A number of people are saying that this war is to be the end of Individualism. "Go as you please" has had its death-blow. Out of this war, whatever else emerges, there will emerge a more highly organised State than existed before--that is to say, a less individualistic and more socialistic State. And there seems a heavy weight of probability on the side of this view. But there are also a number of less obvious countervailing considerations that may quite possibly modify or reverse this tendency.

In this chapter an attempt is to be made to strike a balance between the two systems of forces, and guess how much will be private and how much public in Europe in 1930, or thereabouts.

The prophets who foretell the coming of Socialism base their case on three sets of arguments. They point out, first, the failure of individual enterprise to produce a national efficiency comparable to the partial State Socialism of Germany, and the extraordinary, special dangers inherent in private property that the war has brought to light; secondly, to the scores of approaches to practical Socialism that have been forced upon Great Britain--for example, by the needs of the war; and, thirdly, to the obvious necessities that will confront the British Empire and the Allies generally after the war--necessities that no unorganised private effort can hope to meet effectively.

All these arguments involve the assumption that the general understanding of the common interest will be sufficient to override individual and class motives; an exceedingly doubtful assumption, to say the least of it. But the general understanding of the common interest is most likely to be kept alive by the sense of a common danger, and we have already arrived at the conclusion that Germany is going to be defeated but not destroyed in this war, and that she will be left with sufficient vitality and sufficient resentment and sufficient of her rancid cultivated nationalism to make not only the continuance of the Alliance after the war obviously advisable and highly probable, but also to preserve in the general mind for a generation or so that sense of a common danger which most effectually conduces to the sweeping aside of merely personal and wasteful claims. Into the consequences of this we have now to look a little more closely.

It was the weaknesses of Germany that made this war, and not her strength. The weaknesses of Germany are her Imperialism, her Junkerism, and her intense, sentimental Nationalism; for the former would have no German ascendancy that was not achieved by force, and, with the latter, made the idea of German ascendancy intolerable to all mankind. Better death, we said. And had Germany been no more than her Court, her Junkerism, her Nationalism, the whole system would have smashed beneath the contempt and indignation of the world within a year.

But the strength of Germany has saved her from that destruction. She was at once the most archaic and modern of states. She was Hohenzollern, claiming to be Caesar, and flaunting a flat black eagle borrowed from Imperial Rome; and also she was the most scientific and socialist of states. It is her science and her Socialism that have held and forced back the avengers of Belgium for more than a year and a half. If she has failed as a conqueror, she has succeeded as an organisation. Her ambition has been thwarted, and her method has been vindicated. She will, I think, be so far defeated in the contest of endurance which is now in progress that she will have to give up every scrap of territorial advantage she has gained; she may lose most of her Colonial Empire; she may be obliged to complete her modernisation by abandoning her militant Imperialism; but she will have at least the satisfaction of producing far profounder changes in the chief of her antagonists than those she herself will undergo.

The Germany of the Hohenzollerns had its mortal wound at the Marne; the Germany we fight to-day is the Germany of Krupp and Ostwald. It is merely as if she had put aside a mask that had blinded her. She was methodical and civilised except for her head and aim; she will become entirely methodical. But the Britain and Russia and France she fights are lands full of the spirit of undefined novelty. They are being made over far more completely. They are being made over, not in spite of the war, but because of the war. Only by being made over can they win the war. And if they do not win the war, then they are bound to be made over. They are not merely putting aside old things, but they are forming and organising within themselves new structures, new and more efficient relationships, that will last far beyond the still remote peace settlement.

What this war has brought home to the consciousness of every intelligent man outside the German system, with such thoroughness as whole generations of discussion and peace experience could never have achieved, is a double lesson: that Germany had already gone far to master when she blundered into the war; firstly, the waste and dangers of individualism, and, secondly, the imperative necessity of scientific method in public affairs. The waste and dangers of individualism have had a whole series of striking exemplifications both in Europe and America since the war began. Were there such a thing as a Socialist propaganda in existence, were the so-called socialistic organisations anything better than a shabby little back-door into contemporary politics, those demonstrations would be hammering at the mind of everyone. It may be interesting to recapitulate some of the most salient instances.

The best illustration, perhaps, of the waste that arises out of individualism is to be found in the extreme dislocation of the privately owned transit services of Great Britain at the present time. There is no essential reason whatever why food and fuel in Great Britain should be considerably dearer than they are under peace conditions. Just the same home areas are under cultivation, just the same foreign resources are available; indeed, more foreign supplies are available because we have intercepted those that under normal conditions would have gone to Germany. The submarine blockade of Britain is now a negligible factor in this question.

Despite these patent conditions there has been, and is, a steady increase in the cost of provisions, coal, and every sort of necessity. This increase means an increase in the cost of production of many commodities, and so contributes again to the general scarcity. This is the domestic aspect of a difficulty that has also its military side. It is not sufficient merely to make munitions; they must also be delivered, Great Britain is suffering very seriously from congestion of the railways. She suffers both in social and military efficiency, and she is so suffering because her railways, instead of being planned as one great and simple national distributing system, have grown up under conditions of clumsy, dividend-seeking competition.

Each great railway company and combination has worked its own areas, and made difficulties and aggressions at the boundaries of its sphere of influence; here are inconvenient junctions and here unnecessary duplications; nearly all the companies come into London, each taking up its own area of expensive land for goods yards, sidings, shunting grounds, and each regardless of any proper correlation with the other; great areas of the County of London are covered with their idle trucks and their separate coal stores; in many provincial towns you will find two or even three railway stations at opposite ends of the town; the streets are blocked by the vans and trolleys of the several companies tediously handing about goods that could be dealt with at a tenth of the cost in time and labour at a central clearing-house, did such a thing exist; and each system has its vast separate staff, unaccustomed to work with any other staff.

