it is obvious that it is regarded with some dubiety, if not hostility. But it is necessary to accept the position that the machine industry is here with us and is here to stay; and a proper perception of its true function will save us from assuming a fallacious attitude in regard to it. While the incentive to the development and improvement of large scale mechanical processes has been the pursuit of profit, the real office of these processes is to diminish the purely mechanical and menial operations which are necessary to life, and consequently to release a larger volume of human energy for tasks of a more independent and creative nature. There are certain necessities of life concerning which our requirements are that they should be good in quality and abundant in quantity—and as no question but of utility arises in relation to them, they may be assigned to the large-scale machine industry. This, however, does not in the least absolve us from including in our school curriculum a provision for the habituation of children to mechanical processes of this kind. But because these processes are necessarily monotonous and irksome, every effort should be made to introduce into them what elements of interest may be attached to them; and to reduce to the lowest possible point the current tendency to make the worker a mere accessory of the machine.

Miss Helen Marot has recently described proposals for an educational experiment which aims at the association of discipline in industrial production with the educational process. This particular experiment takes the form of producing wooden toys; and while, as Miss Marot sees, the production of toys has anyhow an intrinsic interest, the details which are given show how radically the atmosphere of the machine industry might be changed by giving it a place in the school curriculum. Miss Marot’s assumption that the machine industry can be so transformed by democratic control as to satisfy the creative instinct has already been adversely criticised in these pages; but the present discussion is not affected by criticism of that particular point. What it is to our purpose to observe is that mechanical processes may be relieved of some of their present irksomeness by supplying them with their appropriate background. First of all, it is necessary that the worker should be acquainted with the whole process of manufacture in order that he may participate in his own special task with a measure of intelligent interest; and this will involve a degree of familiarity with the technical problems of management, with accounting and costing, with the internal conditions of the industry and the plant, and with the larger economics of the enterprise. But in addition to all this more immediate business of habituation to routine, provision is made for the development of artistic judgment and execution and for the acquisition of knowledge relating to the craft itself—consisting in this case of “authentic accounts and inspirational stories of industrial life, especially of the lumber, wood-working and the toy industry.”

Obviously not all trades command the interest which can be created around toy-making. In the manufacture of articles of utility which are produced by processes of a highly standardised kind, it would be less easy to introduce elements of romance and sentiment. Still much can and should be done in every trade; and admission to any particular trade should be preceded by some discipline of this kind. If ever industry is organised on the basis of national Guilds, surely one function of the Guilds will be to establish national trade schools in which a generous training of this kind can be given and which shall be closely co-ordinated to the entire scheme of public education.

III

But it cannot be too frequently emphasised that we are not to accept the present subordination of social life to the exigencies of the machine industry. That the machine industry is here to stay need not be argued; and we may dismiss as impracticable the suggestion of a return to the handicraft system. The machine industry must be retained for the production of utilities where no question of beauty or ornament arises; and it should be so ordered as to reduce the purely mechanical operations entailed in the manufacture of the staple commodities to a minimum. Consequently care should always be had to prevent an exaggerated emphasis upon the place of the machine industry in education. It is not to be pretended that mechanical processes can ever in themselves minister substantially to the joy of life. The best that can be said is that their present disadvantages can be materially reduced; but not even the sense of partnership and democratic control, the shortening of hours and the addition of intellectual interest, taken all together, can turn factory life into “a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.”

