development, with the protection of which it is charged, to be arrested. Moreover, the reply is false in fact. No perfection of State machinery can preserve the life of a nation if the animating principle of voluntary devotion and civic obligation is wanting; and the most imperfect machinery may serve its turn if the pulse of the nation beats strongly and healthily. It was not the imperfection of administrative machinery but the decay of civic virtue that overthrew the Roman Empire. We too desire to see the State efficient for the performance of its task. We desire to see the defects which the war has revealed in our administrative machinery made good. But we believe that the strength of British institutions lies in their power of calling out the spirit of voluntary devotion in the citizens, and that the imposition of an alien system of centralisation, regimentation and bureaucratic supervision, would end, however perfect its mechanism, in destroying the vital principle of the whole.

So with questions of trade and industry. We are told that if, through our characteristic individualism, through our refusal to meet the demand for cheap, lowquality goods, or through attaching too much importance to æsthetic and social considerations, we allow other nations to surpass us in total output or total export per head of the population, our trade will not only stand still but recede, until a point is reached at which it fails to provide that minimum standard of material wellbeing without which mental or moral progress is impossible. This is simply the application to international trade of the modern commercial maxim, 'Get on or get out,' and it is marked by pretty much the same fallacies. The man of varied interests, to whom money-making is an incident rather than a pursuit, may not make so large a fortune as the man who subordinates the enjoyment of riches to their accumulation, and regards profit and not service as the sole criterion of success; but he does not necessarily starve. As a matter of fact, the influence of idealism is not inevitably detrimental to commercial success. Wellpaid labour is usually more profitable to the employer than ill-paid labour; and competition in quality is generally more effective than competition in price.

But, even if the subordination of economic to social

considerations is admitted as a handicap in the struggle with foreign competition, the suggestion that the choice lies between commercial supremacy (as indicated by export figures) and economic ruin will not bear examination. It rests on the assumption that the demand of the world for goods is fixed and limited, and that no nation can increase its exports except at the expense of another. It assumes, further, that this demand is indivisible, and that it is necessary to compete for the supply of shoddy in order to sell broad-cloth; or else that the lower-grade or standardised product will inevitably oust the higher grade or individualised product from the market; all of which assumptions are demonstrably untrue or true only to a very limited extent. Moreover, it ignores altogether the home market, the fact that five-sixths of our production is for consumption and not for export. So far as our essential imports of food and raw materials are concerned, it must not be forgotten that those who desire to sell to us must necessarily take our own products in payment. The nature of the home demand will be conditioned by our view of the qualities which are desirable in production; and, so far as concerns the exports necessary to pay for our requirements from abroad, the fear of such a reduction in the demand for characteristic British products as will seriously affect the exchanges against us is more imaginative than practical. It must be added that success in international competition which adds to the total national income, but leaves the inequality of its distribution unaffected, affords a very indifferent criterion of national wellbeing.

Since the plea of overmastering necessity breaks down on examination, we are free to judge the various proposals put forward on their merits, and to apply to them our own criterion-that of their bearing on the quality of individual life. Tried by this standard, all schemes which are based on a rigid, uniform system of State Control must be condemned. Their deadly uniformity is fatal alike to the variations of local custom and individual character which help to preserve national life from stagnation, and to the license of experiment which is the only means of putting innovations to the test of experience. Their transfer of initiative from the

individual to the State is fatal to the development of decision, responsibility and personal character among the citizens. We lay no less stress than the followers of Treitschke on civic obligations; but, if the fulfilment of those obligations is to involve any real participation in the life of the nation, it must be voluntary and spontaneous. Resort to compulsion may be necessary in the case of those who persistently defraud the community by evading their obligations of service, not merely in the military sense. But the acceptance of compulsion as a last resort and its adoption by preference as a principle, are two very different things.