Since the war began the Government has taken over the general direction of this disarticulated machinery, but no one with eyes who travels about England now can fail to remark, in the miles and miles of waiting loaded trucks on every siding, the evidences of mischievous and now almost insuperable congestion. The trucks of each system that have travelled on to another still go back, for the most part, empty to their own; and thousands of privately owned trucks, which carry cargo only one way, block our sidings. Great Britain wastes men and time to a disastrous extent in these needless shuntings and handlings.

Here, touching every life in the community, is one instance of the muddle that arises naturally out of the individualistic method of letting public services grow up anyhow without a plan, or without any direction at all except the research for private profit.

A second series of deficiencies that the war has brought to light in the too individualistic British State is the entire want of connection between private profit and public welfare. So far as the interests of the capitalist go it does not matter whether he invests his money at home or abroad; it does not matter whether his goods are manufactured in London or Timbuctoo.

But what of the result? At the outbreak of the war Great Britain found that a score of necessary industries had drifted out of the country, because it did not "pay" any private person to keep them here. The shortage of dyes has been amply discussed as a typical case. A much graver one that we may now write about was the shortage of zinc. Within a month or so of the outbreak of the war the British Government had to take urgent and energetic steps to secure this essential ingredient of cartridge cases. Individualism had let zinc refining drift to Belgium and Germany; it was the luck rather than the merit of Great Britain that one or two refineries still existed.

Still more extraordinary things came to light in the matter of the metal supply. Under an individualistic system you may sell to the highest bidder, and anyone with money from anywhere may come in and buy. Great supplies of colonial ores were found to be cornered by semi-national German syndicates. Supplies were held up by these contracts against the necessities of the Empire. And this was but one instance of many which have shown that, while industrial development in the Allied countries is still largely a squabbling confusion of little short-sighted, unscientific, private profit-seeking owners, in Germany it has been for some years increasingly run on far-seeing collectivist lines. Against the comparatively little and mutually jealous British or American capitalists and millionaires Germany pits itself as a single great capitalist and competitor. She has worked everywhere upon a comprehensive plan. Against her great national electric combination, for example, only another national combination could stand. As it was, Germany--in the way of business--wired and lit (and examined) the forts at Liége. She bought and prepared a hundred strategic centres in individualistic Belgium and France.

So we pass from the fact that individualism is hopeless muddle to the fact that the individualist idea is one of limitless venality, Who can buy, may control. And Germany, in her long scheming against her individualist rivals, has not simply set herself to buy and hold the keys and axles of their economic machinery. She has set herself, it must be admitted, with a certain crudity and little success, but with unexampled vigour, to buy the minds of her adversaries. The Western nations have taken a peculiar pride in having a free Press; that is to say, a Press that may be bought by anyone. Our Press is constantly bought and sold, in gross and detail, by financiers, advertisers, political parties, and the like. Germany came into the market rather noisily, and great papers do to a large extent live in glass houses; but her efforts have been sufficient to exercise the minds of great numbers of men with the problem of what might have happened in the way of national confusion if the German attack had been more subtly conceived....

It is only a partial answer to this difficulty to say that a country that is so nationalist and aggressive as Germany is incapable of subtle conceptions. The fact remains that in Great Britain at the present time there are newspaper proprietors who would be good bargains for Germany at two million pounds a head, and that there was no effectual guarantee in the individualistic system, but only our good luck and the natural patriotism of the individuals concerned that she did not pick up these bargains before trading with the enemy became illegal. It happened, for example, that Lord Northcliffe was public-spirited, That was the good luck of Great Britain rather than her merit. There was nothing in the individualistic system to prevent Germany from buying up the entire Harmsworth Press--The Times, Daily Mail, and all--five years before the war, and using it to confuse the national mind, destroy the national unity, sacrifice the national interests, and frustrate the national will.

Not only the newspapers, but the news-agents and booksellers of both Great Britain and America are entirely at the disposal of any hostile power which chooses to buy them up quietly and systematically. It is merely a question of wealth and cleverness. And if the failure of the Germans to grip the Press of the French and English speaking countries has been conspicuous, she has been by no means so unsuccessful in--for example--Spain. At the present time the thought and feeling of the Spanish speaking world is being educated against the Allies. The Spanish mind has been sold by its custodians into German control.

Muddle and venality do not, however, exhaust the demonstrated vices of individualism. Individualism encourages desertion and treason. Individualism permits base private people to abscond with the national resources and squeeze a profit out of national suffering. In the early stages of the war some bright minds conceived the idea of a corner in drugs. It is not illegal; it is quite the sort of thing that appeals to the individualistic frame of mind as entirely meritorious. As the New Statesman put it recently: "The happy owners of the world's available stock of a few indispensable drugs did not refrain from making, not only the various Governments, but also all the sick people of the world pay double, and even tenfold, prices for what was essential to relieve pain and save life. What fortunes were thus made we shall probably never know, any more than we shall know the tale of the men and women and children who suffered and died because of their inability to pay, not the cost of production of what would have saved them, but the unnecessarily enhanced price that the chances of the market enabled the owners to exact."

And another bright instance of the value of individualism is the selling of British shipping to neutral buyers just when the country is in the most urgent need of every ship it can get, and the deliberate transfer to America of a number of British businesses to evade paying a proper share of the national bill in taxation. The English who have gone to America at different times have been of very different qualities; at the head of the list are the English who went over in the Mayflower; at the bottom will be the rich accessions of this war....

And perhaps a still more impressive testimony to the rottenness of these "business men," upon whom certain eccentric voices call so amazingly to come and govern us, is the incurable distrust they have sown in the minds of labour. Never was an atmosphere of discipline more lamentable than that which has grown up in the factories, workshops, and great privately owned public services of America and Western Europe. The men, it is evident, expect to be robbed and cheated at every turn. I can only explain their state of mind by supposing that they have been robbed and cheated. Their scorn and contempt for their employees' good faith is limitless. Their morale is undermined by an invincible distrust.

