CHAPTER XVIII POSTFACE

IT is out of respect for the memory of Charles Fourier that this concluding section has been designated a ‘Postface’ In the foregoing chapters, some attempt has been made to present the sources and origins of socialist thought, and to consider the leading and most influential figures in this long line of development. Before concluding, it may be as well to bring the threads together; to ascertain, if possible, what it all comes to; and—with our eyes more especially on our own country—to ask in what directions we are being led to-day.

It was observed in the Prologue that it is easier to say who are, by common consent, the ‘great socialists,’ than to give a neat definition of socialism which will embrace all socialists and exclude all non-socialists. The internecine feuds between the various socialist schools and sects provide ample testimony that one man's socialism is another man's heresy, and that a dissentient comrade is usually regarded as more worthy of hatred and contempt than is the common enemy. Waiving for the present the possibility of framing a tentative definition of socialism, or (should that prove too difficult and delicate a task) the possibility of at least expiscating the more positive elements commonly found in socialism, a first stage may be reached if we consider what socialism is not. As the words are commonly understood, socialism is ordinarily regarded as opposed to individualism; nor, despite certain reservations that might be made, is the contrast unjustified. In the classical expressions of individualism and laissez faire, the underlying assumption is that each individual is competent to look after himself; that he is the best judge of what is good for him; that, without instruction from any outside authority, he best knows how to run his own business; and that the best service he can render to his day and generation is to look after his own affairs. All unconsciously, we serve others best when we allow ourselves to be guided by enlightened self-interest. We are each led by an invisible hand to promote an end that is no part of our intention. God, thus adroitly concealed behind an invisible hand, is in his heaven; and all's right with a world governed by competition and enlightened self-interest. St. Paul, who in some respects was a rather hardened individualist, comes rather near the core of the matter when he lays on the Thessalonians the injunction ‘that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business.’

On this question of the relation of individualism to socialism, there is, however, this to be said. While it may be convenient to contrast individualism and socialism, they are not so much opposed as complementary principles. There is no one who is completely and exclusively an individualist, just as there is no one who is completely and exclusively a socialist. We are each of us an individual in society. We express ourselves as individuals through society and (whether we like it or not) we depend on society. At times and in certain circumstances, above all at the great crises of life, we all recognise, or should recognise, the supreme importance of ourselves to ourselves, the necessity of fulfilling our own lives in our own way, though the whole world be against us. ‘Necessity is laid upon me,’ said the Apostle, meaning thereby pretty much what Luther meant in various expressions which have become almost proverbial, namely, that in the matter in question, powers and principalities notwithstanding, he would obey the dictates of his own inner self. ‘Kirk and State may gae to Hell,’ said Robert Burns, when embarking on a less laudable enterprise. This is the self-regarding motive which leads each one to regard himself as an ‘end’ to be realised; it is present in all, though it may be long dormant in the docile and the downtrodden. In the extreme case, it may become the right of rebellion, counting the world and life itself well lost, if the price otherwise exacted involves disobedience to the necessity laid upon us.

The other instinct common to all is, of course, that of kinship with our fellows, the feeling that we are parts of a larger whole, that we need society and that we need a healthy society. It is the instinctive realisation of the Aristotelian maxim that man outside society, or apart from the State, is less than a man. Whether these two fundamental instincts be defined as the self-regarding and the other-regarding motives; whether they be classed as egotism and altruism is immaterial; by whatever name they may be called, they are present in all. Moreover, the line between them is neither sharp nor well-defined. In a society still based on the family, each one obviously projects his personality into his family; but the care and love of children and grandchildren, though obviously it is rooted in the self, has clearly altruistic infusions. A Père Goriot, who starves himself for the sake of his daughters, exhibits at worst a modified egotism. But beyond the family, there are groups and relationships (Church membership; trade union membership, etc.), where such sacrifices as we may make for others are nevertheless undergone for a group with which we are already identified. An appeal is admitted to have ‘a claim upon us,’ in proportion as we have already identified ourselves with the cause on behalf of which the appeal is made. In this way the transition from extreme egotism to pure altruism is marked by a long series of gradations.

One other point may be noted on the threshold of these general observations. It is agreed—and the point is not worth discussing—that a society whose members were governed exclusively by self-regarding motives could not exist. It would be a war of all against all, in which life would indeed be nasty, brutish and short. But it is equally true that a world in which altruism and the other-regarding motives had completely displaced the self-regarding motives would be an intolerable nightmare. If, on an over-literal interpretation of Godwin's fundamental principle, we were all to divest ourselves of our trousers every time we met anyone whose need was greater than ours, the business of life in street and market-place would make but slow progress; and even if (still on Godwinian principles) the exchange were not finally effected, the discussion of the issues involved would nevertheless be a time-devouring and obstructive process. A person, moved solely by altruistic motives would be on the rates in a fortnight and a burden to the community at large, having exchanged for naught the glorious privilege of being independent. Let ‘every man shift for all the rest,’ exclaimed the befuddled Stephano, ‘and let no man take care for himself.’ It is a sentiment which he probably restated with greater lucidity when he returned to sobriety; for in itself it is a principle which leads to chaos as surely as does its opposite extreme.

In this broad sense, it may be said that the difference between the individualist and the socialist is not that they stand for uncompromisingly opposed and non-intermingling principles, but that they each represent a fusion of these two principles in varying proportions. According as the one or the other predominates, a man for the time being may be conveniently described as a socialist or an individualist. On the whole, socialism places society first, and points to the chaos and conflicts which may result from an unbridled individualism, pleading for an ordered State in which the community, or some authority representing the community, would have the ordering of things. On the whole, individualism places in the forefront the supreme importance of the personality of each citizen, pleading that he be given the opportunity of self-development, and (so far as may be) untrammelled freedom in his lawful enterprises. In the one case, society comes first, and the individual is (or should be) of no importance as against the claims of society; in the other, the individual is what matters, and the State (avoiding for the present the question of the relation of the State to the community) exists for the individual, and finds its justification in the life of the individual. This is doubtless a somewhat generalised and idealised contrast, subject to many reservations; it is also upset by the existence of the anarchist tradition which tends to nullify all easy generalisations. Within limits, however, it is a defensible statement as a first stage on the journey towards a closer elucidation of the essence of various types of socialism.