Some emphasis has already been laid upon the difference between productive and creative activity. Creation is not merely production, but reproduction, that is to say, the activity in which we express ourselves for the joy of the thing itself. The present writer was brought up in a slate-quarrying town in North Wales. The workers spent their time in mining and dressing roofing-slates—an industry which involves no special skill save only in the department of slate-splitting. This is handwork and no satisfactory mechanical substitute for it has yet been contrived; and there is much emulation among the workers in this process. Apart from this there is nothing note-worthy about the industry except the very considerable extent of partnership which prevails (or used to prevail) in the work itself and of fellowship in the dressing shops. But after the day’s work was done there was a somewhat remarkable activity of another kind. Sometimes a worker would take a piece of raw slate home with him and spend his spare time in turning it into candlesticks or some other article by means of a lathe or by direct manual work. The result from an artistic standpoint was doubtless very crude; but it was interesting and instructive to observe the almost instinctive way in which men, released from necessary toil, turned to the production of things of beauty. This free self-expression took other forms in other men. Welsh quarrymen have always been well-known for their literary tastes; and the town contained a considerable number of quite capable writers of both prose and verse in the Welsh language. Others there were—and these were a large number—whose dispositions were musical; and since the purchase of musical instruments was as a rule beyond these men’s pockets, they devoted themselves to vocal music. The congregational singing in the churches was famous throughout the country; and while there were many individual vocalists and composers of considerable merit, the development of choral singing reached an extremely high point. It was an intensely religious community and was full of religious activities of many kinds. It was perfectly plain that the real business and joy of life lay not in the production of roofing-slates but in the exercises of creative self-expression to which the men appeared to turn naturally and instinctively when the business of making a livelihood was over.

This is a parable for the educator. While the business of producing the necessities of life should be so conceived and ordered as to make participation in it as much a pleasure as a duty, it is not to be gainsaid that the joy and the ultimate wealth of life lies in the free and self-directed activity of self-expression whether by the individual himself or in some free concert with his neighbours. Education for life will necessarily take account of this circumstance—not only because it provides a means of personal satisfaction but also because it might, and properly developed would, become the chief and the most characteristic contribution of the individual to the life and growth of the community. The school must therefore provide opportunity of independent personal self-expression—in every manner of medium—in order that the peculiar creative aptitude of each child may be discovered and encouraged. Whether it be wood-carving or verse-writing, pattern-designing or violin-playing, any education that pretends to fit a child for a vital social service must make room for it.

It is in this region that we are to look for the differentiation of future social function according to particular aptitudes. To-day, education reproduces the traditional social schism between the privileged and the disinherited classes. On the one hand, we have schools and universities which aim to provide a culture appropriate to those who have to assume the business of leadership and government in the community; on the other we have a popular education which appears in the main to aim at providing a docile mass amenable to leadership and government. There is virtually no attempt to sift out of the mass those who have aptitudes for special social tasks or genius for any form of artistic production. Its methods—mitigated only by the vagaries of the personal equation—are calculated to turn out human products having the uniformity of a sheet of postage stamps. This method can have no result but that of producing and perpetuating a general spiritual poverty. In a democratic community it should be intolerable that schools for children should exist other than the common school. The common school being what it is, it is not surprising that there should be a demand for schools that give a better chance to the human material of boys and girls. This, however, tends to stereotype a class-distinction; and for that reason to limit the field in which the talent for public leadership and artistic and political genius might be discovered. In the common school there should be provision and encouragement for the exercise of free and original self-expression in every possible way so that each child may be enabled to discover its own peculiar vocation in the commonwealth. Not every child will reveal a faculty for creative self-expression of a high order; but every child should have the chance of doing so. And it is the only safe assumption on which to proceed that every child has in it the latent capacity for making a unique and original personal contribution to the total life and wealth and beauty of the community. The common school should become the mine out of which we dig the raw material of our poets, whether minor or major, our singers, our sculptors, our fabricators of beautiful garments, our painters of pictures, our orators, our thinkers and our house-decorators; and there is an untold wealth of this raw material which is lost to society all the time under the conditions of our present preoccupation with the making of money. It would be stupid to suppose that every child can become a great artist; but some kind of artist in some kind of medium every child should have the opportunity of becoming, on the assumption that here—in this region of creative self-expression—lies the richest contribution he can make to the common life.

IV

But the democratic principle further requires the intelligent co-operation of persons in the conduct of affairs; and it is the part of the common school to furnish the necessary equipment of this partnership. In this equipment there are two main elements. The first is the provision of adequate capital of information for the stimulation and direction of thought; the second is the encouragement of independent and original thought.

