Welsh Journals

found to a limited extent in the British Labour Party, and on the continent to a much greater extent. The party is out to win, and it has won, power for its own class. The defect of its attitude is that it has not the intellectual basis, the culture or the scientific knowledge necessary to use that power properly. The result is that political success finds it little nearer its real objective than failure would have done. It has political power, but it has not solved the social problem." LABOUR PROBLEMS BEFORE THE WAR AND AFTER I. CLAIMS OF PRODUCERS IN this series of short articles I intend to draw attention to the discussion of industrial pro- blems which was cut short by the outbreak of the War and may well be resumed when we return to peace conditions. This discussion was characterised by (i.) a certain disillusionment as to the effective- ness of State action, (ii.) an assertion, sometimes presented in an extreme form, of the rights of pro- ducers, and (iii.) a violent attack on the wages system. There was a fairly close relation between these criticisms of the existing order and tendency. Those who were alarmed at the lengths to which State action was going found some amount of sup- port in the ranks of the champions of the rights of producers. The latter were apt to overlook the part which the State must play in every industrial community. Even if they recognised that certain functions must be reserved for the State they were involved in considerable difficulties in closely defining those functions. It will facilitate our discussion if I indicate in bare outline the historical development of the question. I can then examine the collectivist ideal in some detail before I discuss the attack which has been made upon it from the standpoint of neo- individualism, which professed to discover that it leads to the Servile State. Having disposed, how- ever inadequately, of this aspect of the question it will be possible to pass on to schemes for giving the producers a greater, if not complete, control of industry. All forms of society tend towards an equilibrium. Unless the community is to be constantly on the Idealism can save us from the profound fallacy that organisation is an end in itself or that machinery will save a people. We are perhaps too apt to believe in the strength of organisation and to overlook its essential weakness. It would be a sordid boom to barter away for the sake of machinery those spiritual initiatives on which all human progrcss^ultimately depends. verge of dissolution some degree of stability must be attained. This stability is secured by a general recognition of an end, and a concensus of effective opinion as to the attainment of it. The end pro- posed may be a static state in which certain orders have well defined functions such as the Brahmans, Rajputs and Vaisyas of early Indian History, or indeed the corresponding Ecclesiastics. Warriors and Villiens of Mediæval Europe. Such an end may be regarded as the fulfilment of the divine plan. Similarly, a modern industrial community, if it is to be stable, must have a consciousness of purpose and a general, but not unanimous, agreement as to how it is to be attained. This purpose must be capable of commending itself on purely rational grounds to an increasing proportion of the popula- tion, for effective opinion is no longer confined to a class like the Brahmans or the Ecclesiastics. Self-consciousness, however, may not be present in the earlier stages of industrial change but it must emerge and must also find a theory by which men can justify existing facts to themselves. It follows then that the great industrial and agrarian changes of the years 1760 to 1830 not only broke up an old form of society, which had its own view of its justification, it also demanded a new theory. Previous to 1760 the prevalent view was that society was divided into grades, classes or castes, that a man was born into a place in society with which it was his duty to be content. Legis- lation, political institutions, labour regulations, religion itself all gave form to this underlying assumption. And it should not be forgotten that