individuals which is implied by military service is steadily and
quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it. It is only in
recent years that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the
huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is still a
very marked tendency to step back again into that multitudinous
assemblage.
For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.
Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified
crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these
other parties. It is the party against the predominating interests.
It is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the
party of decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and
planless association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so
constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to
hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilised state.
Essentially it is the party of criticism, the "Anti" party. It is a
system of hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at times
an elusive common soul. It is a gathering together of all the
smaller interests which find themselves at a disadvantage against
the big established classes, the leasehold tenant as against the
landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and the
moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small
employer as against the demoralising hospitable publican, the man
without introductions and broad connections against the man who has
these things. It is the party of the many small men against the
fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for loving
the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer is
doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but it
resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages
common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the
king. The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege"
because it represents no class advantages, but it is also the party
that is on the whole most set against Collective control because it
represents no established responsilibity. It is constructive only
so far as its antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than
its jealousy of the state. It organises only because organisation
is forced upon it by the organisation of its adversaries. It lapses
in and out of alliance with Labour as it sways between hostility to
wealth and hostility to public expenditure…
Every modern European state will have in some form or other these
three parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and
unsympathetic party of establishment and success, the rich party;
the confused, sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small,
struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a
third party sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes
reuniting with it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses,
the proletarians, Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to
Republican and Democrat, for example, and you have the conditions in
the United States. The Crown or a dethroned dynasty, the
Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions,
the personalities of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and
confuse the self-expression of these three necessary divisions in
the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the
less for that…
And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;-the ideas go
on-as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in
some great brain beyond our understanding…
So it was I sat and thought my problem out… I still remember
my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like
clouds dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course,
couldn't hold a party together alone, "interests and habits, not
ideas," I had that now, and so the great constructive scheme of
Socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily
claimed only by this collection of odds and ends, this residuum of
disconnected and exceptional people. This was true not only of the
Socialist idea, but of the scientific idea, the idea of veracity-of
human confidence in humanity-of all that mattered in human life
outside the life of individuals… The only real party that
would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that in the
entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive
attack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and
claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted
anything in the world.
Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it
before?… I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.
I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.
9
My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to
the final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of
my dream of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and
administered territories-the vision I had seen in the haze from
that little church above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a
more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led to my