It

considering the assumptions upon which that legacy was transferred to younger generations, and the possibilities of once again bringing the institutions of government into a more adequate relationship with the environment of social problems. At once a confession is necessary. We here make no revolutionary proposals. We do not seek to sweep away the old governmental forms and replace them by an entirely new synthesis. Only the generation of Rousseau and one or two belated apostles of that thinker could venture so impossible a purpose. That generation knew almost nothing of government in its present-day connotation; it had few reliable facts upon which to base its theories. Of that, indeed, L'Esprit des Lois and the Contrat Social are supreme illustrations. could revolt; it could throw down; its generalisations afforded that much power. It could not, however, create; for the technique of free government lay as yet in the future, and only a widespread and long experience of it could give the measured, tested and precise induction of a constructive revolution.1 The student of politics, especially where he considers the relation between the administrative departments, the representative assemblies, and the whole of a modern community, sees himself compelled to this judgement : salvation, as far as it is to be attained through political institutions, lies in a process of continuous adjustment; the suppression of an old and outworn institution here, there the realisation in an institution of some new and fruitful idea, the unfortunately slow, but, nevertheless, continual adaptation of the political body to the newly unfolding purposes of society. Such a judgement is the result not of the study of English governmental machinery only, but also of the experience of the United States of America, of France, of Germany (both

1 It needed forty years of extensive and intensive research, thought, experience and writing on political, social and administrative affairs to produce The Constitution for a Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

before and after its revolution of 1918-19), and of Italy during the nineteenth century and in our own time. Before the complexity of the modern administrative scheme revolutionary maxims can achieve only bewilderment and confusion. Let us therefore turn back to our legacy in political institutions and consider its adequacy in relation to modern society and the creativeness necessary to the tasks of the present age.

THE LEGACY AND ITS PRODIGAL USE

It is remarkable with what an optimism the elder Mill, apostle of Jeremy Bentham, bequeathed to us the theoretical basis of Representative Government. Searching for the means of good government (in relation to the political situation of his time and to the crude attempts at psychological analysis of his circle), he found it in representation. "In the grand discovery of modern times," he said, surely with the enthusiasm of one crying Open Sesame!" the system of representation, the solution of all the difficulties, both speculative and practical, will perhaps be found. If it cannot, we seem to be forced upon the extraordinary conclusion that good Government is impossible. For as there is no individual, or combination of individuals, except the community itself, who would not have an interest in bad Government, if entrusted with its powers; and as the community itself is incapable of exercising those powers, and must entrust them to some individual or combination of individuals, the conclusion is obvious: The Community itself must check those individuals, else they will follow their interest, and produce bad Government.

"But how is it the Community can check? The Community can act only when assembled: And then it is incapable of acting.

1 See English Utilitarians, vols. i. and ii., Leslie Stephen; and La Formation du radicalisme philosophique, vol. ii. c. 3, Halévy.

"The Community, however, can chuse Representatives: And the question is, whether the Representatives of the Community can operate as a check?"1 That check was to be found in the short duration of the representative assembly.2

The essential of the theory, and it became the principal element in English practice from 1832 onwards, was the rise of a Parliament assumed to be the sole and sovereign representative of the citizens. The will, the needs, the interests of the citizen so far as they came under the purview and power of the central political authority, were deemed to be clearly expressed and sufficiently represented by persons chosen at periodical elections. It implied that the citizen knew, or could be taught to know, his interests; that the representative caught up the conception of interests from the elector, and then proceeded to act in the sovereign Parliament in accordance with the sense of the electorate. The electors were "atomised ": each was assumed to speak in his own right, and for his individual judgement. The sources of policy, of benevolence, of sympathy, of suggestion as to the realities of life in the nation as mirrored in one body, in Parliament alone, were plainly regarded as discoverable in the enfranchised citizens grouped in their territorial constituencies. And by 1922,

after a process of extension of the franchise in 1867, 1884 and 1918, there were some nineteen millions of such citizens in Great Britain. In the U.S.A. and in France similar theories of representative democracy produced similar representative assemblies and, at first, atomised" and undifferentiated citizen- electors. Germany the story is different, and of its importance we shall speak later.

