[42]. Thorstein Veblen. The Nature of Peace, pp. 173, 174.
VIII
That this in its turn should be subject to a still higher court goes without saying. For in this capacity our industrial parliament represents the community only as producing. The general interests of the common man who has to eat, drink, clothe himself, find a roof over his head, marry, bring up children, are not subordinate to his interest as a producer; nor are they covered by a parliament which supervises the productive interests alone.[[43]] The standard of life must be fixed by the common will of the community; and it will be the business of the industrial parliament to see that the volume, quality and conditions of production shall correspond to this standard; and somewhere there must be a body which also sees to it that the industrial parliament is discharging its task efficiently. It must even be in a position to veto the acts of the industrial parliament should that course become necessary; and this position could be secured by vesting the purchase and control of raw material in the hands of this superior body. At the same time it is evident that there are functions which this superior body is not efficient to discharge simply on the ground of its being representative of the general consumer. The problems of education and public health, for instance, are highly specialised affairs which a purely representative assembly on the traditional lines has proved itself incompetent to handle—and it is notorious how both education and national hygiene have had their development governed and deflected from its proper course by the too great ascendency of trade and business interests in the legislature. Just as the industrial affairs of the community are committed to the charge of those who are directly engaged in them, so the education of the country should be in the hands of a self-governing body of teachers, and the public health to a self-governing medical association—in both cases the personnel being regarded as members of a public service serving under standardised conditions, and their representative and executive body being like the guild parliament answerable to the supreme national assembly.
[43]. It has been suggested that associations of Consumers, e.g. the Co-operative Societies, should be represented in the National Industrial Parliament.
It would be palpably beyond the province of this writing to do more than thus roughly indicate the general direction in which the organisation of government should and is likely to go; and there are conspicuous questions—such as national finance and the administration of law—which would enter deeply into a detailed discussion but have here to be passed by with no more than this cursory mention. It is now desired only to emphasise the fact that the actual conditions of modern life have made the existing legislative machinery obsolete, and that moreover they point to the nature of the changes which are required to make the machinery to fit the facts of the case. Summarily, therefore, it may be said that there are two types of social unit which must be recognised, the one being of the geographical, the other of the vocational order. Somewhere these two sources of representation must meet in a supreme common assembly; and the picture which passes through the mind—say in England—is of a joint house of county and municipal representatives chosen by way of ward and village and district councils, and of representatives of accredited national industrial and professional associations. Yet, insomuch as this process of delegation would make the sense of connection between the individual citizen and the supreme assembly somewhat weak and faint, it would appear to be necessary to provide for some measure of direct popular representation in the assembly. So that we should have a house drawing its personnel from three sources—from the people directly, and by delegation from the two types of social constituency, local and functional. In this body would be vested the supreme and final control of national affairs; and to this body the Guild-parliament and other departmental bodies would render account of their stewardship. It is only in some such way as this that remedy is to be found for a state of things, in which, apart from paid experts in administrative departments, the vital interests of industry, education and national health are committed to a body to which the chances of a general election may return not one single person competent to speak to these matters at first hand.
IX
It is not necessary to extend this discussion into further detail since we are concerned only to indicate a direction rather than to describe a finished product. It may, moreover, be justly questioned whether the business of government can range to any fruitful purpose beyond the common economic, hygienic and educational concerns of the community, and such derivative and concomitant operations as they require for their effectual conduct. In any case it would appear that the remaining interests of life abut on the legitimate province of government only at minor and somewhat special points. These particular interests are for the most part of the “spiritual” order—religious and cultural; and from the nature of the case it were best to leave them to go their own way in peace so long as they may not equitably be charged with encroaching upon the general welfare. Such matters as the property of a religious society or an author’s copyright represent the kind of point at which the spiritual interests come into some sort of relation with the state; and these are essentially matters in the state-regulation of which the chief care should be to avoid anything that may interfere with independence and freedom of thought.
