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were occasions when a purely artificial frame of mind could be produced by artfulness of a kind used by showmen to draw unwilling crowds into their booths, the clan machinery became more and more adapted to such circumstances, the public opinion created for elections was of no permanent value, was, indeed, not public opinion at all, and Parliament tended to drift farther and farther away from the normal life of the nation. The election day mind was sui generis, and its product was equally sui generis.

This also happened for another reason. Whilst the political conflicts of the last century were being waged in the full light of the stage, in its obscure background other fights were being carried on upon issues much closer to the actual lives of the people than the purely political ones. The Radicalism which was contemporary with the French and American Revolutions was social as well as political. Tom Paine threatened kings and aristocrats, not merely because all men were born free and equal, but because he associated political privilege with poverty, and in the second part of his "Rights of Man,” he declared for the abolition of the poor laws, condemned indirect taxes, and advocated a tax upon high incomes from which should be found subsidies for the aged and the unemployed, and also the costs of popular education. In his less-known booklet, " Agrarian Justice opposed to Agrarian Law," he attributed poverty to the kind of government then existing. Every man and woman ought to have an equal share in the land, and he drew a distinction between property in improvements made on land, which he supported, and property in the natural soil, which he rejected. He proposed that the community should levy a 10 per cent. death duty on land and

from the income pay every landless person of twentyone years of age, £15 as compensation, and an annual pension of £10 thereafter. Crude in plan, perhaps, but surprisingly modern in interest and intention. The terrors which the Chartists inspired came not from their political, but their social, programme; they were bogeys not because they were people demanding the vote, but because they were the poor demanding political power for the reason that, in the words of Ernest Jones,

We shall get the land

Only if we get the Charter.

By stages which I have already described,* the discontent of the wage earners became increasingly definite, its causes were more clearly defined, its origin in the defectiveness of social organization became firmly established, and the main features of the organization which would eliminate the inefficiencies of the existing one became fixed and systematized. The function assigned to the State widened as the mass of the people saw that their corporate concerns included affairs like a peaceable and an ample production which they had hitherto been content to leave to chance or individual profitmaking. In its general features, the State was changed from being a police organization to being one of service-giving. From being only a protector of Society it became an organ contributing to the general health and well-being of Society.

When this happened, however, it was seen that the machinery of a police and taxing State was not sufficient to carry on the work of a democratic State, which was the organization of the great pro

* Chap. iii.

ductive and distributive functions of the community. And at the same time, it was discovered that when the body of electors became a great unorganized mass of individuals, grouped into constituencies that were purely artificial, and living no corporate life, elections ceased to be of much value as indications of public need or opinion. The enormous increase in the electorate made under war pressure was like a flood of waters for which no preparation had been made, and which, moreover, came at a time when civic and political life was disrupted, and disciplining and guiding restraints had been broken down. Thus, elections since the war have hardly shown political judgment, but rather the disturbed mentality of war conditions, and during the fortnight or so of the contests the aim has been to make Philip drunk rather than to enlighten and procure the verdict of a reflecting constituency. All that, however, is passing, and the attempts to build up a criticism of democracy on the assumption that the political mind which has been ruling electoral decisions since 1918, is but founding a house on the sands.

The Socialist must be a democrat for he can discover no other foundation for his State but public support. He cannot trust to dictatorships either of force or fraud, because his Society is kept working and in harmony by attitudes of mind which are spontaneous and are beyond the power of edicts and the utterances of authority; nor can he work with those demagogic appeals to a careless people living thoughtlessly and superficially from day to day. He must buttress his State with intelligence, and secure his system in the minds of the people. His democratic creed is not only that every adult should

bear the responsibilities of citizenship, but that every adult should be capable of bearing those responsibilities. The sole way leading to Socialism is the way of education, which supplies the human qualities that demand the Socialist State for their satisfaction and support, and protect those working it out.

As a reformer of the political machinery by which the Democratic State expresses itself, he addresses himself to two main tasks. He must adapt the machinery of political government and administration to a representation of millions instead of thousands, for he knows that the larger the electorate the more complicated become the interests to be represented and the difficulties of the representative, and, in consequence, the more subdivided must the machinery of representation be. He must also address himself to the problem of adapting the political machinery to the new economic tasks of the State, and of adding to it new organizations to enable these tasks to be carried on. I now proceed to consider these two problems.

POLITICAL DEMOCRACY

Democracy can only work by representation. Either in the form of the mass meeting or of the referendum and initiative, modern democracy would come to a deadlock. It would be such a cumbersome mass that its movements would be too slow to secure internal peace. These direct forms of democracy cannot function in such a way as to impose upon the electors responsibility for their decisions. This is plainly seen if we consider what really happens when any important and disputatious matter is referred

to a vote of trade unions, or to a town's meeting. The individual voter is hidden up in the crowd; the leader who is to be responsible for carrying out the decision and who has to bear the brunt of effecting the settlement, and fitting it on to the possibilities of the situation is severely handicapped by the inability of the mass to do anything but criticise. Adaptive reason cannot be exercised by the crowd, partly because its varying issues cannot be submitted, but chiefly because the crowd cannot employ the processes of balanced judgment to control its will. Thus we have found that in trade union after trade union there has grown up behind the official representatives, bodies of local leaders free to express opinion without responsibility, who voice crowd sentiments, but who, if ultimately they become responsible, change their minds and policies under pressure of the realities which they rose into office by flouting. These reflections must not be taken to mean that officials alone should rule. That, indeed, would be a sorry termination of the evolution of democratic methods. But they do mean that mass democracy is so unwieldy and must always be so unsuited to the direct exercise of executive power along with responsibility that it is incapable of being the normal way of democratic operation. The responsibility of leaders to the mass must be secured, but democracy which gives leaders no power will soon discover that it can do nothing. The problem for democracy is how to retain leadership with authority, and yet limit the authority so that it is not a dictatorship.

Nor is the referendum of much greater value or wisdom, and that for reasons similar to those I have just stated. The complexities of modern problems

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