It is no good for Mr. Lloyd George to attempt to cure the gathered ill of a century with half an hour or so of eloquence. When Great Britain, in her supreme need, turns to the workmen she has trained in the ways of individualism for a century, she reaps the harvest individualism has sown. She has to fight with that handicap. Every regulation for the rapid mobilisation of labour is scrutinised to find the trick in it.

And they find the trick in it as often as not. Smart individualistic "business experience" has been at the draughtsman's elbow. A man in an individualistic system does not escape from class ideas and prejudices by becoming an official. There is profound and bitter wisdom in the deep distrust felt by British labour for both military and industrial conscription.

The breakdown of individualism has been so complete in Great Britain that we are confronted with the spectacle of this great and ancient kingdom reconstructing itself perforce, while it wages the greatest war in history. A temporary nationalisation of land transit has been improvised, and only the vast, deep-rooted, political influence of the shipowners and coalowners have staved off the manifestly necessary step of nationalising shipping and coal. I doubt if they will be able to stave it off to the end of the long struggle which is still before us if the militarism of Germany is really to be arrested and discredited. Expropriation and not conscription will be the supreme test of Britain's loyalty to her Allies.

The British shipowners, in particular, are reaping enormous but precarious profits from the war. The blockade of Britain, by the British shipowners is scarcely less effective than the blockade of Germany by Britain. With an urgent need of every ship for the national supplies, British ships, at the present moment of writing this, are still carrying cheap American automobiles to Australia. They would carry munitions to Germany if their owners thought they had a sporting chance of not getting caught at it. These British shipowners are a pampered class with great political and social influence, and no doubt as soon as the accumulating strain of the struggle tells to the extent of any serious restriction of their advantage and prospects, we shall see them shifting to the side of the at present negligible group of British pacifists. I do not think one can count on any limit to their selfishness and treason.

I believe that the calculations of some of these extreme and apparently quite unreasonable "pacifists" are right. Before the war is over there will be a lot of money in the pacifist business. The rich curs of the West End will join hands with the labour curs of the Clyde. The base are to be found in all classes, but I doubt if they dominate any. I do not believe that any interest or group of interests in Great Britain can stand in the way of the will of the whole people to bring this struggle to a triumphant finish at any cost. I do not believe that the most sacred ties of personal friendship and blood relationship with influential people can save either shipowners or coalowners or army contractors to the end.

There will be no end until these profit-makings are arrested. The necessary "conscriptions of property" must come about in Great Britain because there is no alternative but failure in the war, and the British people will not stand failure. I believe that the end of the war will see, not only transit, but shipping, collieries, and large portions of the machinery of food and drink production and distribution no longer under the administration of private ownership, but under a sort of provisional public administration. And very many British factories will be in the same case.

Two years ago no one would have dared to prophesy the tremendous rearrangement of manufacturing machinery which is in progress in Britain to-day. Thousands of firms of engineers and manufacturers of all sorts, which were flourishing in 1914, exist to-day only as names, as shapes, as empty shells. Their staffs have been shattered, scattered, reconstructed; their buildings enlarged and modified; their machinery exchanged, reconstituted, or taken. The reality is a vast interdependent national factory that would have seemed incredible to Fourier.

It will be as impossible to put back British industrialism into the factories and forms of the pre-war era as it would be to restore the Carthaginian Empire. There is a new economic Great Britain to-day, emergency made, jerry-built no doubt, a gawky, weedy giant, but a giant who may fill out to such dimensions as the German national system has never attained. Behind it is an idea, a new idea, the idea of the nation as one great economic system working together, an idea which could not possibly have got into the sluggish and conservative British intelligence in half a century by any other means than the stark necessities of this war.... Great Britain cannot retrace those steps even if she would, and so she will be forced to carry this process of reconstruction through. And what is happening to Great Britain must, with its national differences, be happening to France and Russia. Not only for war ends, but for peace ends, behind the front and sustaining the front, individualities are being hammered together into common and concerted activities.

At the end of this war Great Britain will find herself with this great national factory, this great national organisation of labour, planned, indeed, primarily to make war material, but convertible with the utmost ease to the purposes of automobile manufacture, to transit reconstruction, to electrical engineering, and endless such uses.

France and Russia will be in a parallel case. All the world will be exhausted, and none of the Allies will have much money to import automobiles, railway material, electrical gear, and so on, from abroad. Moreover, it will be a matter of imperative necessity for them to get ahead of the Central Powers with their productive activities. We shall all be too poor to import from America, and we shall be insane to import from Germany. America will be the continent with the long purse, prepared to buy rather than sell. Each country will have great masses of soldiers waiting to return to industrial life, and will therefore be extremely indisposed to break up any existing productive organisation.

In the face of these facts, will any of the Allied Powers be so foolish as to disband this great system of national factories and nationally worked communications? Moreover, we have already risked the prophecy that this war will not end with such conclusiveness as to justify an immediate beating out of our swords into ploughshares. There will be a military as well as a social reason for keeping the national factories in a going state.

What more obvious course, then, than to keep them going by turning them on to manufacture goods of urgent public necessity? There are a number of modern commodities now practically standardised: the bicycle, the cheap watch, the ordinary tradesman's delivery automobile, the farmer's runabout, the country doctor's car, much electric-lighting material, dynamos, and so forth. And also, in a parallel case, there is shipbuilding. The chemical side of munition work can turn itself with no extreme difficulty to the making of such products as dyes.

We face the fact, then, that either the State must go on with this production, as it can do, straight off from the signing of peace, converting with a minimum of friction, taking on its soldiers as they are discharged from the army as employees with a minimum waste of time and a minimum of social disorder, and a maximum advantage in the resumption of foreign trade, or there will be a dangerous break-up of the national factory system, a time of extreme chaos and bitter unemployment until capital accumulates for new developments. The risks of social convulsion will be enormous. And there is small hope that the Central Powers, and particularly industrial Germany, will have the politeness to wait through the ten or twelve years of economic embarrassment that a refusal to take this bold but obviously advantageous step into scientific Socialism will entail.

