II. Good and Bad Government

CHAPTER II GOOD AND BAD GOVERNMENT GOVERNMENT means, or should mean, the right ordering of all. Modern government has de generated into tinkering with the wants or rights or liberties of classes or sections or groups, and it is rare, in these days, to hear a political discussion which takes adequate account of the interests of the whole of the community. The problem before statesmen and other serious citizens is, as Adam Smith puts it, how to arrange that there shall be a " plentiful subsistence " for the 43,000jOOO people who inhabit Great Britain. In approaching that problem there are two big general facts to be borne in mind. The first is the fact that during the Victorian era, notwithstanding all the blemishes on the social life of the time, not withstanding all its shortcomings, all its faults, so widely advertised to-day, that period did provide in this island a better subsistence for the people than had ever been provided before, or had ever been provided in any other country.

Then follows the second big fact, and it is a dis quieting one, that to-day there are other countries in which there is a better subsistence for the people as a whole than we are able to provide·' here. We have sunk relatively in the matter of the general standard of living to a second or third position. Keeping these two facts in mind, we can approach the problem of providing 'a plentiful subsistence for the population of Britain in two distinct ways. We can look at the people of the country in the Indi23 24 The Return to Laisser Faire vidualistway and think rather of the possibilities and the powers of each of them, as individuals, or we can look at them in the more· fashionable Col lectivist way, and think chiefly of their powers as a State or a community. Just as there are prevailing winds so there are prevailing opinions. Society at any given time has a tendency to look at things in a given way, and there is always a public mind at work in one direction or another. If we analyse this great mind of the public, which for thirty or forty years has been thinking in the Collectivist way, and attempt to write a recipe for its composition, giving the constituent thoughts that make it up, we find several easily distinguishable elements.

It consists of five main conclusions, all of which, I suggest, are entirely wrong. It begins with the general assumption that these 43,000,000 people are a hopeless mass of ignorance-· the view of Carlyle that they are" mostly fools." There is, of course, much to be said for that point of view; it is a view that can be argued; it may even have some truth in , it, but it is the most hopeless and helpless point of view when held by statesmen or as a philosophy of government. Observe the way in which it works out to-day. We need not select mare than half-a-dozen of the scores of _examples that are available. This great public mind decides that these 43,000,000 people cannot arrange their own work and so establishes for their benefit a Ministry of Labour. It further decides that we are no judges of our own food, so we must have a Food Council. Then we cannot be Good and Bad Government 25 trusted with our own health, so a Ministry of Health is set up. This mass is incapable of finding shelter, so in every district housing officials must be appointed. It cannot cultivate the land satisfac torily,we have therefore to spend millions on heaven-sent institutions like the Ministry of Agri culture. It does not export the right goods to the right markets, consequently it must have a Depart ment of Overseas Trade. It is, as we now learn, no judge of a film, and some appropriate department must therefore be established to put that right.

That is, in a broad way, what the public mind is thinking, or is asked to think, to-day. Whatever may be the theory of the matter, the facts are unfortunate for the supporters of the Col lectivist point of view. In the year 1913-14, in pur suance of the .policy dictated by the prevailing opinion of the State mind, we spent the sum of £ 83,000,000 on such services as I have mentioned. In 1926-7, for the same sort of services, we spent £ 311,400,000. Yet it is undeniable that as our ex penditure in all those respects has increased, so the results that we hoped to obtain have diminished. Turning to the second assumption upon which the public mind works, we find it to be the belief that by diligent search persons can be found free from all the ignorance shown by the mass, who can be put into positions of authority where they may direct the rest in the better performance of their proper functions. That is the theory of the matter, and Individualists may recall with profit the forecast of 11erbert Spencer, who, in " Man Versus the State,"

26 The Return to Laisser Faire some sixty years ago, wrote the most remarkable prophecy of the position as it actually exists to-day. I venture to assert that in practice all that we accomplish is a scramble by persons with influence, of one kind or another, to invent jobs for people who fear to test their qualities in the open market. The third assumption, again wrong, is that when such persons have .been placed in positions of authority, the people as a whole will respond to their leadership. Two hundred years ago Montesquieu told us that one of the dangers of organised society was· that people were led continually to desire the advantages of society without any of the burdens of it. This statement is proved over and over again. When you appoint officials, people are tempted to forget their. personal responsibility and to leave the struggle for existence in the hands of those who pro fess to know all about it. In the great public mind there follows next the assumption, again, as I sug gest, wrong, that when the officials have been found they will do their jobs. It is far from any wish of mine to write a word of disrespect or show any lack of appreciation of the Civil Service on the personal side, and.1 hope I shall never be guilty of doing so.

