not service only that is needed: it is the service that is also leadership. This, however, will be more evident when we have considered Burke's conception of a natural aristocracy.

(d) The Need for a Natural Aristocracy

For Burke's feet were never on surer ground than when, as we have seen,1 he argued that a civil society, by the very conditions of social struggle and growth, must needs evolve ‘a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.' For a natural aristocracy is neither a product of social artifice, nor a parasitical growth: it is the inevitable result of the long and gradual process whereby society passes from the looser groupings and cohesions of primitive ages on to the larger and more richly integrated forms of civilised organisation. There is a striking passage in which Bagehot the economist, when enlarging on what he calls the necessarily monarchical structure' of the modern business world, puts this point with his wonted animation: This monarchical structure,' he proceeds, 'increases as society goes on, just as the corresponding structure of war business does, and from the same causes. In primitive times, a battle depended as much on the prowess of the best fighting men, of some Hector or some Achilles, as on the

1 P. 173.

good science of the general. But nowadays it is a man at the far end of a telegraph wire-a Count Möltke with his head over some papers-who sees that the proper persons are slain, and who secures the victory. So in commerce. The primitive weavers are separate men with looms apiece, the primitive weapon-makers separate men with flints apiece; there is no organised action, no planning, contriving, or foreseeing in either trade, except on the smallest scale; but now the whole is an affair of money and management; of a thinking man in a dark office, computing the prices of guns or worsteds.' 1 If these words are true of war and industry, they are not less true of politics. And they are never truer than when the course of political evolution has given birth to the democratic state. Unfortunately this is often missed. Too often and too easily it is assumed that democracy levels. And so, in conspicuous ways, it does. It levels down the superiorities of prerogative, privilege and monopoly it levels up the inferiorities of social disadvantage and political disability. But it does not, nor can it ever, equalise. If it deposes a hereditary aristocracy, not to say an aristocracy of Whig 'trustees,' it is driven on, by the needs it itself creates, to find a new aristocracy of its own. By the very fervour and persistence of its passion for equality it creates new inequalities in demolishing 1 Economic Studies, p. 53.

old ones. And this result follows from three causes, so closely concatenated that they might be said to furnish a kind of logic of democratic politics.

The first of these is that the passion for equalitythe ruling passion of democracy if De Tocqueville is to be believed-creates problems. And not political problems only, such as touch parliamentary reform and government, but a crowd of social problems which follow in the train of the demand for more equality of opportunity and less inequality of wealth. The second point is that these problems have come to be of such magnitude that it has now for some time been recognised that nothing short of organised collective effort, private and public, and the resources it can command, can hope to solve them. Hence that astonishing growth of organisations which has steadily increased in defiance of all pessimistic prophecies of social disintegration (those, for example, of Carlyle), till at the end of every vista we see a union, a federation, a league, a society, a syndicate, a commission, a conference, and what not. And the third consideration is that, where there are organisations, there, as never before, there are to be found the need and the opportunities of leadership. It is an illusion to suppose that social organisation, however democratic, abates, far less supersedes, the need for leaders. It intensifies it. For these practical problems, with which organised effort is needed to

grapple, are admittedly of a most intricate and / baffling complexity. Many a student of society has felt the need of a life-time for their investigation. And many a statesman must have felt that he would give much, if only it were possible to suspend decision and action till he had more adequately analysed and grasped the conditions with which he has to deal. Yet this is what he cannot do. The world, the democratic world at any rate, does not suffer him to do it. For the problems that face him are not only complex: they are urgent. The hungry spirit, the deep dissatisfactions, the equalitarian ambitions of democracy make them urgent, clamant. Suspense of judgment, that privilege of the student, is denied to the man of affairs who, all too often for his own peace of mind, finds himself compelled to move to his solutions by decisions which, to the eye of the student, must seem to verge perilously near a leap in the dark.

Hence the result, which brings us back again to the teaching of Burke, that the solution of all great political questions demands nothing less than the union of two qualities, both admirable, both in-: dispensable, but extraordinarily difficult to unite : the searching, patient, analytic grasp of conditions, and the virile practical judgment, the 'prudence of Burke's panegyric, which knows when to cut deliberations short, to grasp the skirts of opportunity, and to decide resolutely what has here and now to

י

be done. For it is the union of these two qualities that is the passport to statesmanship. Nothing less will suffice. The massive push of collective effort is not enough. The deliberations and resolutions of the collective wisdom of ordinary men, however well intentioned and earnest, are

enough. Wherever political questions are great, complex, baffling, urgent, they will inevitably, no matter what the form of government may be, prove themselves to be both the touchstone and the whetstone of leadership. For organisations do not work by a human automatism, nor are they selfadjusting organisms such as political biologists press upon us as analogies. If they are to achieve the tasks for which they are called into being, they must be vitalised, directed, and controlled by the proximate efficient forces of exceptionally gifted and well-trained human wills.

This is what Burke saw so clearly and expressed so loftily in his description of a natural aristocracy.' He had thought much about equality. He had thought much about inequality. And one of the conclusions to which he had come was that those who attempt to level can never equalise. No; they can never equalise, because by the inborn and ineffaceable inequalities of human faculty, by the laws of social struggle and growth-the 'discipline of nature,' as he called it-and by the nature of social organisation, there must always emerge in every