But the prophet must be on his guard against supposing that, because a thing is highly desirable, it must necessarily happen; or that, because it is highly dangerous, it will be avoided. This bold and successful economic reconstruction upon national lines is not inevitable merely because every sound reason points us in that direction. A man may be very ill, a certain drug may be clearly indicated as the only possible remedy, but it does not follow that the drug is available, that the doctor will have the sense to prescribe it, or the patient the means to procure it or the intelligence to swallow it.

The experience of history is that nations do not take the obviously right course, but the obviously wrong one. The present prophet knows only his England, but, so far as England is concerned, he can cover a sheet of paper with scarcely a pause, jotting down memoranda of numberless forces that make against any such rational reconstruction. Most of these forces, in greater or less proportion, must be present in the case of every other country under consideration.

The darkest shadow upon the outlook of European civilisation at the present time is not the war; it is the failure of any co-operative spirit between labour and the directing classes. The educated and leisured classes have been rotten with individualism for a century; they have destroyed the confidence of the worker in any leadership whatever. Labour stands apart, intractable. If there is to be any such rapid conversion of the economic machinery as the opportunities and necessities of this great time demand, then labour must be taken into the confidence of those who would carry it through. It must be reassured and enlightened. Labour must know clearly what is being done; it must be an assenting co-operator. The stride to economic national service and Socialism is a stride that labour should be more eager to take than any other section of the community.

The first step in reassuring labour must be to bring the greedy private owner and the speculator under a far more drastic discipline than at present. The property-owning class is continually accusing labour of being ignorant, suspicious, and difficult; it is blind to the fact that it is itself profit-seeking by habit, greedy, conceited, and half educated.

Every step in the mobilisation of Great Britain's vast resources for the purposes of the war has been hampered by the tricks, the failures to understand, and the almost instinctive disloyalties of private owners. The raising of rents in Glasgow drove the infuriated workmen of the Clyde district into an unwilling strike. It was an exasperating piece of private selfishness, quite typical of the individualistic state of mind, and the failure to anticipate or arrest it on the part of the Government was a worse failure than Suvla Bay. And everywhere the officials of the Ministry of Munitions find private employers holding back workers and machinery from munition works, intriguing--more particularly through the Board of Trade--to have all sorts of manufactures for private profit recognised as munition work, or if that contention is too utterly absurd, then as work vitally necessary to the maintenance of British export trade and the financial position of the country. It is an undeniable fact that employers and men alike have been found far readier to risk their lives for their country than to lay aside any scale of profits to which they have grown accustomed.

This conflict of individualistic enterprise and class suspicion against the synthesis of the public welfare is not peculiar to Great Britain; it is probably going on with local variations in Germany, Russia, Italy, France, and, indeed, in every combatant country. Because of the individualistic forces and feelings, none of us, either friends or enemies, are really getting anything like our full possible result out of our national efforts. But in Germany there is a greater tradition of subordination; in France there is a greater clarity of mind than in any other country.

Great Britain and Russia in this, as in so many other matters, are at once close kindred and sharp antithesis. Each is mentally crippled by the corruption of its educational system by an official religious orthodoxy, and hampered by a Court which disowns any function of intellectual stimulus. Neither possesses a scientifically educated class to which it can look for the powerful handling of this great occasion; and each has acquired under these disadvantages the same strange faculty for producing sane resultants out of illogical confusions. It is the way of these unmethodical Powers to produce unexpected, vaguely formulated, and yet effective cerebral action--apparently from their backbones.

As I sit playing at prophecy, and turn over the multitudinous impressions of the last year in my mind, weighing the great necessities of the time against obstacles and petty-mindedness, I become more and more conscious of a third factor that is neither need nor obstruction, and that is the will to get things right that has been liberated by the war.

The new spirit is still but poorly expressed, but it will find expression. The war goes on, and we discuss this question of economic reconstruction as though it was an issue that lay between the labour that has stayed behind and the business men, for the most part old men with old habits of mind, who have stayed behind.

The real life of Europe's future lies on neither side of that opposition. The real life is mutely busy at present, saying little because of the uproar of the guns, and not so much learning as casting habits and shedding delusions. In the trenches there are workers who have broken with the old slacking and sabotage, and there are prospective leaders who have forgotten profit. The men between eighteen and forty are far too busy in the blood and mud to make much showing now, but to-morrow these men will be the nation.

When that third factor of the problem is brought in the outlook of the horoscope improves. The spirit of the war may be counted upon to balance and prevail against this spirit of individualism, this spirit of suspicion and disloyalty, which I fear more than anything else in the world.

I believe in the young France, young England, and young Russia this war is making, and so I believe that every European country will struggle along the path that this war has opened to a far more completely organised State than has existed ever before. The Allies will become State firms, as Germany was, indeed, already becoming before the war; setting private profit aside in the common interest, handling agriculture, transport, shipping, coal, the supply of metals, the manufacture of a thousand staple articles, as national concerns.

In the face of the manifest determination of the Central Powers to do as much, the Allies will be forced also to link their various State firms together into a great allied trust, trading with a common interest and a common plan with Germany and America and the rest of the world.... Youth and necessity will carry this against selfishness, against the unimaginative, against the unteachable, the suspicious, the "old fool."

But I do not venture to prophesy that this will come about as if it were a slick and easy deduction from present circumstances. Even in France I do not think things will move as lucidly and generously as that. There will be a conflict everywhere between wisdom and cunning, between the eyes of youth and the purblind, between energy and obstinacy.

The reorganisation of the European States will come about clumsily and ungraciously. At every point the sticker will be found sticking tight, holding out to be bought off, holding out for a rent or a dividend or a share, holding out by mere instinct. At every turn, too, the bawler will be loud and active, bawling suspicions, bawling accusations, bawling panic, or just simply bawling. Tricks, peculation, obstinacies, vanities--after this war men will still be men. But I do believe that through all the dust and din, the great reasons in the case, the steady constructive forces of the situation, will carry us.