Indeed, it is probably wise to refrain from searching with undue diligence for any precision in the matter of a definition, warned in advance by the cloud of wholly inadequate definitions that clutter up the ordinary sources of illumination in these matters. The older writers (such as Flint and Graham)¹ amused themselves and instructed their readers by assembling representative definitions, which are sometimes of interest inillustrating the path by which we have come. Proudhon is quoted as having defined socialism as consisting of ‘every aspiration towards the amelioration of society’ ‘In that case,’ said the examining magistrate, anticipating Sir William Harcourt by a good half-century, ‘we are all socialists.’² Proudhon should have done better than this. Sidgwick in one place appears to make socialism equivalent to ‘the mitigation of the harshest inequalities in the present distribution of incomes.’³ There is an interesting line of French thought which extends from Janet, through Leroy-Beaulieu and de Laveleye to Emile Faguet which finds the whole essence, the idée mère, of Socialism in a striving for equality. ‘Every socialistic doctrine,’ says M. de Laveleye, ‘aims at introducing greater equality into social conditions; and, secondly, it tries to realise these reforms by the action of the law or the State.’ Socialism for him is essentially ‘égalitaire et niveleur.’⁴ With characteristic incisiveness, Faguet opens his discussion by asserting: ‘J'appelle socialisme toute tendance ayant pour objet l'égalite réelle entre les hommes.’⁵

On all this type of definition, two observations are necessary in order to get ideas in their proper perspective. Firstly, definitions of the nature of that offered by M. de Laveleye point merely to reform, and there is no one who does not at least profess to be a reformer. Now there is doubtless an evolutionary as well as a revolutionary socialism (though the former would be disowned by the latter as spurious), yet even the evolutionary socialist aims at something more than mere reform. He aims at a complete transformation of the social order, and though he hopes to attain this by constitutional means, nevertheless the final result is meant to be an uprooting of the existing scheme of things and its replacement by another. The socialist is, or ought to be, something more than a reformer. The second general observation is suggested by the unusually fatuous definition given in an idle moment by Proudhon, though indeed there are many other pegs on which it might be hung. It is that there is nothing peculiarly socialistic in an aspiration for a better world, or in sensitiveness towards the houseless heads and unfed sides of the poor. There is indeed a very real, and doubtless sincere, type of benevolence, associated with what may be called Tory despotism. One need not be a socialist in order to feel indignation against those who sow upon the furrows of unrighteousness, or who buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes. It requires more than indignation to make a socialist; and not all who are indignant are socialists. It ought not to be necessary to say this, but apparently it is.

Socialism, in short, beyond indignation and reform, demands the abolition of the private ownership of much (if not all) wealth, and requires that the wealth so transferred should in some way be vested in, and operated by the community as a whole. Always remembering that anarchism is in a class by itself, a definition which did good service in its time represents what may be fairly taken as the orthodox view in this country during the period when there was an approach to socialist orthodoxy: ‘Socialism denies individual private property, and affirms that Society organised as the State should own all wealth, direct all labour and compel the equal distribution of all produce.’¹

Lastly, in this attempt to find something approaching to a definition which will cover much, if not the whole, of the field, we may, though without undue approval, note what M. Hubert Bourgin has to say on the subject. M. Bourgin has spent a lifetime closeted with Les Systèmes Socialistes, and he is therefore entitled to be listened to with more than respect. In groping for the criteria which determine whether a system of thought should or should not be allowed to pass the barrier into the enclosure reserved for his Systèmes Socialistes, he formulates four points which he enumerates, gracefully but peremptorily, in a series of paragraphs beginning: N'est pas socialiste tout système qui ne...² He thus proceeds by a system of exclusion. In the first place he excludes any system which does not imply ‘a system of total reconstitution of society’; to be socialist, a system of thought must extend to the sum-total of social relationships, to the whole of the institutions which make up society at the time when the system was conceived. Secondly, although to the ordinary man it seems implied in the foregoing, he excludes all systems which do not involve a radical criticism of existing social institutions; on this critical side, it must put in question ‘l'institution sociale toute entière, dans son existence, dans son organisation ou dans son fonctionnement.’ Thirdly, he excludes all systems which do not imply the idea of a ‘régime social coordonné’; and fourthly, all systems which do not contain ‘un principe social d'intervention dans les relations entre les individus.’

Thus M. Bourgin, in his gropings for a dividing line between what is socialist and what is not socialist. He is perhaps unduly strict. The first and second test-questions emphasise that socialism is no mere matter of reform, no mere ‘tinkering’; but that all things must be questioned and all things made new. It is, however, probable that there are some institutions that do not necessarily call for reconstitution. Marriage, for example, would be regarded by most as one of the institutions, ‘dont la société se compose’; yet socialists do not necessarily desire the réconstitution of marriage—nor are those who may desire the abolition of marriage necessarily socialists. The third of M. Bourgin's conditions points to what in to-day's phraseology would be called ‘planning’; and the fourth calls for some central authority with powers of intervention and regulation. In sum, M. Bourgin, while wisely eschewing any crisp definition, postulates a wholesale criticism of all aspects of the existing order; a fundamental transformation of all things; something for convenience called ‘planning’; and a central authority with powers of intervention, regulation and control. Whether in fact all the types of socialism discussed in M. Bourgin's Systérnes Socialistes passed all these tests on their merits, or (like some other candidates) through the kindly indulgence of the examiner, is another question.

Leaving aside the quest for a water-tight definition as an enlightening journey that leads nowhere, it may be profitable, before seeking to classify types of socialism, to confront certain fundamental questions relating to the ultimate ideals of socialism. In certain respects, it may be suggested that socialism aims at ends, and is actuated by motives that are ultimately incompatible. Broadly speaking, one would not be far wrong in saying that socialism has two main springs of inspiration. It is, in the first place, a protest against the injustice of this world; witnessing the grinding of the faces of the poor and the monstrous inequalities in the conditions of men, it contrasts this repulsive reality with a better world where justice will prevail. But socialism is also a protest against the inefficiency, the mess, and the incompetence of this present competitive world. The Fabians, seeing whole cohorts of individualistic milk-carts delivering milk in each street; Fourier, seeing every miserable housewife cooking her miserable dinner on her individualistic fire, exclaim that this is not how things should be done. We compete when we ought to co-operate. We get in each other's way, and we waste our efforts, because we never see the tasks of life steadily nor do we see them whole. Now justice (if we only knew what it was) is an admirable ideal, and so is efficiency; but they are wholly distinct ‘values.’ Justice concerns the individual, and is something that is promised to the individual, that he should, for example, have a ‘fair deal’—purposely keeping to appropriately nebulous language. It is in the working of the whole machine that the socialist looks for efficiency: society is to be an efficient organism. But not only are efficiency and justice distinct values; they represent ideals which may conflict. To attain to an efficient society, one may have to be unjust to the individual: part of the price of justice may be a certain measure of inefficiency. At one time the right to the whole produce of labour was one of the leading catchwords of socialism, springing from the side of socialism that is based on justice; but at least in some of its interpretations, it was the most individualistic of all catch-words, and the most anti-social principle imaginable. Justice, inasmuch as it is a protest against injustice, is a humanitarian principle; but efficiency and humanitarianism are not easy bed-companions. In the extreme case efficiency may require that the individual should be entirely suppressed, which, in its way, is the height or depth of injustice. In some countries and in some quarters, and at certain times, it has even been suggested that the old and the useless should be liquidated as a contribution to national and social efficiency, just as in the bee-hive the drones are eliminated when their opportunities of usefulness are exhausted.