But it does seem to me impossible to do a job which fronl its nature cannot be done. Many kinds of work cannot be well done without the stimulus of competition, or where there is no real necessity to give satisfaction. Good work may often become impossible when it is free from any real penalties in the event of failure. Let us look Good and Bad Government 27 for a moment at the matter in a simple and homely way. Take possibly the best of the Civil Servants, the panel doctors,and let us go to tea with a panel doctor' s wife. That is a useful way of getting at the real situation-to talk to a man's wife. Just imagine what she is really thinking and the order of importance in which she, good soul,places her husband's functions. What is her first thought? That he should draw his fees from the benevolent State. Her second thought is that he should look after his private practice, and her third that. he should give due consideration to the complicated business of endeavouring to understand official pro cedure and take his due share in the agitation to get better terms and better conditions. When these three things are properly attended to the panel doc tor's wife is prepared to consider the panel patient, but only on condition that he will queue up at the hour appointed not by the patient, but by the doctor; and that in queueing up he will absolutely divest himself of any vestige of the proper attitude of the customer towards the supplier of service.

In this process of analysing the great public mind we find that underlying all the assumptions is the last that I will mention, the assumption that all men are alike; an assumption that is carried to its logical conclusion by a logical, bureaucratic Moscow; an assumption .that is simply devastating in its reactions. That, it will be said, is an exaggerated picture. But it should be remembered that it does not, of course, mean that all government is bad-that we 28 The Return to Laisser Faire can do without government. It does mean, how ever, that government is too serious, too responsible, too risky an undertaking to enter upon lightly, and that no extension of the powers or function~ of government should be permitted until it is demon strated beyond any possibility of doubt that there is no other way of achieving the desired end. Such agitations as are now proceeding in connection with the Ministry of Transport or the Food Council ought, in my judgment, to be suspended, as they re quire far more consideration than is possible in the circumstances before any of the proposals they put forward can be justified.

Hooker told us that no prince or potentate ought to propound a law except by " express commission immediately and personally received from God," or by the consent of the persons upon whom it was proposed to impose the law. ", Laws they are not," says Hooker, "which public approbation hath not made so." I am not informed whether the Ministry of Transport has received express commission im mediately and personally from God, but I submit that nothing in the nature of public approbation can be claimed for the latest of its products, the Road Traffic Bill, with its ninety-two clauses. A simple illustration of the bill's effect, if-it be come law, can be found in Clause 62. Under the bill, the taxi-driver who may think that his carburet tor is not working satisfactorily and may wish to substitute one of another make, will have his atten tion called by an official to this clause, which says: " That on any alteration being made in the structure Good and Bad Government 29 or equipment of the vehicle he must forthwith give notice to the Public Services Vehicles Examiner of the licensing authority which granted the license, and if he fails to do so shall be guilty of an offence."

Ninety-two such clauses I-which mean in plain English the arresting of any progress in the matter of transport in this country, and the setting up of yet another oppressive bureaucracy. Or take the present agitation to re-establish the Ministry of Food. We are the best fed nation in the world because our food has hitherto been left to the free play of individual enterprise, spurred and checked and perfected by competition. In the course of a few months, we have lost the advantages of cream; fish, fruit and other delicacies are becom ing scarcer, and the next generation is likely to be better supplied with forms and to be correspond ingly short of nourishment. There is an even more serious side to this tend ency in the State mind to override the individual, a side on which there is not even a shadow of a joke, , and that is the danger which it presents to the demo cratic system itself. We are the guardians of the sacred trust of democracy, and to-day we are abus ing that trust in such a way that when, as must hap pen presently, our 3°,000,000 electors discover that food and houses are not made with votes, they will give up the votes and abandon the blessings of the democratic system.