I believe that out of the ruins of the nineteenth century system of private capitalism that this war has smashed for ever, there will arise, there does even now arise, in this strange scaffolding of national munition factories and hastily nationalised public services, the framework of a new economic and social order based upon national ownership and service.

Let us now recapitulate a little and see how far we have got in constructing a picture of the European community as it will be in fifteen or twenty years' time. Nominally it will be little more of a Socialist State than it is to-day, but, as a matter of fact, the ships, the railways, the coal and metal supply, the great metal industries, much engineering, and most agriculture, will be more or less completely under collective ownership, and certainly very completely under collective control. This does not mean that there will have been any disappearance of private property, but only that there will have been a very considerable change in its character; the owner will be less of controller but more of a creditor; he will be a rentier or an annuitant.

The burthen of this class upon the community will not be relatively quite so heavy as it would otherwise have been, because of a very considerable rise in wages and prices.

In a community in which all the great initiatives have been assumed by the State, the importance of financiers and promoters will have diminished relatively to the importance of administrative officials; the opportunities of private exploitation, indeed, will have so diminished that there will probably be far less evidence of great concentrations of private wealth in the European social landscape than there was before the war.

On the other hand, there will be an enormously increased rentier class drawing the interest of the war loans from the community, and maintaining a generally high standard of comfort. There will have been a great demand for administrative and technical abilities and a great stimulation of scientific and technical education. By 1926 we shall be going about a world that will have recovered very largely from the impoverishment of the struggle; we shall tour in State-manufactured automobiles upon excellent roads, and we shall live in houses equipped with a national factory electric light installation, and at every turn we shall be using and consuming the products of nationalised industry--and paying off the National Debt simultaneously, and reducing our burden of rentiers.

At the same time our boys will be studying science in their schools more thoroughly than they do now, and they will in many cases be learning Russian instead of Greek or German. More of our boys will be going into the public service, and fewer thinking of private business, and they will be going into the public service, not as clerks, but as engineers, technical chemists, manufacturers, State agriculturists, and the like. The public service will be less a service of clerks and more a service of practical men. The ties that bind France and Great Britain at the present moment will have been drawn very much closer. France, Belgium and England will be drifting towards a French-English bi-lingualism....

So much of our picture we may splash in now. Much that is quite essential remains to be discussed. So far we have said scarcely a word about the prospects of party politics and the problems of government that arise as the State ceases to be a mere impartial adjudicator between private individuals, and takes upon itself more and more of the direction of the general life of the community.

The riddle of administration is the most subtle of all those that the would-be prophet of the things that are coming must attempt. We see the great modern States confronted now by vast and urgent necessities, by opportunities that may never recur. Individualism has achieved its inevitable failure; "go as you please" in a world that also contained aggressive militarism, has broken down. We live in a world of improvised State factories, commandeered railways, substituted labour and emergency arrangements. Our vague-minded, lax, modern democracy has to pull itself together, has to take over and administer and succeed with a great system of collective functions, has to express its collective will in some better terms than "go as you please," or fail.

And we find the affairs of nearly every great democratic State in the hands of a class of men not specially adapted to any such constructive or administrative work.

I am writing here now chiefly of the Western Allies. Russia is peculiar in having her administrative machine much more highly developed in relation to her general national life than the free democratic countries. She has to make a bureaucracy that has not hitherto been an example for efficiency into a bureaucracy that will be constructive, responsive, liberal, scientific, and efficient; the Western countries have to do the same with that oligarchy of politicians which, as Professor Michels has recently pointed out in his striking book on "Political Parties," is the necessary reality of democratic government. By different methods the Eastern and Western Powers have to attain a common end. Both bureaucracy and pseudo-democratic oligarchy have to accomplish an identical task, to cement the pacific alliance of the Pledged Allies and to socialise their common industrial and economic life, so as to make it invulnerable to foreign attack.

Now in Great Britain, which is the democracy that has been most under the close observation of the present prophet, there is at present a great outcry against the "politician," and more particularly against the "lawyer-politician." He is our embarrassment. In him we personify all our difficulties. Let us consider the charges against this individual. Let us ask, can we do without him? And let us further see what chances there may be of so altering, qualifying, or balancing him as to minimise the evil of his influence. To begin with, let us run over the essentials of the charge against him.

It is with a modest blush that the present prophet recapitulates these charges. So early as the year 1902 he was lifting up his voice, not exactly in the wilderness but at least in the Royal Institution, against the legal as compared with the creative or futurist type of mind. The legal mind, he insisted, looks necessarily to the past. It is dilatory because it has no sense of coming things, it is uninventive and wasteful, it does not create, it takes advantage. It is the type of mind least able, under any circumstances, to organise great businesses, to plan campaigns, to adventure or achieve. "Wait and see" crystallises its spirit. Its resistance is admirable, and it has no "go." Nevertheless there is a tendency for power to gravitate in all democratic countries to the lawyer.

In the British system the normal faults of the lawyer are enhanced, and his predominance intensified, by certain peculiarities of our system. In the first place, he belongs to a guild of exceptional power. In Britain it happens that the unfortunate course was taken ages ago of bribing the whole legal profession to be honest. The British judges and law officers are stupendously overpaid in order to make them incorruptible; it is a poor but perhaps a well-merited compliment to their professional code. We have squared the whole profession to be individually unbribable.

The judges, moreover, in the Anglo-Saxon communities are appointed from among the leading barristers, an arrangement that a child can see is demoralising and inadvisable. And in Great Britain all the greatest salaries in the government service are reserved for the legal profession. The greatest prizes, therefore, before an energetic young man who has to make his way in Great Britain are the legal prizes, and his line of advancement to these lies, for all the best years of his life, not through the public service, but through the private practice of advocacy. The higher education, such as it is, in Great Britain, produces under the stimulus of these conditions an advocate as its finest flower. To go from the posing and chatter of the Union Debating Society to a university laboratory is, in Britain, to renounce ambition. Few men of exceptional energy will do that.