The same point may be put from a somewhat different angle. It may be a hard saying, yet it is true, that of all systems of government that which is most austere, that which demands most from the individual, is the socialist commonwealth. By its very name it proclaims that what comes first is society, the commonwealth; that the individual is subordinate and must be prepared, if need be, to be sacrificed for a higher good. It should be a gospel of sacrifice, of surrender, of renunciation. Needless to say, it has not proceeded on these lines, above all in popular propaganda. Instead of imposing burdens on the individual, it has rather tended to promise all things to all men. Another possible conflict of ultimate ideals is that involved in the incompatibility between liberty and order—which may indeed be but a subhead of the point already considered. Socialism, in its leading exponents, almost invariably represents itself as a liberating force; its purpose is to deliver the proletarian from his chains, to give real content to rights which may be ineffective and nominal in present conditions. Nor can it be denied that the influence of socialism has indubitably been in this direction. But it is equally clear that socialism cannot be a society of free men, guaranteeing to all the right to a full life, the development of their personality and all the rest of it, consistently with the pursuit of its other object, that of being an ordered society intent on ends to which all are subordinate. The one ideal excludes the other. In some visions, the ordered state to be attained under socialism must involve a grave curtailment of liberty.

It may indeed be doubted whether socialism gains—or indeed whether any system of thought gains—from being mixed up overmuch with the idea of justice, so fundamental in Proudhon, to mention one name only. It was somewhat of an obsession with Emile Faguet that with the idea of abstract justice we get nowhere, and although he expressed his views so uncompromisingly that they almost became an ‘odious paradox’¹ he was substantially justified. Love we know; efficiency we think we know; ‘kindness,’ which Mr. Hawtrey has recently sanctified, we can guess at; but what is justice? God Almighty himself does not aim at justice, so far as the human eye may descry; nor has official theological dogma made any such claim on his behalf, either with regard to this world or the next. ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.’ One is sent into the world with normal equipment; another is born a cripple, or blind, or an idiot, burdened with the seeds of disease. We enter this world with different capacities, endowments, defects and deformities, and we suffer very different afflictions in our journey through life. In all this, there is no ‘justice’: we can but reflect that the economy of heaven is dark. We may ask despairingly whether they of Babylon are then better than they of Sion; but the only answer we can get is that ‘on ne raisonne pas avec Dieu,’ as Proudhon remarked somewhere, coming nearer the mark than he usually did when he trespassed into theology, and, as it happens, almost echoing one of the grievances of Job. Nor in the ordinary affairs of this world is it possible to give ‘justice’ any satisfying meaning, or indeed any meaning other than that it is that to which a man is entitled under contract or by virtue, of the law of the country. Even a Court of Justice does not ordinarily administer ‘justice’; it determines rights in certain conditions, but whether the contract which it enforces is just, whether the Act which it administers is just, is not ordinarily before it. When Portia said: ‘The Jew shall have all justice,’ she knew and everyone else knew that justice here merely meant the unduly literal enforcement of a badly drawn contract, and that in fact the Jew was going to get what was coming to him. But is this justice?

We are now perhaps in a position to classify the various types of socialism. If their differences can be carefully catalogued, what they have in common may also become apparent. It is not impossible that the different types of socialism represent different attempted answers to the same question. If so, what is that question? This exercise in classification is all the more necessary, because there prevails in the use of certain terms not a little confusion which it is now doubtless impossible to eradicate. In particular, one of the most important of all, ‘communism,’ has in fact changed its meaning with the passage of time, and has at different stages had very different associations.

Waiving, as irrelevant for our present purpose, certain movements which have socialist infusions, though they are themselves doubtfully socialist—such as the co-operative movement—the socialist systems which have been prominent in the last generation fall broadly into four groups. There is, firstly, anarchism; secondly, collectivism; thirdly, communism; and fourthly, there is the type represented by syndicalism and Guild Socialism, for which no convenient name is in existence. In the early days, Faguet suggested for the fourth type ‘Appropriationism,’ which is an ungainly word, and, as things have developed, is now inaccurate. Perhaps we may call this fourth type ‘trade union socialism’ which, as it happens, is more or less a translation of ‘syndicalism’ without, however, the associations which that word has acquired. As briefly as may be, how do these types differ?

Of anarchism little need be said. Strictly speaking, it is hardly entitled to appear as a socialist system at all; and nothing is easier than to show, in the lecture room or on paper, that anarchism, so far from being a type of socialism, is the complete antithesis of most forms of socialism. An anarchist is a liberal who carries his distrust of the State so far that he desires to abolish it altogether. Yet in practice anarchism works out as an extreme form of socialism. It has its roots in that side of socialism which seeks for freedom; and as the State is the greatest of all tyrants, the State (if we may waive the Almighty) is the chief enemy. Having abolished the State, the work of the world will be carried on by voluntary associations—spontaneously hatched like mayflies and with something of the mayfly's delightful evanescence. Anarchism is rather the charming dream of an innocent child. It postulates the passing of all political bones of contention; the evaporation of all passion; the reign of reason. In the matter of the relation existing between anarchism and other forms of socialism, it is of extreme significance that the ultimate long-term ideal of the Marx-Engels-Lenin tradition, after the State has withered away, is a condition of anarchy, indistinguishable from other dreams of anarchism. If Marx and Lenin detested anarchism, it was not because they disapproved of the ultimate vision, but because the anarchists were so foolish as to imagine that the vision could be realised forthwith, as the result of a mere act of volition.

Collectivism and communism may conveniently be considered together. ‘Communism’ is the word with the longer pedigree, as witness The Communist Manifesto; J. S. Mill's use of the word is also of interest. ‘Collectivism,’ as a word, is a much more recent arrival. Collectivism has gradually come to denote that type of socialism which concentrates attention on the side of production. At its purest it is seen in the Fabians. By the nationalisation of industry all enterprise is ultimately vested in the State. The private capitalist goes; the critics suggest that State capitalism arrives. All, or nearly all, would ultimately become employees of the State, which, as the unquestioned monopolist in every industry, would be exalted to a place of peculiar power. But collectivism need not aim at equality: as there is a hierarchy and much inequality in the Civil Service now, so in that extended Civil Service which will be represented by the nationalised industries of the collectivist State, there will be grades and ranks, marked by appropriate differences of rewards.

Communism is much more elusive; but it may be seen, inter alia, in More's Utopia, and in the brief glimpse which Lenin allows his readers of a far-off distant paradise. Communism is the socialism of consumption: it is the socialism in which all, metaphorically speaking, eat out of a common pot, sharing as members of a family. It would be wrong to regard communism as involving distribution on an equal basis, for nothing is less equal than formal equality. Rather is it distribution according to needs. Assume—and it is an easy assumption—that more than enough has been produced for all, through the love that all men have for their work; assume—and again it is an easy assumption—that in a world cured of its unreason, all men will be reasonable. Then, if reasonable, they will not take more than they require, and the problem of distribution can be solved by allowing all to take what they require ‘from the Halls.’ Collectivism then, we may say, is the socialism of ordered production, prompted by the desire for efficiency, not necessarily unduly revolutionary in the matter of distribution. Communism is the socialism of consumption, prompted by the impulse to equality and justice, and not unduly curious of how the goods are in fact being produced.