The assumption is that 30,000,000 people in the exercise of the franchise can manage everything. They cannot. The assumption is that they can 30 The Return to Laisser Faire know everything. They cannot. These are as sumptions full of danger, to which it is necessary to call serious public attention if we are to get back to a recognition of the position of the individual, for it is obvious that one of the rights of the indi vidual is to know about his particular job rather better than others, and certainly better than the Government. We are such poor guardians of .the democratic in stitutions secured for us at the cost of immense effort and sacrifice by our forefathers that the chief use we make of the power to govern ourselves is, day by day, to pass larger and larger slices of that power over to an.ever-increasing and ever more oppressive bureaucracy. If the matter were not so serious there would be a funny side to it. Think of society as a crowd standing on the pavement of Fleet Street looking at the Lord Mayor's Show. One bright individual hits upon the idea of getting a soap box and stand ing on it. Thus he can see better than the rest of the crowd. That is a good and sensible notion from his point of view. But presently everybody gets a soap box-and each box is labelled "work or maintenance," " right to live," "insurance,"

" grant in aid," "subsidy," " safeguard," "tariff," "dole," "pension," or " guarantee" ; and the only result is that the whole crowd of which society is composed, instead of standing upon the firm foundation of Mother Earth, is balancing upon a flimsy basis of soap boxes which must in time collapse.

Good and Bad Government 31 We have poured out the national income to carry out what I may call the soap box policy until we have arrived at an expenditure of £ 3 per week per family-that being the sum that week by week goes into and comes out of the public purse. What, then, is the remedy? How can we re store purity to democratic government and free the individual from bureaucratic oppression? I believe that it is time to think matters over again, to examine carefully the policy of Individualism, the policy which once put Britain and the British in a position rather higher than that of any other country or any other people. Our Individualist case is strengthened when we reflect that· these modern tendencies are built upon bad history, for the time has yet to come when we shall have a really reliable popular history of the Industrial Revolution and of the Victorian period. Such a history will have to be written in a new tone and a new light, so that we may begin to realise some of the blessings that were given to us in those glorious days.

Reference has already been made to the disquiet ing fact that this country has now to accept a second position from the point of view of the subsistence of the people. ,The United States of America is a stronghold of Individualism, in the economic sphere; and America has produced a standard of living far ahead of anything that we have attained here. That difference needs to be brought out by inviting a broad comparison of Britain and America. The prevailing opinion in the United States may 32 The Return to Laisser Faire be said to move in the opposite direction to prevail ing opinion in this country. Imagine those two old gentlemen, John Bull and Uncle Sam, each explaining his point of view to his worker son. What they are saying to-day is, I think, something like this: JOHN BULL: You are a good fellow, do the best you can; don't kill yourself at it. You were not made for work; a happy life is what you came here for. If yon find things too hard for you, there is an insurance fund and a dole and an old-age pen sion at your service. If at all times our arrange ments for your well-being and comfort do not in every way meet with your approval, yo~ can rely on the Government, or the universities, or the trade unions, or some other highly intellectual body of persons to· devise new means for your perfect comfort.' So much for John Bull. What is Uncle Sam's advice?

UNCLE SAM : You are a man : you are as good as any other man; anything which any other man can do you can do if you will try. Life is not a bed of roses; it is a struggle with the forces of Nature. ,The world depends upon work, effort and endeavour on your part, and on the part of everybody else. If you succeed you help to lift others up; if you fail you help to push others down. So get out and get on, and be quick about it; and, above all, remember that you are an American· citizen and that America is destined to lead mankind. It surely cannot be denied that the whole force of Good and Bad Government 33 public opinion in this country is directed to teaching our people to lean, whereas on the other side of the Atlantic the whole force of public opinion is directed to encouraging the people to push. That is, in a single sentence, the difference between the Indi vidualist and the Collectivist conceptions of the State, and from our point of view it is a very dangerous difference.

We plead for a return to the Individualist point of view. We should concentrate our thoughts on men and worn.en as individuals, realising that each one of them represents a piece of God's best work, and that the task before us is to give them a chance to do their own best work in their own way. 3 CHAPTER III MERRIE ENGLAND DISCONTENT is the mainspring of action, and if applied to constructive purposes, it 1S to be en couraged. A certain amount of Socialism is good for any nation. It provides a background of criticism and comment which keeps the work of the nation constantly under examination and forms a safe guard against complacency and satisfaction, danger& that would bring any society to an end; but in these days, ten years after the war,we have a rather larger proportion of Socialism than is good or convenient. The reason is not hard to seek. The useful Socialist, the man who helps society, is always under 30 years of age. The dangerous Socialist, and there are never very many of them, is the man of over 50. It is the men and women of from 30 to 50 who do the work of the nation and on whom the criticism of the young Socialist and the· cynicism of the old Tories act as useful spurs and brakes. At 30 the normal man and woman begin to realise that happiness and prosperity depend upon their per sonal efforts, and 30 is the age when the active Indi vidualist starts on all the things that really matter to society.