There is a certain body of knowledge which it is essential that the child should have if he is to think rightly and to order his conduct accordingly. This body of knowledge may be roughly described as knowledge of the world in which we live; and its two chief parts have reference to the world as it now is, and to the story of how it came to be what it is. The former involves observation and interpretation of the actual conditions of the life in which the child lives; and the process should begin where the child stands. In the modern teaching of geography, the beginning is made in school-yard or the precinct and from this centre it broadens out to cover one’s city, one’s county, one’s state or province, one’s country, until at last it embraces the round earth. This is as it should be. In the past the teaching of geography has been a mere imparting of a mass of facts, which have seemed to possess no direct relation to life; by making the child’s own location a focus round about which the available and necessary knowledge of the world can be gathered in a more or less coherent fashion, the relation of facts, which in themselves might seem remote and irrelevant to the business of life, becomes more evident, and the entire study gains a new vitality. This discussion is now trenching dangerously upon the province of educational theory; but it is needful to emphasise how indispensable it is that knowledge should not be, as it has so often been, allowed to appear unconnected with the actual business of living in this world. Even yet one may hear children asking in a bewildered way—“What on earth is the use of my learning the height of Popocatapetl?” Or “what good is it to know the length of the Yang-Tse-Kiang?” Information of this kind has no doubt a certain fascination for some types of mind; but it may be left for those minds to seek it out for themselves. The business of the school is to make possible the acquisition of the knowledge which bears upon the contribution which the pupil is expected to make to the community. This is not to say that there is not knowledge which is desirable for its own sake, or that the love of knowledge should not be encouraged for what it brings. Moreover, soon or late all knowledge will possess a social value. But the knowledge which is most valuable is that which the individual acquires for himself; and the responsibility of the school in this matter is to release and quicken the capacity for independent and continuous acquisition of knowledge. But this desideratum is not in the least compromised or neglected by ordering the acquisition of knowledge in the first instance with reference to the actual business of social life.

It is the business of the educator to determine what the subject-matter of the curriculum must be in order to give the pupil adequate knowledge of the world in which he has to live; it is our business here simply to stress the point that this knowledge shall be of a relevant and vital kind. It should have to do not only with the physical features of the world, but with social and political institutions and the like; and indeed throughout it should have more to say about the ways than about the places in which people live. But chiefly this aspect of the educational process should aim to equip the pupil with the necessary knowledge to enable him to acquire more knowledge through his own direct experience of the world.

But this knowledge of the world as it is would be hopelessly inadequate were it not connected with some knowledge of how the world came to be what it is. Here again the subject-matter must be defined by the experience of the educator. The business of this writing is to emphasise the requirement that this knowledge of the past shall be ordered conformably to the ultimate social fruitfulness of the pupil. In his boyhood the present writer was required to study geology—at first sight a somewhat irrelevant subject for a lad in his early teens. But he happened to live in a district where slate-quarrying was the only industry; and when he learnt that his bread and butter came from the “Llandeilo Beds”; and that these same “beds” occupied a specific place in a more or less orderly process of world-making, the study of geology assumed a new interest. But its most important action was the awakening of a dim sense of being an “heir of all the ages.” This feeling received a very powerful reinforcement from another side. The writer well remembers his first reading of the story of the Pilgrim Fathers. Hitherto history had seemed to consist mainly of the puerile and discreditable exploits of a succession of royal persons of whom none were better than they should be; and he had wondered what on earth all this had to do with a boy living among the Welsh mountains in the nineteenth century. But the Pilgrims Fathers were different; here at last was something that seemed to have a meaning, and it is easy to see what that meaning would be to a lad whose upbringing had been in a Strong Nonconformist tradition. It took long years to fill with a connected content the interval between the sailing of the Mayflower and the campaign for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales; but from henceforth the lad knew that he stood in the succession of a tradition that had made a difference to the world and that he owed a very great deal to it.