There the matter might rest, but for the confusion which has resulted in the last generation owing to the adoption of the word ‘communist’ by the dominant party in Russia. For sufficient reasons, Lenin desired to change the name of his party; for quite plausible reasons, he selected a name honourably associated with Marx's earlier days. The result, however, has been anything but fortunate, for the communist party is in no way a communist party—yet. As has been noted in the chapter on Lenin, there is a long journey to be traversed before that stage is reached. There is, firstly, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is a régime of rigorous repression, followed by a long process of the withering away of the State—a process the very beginning of which is necessarily, according to Stalin, indefinitely delayed. Then, when the State has finally withered away, we may expect communism. The communism of the communist party is thus postponed to almost as remote a future as it is possible to contemplate. It is rather important to realise this, because orthodox ‘bourgeois’ labour parties have at times shown little inclination to be identified with ‘communism,’ and have in certain quarters been harshly criticised and misunderstood in consequence. Communism is a great ideal: it is the vision of the brotherhood of man at last realised, of mankind living as a family. Even if they are impractical, it is the communist and the anarchist who have the loftiest vision. When, however, the bourgeois Labour M.P. avoids too close contact with communism, it is not that he wishes to disown the poetic vision of an ultra-remote future: what disconcerts him is the dictatorship of the proletariat of the immediate present, in which the dictatorship is more prominent than the proletariat. Enough, however, to note here that in the commonest use of the word in the last generation, ‘communist’ has, strictly speaking, been a misnomer.

The fourth general group corresponds to Faguet's ‘appropriationism,’ a word devised when this tendency was still at the elementary stage of ‘the Mine to the Miners,’ ‘the Railways to the Railwaymen,’ ‘the Sewers to the Scavengers,’ and so on. In this phase, it is best regarded as an attempt to find a plausible solution to the problem of property. For if the objection to the absentee landowner, the absentee mineowner, the absentee shareholder generally, is that he is in fact an absentee-owner, doing nothing and living prosperously notwithstanding, it is a fairly obvious suggestion that justice will be done and the unjust rights of property extirpated, if the land is given to the peasant, the mine to the mine-worker, and generally the tools and instruments to those who in fact are doing the work. But syndicalism and Guild Socialism are a great deal more than such ‘appropriation’ of the means of production by the workers concerned; indeed Guild Socialism would deny that it is appropriationist in this sense at all. Trade union socialism is best viewed as resulting from Marxian hatred of the class State, seen as a potent instrument in the class war, combined with an infusion from anarchist sources, suggesting that perhaps the State is not really necessary. Putting aside the State, can the working classes build up their own machine to displace the State, or—if the State may not be wholly displaced—to reduce the State to its proper and comparatively insignificant rôle? The answer is that in the one case there are the syndicats, the trade unions; in the other that there may be guilds, obtained by a slight refashioning of trade unions, and if something like a State is left, it need be but a shadow of its former self, with its functions delimited and defined. And thus a world arises in which the government, so far as government is necessary, shall be upon the shoulders of the workers' organisations, and in these the workers will enjoy freedom from tyranny.

In the light of this classification of the four main types of socialism, it is not difficult to arrive at what is the central question of socialism. We saw at the outset of this section that socialism and individualism are complementary in this sense, that socialism tends to place society first and to subordinate the individual, whereas individualism underlines the importance of the individual and only thinks secondarily of society. It is a question of the relative emphasis placed on the obvious right (or duty) of self-expression, and the equally ineluctable fact that there are others who make claims (and hampering claims) upon us. In short, the contrast between individualism and socialism springs from the eternal question of the relation of the individual to society. Now it has been sufficiently hammered into us in the last generation that we must not confuse society and the State; nor should we. But just precisely what the State is, and what should be the relation of the State to society are questions which are not easily to be answered. Heaven forbid that at what (it is hoped) is the fag-end of a chapter which is itself the fag-end, we should allow ourselves to be enticed into the unending labyrinth of sociological and political theory. It is clear, however, that here we touch on the core of socialism, and above all of modern socialism. Increasingly, as we approach Leninism, socialism merges into the general, fundamental, eternal questions of politics. Do we need a State? What is the State anyhow? Can we cunningly side-track the existing State, and arrive at something ‘functional’? Can we make use of the State, such as it is, and with its help fashion a better world? Or is there a canker at the heart of the State, of any State known to us, which makes it for ever an enemy and an instrument of oppression, so that the only remedy is to ‘smash’ it and replace it by something which will be, not a State in the ordinary sense, but—a dictatorship?—a State, born to wither away? These, in various combinations, are the problems that more or less lie at the heart of recent socialism. In its modern forms, socialism has largely become a dissatisfied and sceptical questioning of the theory of the nature and the functions of the State.

It was of the essence of the teaching of Aristotle on the subject that the State had a natural existence. In a too frequently quoted dictum: ‘as the State was formed to make life possible, so it exists to make life good.’ It may be that if we are so hardy as to ask whose life it is that the State exists to make good, we may get an answer which will deter us from quoting Aristotle to Lenin: for assuredly, Lenin would have been more interested in the many unconsidered slaves than in the few consecrated to the good life. Nevertheless on the inevitability, the naturalness of the State, the teaching of Aristotle is as relevant to-day as ever. The conditions necessary for anarchism, whether it be the straightforward, immediate anarchism of Godwin and Kropotkin, or the indefinitely postponed ‘statelessness’ of the Marx-Engels-Lenin tradition which will come with the final withering away of the State, are so remote from actuality that anarchism must remain a doctrinaire and academic plaything. Not till the nature of man has changed, as Lenin expressly realised, shall we be ready for the ultimate witheringaway of the State. Till then the State (or a State) remains.

With somewhat more hesitation, the same may be said of trade union socialism. The leading exemplars here are hybrids, the daughter or the grand-daughter of anarchy, and, like other hybrids, they are deprived of the hope of posterity. In its attitude to the State, syndicalism is almost entirely anarchist; Guild Socialism somewhat less so. Alike they leave unanswered a multitude of questions of co-ordination and what-not, which for their answer would recall the State (or its equivalent) from the semi-limbo to which trade union socialism would consign it. Doubtless ideas with kinship to those of syndicalism and Guild Socialism will periodically recur to enliven and fertilise discussion; but with some assurance it may be said that the future of socialism does not lie in the direction of trade union socialism.

There remains as the central question of socialism to-day the choice between the pessimistic view of the State inherent in the Marxian tradition, and the more hopeful and optimistic attitude represented conveniently by Bernstein and the Revisionists, and by the Fabians. The contrasted views have already been expounded in the relevant chapters, and a mere cross-reference is sufficient here. The Marxian view is that the State always has been, is now, and always will be an engine of repression; that in consequence nothing good can come out of it, or be achieved through it; that it is the instrument through which the dominant class exercises its domination; that accordingly it is necessary to ‘smash’ it, and replace it by something entirely different. This is the socialism of revolution, according to which socialism can be realised only as the result of a revolution. The contrary view is that the State is not so black as it is painted; that it can in fact be used, as it has been used, to effect reform—and indeed, indefinitely and without any assignable frontier, including reform in the State itself; that, in consequence, revolution is not an ineluctable necessity, but on the contrary would probably be an uncertain gamble. This, in short, is evolutionary socialism, making use of the existing State and of the existing State machinery.

