political parties, bring about "socialism" in twenty-five years, or do
anything beyond contributing in our place and measure to that
constructive discussion whose real magnitude we now begin to realise.

We have faith in a possible future, but it is a faith that makes the
quality of that future entirely dependent upon the strength and
clearness of purpose that this present time can produce. We do not
believe the greater social state is inevitable.

Yet there is, we hold, a certain qualified inevitability about this
greater social state because we believe any social state not affording a
general contentment, a general freedom, and a general and increasing
fullness of life, must sooner or later collapse and disintegrate again,
and revert more or less completely to the Normal Social Life, and
because we believe the Normal Social Life is itself thick-sown with the
seeds of fresh beginnings. The Normal Social Life has never at any time
been absolutely permanent, always it has carried within itself the germs
of enterprise and adventure and exchanges that finally attack its
stability. The superimposed social order of to-day, such as it is, with
its huge development of expropriated labour, and the schemes of the
later Fabians to fix this state of affairs in an organised form and
render it plausibly tolerable, seem also doomed to accumulate
catastrophic tensions. Bureaucratic schemes for establishing the regular
lifelong subordination of a labouring class, enlivened though they may
be by frequent inspection, disciplinary treatment during seasons of
unemployment, compulsory temperance, free medical attendance, and a
cheap and shallow elementary education fail to satisfy the restless
cravings in the heart of man. They are cravings that even the baffling
methods of the most ingeniously worked Conciliation Boards cannot
permanently restrain. The drift of any Servile State must be towards a