The story of how we have come by our inheritance of freedom, of the age-long upward struggle of mankind, this above all should furnish the inspiration and the guidance for our service of the present. For this reason, emphasis should be laid upon the history of peoples rather than of states, upon the movement of social life rather than upon historical biography. It seems hardly credible but it is strictly true that the present writer left school without ever having heard of the Craft Guilds of the Middle ages; or of the great tradition of ecclesiastical architecture which enters so organically into the story of social development in England. He had heard in a somewhat casual manner of Wat Tyler and John Ball, and of other incidents which disturbed the normal flow of royal intrigue and adventure; but of the story of the common people he knew virtually nothing at all. Yet after all that is the history that chiefly matters; and much has yet to be done to give it its proper place in the school curriculum.

Whatever the subject-matter, its arrangement and presentation should be so ordered as to inspire and enable the child to make a willing and worthy contribution to the life of his community. But the social emphasis in education, if it is to be true to itself and indeed to the general history of mankind, must define society in wider terms than that of the immediate community. Mr. Wells has told us that mankind has been forever “pursuing the frontiers of its possible community.” Whether by revolution within the commonwealth, by imperial expansion or by fusion with other commonwealths, there has been an abiding impulse—erratic and often perverse in its operations—to broaden the basis of human fellowship. And in the present position of the world, there is nothing so urgent as to quicken a social sympathy wide enough to embrace the world. It is peculiarly the function of geography and history to serve this purpose. Geography should assume that frontiers are the lines at which peoples meet rather than part; and history should lay stress upon the forces that have made for human unity rather than for national power. If the writer may be permitted to indulge in a last personal reminiscence, the tendency in the teaching of history in the past may be illustrated by the fact that the outstanding impression left upon him by the school history was that the French were the hereditary enemies of the British; and it is something to the point to observe that the text books of American history have in the past failed to lay proper emphasis upon the circumstance that during the Revolutionary War the best mind of England was on the side of the colonists. The gratuitous and unhistorical prejudice which the traditional attitude in school history has bred is not a little accountable for the divisive tempers that have led to wars. To-day the shrinkage of the world has made this attitude more than ever disastrous; and in view of our hope of a League of Nations it is essential that geography and history in particular should be treated as the opportunity for a general expansion of social sympathy.

V

It is hardly necessary to point out that the conception of history which is pleaded for here includes the history of thought, of art, and of religion; and that so far as is possible, this history should be learnt by direct recourse to its sources in the classic literature and art of the past. But generous and comprehensive as the provision for acquiring knowledge should be, the educational process has not finished its business until it has habituated the youth to the task of using this knowledge as the basis and material of independent thought. Democracy faces no greater danger than the inability of the people to exercise a critical judgment upon the voices that clamour for their suffrages; and the experiences of war-time have shown that freedom is not inconsistent with a very dangerous unreflective docility on the part of the public. This danger is the greater when the staple of a people’s reading is the daily press, which envelops men in the tumult and the clangour of passing events without providing them with the longer perspective necessary to a valid judgment. The power of the demagogue and the tyranny of the press are to be mitigated only by an educational process which does two things—first of all, provides a background of general knowledge and interest, and second, turns out individuals able and accustomed to think for themselves. And just because the life of democracy requires free discussion, the school curriculum should contain stated provision for the discussion of current matters, which would turn out to be a powerful stimulant of independent thought, especially in its critical aspects. The more constructive and sustained elements in independent thought may be encouraged by a careful development of the time-honoured method of the essay. But whatever the precise methods may be, the aim must be the systematic encouragement of the habit of independent thought; and in this connection, with proper safeguards against putting a premium on “cussedness,” it is important that dissenting and minority opinions, which whether right or wrong contain some guarantee of independence, should be welcomed and valued as the promise of ultimate social usefulness.