The Marxian theory of the State is itself, of course, merely an inference from the dogma of the class struggle. In the Marxian tradition, history is nothing but the record of class struggles; with the emergence of class distinctions, the State itself emerged; when, after the coming revolution, we approximate to a classless society, the end of the State will also be at hand. The State and the class struggle are, in short, almost interchangeable terms; or (more accurately) the State is merely part, though perhaps the most important part, of the armoury used in the class struggle. In this sense the syndicalists were right in seeing in the class struggle the innermost core of Marx. In foregoing chapters, the views of Marx, the syndicalists and others on the class struggle, have been stated without undue comment, and without attempting to assess how far this society of ours is in fact rent by a class struggle (between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) which goes on and on, for ever and ever—or at least will do so until it is ended! Here, in drawing the threads together, especially as this class struggle is the begetter of the Marxian theory of the State, it may be as well to look more closely at this ‘class war,’ which, as we are assured, lies at the heart of all things.

Now it is obvious that at any time and in any society known to history, there have been conflicting interests; and in the extreme case where there is an unbridgeable gulf between one section and another, a barrier which none may pass, there may be something like a class war and the State may quite properly be viewed as a class organisation. Even in the Great Britain of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (to come no later), when the bulk of the population was disfranchised, the State, conforming to the Marxian formula, represented the interests of the small fraction enjoying suffrage rights. To-day, however, while there are admittedly conflicting interests, these conflicting interests are in a condition of perpetual flux, and there is nothing to justify the assumption of a perpetual war between two classes, eternally divided and eternally struggling. Before it is possible to speak, with even a semblance of symbolic accuracy, of a class war, it is necessary to postulate that there are in fact classes in opposition, and strictly one should also postulate that the classes never intermingle. One must assume that all on one side of the fence have common interests, that there is in fact ‘solidarity’ among all workers over the whole range of the battle, which means, ultimately, a solidarity of interest uniting the proletariat of the whole world, just as equally it must be assumed that there is solidarity among all employers. All workers must have common interests against all employers. That there may be a really effective class war, both sides should also be aware of their community of interests. There must be no confusion along the battle-front: if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?

In fact, of course, there never was a battle where the trumpet, most raucous of wind-instruments, so triumphantly succeeded in giving forth so uncertain a sound. The assumed solidarity of interest uniting all workers, an essential condition of a class war, is a mere delusion. In a given industry there may be a conflict of interest between the different grades. Station-masters, signalmen, engine-drivers and ticket-collectors may have certain interests in common, springing from their common employment; but equally, and for the same reason, they may have divergent interests. If the station-masters are over-paid, the ticket-collectors may have to do without. Strippers, brushers and oncost workers may be divided by jealousy as well as united by love. It is equally and glaringly true that workers in different industries may have sharply contrasted interests. A coal strike which successfully raises the wages of miners may lead to dearer coal, hampering employment in countless dependent industries. There is, tucked away in the files of the Ministry of Labour, the records of a dispute where the trade union and the employers' association in industry A. waged a bitter feud in a demarcation wrangle with the trade union and the employers' association in industry B. On each side the workers' dearest friends were their corresponding employers' association; their bitterest enemies (for the time being) were in the opposite trade union. In fact, the frequent alliance between trade unions and employers' associations, gratifying though it may be in certain respects, is one of the disturbing features of these times, representing, as it does, the danger of an anti-social conspiracy directed against the consumers. When we approach the assumed solidarity of workers in different countries, the whole argument lamentably collapses. Here the economic struggle tends to conform to the example just cited. Competition between countries is reflected in competition between the workers of different countries, and employers and workers have a joint interest in manipulating the tariff (and in doing other things) so that they may keep what they have at the expense of others. Nor is it any answer to say that these things should not be so, and that if the workers were better educated to a higher stage of class consciousness, they would behave otherwise. The point is that the class war is represented as something that is now raging, and has been raging as far back as the memory of man runneth; but the class war postulates solidarity of interests among the workers, and at this moment such solidarity of interest does not exist.

The fatuity of this assumed eternal, unremitting class-war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat becomes obvious along another line of approach. It is a curiously significant fact, indicating how alien the whole idea is to us in this country, that in these matters the English language reveals its bankruptcy, and we are compelled to resort to a foreign language which we imperfectly understand. It may be that in other countries they know just exactly what the bourgeoisie is; in this country it is hardly too much to say that, outside the compositors' room, no one has any clear conception of the idea that he intends to convey to another, or that in fact will be conveyed to another, when he uses the word ‘bourgeois.’¹ It may be a term of contempt or abuse for that which is contemptible or worthy of abuse. So are other words.

How beastly the bourgeois is,
especially the male of the species,

as the modern poet sings in characteristically modern cadences. ‘Bourgeois,’ says Lenin somewhere with less than his usual lucidity, ‘means an owner of property.... A big bourgeois is the owner of big property. A petty bourgeois is the owner of small property.’ Who then, indeed, shall be saved? ‘Bourgeois’ entirely, and ‘proletariat’ somewhat less so, mean (in English) just what anyone cares to make them mean. This ambiguity in the definition of the two contending parties is paralleled by the fact that in practice (quite apart from terminology) no frontiers can be drawn. Society discloses an infinite series of almost undiscernible gradations. Almost equally significant is the fact that society is perpetually in flux; it is never static. Even when you have caught your unmistakably typical proletarian family, there is no saying where they will be in half a generation's time. It is the fate of many a good bourgeois to experience a proletarian sunset to his days. The difficulty is felt by all honest enquirers who seek to force society into categories to which society in fact refuses to conform. Mr. Cole, in wrestling with the petite bourgeoisie, asks himself and his readers what is meant to be a searching conundrum:

How are we to classify a family in which the father is a local grocer, the mother the daughter of a works manager in a big factory, one of the sons a garage proprietor, another a municipal official, and a third a technician in a large-scale business, while one daughter has married a schoolmaster, one a small-scale employer with a tiny workshop of his own, and another a trade union official?¹

Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them. Apart from regretting that there is apparently no one to carry on the grocer's business, the obvious answer would probably be that there is no urgent necessity to classify them, and that none of them, probably not even the trade union son-in-law, had ever realised that they lived under sentence of classification. But indeed Mr. Cole is singularly modest in the dispersal he allows his grocer's family. It may be that in Scotland, where proverbially we are ‘a’ Jock Tamson's bairns' (whoever Jock Tamson may have been), the general environment and tradition facilitate a greater movement throughout society than is readily seen elsewhere. But on all this question of the assumed dichotomy of society, two tests are illuminating and at times surprisingly instructive. Wander into any village of Scotland, and ask the first person of reasonable age for the tale of his cousins—assuming always that he knows about them, and assuming also that he belongs to a generation when families were large, and cousins correspondingly abundant. In a surprisingly large number of cases, the result will give a picture of all society in miniature. The other test—a favourite device of the novelists—is to look at the movement through two or three generations. One of the few advantages of growing old is that we begin to see the grandchildren of those whose grandfathers we dimly remember. The story of the years tells the same thing. Society is in perpetual movement; and if in perpetual movement, there can be no rigid classes between which eternal warfare must be waged.

