informal fellowships of men engaged on the same professional tasks, or trained in the same schools. To whittle this down to combination for economic purposes is to forget the impossibility of separating business partnership from ordinary human friendships and enmities. The monastic system found it necessary to make special rules and provisions against the growth within the order of too strong attachments which threatened-as Plato might have feared-to turn its members away from their work in the Church to more personal concerns, even though the family bond was absent. This was no mere aberration of a fanatical theory. Attempt to suppress all loyalty except what a State or a Church may gain, and the number of subordinate organizations you must suppress becomes frightening: still more alarming is the fact that when you have suppressed them, you are only creating a special order of men in whom the same dangers of clique, party, and profession are repeated and fostered.

It is here, in fact, that we may rightly introduce the somuch-abused argument from the necessities of human nature. Devotion to a city, a State, or a world-wide society cannot in ordinary humanity attain the same strength as special personal connexions of kinship, common profession or common taste. Between the wider organizations there may be comparatively little to choose, and the city of Zeus may command hardly less devotion than the city of Cecrops. But neither will normally command the same devotion as a child or a friend. There is no use in blaming human nature in this respect, still less in trying to change it by violence: the deficiency is bound up with the necessary limitations in the range of our direct knowledge, the narrow span of our attention. To check and control any lesser

obligations by reference to a wider public duty is not impossible: to make this easier by removing the lesser obligations is a quite futile endeavour.

§ 3. The State and the Economic System

THE substitution of the State for smaller societies by so violent a method is hardly in keeping with modern views. Of all modern theories Socialism has most exalted the State: but in the State of the Socialist Future, the family is usually to remain, differences of taste and inclination are not to be violently uprooted or suppressed, and even professional organizations might be encouraged.1 But if the State is not then intended to fill the place of those voluntary organizations discussed when we treated men as 'members of society', it is held to be capable of supplanting the relations of economic competition. The economic man, it is thought, is simply human nature cramped and mutilated to fit an unnatural system.

Provide a new method of distribution and exchange, and it will be possible to avoid all such degradations. This new method is the abolition of the competitive system by the Socialisation of industry.

Round such proposals the hopes and dreams of a large section of humanity have been concentrated for many years. They have become the economic kernel of a vast

1 Thus Mr. Ramsay Macdonald in his last work on Socialism defends not only autonomous academies within the State, but leagues of producers: Mr. Sidney Webb has asserted that Trade Unions would be necessary under a Socialist regime: and the modern Guild-Socialists like Mr. Cole (in his brilliant book The World of Labour) look forward to a wide delegation of powers from the central State to bodies of producers bound by the ties that a common craft or profession can both in coarse and subtle ways establish between its members. On the question of the relation of such bodies to central authority turns, of course, the difference between Syndicalism and Socialism.

movement played on by many motives, representing to its adherents much beyond the bare abstract proposals thus summarily described. With all of these further implications of the Labour Movement we have for the moment no concern. It is sufficiently difficult to steer a way between the conflicting assertions of the opposing sides on the mere outline of the economic policy. With much plausibility it is urged on the one side that personality demands a medium of expression: that the material possibility of finding such expression is property: so that to destroy private property is to destroy initiative in character, and Socialism is an outrage on personality'. With equal plausibility it is replied that a distinction can be drawn between the things of use and enjoyment, and the means of production: that, given a real power of choosing what he likes in the former category, man obtains all that is necessary to make him free: but give him the latter also, and the further freedom thereby granted is bound to result in the enslavement of some of his fellows. Thus, in the name of freedom and personality the one school of thought believes private property, even in land and capital, to be an ethical necessity, and on the same grounds another school thinks the first essential of government to be the removal of land and capital from private hands, the ending of 'competition' and the ordering of industry by the State in the public interests, not to secure the profits of a few great capitalists. Support and criticism of these proposals is too apt to centre round mere details. What is the essential feature of the scheme? Clearly the adjustment in the council-chamber of relations now decided in the market. Under economic competition every fluctuation of demand or supply has its echo in some change of

Under

price. Under State Socialism the amounts to be produced in each kind, and the rates of exchange, must be determined by a central political authority; in concrete terms the State has to decide how many boots shall be produced and how much corn, or in still further detail, how much labour a bootmaker must contribute for how many loaves. The fight between capital and labour may seem to be suspended, though in its most literal form it will appear again in strife whether the State should use up its resources on present enjoyments or aim at greater riches to enjoy in the future. But what is far more important, another kind of fight must still continue: the fight between different classes of producer, or between producer and consumer. this system labour is exchanged for labour. It is possible to debate at great length what are the most equitable terms of exchange, whether all men should receive the same wage, or a preference should be given to superior skill, industry, and talent. But in the heat of controversy about the right and proper solution-natural among men preoccupied with a zeal for equity-the plain fact has too often been ignored that whatever decision is reached can only be reached through debate in a deliberative assembly, or a trial of political force in the electorate which chooses it. So far as there is a divergence of interest between different producers, this remains now as much a reality as before. It is merely expressed differently. For at present whatever hand Parliament takes in settling wages its action is subordinate to the ordinary bargaining forces of the market. Then, however, the market in the proper sense of the word disappears. But the variety in the services rendered by different producers does not disappear, nor the necessity of

equating service with service.

Exchange is as real a fact as ever, and on the level of exchange when men expect and demand a fair quid pro quo, and generosity does not drown the economic desires or the claims of abstract justice, there is still as much divergence as identity of interests. Division of labour is useful to all inasmuch as it accumulates a larger store of goods to be distributed but this very division renders acute the question in what quotas the products of labour shall be distributed. If there seems a likelihood that the problem could be more easily or satisfactorily handled when transferred to a political body and taken out of the market-place, well and good, that would be sufficient reason for the Social Revolution. But it is wholly chimerical to think that such a change, however advantageous, means the substitution of co-operation for competition. Both were facts before, both will remain facts now. For man as a wealth-producer is associated with his fellows by ties cosmopolitan in range, but too weak and unsubstantial to bridge over the gulf between personal aims and tastes. In such relations he desires. an advantageous exchange in whatever way he may have to negotiate for it. Whether this desire can ever be uprooted it is useless now to speculate: in the comparative poverty of the world it has its place, and even apart from that it might always have some use to correct the blind nobilities of generous impulse. What is mere day-dreaming is to suppose that a change in the

1 Socialism might, of course, be combined with oligarchy or tyranny: and these forms of government would not allow the divergence of interests to be so plainly expressed as in democratic assemblies. But they, too, would have to settle the terms of exchange in political action, and might obviously please people less by their decisions even than the present system.