VI

Important as the materials and methods of education are, we cannot afford to forget that there are two other elements of our problem, closely related to one another, which are in the end of greater importance. The first of these is the teacher. It is not a gratuitous slander upon the general body of teachers to say that the whole method of recruiting teachers and the conditions of the teaching profession tend to degrade teaching into a trade. A great deal needs to be done to exalt the teacher’s office in the public mind; and the teaching profession should be so honoured as to give it the first call upon the human material in the community. As things are, it is far too much regarded as a means of livelihood, comparatively easily qualified for, and tolerably well remunerated; and the training required for admission into the profession is quite inadequate. If only teaching were rightly esteemed and its practitioners held in such honour as even judges, who do a much inferior work, are held, it would be possible to exercise a far more careful selection of persons suited by their temperamental and moral characters for the work. For we have to look for something infinitely greater than the successful communication of knowledge, or the training of mental faculties. Robert Owen followed an essentially sound instinct when, having established a school for infants in New Lanark he put at the head of it a man who could neither read or write, but who was familiar with birds and flowers and had “a way with him.” Robert Louis Stevenson, writing of Wordsworth, says, “I do not know that you learn a lesson. You need not agree with any of his beliefs; and yet a spell is cast. Such are the best teachers. A dogma learned is only a new error, the old one was perhaps as good. But a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves and what is best in themselves that they communicate.” It was said during the education controversy in England that some teachers taught more religion in an hour’s arithmetic lesson than others did in a year of “religious instruction,” and the saying is true. It is the spirit communicated that makes the difference between a real and a spurious education.

Especially is this the case when we consider the business of education from the point of view of social efficiency. For the prerequisite of social efficiency is social vision, social passion; and this is supremely a matter of contagion. For this reason, the true type of teacher will be devoid of the pontifical, ex-cathedra temper and will rather seek out a relation of comradeship with his pupils. The form of a democratic education will be essentially co-operative; and its spirit will be that of fellowship. This brings us to the second outstanding point of our discussion, namely, the question of “atmosphere.” Upon this subject there is little more to be said than what is contained in Professor Dewey’s dictum that the school should so far as possible be a miniature of the society we desire to create. The creation of “atmosphere” is of course specifically the task of the faculty; and the eagerness and the enthusiasm of their participation in the more informal amenities of school life is an important factor in the process. But most of all is a genuine social passion in themselves the surest guarantee that they will help in the making of socially creative and effective persons.

Much is being said at the present time concerning the introduction of military training into schools. It is worth notice in passing that Mr. Fisher, the British Minister of Education, recently informed a deputation of miners that the government had canvassed the question and had decided that the innovation had neither educational nor military value and would not be adopted. It is no doubt true that military training would have a beneficial effect upon the physique of the boys; but, quite apart from its dubious value for education and any subsequent purpose, it must be observed that the genius of the military business is intrinsically hostile to the development of the democratic ideals. For the military organisation is a regimentation of men for power; it entails the mechanisation of the human material and imposes a discipline of uniformity upon those who are subject to it. Democratic education has to do with life, and its genius moves in the direction of the largest possible spontaneity and variation in the individuals with whom it has to do. Moreover, military discipline introduces the authoritarian temper into the atmosphere; and this is a temper altogether at variance with the spirit of frank comradeship in which a democratic education should be pursued. What advantages may accrue to the future in the shape of improved physical health and strength in the community is more than counter-balanced by the injection of an undemocratic virus into the minds of those who are called to sustain the democracy of the future.

Nor is it impossible to compensate ourselves for the loss of physical training consequent upon the rejection of military training. For there are other ways of providing for physical efficiency; and those other ways are more consistent with the aim of a democratic education. In the sports field, for instance, you have at once an instrument of physical training as well as a definite education in a team work, which does not depend upon uniform and synchronous movements commanded from without, but upon the intelligence and dexterity of the players themselves. Moreover, the sports field affords an illustration of the proper use of the competitive spirit. The military discipline has its eye upon potential enemies to be destroyed; the sports discipline has its eye upon rival teams of friends and thus always a cheer for the beaten team in the end. It has been observed that the difference in temper between the behaviour of the German and the English soldier was to be traced to the fact that the football field had played a large part in the training of the latter; and it is not unlikely that even the superior military efficiency of the English soldier in the latter stages of the war has to be attributed to the same circumstance. In any case, sportsmanship is nearer akin to the spirit of democracy than the military discipline.