The class war is so much at the root of the Marxian view of the State and is so potent an influence in determining the shape of Marxian politics, that one last method of approach may be permissible in considering how far in these days the class struggle does or does not exist as an actual fact. Nowhere in the Marxian tradition is the class war so prominent as in the syndicalists, and it is of unusual interest to look somewhat more closely at the implications of certain of Sorel's pronouncements on the subject. Labriola may say with vigour that ‘the only reality we recognise is the existence of the class struggle’¹; yet it is obvious that, at least for the intellectuals, this ‘reality’ fades away into a mere myth—one of those things which, even if untrue, are nevertheless good to think about. There is an illuminating sequence of paragraphs in the Préface pour Colajanni on this point. The Marxian theory of classes is, Sorel here remarks, an abstraction. Admittedly, the middle classes are not disappearing; and indeed, as he rightly observes, it is from the middle classes that most of the leaders of socialism come. What Marx did was to present the conflict of juridical ideas ‘sous la forme de luttes engagées entre couples antagonistes.’ Without this dichotomic division of society, it would have been impossible for socialist propaganda to get the revolutionary idea across to their public—de faire comprendre l'idée révolutionnaire. The class struggle is thus merely a picturesque and symbolic abstraction, the justification of which is to be found in its effectiveness for propaganda purposes.²

Even more significant, because expressed in simpler language, is the corresponding passage in Reflections on Violence. Speaking of the Marxian division of society into two fundamentally antagonistic groups, Sorel concedes that ‘a certain effort of will is necessary before we can find it verified in the phenomena of everyday life.’ You have to make up your mind in advance that you are going to see the class struggle, before the vision will be vouchsafed. But, rather oddly, any dullness of sight may be overcome by introducing the conception of the general strike: for society is plainly divided into two camps, and only into two, on a field of battle.³ Thus may one myth give support and sustenance to another, by a curious process of blood transfusion which strengthens him that gives and him that takes. The clear inference from such statements as these is that the class struggle, so far from being the ‘only reality,’ is merely, after the manner of myths, a vividly pictorial way of visualising something that some of us (apparently) would like to believe. Without undue fastidiousness one may trace in all Sorel's references to the class struggle that process of circular reasoning which infests the whole of this question: it is the purpose of syndicalism to produce that sharp division of classes which syndicalism has already postulated as the sole ground for its existence. On a survey of the syndicalist philosophers, one may say that the class war exists only for those who are prepared to make the necessary effort of will required to see the class war. The greatest of all the syndicalists has said it.

It may be that in all this class-war business, there is something that eludes us of Anglo-Saxon stock, and disqualifies us from passing judgment. It is wisdom to realise that we never understand our neighbours. Sorel laments that the English and the Americans alike have no proper comprehension of the class war. In the case of America his comment is extraordinarily suggestive. In America, he says, la vie ouvrière is not looked upon as a condition peculiar to any section of the people; but rather it is regarded as ‘a preparation, a school, a means of selection for everyone’: the fundamental idea is that every citizen should regard himself as under obligation to pass through this apprenticeship.¹ This may or may not be a valid analysis of the American situation; it is certainly a happy and healthy contrast to the squalor of the class war. And, be it noted, in no country is capitalism so fully developed. With regard to contemporary England, Sorel can merely record, rather ruefully, that ‘the English are distinguished by an extraordinary lack of understanding of the class war²; and there is a naive footnote in which he contrasts English and French trade union leaders: ‘the English trade union leaders rapidly become gentlemen, without any one blaming them for it.’ Assuredly, we do not understand the class war.³

This somewhat lengthy digression has been necessary because the assumption of classes, leading to the everlasting class struggle, explains the Marxian conception of the class state. But if, speaking for this country and relying on Sorel for support, the Marxian dichotomising of society in no way corresponds to reality, but is, at best, a vividly effective symbol with considerable propagandist value, then the ‘class State’ also goes. The State, as we have known it in the last two generations, has been anything but the organ of a class. It has given surprising evidence of adaptability, and of power to give effect to changes considered desirable—to changes, moreover, that may be far-reaching in their scope and consequences. The State can be used; unless in the eyes of those to whom a violent revolution is in Itself a desirable experience, there is no occasion to ‘smash’ it.

This means that we may eliminate Marxism from the paths of development which may be commended to British socialism to-day. We have not in this country suffered overmuch from Marx, and, it may be suggested, it is in no way a matter of regret that he has succeeded so ill in becoming acclimatised. Marx has been so large a part of the history of the last two generations that it is perhaps more than usually futile to speculate on how the world would have got along without him. It may be that we are now tending to exaggerate Marx's influence in his own lifetime; it is fairly clear that at the time of his death he counted for little in the eyes of the world at large. Ultimately, however, without doubt he brought socialism something that it had hitherto lacked—a driving force, a revolutionary power, a daemonic energy. Yet it is equally true that wherever the Marxian tradition has prevailed, something has gone out of socialism, leaving it poorer. The case against Marx is simple. It is that he built socialism on class warfare, and set hatred, and not love, at the centre of all things. In his hands, socialism lost its vision, and it lost its breadth; for however useful hatred may be as the inspiration of a short-term policy, the doctrine of eternal rancour, of class warfare and undying bitterness provides too narrow a basis for a philosophy of life. And perhaps just here we find one reason why Marxism has shown itself so little congenial to the English temperament. For the English (and it is more an English than a Scots virtue) are of all peoples the least inclined to cherish malice, and to feed present hatred on the memory of past grievances. It was a Scots and not an English poet who pictured the neglected wife ‘nursing her wrath to keep it warm.’ That it is, however, a virtue not unrecognised in Scotland, a land of long memories, certain of our own poets remind us:

What signifies 't for folks to chide
For what was done before them?

By a process of elimination we are thus forced back to the use of the existing State and the machinery of the existing State. But, for the socialist cherishing socialist ideals, the question of how the existing State should be used is by no means simple; and very probably—and indeed most certainly—the answer given to-day would be very different from that which would have been given forty years ago. Then the answer was simple. The ideal then of orthodox socialists was the completely collectivist State, arrived at by nationalising as rapidly as possible all the industries of the country, and putting each one under a Minister, sitting on an indefinitely elongated front bench. This vision has rather faded, partly under criticism, and partly under the pressure of changing events. For the difficulties of the completely collectivist State are enormous. The State could be the universal employer; everyone would be an employee of the State. Life would be a civil service examination, in which there would be no failures. There would be no outer limbo, into which to toss the incompetents and the insubordinate, in the hope that they would be brought to their senses by being left to fend for themselves for a time. Also the completely collectivist State would in practice be the ‘horridest tyranny.’ The State being everything, there would be nothing outside the State; and though this does not seem to have unduly perturbed some of the socialists of the unadulterated collectivist era, a later generation has begun to wonder whether there would be quite enough fresh air about such an arrangement. The State may be as tough a taskmaster as any ordinary capitalist, and in a world of ‘State capitalism,’ where there would not even be the satisfaction of changing one's boss, life might be even less pleasant than at present.

Here, however, as not infrequently happens in life, the great change in the attitude to complete undiluted collectivism is due to the fact that in this long controversy, each side has to a very considerable extent succeeded in convincing its opponents. It would probably not be true to say, in the well-worn phrase, that ‘we are all socialists now’: Lenin would certainly not admit that we were. But what may plausibly be suggested is that much of what the socialists contended for forty years ago has passed into fairly general acceptance in the minds of the population at large. We would certainly, with but few exceptions, all be regarded as socialists—and indeed as dangerous socialists, past praying for—by the startled eyes of Sudre and Thonissen. On the other hand, the socialist has to a large extent been convinced by the arguments of his opponents, reinforced (perhaps oddly) by those of the anarchists, that unrelieved collectivism would be not merely an unlovely and stifling world, but that in fact it would not work.

