and vanishes again. Only such strikes as we have had during the past
year will rouse him from that attitude of mind. The statesman at the
other extremity has to consider the worker as a being with a beginning,
a middle, an end--and offspring. He can consider all these possibilities
of deferring employment and making the toil of one period of life
provide for the leisure and freedom of another, which are necessarily
entirely out of the purview of an employer pure and simple. And I find
it hard to see how we can reconcile the intermittency of competitive
employment with the unremitting demands of a civilised life except by
the intervention of the State or of some public organisation capable of
taking very wide views between the business organiser on the one hand
and the subordinate worker on the other. On the one hand we need some
broader handling of business than is possible in the private adventure
of the solitary proprietor or the single company, and on the other some
more completely organised development of the collective bargain. We have
to bring the directive intelligence of a concern into an organic
relation with the conception of the national output as a whole, and
either through a trade union or a guild, or some expansion of a trade
union, we have to arrange a secure, continuous income for the worker, to
be received not directly as wages from an employer but intermediately
through the organisation. We need a census of our national production, a
more exhaustive estimate of our resources, and an entirely more
scientific knowledge of the conditions of maximum labour efficiency. One
turns to the State.... And it is at this point that the heart of the
patriotic Englishman sinks, because it is our national misfortune that
all the accidents of public life have conspired to retard the
development of just that body of knowledge, just that scientific breadth
of imagination which is becoming a vital necessity for the welfare of a
modern civilised community.