collectively unconscious activities of men, by competitions and survival
and the higgling of the market. Humanity is rebelling against the
continuing existence of a labour class as such, and I can see no way by
which our present method of weekly wages employment can change by
imperceptible increments into a method of salary and pension--for it is
quite evident that only by reaching that shall we reach the end of these
present discontents. The change has to be made on a comprehensive scale
or not at all. We need nothing less than a national plan of social
development if the thing is to be achieved.

Now that, I admit, is, as the Americans say, a large proposition. But we
are living in a time of more and more comprehensive plans, and the mere
fact that no scheme so extensive has ever been tried before is no reason
at all why we should not consider one. We think nowadays quite serenely
of schemes for the treatment of the nation's health as one whole, where
our fathers considered illness as a blend of accident with special
providences; we have systematised the community's water supply,
education, and all sorts of once chaotic services, and Germany and our
own infinite higgledy-piggledy discomfort and ugliness have brought home
to us at last even the possibility of planning the extension of our
towns and cities. It is only another step upward in scale to plan out
new, more tolerable conditions of employment for every sort of worker
and to organise the transition from our present disorder.

The essential difficulty between the employer and the statesman in the
consideration of this problem is the difference in the scope of their
view. The employer's concern with the man who does his work is day-long
or week-long; the statesman's is life-long. The conditions of private
enterprise and modern competition oblige the employer to think only of
the worker as a hand, who appears and does his work and draws his wages