Why a nationalised industry need not necessarily be an efficient industry raises some curious questions. No subject in our time seems to provide such a perennial fountain of discussion wherever men meet, and whenever they are moved to write to the Press, as this problem of the incompetence of Government departments, compared with the greater assumed efficiency that distinguishes business circles. The lack of zeal which Adam Smith noted as the natural badge of employees of joint stock companies, deprived of the spur which comes from managing one's own business, may be ignored. Few of us to-day manage our own affairs; yet zeal (or some zeal) survives. The whole discussion tends to overlook the fact that it involves a comparison between work which is carried on under conditions which are wholly dissimilar. So long as we live under a system of Parliamentary government, and so long as the transaction of Parliamentary business is subject to the principle of Parliamentary responsibility, the servant of the State must of necessity perform his work under restraining conditions from which the business man is happily free. The business man is responsible only to himself and his shareholders, who are not unduly hard to placate, if things are going reasonably well; the Government is responsible to the House, the public, the Press and anyone who may care to ask questions. Business is relatively informal and confidential; the Government, in normal times, must be prepared to live in the open and to defend all that it does. For we now engage an official leader of the opposition to be critical in advance, and to search diligently with a candle for every flaw in the Government's record. It is a natural consequence of the party system, as we have known it, that in the work of government every item is looked at in isolation; the minutest point in administration may be detached and given an unholy prominence. The standard tacitly set up is that the Government must not make any mistake anywhere. Again, it is exacted of the Government that it must attain absolute uniformity in time and place. It must treat all alike at any given time; not only so, the answer it gives to-day—in the absence of changed legislation or other authorised modification of policy—must be consistent with all the answers it has given in the last ten years. There must be regard for precedent; and regard for precedent and the precedent-book means delay and red-tape (which is now white). From all this, business in the great outside world is relatively free. Above all, however, the principle of Ministerial responsibility has far-reaching effects in producing an atmosphere of caution and prudence in Government activity. The Minister (we are speaking of days of healthy political warfare) is there to be shot at; whatever he does, he will be attacked. Some Ministers may enjoy this; temperamentally others may not, and may accordingly seek to expose as small a surface as possible to the blows they are there to receive. But it reaches far beyond this. Everything that any civil servant does is in theory the act of the Minister; the ideal civil servant is, as nearly as may be, non-existent; he is, as nearly as may be, merely one of the many vehicles through which the Minister lives and moves, signs letters, makes statutory orders and has his being. He must conform to what he knows or believes to be the will of the Minister. But, to pursue the question no further, what is a poor civil servant to do if he has no clear guidance, or if no clear guidance is obtainable, and he has the choice of doing something spectacular and inspired (but of which the chances are that the Minister would disapprove) or of doing something humdrum and conventional, which if uninspired is well within the frontiers of safety? If he is a good civil servant he will not splash; his first duty is to his Minister, and, relying on such lights as he may possess, he must not get his Minister into a hole. Other differences might be noted; there are, for example, the fundamentally different financial positions of Government and private enterprise, the transience of Ministers, and so on; but enough has been said to indicate that, so long as we live under a Parliamentary regime, the Government machine and the business machine operate in entirely different atmospheres. The administrative machine in this country is in the highest degree efficient, but we have hedged it about with conditions which impel it to be cautious, to aim at formal correctness, to avoid undue risk, and to be forearmed against criticism. These are not the qualities which make for success in business; and few business men, however scathing they may be in their criticisms of Government incompetence, would care to conduct their affairs under an incessant barrage of Parliamentary questions and with several hundred Members of Parliament yapping on their flanks.

It is this highly practical consideration that provides the real argument against collectivism in the older sense. The State—or at least the Parliamentary State—does not provide the appropriate machine for the day-to-day running of a great industry. The consequence is that the demand for ‘nationalisation’ has curiously faded into the background; already the word has a somewhat old-fashioned flavour about it. Mr. Cole is here the most illuminating of commentators:

The idea of socialisation remains; but perhaps we shall find that we no longer want to ‘nationalise’ any industry at all, in quite the old sense.¹

Elsewhere in the same argument he remarks:

What the Socialist does essentially set out to nationalise, or perhaps better to socialise, is, not this or that particular industry, but the control and direction of the economic life of the community.²

Control, then, takes the place of the older, rather too facile suggestion of nationalisation; and the underlying reason is in some ways an acknowledgment of the individualistic argument. Things are better run by people whose job it is to know how to run them; and therefore, always assuming that they can be kept in order, it is better to leave the actual conduct of business to those who bring to it something of the virtues of individual enterprise. The importance of national ownership recedes, as Mr. Cole expressly acknowledges:

Let the State control the nation's industries, and it need not care who owns them, as long as it has the unfettered power of taxation in its hands.³

Herein lies the significance of the various half-way houses devised, or stumbled upon, in the inter-war period; and likewise it gives a clue to the periodic demand that one thing or another should be ‘taken out of politics.’¹ The London Passenger Transport Board gives, in its way, a fairly perfect example of the curious hybrid form which is supposed to combine the advantages of private enterprise with the advantages of social control, the elimination of the cruder forms of the profit motive with emphasis on the idea of service. With these we must take the various special Commissions—sugar, coal, white fish, and heaven knows what else—with doubtless very diverse functions, but all in a way attempts to do things on behalf of the State, but not directly through the State. There have been attempts to mould the General Post Office more on business lines, and the original Unemployment Assistance Board was not meant to be, and theoretically its successor, the Assistance Board, is not yet, a straightforward Government department. In part, this last example has its roots in the foolish belief, which we have seen periodically cropping up, that the economics and the politics of life may be kept apart, that the ‘administration of things’ differs from the government of men, and that therefore anything that represents the routine doing of things may be taken out of politics. On all this question of the development of subordinate quasi-governmental activity, we are at present confronted with a curious spectacle. More and more the State ‘interferes’ or ‘controls’ (according to the political bias of the observer); but the more it interferes and controls, the less does it show a disposition to accept ultimate and direct responsibility for what is done.²

The ‘half-way houses’ have produced quite an extensive literature on the economic and administrative side, but they have not yet been sufficiently studied by the constitutional lawyer. The London Passenger Transport Board, for instance, has very extensive powers and, if it chose, it might exercise these somewhat arbitrarily. To whom it is responsible and how that responsibility can be enforced are questions which it is by no means easy to answer. Needless to say, these examples are cited merely in illustration of the argument. If we elect to adhere to the existing State, and yet turn away from the serfdom of universal nationalisation, one of the tasks of the next generation will be to explore the ways whereby the State—itself in the background—may yet exercise control through bodies which are sanctioned by the State, yet are not of the State. Moreover, it may be necessary in the process to rewrite certain sections of our Dicey, or perhaps even add a new chapter.