The national consequences of this state of affairs have been only too manifest throughout the conduct of the war. The British Government has developed all the strength and all the weakness of the great profession it represents. It has been uninventive, dilatory, and without initiative; it has been wasteful and evasive; but it has not been wanting in a certain eloquence and dignity, it has been wary and shrewd, and it has held on to office with the concentrated skill and determination of a sucker-fish. And the British mind, with a concentration and intensity unprecedented before the war, is speculating how it can contrive to get a different sort of ruler and administrator at work upon its affairs.

There is a disposition in the Press, and much of the private talk one hears, to get rid of lawyers from the control of national affairs altogether, to substitute "business men" or scientific men or "experts." That way lies dictatorship and Caesarism. And even Great Britain is not so heedless of the experiences of other nations as to attempt again what has already been so abundantly worked out in national disaster across the Channel. The essential business of government is to deal between man and man; it is not to manage the national affairs in detail, but to secure the proper managers, investigators, administrators, generals, and so forth, to maintain their efficiency, and keep the balance between them. We cannot do without a special class of men for these interventions and controls. In other words, we cannot do without a special class of politicians. They may be elected by a public or appointed by an autocrat; at some point they have to come in. And this business of intervening between men and classes and departments in public life, and getting them to work together, is so closely akin to the proper work of a lawyer in dealing between men and men, that, unless the latter are absolutely barred from becoming the former, it is almost unavoidable that politicians should be drawn more abundantly from the lawyer class than from any other class in the community.

This is so much the case, that when the London Times turns in despair from a government of lawyers and looks about for an alternative, the first figure that presents itself is that distinguished advocate Sir Edward Carson!

But there is a difference between recognising that some sort of lawyer-politician is unavoidable and agreeing that the existing type of lawyer who is so largely accountable for the massive slowness, the confused action, the slovenliness rather than the weakness of purpose, shown by Great Britain in this war, is the only possible type, The British system of education and legal organisation is not the last word of human wisdom in these matters.

The real case we British have against our lawyers, if I may adopt an expressive colloquialism, is not that they are lawyers, but that they are such infernal lawyers. They trail into modern life most of the faults of a mediaeval guild. They seem to have no sense of the State they could develop, no sense of the future they might control. Their law and procedure has never been remodelled upon the framework of modern ideas; their minds are still set to the tune of mediaeval bickerings, traditionalism, and State blindness. They are mystery dealers, almost unanimously they have resisted giving the common man the protection of a code.

In the United Kingdom we have had no Napoleon to override the profession. It is extraordinary how complete has been their preservation of barbaric conceptions. Even the doctor is now largely emancipated from his archaic limitations as a skilled retainer. He thinks more and more of the public health, and less and less of his patron. The more recent a profession the less there is of the individualistic personal reference; scientific research, for example, disavows and forbids every personal reference.

But while everyone would be shocked at some great doctor, or some great research institution, in these days of urgent necessity spending two or three weeks on the minor ailments of some rich person's lapdog, nobody is scandalised at the spectacle of Sir Edward Carson and a costly law court spending long days upon the sordid disputes that centre upon young Master Slingsby's ear--whether it is the Slingsby family ear or the ear of a supposititious child--a question that any three old women might be trusted to settle. After that he rests for a fortnight and recuperates, and returns--to take up a will case turning upon the toy rabbits and suchlike trifles which entertained the declining years of a nonagenarian. This, when we are assured that the country awaits Sir Edward as its Deliverer. It is as if Lord Kitchener took a month off to act at specially high rates for the "movies." Our standard for the lawyer is older and lower than it is for other men.

There is no more reason nowadays why a lawyer should look to advocacy as a proper use of his knowledge than that a doctor should make private poisoning the lucrative side of his profession. There is no reason why a court of law should ignore the plain right of the commonweal to intervene in every case between man and man. There is every reason why trivial disputes about wills and legitimacy should not be wasting our national resources at the present time, when nearly every other form of waste is being restrained. The sound case against the legal profession in Anglo-Saxon countries is not that it is unnecessary, but that it is almost incredibly antiquated, almost incredibly careless of the public well-being, and that it corrupts or dwarfs all the men who enter it.

Our urgent need is not so much to get rid of the lawyer from our affairs as to get rid of the wig and gown spirit and of the special pleader, and to find and develop the new lawyer, the lawyer who is not an advocate, who is not afraid of a code, who has had some scientific education, and whose imagination has been quickened by the realisation of life as creative opportunity. We want to emancipate this profession from its ancient guild restrictions--the most anti-social and disastrous of all such restrictions--to destroy its disgraceful traditions of over-payment and fee-snatching, to insist upon a scientific philosophical training for its practitioners, to make the practice of advocacy a fall from grace, and to bar professional advocates from the bench.

In the British trenches now there must be many hundreds of fine young lawyers, still but little corrupted, who would be only too glad to exchange the sordid vulgarities and essential dishonour of a successful lawyer's career under the old conditions for lives of service and statecraft....

No observer of the general trend of events in Europe will get any real grasp of what is happening until he realises the cardinal importance of the reactions that centre upon this question. The current development of political institutions and the possible development of a new spirit and method in the legal profession are so intimately interwoven as to be practically one and the same question. The international question is, can we get a new Germany? The national question everywhere is, can we get a better politician?

The widely prevalent discontent with the part played by the lawyer in the affairs of all the Western Allies is certain to develop into a vigorous agitation for legal reconstruction. In the case of every other great trade union the war has exacted profound and vital concessions. The British working men, for example, have abandoned scores of protective restrictions upon women's labour, upon unskilled labour, for which they have fought for generations; they have submitted to a virtual serfdom that the nation's needs might be supplied; the medical profession has sent almost too large a proportion of its members to the front; the scientific men, the writers, have been begging to be used in any capacity at any price or none; the Ministry of Munitions is full of unpaid workers, and so on.

