July from above-though not necessarily from a government department-is the only way of securing a standard of efficiency, which many parents are too ignorant or too indifferent to call for. But the present Education Bill aims not only at raising the standard of educational efficiency, but also at lowering it in order to secure equality at the expense of liberty. One clause of the Bill compels local education authorities to abolish the few fee-paying elementary schools which are still maintained to meet the wishes of parents who are afraid that their children may pick up unpleasant habits, or still more unpleasant insects, in the rougher type of free school. This is surely a very laudable parental precaution for which the parent is fully prepared and even anxious to pay. But a large number of English Socialists are endowed with a mentality similar to that of the Russian Bolsheviks. They demand absolute equality of condition for everybody, and the cultivated Oxford don, who is now Minister of Education, finds himself compelled to bow to their demand. We could not have a better illustration of the present drift of democracy in the direction of tyranny.

That drift is ultimately due to false economic teaching based upon social envy. Large numbers of voters have been taught that the only way to lift the poor is to pull down the rich; that the way to increase wages is to destroy capital. They are able to give immediate political effect to this false economic teaching because of the peculiar faults of our machinery of government.

That machinery had its origin more than six centuries ago. The House of Commons was called into being for a very specific purpose, and its constitution was designed for that purpose. The counties and boroughs of the kingdom were required to send representatives to the King's Court to settle with his ministers what contributions these communities should make towards the cost of carrying on the King's government. These communities, the freeholders of the county and the burgesses of the town, had definite local interests of their own, and it was the business of their representatives to defend those interests. Quite properly, the representatives were paid by the constituencies whose interests they defended. In a very short time these delegates to the King's Court established the principle that the King must

listen to their tale of grievances before they would vote his supplies.

That is the beginning of parliamentary government in England. It meant the establishment of a body, more or less popular in character, with power to influence the executive government. The system worked on the whole well for many centuries, though in the later period its success was, perhaps, rather due to the innate love of liberty and to the genius for compromise which the English people possess than to the primary merits of the constitution itself. That primary

merit, the direct connexion between the interest of the constituency and the duties of the representative, disappeared with the defeat of the Stuarts by the House of Commons. As soon as parliament had established its own supremacy, a seat in the House of Commons became valuable for the advantages which the occupant could obtain for himself. The constituencies then ceased to pay their representatives; instead the candidates paid the voters. There was thus a complete inversion of the original conception of the English parliament.

Nevertheless, England, in fact, enjoyed throughout the eighteenth and the earlier half of the nineteenth centuries a government so far superior to that of most other countries that her constitution then served as a model for the whole world. By the latter half of the nineteenth century nearly every autonomous country had adopted the English parliamentary system. The results have often been-as in the South American Republics-ludicrously unsatisfactory. Nor need we be surprised. For long before these foreign countries began to copy our system, a wide breach had been made between its theoretical basis and its practical working. Our imitators copied the theoretical basis, not realizing that this basis had its birth under conditions which had long ceased to operate. We made the system work largely because, to quote the flattering words of Professor Wallace, we had been able to prove that the popular will among a highly civilized people, notably gifted in public self-control and following 'the leadership of a patriotic governing class, is itself a suffi'cient safeguard to individual and national liberty.'

But can we permanently rely upon this very vague safeguard? The danger ahead arises not from the mere extension

of the suffrage to as many millions of electors as there were hundreds of thousands in the mid-Victorian period, when the House of Commons reached perhaps the zenith of its reputation; for there is no reason to believe that the new electors differ fundamentally in character from their predecessors, and the machinery required for counting a thousand votes is much the same as that necessary for counting a hundred. The really important difference is the enlargement of the functions of government, which has resulted in the multiplication of government employees, who are all voters, and in the complication of issues to be submitted to the electorate. The territorial basis for the election of the House of Commons, which was absolutely logical in the days of Simon de Montfort, has no relevance whatever to existing conditions. It would be hard to discover a single constituency which, in its corporate capacity, has any common interest to defend at Westminster, except, indeed, in the case of constituencies wishing to receive a bribe from the central government in the shape of some local undertaking to be subsidized at national expense. A typical illustration of this factor occurred a few years ago in a northern constituency, where each of the rival candidates promised to bring pressure to bear upon the government of the United Kingdom to spend more money upon a local harbour. That clearly is not a form of political motive which it is desirable to encourage.

Apart from such obviously undesirable examples as this our present territorial constituencies have no communal interest of their own in the vast number of problems now coming before parliament. Nor have the electors as a body any special knowledge or any means of acquiring knowledge of the complicated issues submitted to them. In such conditions it is altogether unreasonable even to hope for a sound judgment. What England now has to do is to follow the spirit instead of the letter of Simon de Montfort's great achievement. We have to evolve new forms of government to deal with new problems. If our plans are to be successful they must be based, as was Simon de Montfort's, upon the principle of a direct and logical connexion between the purpose aimed at and the character of the agency framed for achieving that purpose. The most urgent of modern day problems are industrial or commercial; therefore the basis of the agency or agencies

for dealing with them must be industrial or commercial, and not territorial.

Happily, the genius of our people is already moving in this direction. The trade unions have already ceased to be local. They have organized themselves into great national bodies and have also created what amounts to their own diplomatic service for communicating with analogous bodies abroad on matters of common interest. In addition, great progress has been made of recent years in the constitution of Works Committees, which give a direct voice to the employees in determining the conditions of employment in the workshop itself. The relationship of Works Committees to trade unions is at present undetermined, and probably both forms of organization will do better work by existing side by side than by attempting to absorb one another. Together they should be able to form effective constituencies for the election of representatives of wageearners on national councils of industry. Much progress has also been made in recent years among employers in the direction of combining together for common ends.

These combinations on both sides have certainly tended to improve relationships between employers and employed by creating that feeling of mutual respect which usually emerges when each side is forced to recognize the power of its opponent. The general result is that employers and employed are more inclined to co-operate on friendly terms than at any period since the growth of big industries destroyed the individual tie between master and hired man working side by side in the same shop. It must be added that the inclination of employers and employed to a friendly alliance has been immensely strengthened in the last year or two by their common impatience with the irritating interference of government departments. At the same time the new combinations of employers are quite rightly concerning themselves with the commercial interests of the industries they control. Instead of relying upon the Foreign Office or upon the Board of Trade, or upon any new government department that may be brought into being by restless politicians, they are making arrangements, at their own expense, for the collection of commercial information abroad of the precise character required.

In these encouraging developments of our industrial life we can see the germs of a true parliament of industry and commerce. Such a parliament would be composed of men necessarily cognizant of the problems with which they are required to deal and pecuniarily interested in their satisfactory settlement. The members of the existing type of parliament are not necessarily cognizant of anything except the art of winning votes from indifferent electors; in their capacity as members of parliament they have no pecuniary interest in anything except their own self-voted salaries and their chances of obtaining office. Taken in the mass, members of parliament elected for territorial constituencies are incapable of bringing to bear on commercial and industrial problems any technical knowledge, and their decisions instead of being guided by the commercial motives which lead to commercial success, are constantly subject to irrelevant and even corrupt influences. If the House of Commons retains its present constitution it should confine itself to functions which affect the nation as a whole in its corporate capacity, and should leave to bodies constituted on a commercial and industrial basis the settlement of commercial and industrial problems. If England can evolve such a constitution as this, she may yet teach the world how to combine democracy with liberty.

EDITOR.

No. 466 will be published in October, 1918.

Printed by Jarrold & Sons, Ltd., Norwich, England.