The doubts regarding collectivism expressed in the foregoing paragraphs are based on the contention that a Government department is not an appropriate machine for running much of the business of the country, so long as Ministerial responsibility is maintained. There are few to-day who would openly or consciously suggest that Ministers should in normal times be freed from the shackles of Parliamentary responsibility; although it may be observed that all the half-way houses are in one sense devices for diminishing or sharing the Minister's responsibility. If anyone doubts, let him study the answers given in the House in reply to questions regarding the B.B.C. It is true that an irresponsible Government, should we choose that path, might in the short period be an efficient Government; it is significant that, in the Marxian theory, after the revolution the first stage in the building of socialism is a dictatorship. After all, the irresponsible Government can plan; and an organised and planned system of production has always been a large part of the socialist vision. It is important in these days to consider how far ‘planning’ calls for irresponsibility: how far it can be fitted into the machinery of democratic responsibility.

In so far as a planned economy is the antithesis of a competitive economy, it is primarily a socialist ideal; and the almost universal clamour for a planned economy to-day may very properly be cited as an illustration of the general acceptance of much that socialism has stood for. In any case he is a fool who does not plan, if the contrary means doing things without foresight and without calculation. Yet the present mania for planning has its dangers, and it may indeed be doubted whether ‘planning,’ as understood by the zealous, is consistent with our freedom and our liberties. It may indeed be a short cut to a dictatorship. Let no one delude himself that it is possible to have an economic plan in an isolated chamber, kept rigidly apart from the political life of the country. If we agree to adopt a plan, then either we may not criticise the plan, once it is adopted, in which case the plan becomes our dictator during its currency; or we may reserve the right to criticise and modify the plan, in which case the plan ceases to be a plan, as now understood in many quarters. One simple-minded enthusiast has spoken quite cheerfully of a long-term 75-years plan. Who are we to expect from our great-grandchildren a measure of respect and docility which we ourselves would never dream of according to our own great-grandfathers? Can anyone seriously contend that, if somewhere round about 1875 a plan had been evolved by the greatest minds of the day, the subsequent years would have regarded it as sacrosanct, or—even with the best intentions—could possibly have lived within the blue-print? Democracy, the critic may say, means the right to change views with indefinite frequency: it also means the right to shake off the fetters forged by our fathers. Even under the name of Planning, we cannot bind our successors. Socialism in the next generation may be tempted to play planning as its long suits. It should be very sure that its plan is a servant liable to statutory notice, not a master concealing a hidden dictatorship.¹

It is on the whole an idle pastime to conjecture the shape of things to come. At the present moment the individual is under an eclipse—perhaps unduly and even dangerously so. Society in the last generation has undergone a curious process of coagulation. We express ourselves through the group to which we belong. A worker tends to be nothing unless he is a member of his union; an employer is an outcast unless he belongs to his association. Even the individualists have formed an individualist society—an ominous indication of the sapping of their individualist faith. From the point of view of industrial negotiations, trade agreements and much more, this coagulation of society is probably highly advantageous. It makes it possible to achieve an organisation of industry such as could not be dreamed of in an atomistic society. But without doubt it renders the individual of small account. Nor does the individual get back his self-respect when, as an elector, he contemplates the working of the political machine. It would be idle to deny that democracy has not worked out just quite as was anticipated. Putting aside Hitler and Lenin as somewhat violent and prejudiced witnesses, there is an uneasy feeling that the individual elector counts for nothing and can do nothing. He may have the option periodically of indicating his preference between two (or three) candidates, among whom in fact he feels no preference. The claim constantly made by Lenin that the soviets gave each worker a feeling that he counted for something may, or may not, be justified: few can speak of Russia with any grounded knowledge. But it would be foolish to deny that the implied criticism of the working of democracy has foundation. The headquarters party machine may count for much; the local party machine may count for a little; but the lone elector, no longer enthusiastic for any of the prevailing political creeds, counts for nothing, and he feels that he counts for nothing. This is in part the explanation of the apathy increasingly manifested at elections, so frequently deplored by the righteous. And very properly deplored: for an electorate that abdicates is already opening the door invitingly to a dictatorship in one form or another. Democracy, if it is to face the future with equanimity, must contrive some means whereby the ordinary elector will attain to a better conceit of himself.

In pursuing the aim of reconciling social control with the spontaneity of individual initiative, it is probable that for some time to come the eclipse of the individual will become more pronounced. The curious speculator may be invited to consider what will be the effect, on our changing view of the State's functions, of the imminent and inevitable decline in our population, for which the stage is now completely set. It might be reasoned with much force (though not here) that a shrinking population will raise such difficult and delicate questions in every direction as may not be left to solve themselves ambulando, by the march of time, and with reliance on the surviving remnants of laissez faire. In an expanding world, with expanding markets and expanding industries, the individualist comes into his own, and a policy of laissez faire may in a sense be imposed. On the other hand, nothing is so difficult as to shrink gracefully and proportionately, while avoiding yawning maladjustments in the body social and economic. Here, within the next generation is a task which will require of our governors a most unusual combination of firmness of purpose and delicacy of touch. Nor will the problems be presented in a field that can be delimited. If we are to get through the years of shrinkage, we shall need a State professing an obligation to exercise a guiding and controlling influence in every sphere of the national life, and prepared to act accordingly. In the end, it may well be found that the population factor, as that will be increasingly revealed in the next fifty years, will be the chiefest cause urging in the direction of what, for convenience, we may call the Socialist State.

But, even if it be recognised that for all manner of reasons the tide is still flowing, and is likely to continue for some time to flow, so strongly in the direction of a more ubiquitous State and a less significant individual, it may just for that reason be all the more necessary to emphasise the other side in order that a proper balance may be maintained. It is of the essence of democracy that there should be someone to point out the dangers inherent in the views of the prevailing majority, and to draw attention to the pitfalls along the path by which we are being led. Quite apart from the economics and the politics of the matter—which perhaps in the light of eternity are the least important parts of life—we are to-day too much lost in the crowd; we are too much mass-produced. The race of eccentrics, the salt of the world, has perished from the earth. Where is there to-day a Saint-Simon or a Fourier? Who would listen to them if they were to arise and speak? The great need of the present day is for a prophet of liberalism: not because liberalism, any more than any other tenable political creed, is an exclusive repository of wisdom and truth, but precisely because liberalism, in so far as it stands for the pre-eminent worth of the individual, is an essential ingredient in any balanced view of things, and because liberalism at the present moment is dangerously in eclipse. For the strength of liberalism or individualism, or whatever it may be called, is that all great things are conceived in solitude—however they may be executed—by men who have relied on themselves, and not on their fellows or the State. There may be a divinely inspired man; there may even be a heaven-sent statesman; but there was never a divinely inspired State. In the great moments of life, man is necessarily, and perhaps lamentably, alone. For every life is a pilgrimage, and every true pilgrimage ends in solitude. As John Bunyan shrewdly observed, a man may have company when he sets out for heaven, and yet go thither alone. The danger involved in the drift or urge in the direction of an ever more actively controlling and intervening State, is that at the end of that path—however it may be disguised—lies totalitarianism, with the individual even less than the Guild Socialist's manure, even less than a thing of naught. The very great and deserved welcome accorded to Mr. Hayek's warnings regarding The Road to Serfdom may perhaps be interpreted as an indication that the public mind and conscience are not wholly at ease on the question.