The British legal profession and trade union alone has made no sign of any disposition to relax its elaborate restrictions upon the labour of amateurs and women, or to abate one jot or one tittle of its habitual rewards. There has been no attempt to reduce the costly law officers of the Government, for example, or to call in the help of older men or women to release law officers who are of military experience or age.

And I must admit that there are small signs of the advent of the "new lawyer," at whose possibility I have just flung a hopeful glance, to replace the existing mass of mediaeval unsoundness. Barristers seem to age prematurely--at least in Great Britain--unless they are born old. In the legal profession one hears nothing of "the young"; one hears only of "smart juniors." Reform and progressive criticism in the legal profession, unlike all other professions, seem to be the monopoly of the retired.

Nevertheless, Great Britain is as yet only beginning to feel the real stresses of the war; she is coming into the full strain a year behind France, Germany, and Russia; and after the war there lies the possibility of still more violent stresses; so that what is as yet a mere cloud of criticism and resentment at our lawyer-politicians and privileged legal profession may gather to a great storm before 1918 or 1919.

I am inclined to foretell as one most highly probable development of the present vague but very considerable revolt against the lawyer in British public life, first, some clumsy proposals or even attempts to leave him out, and use "business men," soldiers, admirals, dictators, or men of science, in his place--which is rather like throwing away a blottesque fountain-pen and trying to write with a walking-stick or a revolver or a flash-light--and then when that is found to be impossible, a resolute attempt to clean and reconstitute the legal profession on modern and more honourable lines; a movement into which, quite possibly, a number of the younger British lawyers, so soon as they realise that the movement is good enough to risk careers upon, may throw themselves. A large share in such a reform movement, if it occurs, will be brought about by the Press; by which I mean not simply the periodical Press, but all books and contemporary discussion. It is only by the natural playing off of Press against lawyer-politician that democratic States can ever come to their own.

And that brings me to the second part of this question, which is whether, quite apart from the possible reform and spiritual rebirth of the legal profession, there is not also the possibility of balancing and correcting its influence. In ancient Hebrew history--it may be a warning rather than a precedent--there were two great forces, one formal, conservative and corrupting, the other undisciplined, creative, and destructive; the first was the priest, the second the prophet. Their interaction is being extraordinarily paralleled in the Anglo-Saxon democracies by the interaction of lawyer-politician and Press to-day.

If the lawyer-politician is unavoidable, the Press is indispensable. It is not in the clash and manoeuvres and mutual correction of party, but in the essential conflict of political authority on the one hand and Press on the other that the future of democratic government apparently lies. In the clearer, simpler case of France, a less wealthy and finer type of lawyer interacts with a less impersonal Press. It is in the great contrasts and the essential parallelism of the French and the Anglo-Saxon democratic systems that one finds the best practical reason for anticipating very profound changes in these two inevitables of democracy, the Press and the lawyer-politician, and for assuming that the method of democracy has still a vast range of experimental adjustment between them still untried. Such experimental adjustment will be the chief necessity and business of political life in every country of the world for the next few decades.

The lawyer-politician and the Press are as it were the right and left hands of a modern democracy. The war has brought this out clearly. It has ruptured the long-weakened bonds that once linked this and that newspaper with this and that party. For years the Press of all the Western democracies has been drifting slowly away from the tradition--it lasted longest and was developed most completely in Great Britain--that-newspapers were party organs.

In the novels of Disraeli the Press appears as an ambiguously helpful person who is asked out to dinner, who is even admitted to week-end conferences, by the political great. He takes his orders from the Whig peers or the Tory peers. At his greatest he advises them respectfully. But that was in the closing days of the British oligarchy; that was before modern democracy had begun to produce its characteristic political forms. It is not so very much more than a century ago that Great Britain had her first lawyer Prime Minister. Through all the Napoleonic wars she was still a country ruled by great feudal landlords, and gentlemen adventurers associated with them. The lawyers only came to their own at the close of the great Victorian duet of Disraeli and Gladstone, the last of the political gentlemen adventurers. It is only now, in the jolts and dissatisfactions of this war, that Great Britain rubs her eyes and looks at her government as it is.

The old oligarchy established the tradition of her diplomacy. Illiberal at home, it was liberal abroad; Great Britain was the defender of nationality, of constitutionalism, and of the balance of power against the holy alliance. In the figure of such a gentleman as Sir Edward Grey the old order mingles with the new. But most of his colleagues are of the new order. They would have been incredible in the days of Lord Melbourne. In its essential quality the present British Government is far more closely akin to the French than it is to its predecessor of a hundred years ago. Essentially it is a Government of lawyer-politicians with no close family ties or intimate political traditions and prejudices. And its natural and proper corrective is the Press, over which it fails to exercise now even a shadow of the political and social influence that once kept that power in subjection.

It is the way with all human institutions; they remain in appearance long after they have passed away in reality. It is on record that the Roman senate still thought Rome was a republic in the third century of the Christian era. It is nothing wonderful, therefore, that people suppose that the King, the Lords, and the Commons, debating through a Ministry and an Opposition, still govern the British Empire. As a matter of fact it is the lawyer-politicians, split by factions that simulate the ancient government and opposition, who rule, under a steadily growing pressure and checking by the Press. Since this war began the Press has released itself almost inadvertently from its last association with the dying conflicts of party politics, and has taken its place as a distinct power in the realm, claiming to be more representative of the people than their elected representatives, and more expressive of the national mind and will.

Now there is considerable validity in this claim. It is easy to say that a paper may be bought by any proprietor and set to put what he chooses into the public mind. As a matter of fact, buying a newspaper is far more costly and public a proceeding than buying a politician. And if on the one hand the public has no control over what is printed in a paper, it has on the other the very completest control over what is read. A politician is checked by votes cast once in several years, a newspaper is checked by sales that vary significantly from day to day. A newspaper with no circulation is a newspaper that does not matter; a few weeks will suffice to show if it has carried its public with it or gone out of influence. It is absurd to speak of a newspaper as being less responsible than a politician.