For when all is said and done, it is in this particular region that we must look for the actual and characteristic fruits of a democratic order. The real wealth of a community consists in the capacity it possesses and acquires for activity of a creative kind; its true riches are “the riches of the mind.” And in a sense we may say that the business of government is to set the house-keeping machinery moving so smoothly and efficiently that there will be real wayleave for the spiritual business of life. Just as the best physical condition of a man is that in which he is least aware of his body, so the best government is that which makes the governed least conscious of its operation. Here as elsewhere, magna ars celare artem. But is there any guarantee that such a state-organisation as is here pleaded for will be any more friendly to freedom of thought than the existing type? So far as the traditional state is concerned, it regards freedom of thought largely as a concession which is not quite congruous with the postulates upon which it habitually acts. Freedom of thought has been wrested from the state by main force; and then only with the understood proviso that the state is empowered on due occasion to withdraw the concession. The habit of free thought has however become so ingrained in the idea of democratic progress that there is now only one due occasion on which the state can interfere with it with any prospect of success—that is, in the event of war. Still from the standpoint of the state, freedom of thought is a regrettable, though, as things are, unavoidable defect in its machinery. It interferes sadly with the uniformitarian programme of the typical governmental mind. But this grudging toleration of freedom of thought is an inheritance from the dynastic period when it was necessary to have a population easily mobilisable for whatever adventure the dynast might plan, or whatever necessity of defence might be laid on him. The dynastic tradition required a regimentated people; and we have outgrown the dynastic tradition without discarding all its characteristic modes of working. This is in part to be accounted for by the fact that the continued existence of dynastic pretensions and the consequent danger of dynastic adventures of a predatory kind has necessitated the survival of dynastic ideas and practices as a measure of insurance even in communities that have discarded the dynastic principle. There will be no secure freedom of thought anywhere so long as the world contains any powerful survival of the dynastic tradition.
Latterly the dynastic tradition has (for patent reasons) been the enemy; but it is not unlikely that the downfall of the dynastic tradition may do no more than clear the decks for another more recent predatory institution, not less ominous for human well-being, which may secure the reversion of all the stock-in-trade and goodwill of its predecessor in the matter of national prestige and honour and the like. This is that commercial imperialism which has already insinuated itself into the folds of whatever mantle the dynastic tradition is still able to wear—so much so that it is popularly believed to be impossible to define the frontier at which dynastic pretensions end and commercial chauvinism begins. In any case it is sure that as the dynastic institution falls into desuetude, this commercial imperialism will make a strenuous effort to step into its shoes and arm itself with its weapons. There may be some difference between the person who seeks to gobble up the face of the earth and his brother who seeks to gobble up the markets of the earth. But for practical purposes they belong to the same class and will use the same methods. The nations will be persuaded to maintain sufficient military establishments to protect national capital when it is sent upon profitable adventures beyond the frontier; and the prospect of national prosperity and jealousy for national prestige will be worked for all that they are worth in support of these projects. With the net result that the attention of the state will be chiefly directed in the future as in the past to the furtherance of particularist national interests, and the consequent need of centralised power in the state for the easy regimentation of the people in case of emergency will remain as a permanent arrest on democratic development. And all this is the more tragic in that the “national” interests alleged to be engaged are in point of fact the interests only of the capitalist class. The rest of the nation stands to gain nothing material from these operations.
This latter danger can, however, be dealt with by the simple expedient of declaring that the capital goes out of the country at its own risk. It is, anyhow, preposterous to assume that capital has any inherent right to seek national protection when it travels abroad on private ventures of its own. That should be as clear as daylight; and its recognition would remove one of the main sources of international trouble. But it would also release the community from a good deal of the present wasteful and distracting preoccupation with the business incidental to the chances of international trouble, and leave it free to concern itself with the more vital matters of its inner life. And most of all, with the passing of the dynastic danger, this refusal to under-write the risks of profit-seeking capitalistic adventures abroad would remove the chief reason for that residual embargo on utter freedom of thought which must exist in a community which has to be held in readiness for swift regimentation. Men will never be wholly free until the possibility of war has disappeared from the earth.