1 Essay on Government (1824), James Mill, pp. 16, 17.

2 Ibid. p. 18.

In

"The

3 Cf. Brougham, House of Lords, Oct. 7, 1831, on the Reform Bill of 1832: system of representation consists altogether in the perfect delegation by the people of their rights and the care of their interests to those who are to deliberate and to act for them." Cited in Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, p. 220.

On this theory Parliament stood as the sole representative assembly, making and unmaking Ministries, conceiving plans, discussing projects, speaking from knowledge, accommodating and reconciling interests, passing laws, and in relation to the day-to-day business of administration acting as the "grand inquest of the nation." If Parliament had these properties it was representative in reality. If it had not, the quality of being representative should be openly denied it, because public morality is to be improved only after we recognise the truth about our ruling fictions.

In

Observation, however, over the last three-quarters of a century discovers two things: first, that neither Parliament nor the Cabinet (the committee responsible. to Parliament) believed in their own due acquaintance with the interests of the nation; and, second, that the citizens increasingly distrusted the theory of representation through elections in territorial constituencies and deliberation in Parliament as being in any sense adequate as the servant of their interests in government. relation to the first observation, one notices from the first Reform Parliament the growing number and importance of Royal Commissions,1 Select Committees and Departmental Committees set up by the Government, most often at the instance of some member in the House of Commons, to make researches and inquiries into matters upon which all sides were ignorant.2 Sporadically, advisory bodies are set up from persons wholly or mainly outside the Departmental bureaucracy. Their purposes are either to gain the consent of the various interests concerned to policy or intended policy, or to obtain from the interests the technical information

1 Sydney Smith: "... the whole earth was in Commission, and mankind had been saved from the Flood only to be delivered over to barristers of six years' standing"; and G. Toulmin Smith, Local Self-government and Centralisation, 1851, p. 158.

2 A splendid picture of the work of Royal Commissions of Enquiry is to be had from a study of the Parliamentary Papers giving returns of the Commissions; Accounts and Papers, 1856, vol. 38; Parliamentary Papers, No. 720 of 1850; No. 317 of 1862; No. 720 of 1850; No. 342 of 1885; No. 338 of 1896, and No. 315 of 1904.

that the Administration requires.1 The same phenomenon appears in other countries with representative government neither the private member nor any one party organisation, nor even the permanent officials in the Departments of State, know, really, either the needs, the interests or the will of the nation whose fate, in some measure, lies in their hands.

Of the second observation, the illustrations are as numerous as, and even more instructive than, of the first. No day goes by without its Press story of some deputation to the Departments: it may be on behalf of an organisation of employers or workers in some industry or group of industries, of some ratepayers' or educationists' association, of agriculturists anxious to avoid this thing or compass that. There is sporadic but constant direct action of citizens, freely grouped on the basis of interest, upon the Government. Within the House of Commons are groups of members specially formed to further their common purpose, not as citizens, but as representatives of a distinctive social interest. In France one hears of the Agricultural Group, the Sugar Group, the Vine-growing Group, the Group of Physicians.2 The Industrial Group (of big industrials) meets every week for House of Commons purposes; there are groups serving motor transport services and agriculture. It is not without cause that the flats in the places surrounding the Palace of Westminster are increasingly occupied by the offices of various associations for industrial and social purposes.

Nor is the process of " lobbying," i.e. directly soliciting the support of members of legislature for or against a measure, known only in the U.S. Congress or in the

1 Cf. Ministry of Agriculture Act, 1918, and Ministry of Health Act, 1919.

2 Cf. Bryce, Modern Democracies, vol. i. p. 284: "These aggregations form a sort of cross division of the Chamber. Most of them have nothing to do with party politics, and exert pressure on the Ministry only for the advancement of their special industrial or commercial aims." Cf. also Roustan, Les Groupes, 1914, p. 459 et seq.