Nevertheless, the influence of a great newspaper is so much greater than that of any politician, and its power more particularly for mischief--for the creation of panic conditions, for example--so much swifter, that it is open to question whether the Press is at present sufficiently held to its enormous responsibilities.

Let us consider its weaknesses at the present time, let us ask what changes in its circumstances are desirable in the public interest, and what are likely to come about. We have already reckoned upon the Press as a chief factor in the adequate criticism, cleansing, and modernisation of the British lawyer-politician; is there any power to which we may look for the security of the Press? And I submit the answer is the Press. For while the legal profession is naturally homogeneous, the Press is by nature heterogeneous. Dog does not eat dog, nor lawyer, lawyer; but the newspapers are sharks and cannibals, they are in perpetual conflict, the Press is a profession as open as the law is closed; it has no anti-social guild feeling; it washes its dirty linen in public by choice and necessity, and disdains all professional etiquette. Few people know what criticisms of the Lord Chief Justice may have ripened in the minds of Lord Halsbury or Sir Edward Carson, but we all know, to a very considerable degree of accuracy, the worst of what this great journalist or group of newspaper proprietors thinks of that.

We have, therefore, considerable reason for regarding the Press as being, in contrast with the legal profession, a self-reforming body. In the last decade there has been an enormous mass of criticism of the Press by the Press. There has been a tendency to exaggerate its irresponsibility. A better case is to be made against it for what I will call, using the word in its least offensive sense, its venality. By venality I mean the fact, a legacy from the now happily vanishing age of individualism, that in theory and law at least anyone may own a newspaper and sell it publicly or secretly to anyone, that its circulation and advertisement receipts may be kept secret or not as the proprietors choose, and that the proprietor is accountable to no one for any exceptional incomings or any sudden fluctuations in policy.

A few years ago we were all discussing who should buy The Times; I do not know what chances an agent of the Kaiser might not have had if he had been sufficiently discreet. This venality will be far more dangerous to the Allied countries after the war than during its continuance. So long as the state of war lasts there are prompt methods available for any direct newspaper treason, and it is in the neutral countries only that the buying and selling of papers against the national interest has occurred to any marked extent.

Directly peace is signed, unless we provide for the event beforehand, our Press will pass under neutral conditions. There will be nothing to prevent, for example, any foreseeing foreign power coming into Great Britain, offering to buy up not only this paper or that, but also, what is far more important, to buy up the great book and newspaper distributing firms. These vitally important public services, so far as law and theory go, will be as entirely in the market as railway tickets at a station unless we make some intelligent preventive provision. Unless we do, and if, as is highly probable, peace puts no immediate stop to international malignity, the Germans will be bigger fools than I think them if they do not try to get hold of these public services. It is a matter of primary importance in the outlook of every country in Europe, therefore, that it should insist upon and secure responsible native ownership of every newspaper and news and book distributing agency, and the most drastic punishment for newspaper corruption. Given that guarantee against foreign bribery, we may, I think, let free speech rage. This is so much a matter of common sense that I cannot imagine even British "wait and see" waiting for the inevitable assault upon our national journalistic virtue that will follow the peace.

So I spread out the considerations that I think justify our forecasting, in a very changed Great Britain and a changed Europe, firstly, a legal profession with a quickened conscience, a sense of public function and a reformed organisation, and, secondly, a Press, which is recognised and held accountable in law and in men's minds, as an estate of the realm, as something implicitly under oath to serve the State. I do not agree with Professor Michel's pessimistic conclusion that peace will bring back exacerbated party politics and a new era of futility to the democratic countries. I believe that the tremendous demonstration of this war (a demonstration that gains weight with every week of our lengthening effort), of the waste and inefficiency of the system of 1913-14, will break down at last even the conservatism of the most rigidly organised and powerful and out-of-date of all professions.

It is not only that I look to the indignation and energy of intelligent men who are outside our legal and political system to reform it, but to those who are in it now. A man may be quietly parasitic upon his mother, and yet incapable of matricide. So much of our national energy and ability has been attracted to the law in Great Britain that our nation, with our lawyers in modern clothing instead of wigs and gowns, lawyers who have studied science and social theory instead of the spoutings of Cicero and the loquacious artfulness of W.E. Gladstone, lawyers who look forward at the destiny of their country instead of backward and at the markings on their briefs, may yet astonish the world. The British lawyer really holds the future of the British Empire and, indeed, I could almost say, of the whole world in his hands at the present time, as much as any single sort of man can be said to hold it. Inside his skull imagination and a heavy devil of evil precedent fight for his soul and the welfare of the world. And generosity fights against tradition and individualism. Only the men of the Press have anything like the same great possibilities of betrayal.

To these two sorts of men the dim spirit of the nation looks for such leading as a democracy can follow. To them the men with every sort of special ability, the men of science, the men of this or that sort of administrative ability and experience, the men of creative gifts and habits, every sort of man who wants the world to get on, look for the removal (or the ingenious contrivance) of obstructions and entanglements, for the allaying (or the fomentation) of suspicion, misapprehension, and ignorant opposition, for administration (or class blackmail).

Yet while I sit as a prophetic amateur weighing these impalpable forces of will and imagination and habit and interest in lawyer, pressman, maker and administrator, and feeling by no means over-confident of the issue, it dawns upon me suddenly that there is another figure present, who has never been present before in the reckoning up of British affairs. It is a silent figure. This figure stands among the pressmen and among the lawyers and among the workers; for a couple of decades at least he will be everywhere in the British system; he is young and he is uniformed in khaki, and he brings with him a new spirit into British life, the spirit of the new soldier, the spirit of subordination to a common purpose....