It is chiefly for this reason that we distrust the doctrines of the State Socialists. Their proposals are animated, it is true, by the desire to ensure a fuller and richer life for the mass of the people. They claim that only by the State assuming, as trustee for the people, possession of the machinery of production and exchange, can these be prevented from falling into the hands of a favoured few, and that only through State action can the people acquire any real control over the conditions. of their employment. It may be doubted, however, whether the participation in control thus conferred would amount to very much in the case of the individual, and whether the triumph of State Socialism would not involve the risk of a bureaucratic tyranny as fatal to individual responsibility and freedom as Prussian Militarism itself. In the organised Socialist State there would be no room for minorities; and, where there is no room for minorities, there is little hope of development. We may doubt, too, whether the supporters of State Socialism do not place altogether too much faith in legislation as a method of reform. They are right in claiming that it lies within the province of the State to exercise a veto, in the interests of social welfare, over all forms of activity by which that welfare may be impaired. But the good which can be accomplished by legislation is chiefly negative. You can forbid a man to do wrong; you can even place him among surroundings which provide him with the opportunity to do right; but you cannot equip him by law with vigour, personality and ideas. And to these things an atmosphere of systematic regulation is not conducive.

Those whom we have termed the Scientific Industrialists are, as we have seen, generally opposed to direct State control of industry. They include a certain number of employers who maintain that the unfettered authority of the experienced business man, freed from legislative interference and secured against the pretensions of Labour, is the only guarantee of successful commercial effort, and is, in the long run, beneficial to the workers themselves. By the more progressive members of the group, however, this claim to autocracy is abandoned; and several schemes for the reorganisation of industry on the lines of an autonomous development have been drawn up. The ablest of these was published as a manifesto by the Council for the Study of Industrial Reconstruction, and suggested the setting up of a Government Department for the promotion of trade, and the creation by this Department of Trade Councils, to whom the control of each trade and industry should be handed. Both employers and employed were to be represented on these Councils, by means of a vocational franchise; and the welfare of the workers was placed on the list of subjects for which special departments were to be created, though not very high on the list.*

Here we have a representative programme palpably inspired by an honest desire to improve the status of industry as well as to increase the annual volume of production and export. It suffers, however, from two grave defects. In the first place, it makes far too little provision for the representation of other than economic interests. It must be admitted that in any scheme of industrial organisation it is difficult to afford adequate protection to the consumer and to the social interests of the community, or to guard against the danger of these vast organisations exercising undue pressure on the State. This objection is recognised by the advocates of voluntary Joint Standing Councils, on the lines of the Whitley Report, as equally applicable to their own proposals; and they have not as yet found a completely satisfactory solution. Nevertheless, it must be said that the whole tone of the programme under consideration shows too great a tendency to regard industry as a

* See 'Westminster Gazette' of Oct. 11, 1917.

separate entity, and to regard the interests of those engaged in it as confined to profits and wages.

In the second place, the scheme, like all those of the Scientific Industrialists, is based on the adoption of a rigid compulsory code, with all the disadvantages that attach to the substitution of a mechanical system for individual initiative. It must be put into force as a whole or not at all, and leaves no room either for dissentients or for experiment. It suffers, in fact, from the logical perfection of paper constitutions. The most representative British institutions are things of organic growth, not systems worked out in the study and imposed by a single legislative act. Moreover, the compulsory subordination of the existing Labour organisations to any new controlling bodies would raise in an acute form the question of the pledges given to the Trade Unions.*

There are two or three typical features which mark almost all that is written by the Scientific Industrialists on the subject of reconstruction. They lay great stress on the desirability of Technical Education; they are advocates of scientific management and mass production; they are fond of alluding to our unexhausted reservoir of woman power. In all these tendencies there is an element of danger.

An improvement in our methods of technical education is an admitted necessity, though its value at an early age is at least doubtful. We shall do well, however, to regard with grave suspicion all attempts to subordinate general education to vocational instruction. The purpose of education is to fit children and adolescents for their lives as men and women, as loyal and intelligent members of the community, not merely to supply employers with handy operatives or capable clerks.

Again, so far as scientific management implies simply the elimination of waste in material or effort, and the selection of particular men for particular jobs according to capacity and preference, it is wholly beneficial. But in practice its effect is frequently to reduce the worker

Since this article was written, this programme appears to have been abandoned by the Council in favour of a frank acceptance of the proposals of the Whitley Report; but the original manifesto was typical of a line of thought which is becoming increasingly common.