A plea has been made for military training on the ground that the rhythm of its movements has a certain psychological value. That the place of rhythm in education has been neglected is indeed true; and there is little doubt that a more sustained attention to it would add much to physical grace and the joy and beauty of life. The question, however, remains whether the military rhythm which rests upon a principle of regularity is likely to have the psychological effects proper to such education as these pages contemplate. The rhythm of the folk-dance like the rhythm of the ballad is a far more accurate version of the rhythm which is natural to men and women; and the rhythm of Walt Whitman, which is of the same order, reflects the genuine rhythm of democracy. The Eurhythmics of Dalcroze, because they encourage a spontaneous self-expression through the free rhythmical movement of the body promise more for the future grace and beauty of democratic life than a military discipline can from its very nature do.

VII

The sum of the matter then is this, that the test of a true democratic education lies in the quality and power of the social vision it evokes in the growing child, in the measure of power and capacity it gives to the child to share in the realisation of the vision, and in this sharing to give to the child the inspiring and joyous promise of personal self-fulfilment. Here we have tried only to sketch in very rough and fragmentary outline what would appear to be the temper and the general configuration of such an educational process; and much has been omitted which naturally belongs to a full discussion of the subject. Of the place of dramatic and symbolic activities in education, generous notice should be taken in any extended treatment, for it is obvious, first of all that the dramatic and the symbolic make a peculiar appeal to the child, and second, that the social enthusiasm which it is our desire to quicken can be quickened more effectively in no other way. There is one point, however, upon which it might serve an immediate purpose to dwell. The graduation ceremony in an American school provides a fitting close to a school career; it rounds it off with dignity and solemnity. But something more than this should be done—whether on leaving school or college or trade school—in order to impress upon the individual that he is passing into another world demanding other and more responsible service. Some solemn ceremonial of initiation into the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, accompanied by every circumstance of gravity and reverence, should furnish the fitting close to the period of training. At present we slip out into the business of life in a ragged insignificant way. Our entry upon responsible citizenship should be signalised by a great public observance which should serve the purpose not only of launching the youth upon his course in life, but also of reminding the rest of the community of its vows and its obligations to the common life.[58]

58.  This discussion closes without any attempt to deal with the problem of education beyond the school age. The office of the University in democratic development is obviously large and important; but here again the writer confesses his inability to handle the subject adequately with any degree of confidence. Valuable suggestions concerning the social ministry of the University may be found in The Coming Polity, by Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, especially in the chapter on “The University Militant.”

HEADLEY BROS., ASHFORD, KENT & 18 DEVONSHIRE ST., E.C.2.

- Transcriber’s Notes:

- Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.

- Typographical errors were silently corrected.

- Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.

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Table of Contents

- THE UNFINISHED PROGRAMME OF DEMOCRACY
- CONTENTS
- PREFACE

- Chapter I. THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY

- I
- II
- III

- Chapter II. THE TESTS OF DEMOCRATIC PROGRESS

- I
- II
- III
- IV

- Chapter III. THE PECUNIARY STANDARD

- I
- II
- III
- IV

- Chapter IV. THE REDEMPTION OF WORK.

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII

- Chapter V. THE ACHIEVEMENT OF FREEDOM.

- I
- II
- III
- IV

- Chapter VI. THE PRACTICE OF FELLOWSHIP.

- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VII

- Chapter VII. THE ORGANISATION OF GOVERNMENT.

- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX

- Chapter VIII. A DEMOCRATIC WORLD.[44]

- I
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII

- Chapter IX. EDUCATION INTO DEMOCRACY.

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII

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