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ance to the cultural part of life, the part that is true living; and as intelligence increases this demand will be made by the workmen with increasing emphasis. Therefore, we must be careful not to construct a political system based on the assumption that workshop differences are to continue to be so important as they are at present, or that the divisions created by the antagonisms of capital and labour, or the excessive toil caused by capitalist expropriation and inefficiency, are to last. That, for instance, a Guild of teachers should control education to the exclusion of all other members of the community is a vilely reactionary and subversive proposal. Wherever professions, as in the law, have settled their own selfgovernment, they have taken self-regarding views and have ranged themselves in opposition to freedom and progress. However we settle this problem of the well-being of the functioning groups in Society, or of the admitted difficulty of securing an accurate representation of the somewhat complicated interests of a complete citizenship, we must not abandon the view that the citizen should be regarded as the sovereign authority in the State, because this is the richest and widest personality, is, indeed, the only personality, and that the institution or institutions holding that authority in custody should be representative of citizenship and not of factories, workshops, professions, or any function whatever. The problem, therefore, remains: How are we to build up the Civic State? How are we to secure a satisfactory representation in that State?

THE CIVIC STATE

We must be careful to remember at the outset of our enquiry that the State is not merely the Parlia

ment or the national government, but includes both municipal government and the administration of the Civil Service, and of all those bodies created either permanently or from time to time by proper authority to carry out legislation, departmental orders, Orders in Council and such constitutional work. Thus, whilst a labour committee appointed to deal with unemployment, and to see that municipal councils or Boards of Guardians do their work, is not part of the State, a local committee set up for the same purpose in accordance with the provisions of an Act of Parliament or by a decision of a competent Department, is part of the State machinery.

INDUSTRIAL ADMINISTRATION

If the organization of the State is to extend its authority into industry as is proposed in this book, and if the community is to provide an organization of itself responsible for production and distribution, obviously the administrative organization of the State must be amplified, and new machinery created to allow the work to be carried on. It is this that has compelled Socialists to move beyond the earlier phase of State Socialism, meaning by that the direct control of industry by the political organ working through a bureaucratic Civil Service, and also beyond the earlier Socialist view of Co-operation that the consumer should control production, and consumers' organizations be responsible for factories. These were temporary and makeshift improvisations quite adequate to a time when the simple Socialist idea of communal responsibility for production and distribution had to be popularized, and when Socialism was more a criticism of Capitalism than a move

ment responsible for proposals which at any moment might have to be carried into actual practice.

The aid which the academic school of functionalists and the Guild Socialists have given to Socialist construction is not the theories they have propounded regarding representation, which are uniformly bad, but the suggestions they have given regarding administration, which have been most helpful. I have already dealt with this,* and have shown how, by the association of the workers with the management, production can be carried on by workshops self-controlled so far as internal arrangements are concerned, linked up in districts, supplied with raw material and with all the efficiencies that science and skill can put at their disposal, co-ordinated with kindred places of production, and all kept in contact with the markets which they have to supply. Not a few of the thorny questions that have been propounded regarding the relations between the industrial and political organizations of such a State have arisen from a simple error. This industrial organization is assumed to be of a legislative character necessitating Parliaments and quasi-sovereign councils, whereas it is only a machinery of administration, which, though altering the arrangement of the political Departments at Whitehall, does not change the civil character of the State itself, and does not alter the problem of democratic representation. There is to be self-administration in industry, but its powers are to be derived from the political State, and the community, as a last resort, is to impress its will upon the producing and the distributing organizations through the political State. Therefore the problems of civic representa

* Chap. IV., especially pp. 141 et seq.

tion cannot be avoided whatever political or industrial theory one may adopt. It is like one's shadow. It is inseparable from communal life. When the earlier and the later Socialists, from a somewhat similar mistaken analysis, thought that the State was a capitalist institution only, they mistook one of its historical forms for its real and permanent existence.

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

It is pretty evident that a democratic state institution must be built up from the bottom and not down from the top. We must proceed from the fireside outwards so that contact will be kept throughout between immediate experience and a more remote one, between the definitely known and the more dimly apprehended. Only in this way can we construct a system which meets the needs of reality and corresponds to the intelligence which is behind it and must work it. As opposed to the functional view, I put forward one of social contacts. We must begin to organize the political State from the smallest civic unity which men form, that is the village and town or urban and rural district. The municipal bodies which administer local affairs to-day are mean and cannot appeal to the imagination by reason of their limited powers and the Whitehall red tape which strangles them. They can embark on no great ventures of self-government, they cannot build a house or acquire an acre of land, they can do nothing to enliven the local life or make it something in which men may take pride, unless Whitehall permits them. A great many of them have none of those powers of judiciary which are so necessary to equip local authorities with dignity and to make men feel that

they are living in true community, and none have it to a sufficient extent. To remedy this is the first step required in order to enliven democratic intelligence and interest. Until men feel the community of their town or district, a patriotism of their locality, they cannot feel the community of their nation or the patriotism of their country, and still less those of an Empire. Patriotism then appeals to them in its lower forms of might and power, and becomes a mere heady boast or prejudice satisfying itself in the conceit of wide-flung territory and the bragging of military strength. The patriotism which expresses a share in common life felt and valued is of a totally different quality from that which expresses a share in common power. This latter is the patriotism that "is not enough," that issues in no fine national spirit and no sane political judgment. It is a blinding pride not an enlightening dignity. Therefore, political education should begin by the cultivation of the tradition of the locality, and democratic government should be founded on the self-government of the local community. "My fathers' graves are there."

Local governing bodies must be relieved of much of the control of Whitehall. They should be allowed to develop a policy of their own and to shoulder their own responsibilities. It is far better that they should be free to make mistakes and be punished by a democratic vote than be bound to make only the mistakes imposed upon them, or permitted, by Whitehall (whose blunders in local government have been colossal), and be punished for sins which they themselves never committed. Housing should be their own concern; they should be free to deal with the land within their areas and to combine with their neighbours upon a common policy; they should be able

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