official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher in the

first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the

first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like

gifts to the pretence-a quack. These are attempts to live deep-

side shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To

understand Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to

join a Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not

even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for

which it stands…

I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had

taken me some years to realise the truerelation of the great

constructive ideas that swayed me not only to political parties, but

to myself. I had been disposed to identify the formulae of some one

party with social construction, and to regard the other as

necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined to follow

the Baileys in the self-righteousness of supposing myself to be

wholly constructive. But I saw now that every man of intellectual

freedom and vigour is necessarily constructive-minded nowadays, and

that no man is disinterestedly so. Each one of us repeats in

himself the conflict of the race between the splendour of its

possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be shaping

immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and

have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man

counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but

for his common workaday, selfishself; and political parties are

held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the

stabler bond of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for

progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change,

except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular

method of living and behaviour. Every party stands essentially for

the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of

classes in the exciting community, and every party has its

scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with well-

defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public-

spiritedform, and its superficial-minded following confessing its

meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish

itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct

itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited

socialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression

upon other classes lies the essential driving force of modern

affairs. The instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway

and struggle. The ideas and understandings march on and achieve

themselves for all-in spite of every one…

The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of

two great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends

in the event of a small Government majority. These two main parties

are more or less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has

certain necessary characteristics. The Conservative Party has

always stood quite definitely for the established propertied

interests. The land-owner, the big lawyer, the Established Church,

and latterly the huge private monopoly of the liquor trade which has

been created by temperance legislation, are the essential

Conservatives. Interwoven now with the native wealthy are the

families of the great international usurers, and a vast

miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise. Outside the range of

resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has

always shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any

other party. The great landowners have been as well-disposed

towards the endowment of higher education, and as willing to co-

operate with the Church in protective and mildly educational

legislation for children and the working class, as any political

section. The financiers, too, are adventurous-spirited and eager

for mechanical progress and technical efficiency. They are prepared

to spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and

public communications, upon sanitation and hygienic organisation. A

certain rude benevolence of public intention is equally

characteristic of the liquor trade. Provided his comfort leads to

no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see

the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar.

All sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably

inclined to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised

population in uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners

and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised self-importance,

jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the

power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the party

as a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely

confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective

control of land, for example, or state mining and manufactures, or

the nationalisation of the so-called public-house or extended

municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of

property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine

bar. It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement in