enough to become unrepresentative, and because membership of Parliament was a whole-time job without a salary. A century has seen the concession of all but one of the main points of the Charter. Equally has it brought home to us that disillusionment with the first fruits of democracy is typical of disillusionment with its riper harvest. There is perhaps no disappointment more bitter than the disappointment with the working of democracy that is coming over the people of this and other countries. Improvements of democratic machinery have not sufficed, and it is questionable whether even with the last refinement of proportional representation they ever will suffice, to conceal the fact that selfgovernment is not realised unless all the governed selves in the plural are identical with the no less plural governing selves.

If the will of each were the will of all, then there might be a possibility that representative government, even in a large community, would be self-government. In that case the general will could and would be expressed. But as things are there is no General Will; there is no social self-only a number of conflicting wills and inharmonious selves. Meanwhile, the development of democratic theory and practice has been a search for the social self. True self-government lies where the rainbow ends. But the creation of a fictitious self brings a bastard self-government ready to hand. In our pursuit of democracy we have subjected ourselves to the tyranny of a succession of such bastards. In so doing, we work a double evil. We shatter the faith of believers in true self-government, and we degrade a great idea.

To begin with, we personify the State, and persuade ourselves that democracy is attained when the democratic idea is embodied in a democratic political constitution. It is easy to see how this abstract social Self was created, and equally easy to see that in its primitive form it may not have been pernicious. A and B, who are just emerging from the pastoral stage of human development, have an idea that life would be considerably more restful if instead of perpetually roving from place to place in search of new pastures, they should assist Nature's efforts to maintain her children by some simple operations of tillage. A and B, being pushful men, like most originators

of ideas, instil this notion into C and D and a host of others, who, like most hosts, are at once suggestible and apathetic. Y and Z perhaps hold diverse opinions and stick fast to them; but it is always only too easy to coerce the Ys and Zs of society. So at the instigation of A and B the tribe settle down in a choice spot and village life begins. In process of time the village becomes a village community, at least dimly conscious of itself and zealous for its own welfare. Skirmishes are undertaken and ordinances made for the good of the village, and the whole ordering of life assumes a more social aspect.

As long as a village is a village there is nothing very pernicious in its members becoming conscious of it as an end to be promoted. Nor perhaps is the danger very great when the village has blossomed into a city-state. The city-state is still so small that its tyranny is hardly likely to be worse than the autocracy of a petted child. Athens is personified, and her citizens are bidden to regard her with an affection so intense that the language of sex-love is actually employed to describe it. Even so the social self is not unduly fictitious. But it has in it the makings of a false god. Multiply your city-state by a large enough number, and you have not Athens, but Leviathan-the modern State. The patriotism of the citizen, at once an idea and an ideal, develops into that orgy of modern State worship which represents an idea incarnate in a tyrant's form, and which springs from our passionate desire to conceive society as a personal self. Athens may not be very different from the Athenians; but the connexion between Britannia and the Britons becomes daily more and more obscure. We are, in fact, just emerging from a period of the rankest idolatry-idolatry of the political State. Tom, Dick, and Harry are bullied or cossetted, ordered to insure their health or provided gratis with a costly and inadequate education, because these things promote the good of the State of which through no fault of their own they were born members. But the organ of this State is a government which Tom, Dick, and Harry rightly regard as wholly external to themselves. It governs them; they do not govern it; nor can it be said that the democratic State as we know it embodies anything that can be called self-government. Individuals in the mass are

expected to endure anything and everything in order to ensure the prestige, the security, or the morals of a State which, if it is anything at all, is merely those same individuals with the individuality stripped off and only the mass left.

Thanks to the agency of such writers as Prof. Hobhouse, the absurdity of submission to the tyranny of the State, of exalting the State with 'chatter of a transcendental kind,' has lately become apparent. We no longer suppose that the State-which is the government-is synonymous with the community, much less with you and me. Considering the number of people who find denunciation of the government an important form of recreative activity, we may suppose that the belief in this bastard self-government is already passing.

The happiness or welfare of individuals is a conception which we can understand; but the happiness or welfare of a State viewed as distinct from the individuals of whom it is composed, is the height of absurdity and a ludicrous parody of democracy. And when it comes to sacrificing individuals, not merely occasionally or here and there but literally en masse, for the sake of the State whereof they are members, the absurdity becomes too blatant to be borne. The personified Idea of the State is seen in the light of day to be neither more nor less than the autocracy of mediocre men in high places.

Once more, however, we leap out of the frying-pan into the fire, and reading 'community' for 'State' devote ourselves to the creation of a new social self. Political governments are not adequate incarnations of the general will of the inhabitants of the geographical area over which their authority extends. That we realise. But there must be some social self or there could not be self-government. So for the State we proceed to substitute the community, and in order to draw an appropriate distinction between the earthiness of the former and the splendour of the latter, we endow the community with all the glories of diversity in unity. The State is only one of many forms of association. It is not the only or the best basis of organisation, since in present-day communities the ties of professional association, for instance, are frequently stronger than

those of neighbourliness, which are the basis of the territorial State. The community, however, unlike the State, consists of an ordered (it never appears how or why the ordering is done) assemblage of different organisations representing man in all his aspects. Allegiance is equally due to the political government, the trade union, the football team, the Church, the learned society, the dance club, and all the other associations of which we are members, and which in their totality constitute the Community with a very large capital C, and any one of which may, in a narrow way of speaking, be regarded as par excellence the community for the time being. The new tyranny-the tyranny of the community idea-will soon be as dangerous as the old. The community is in reality as abstract as the State; and if it is so diverse in character it is even harder to identify. When is the community prospering? When John Brown is prosperous in his capacity as an inhabitant of Birmingham, but unfortunate as a member of Brown's Bouncing Boxers; happy in the care which his chapel takes of his immortal soul, but most unfortunate in the partner whom the favourite dance club frequently assigns to him? It is hard enough to come to a decision about the welfare of a concrete person like John Brown. It is problem enough for him to be a self-governing self. But it is harder still to form a conception of the welfare of a community which is composed of some millions of John Browns, Mrs. John Browns, Johann Brauns and Frau Dittos, as well as Jack Browns Junior, grouped and regrouped in endless conflicting associations. Even a knowledge of permutations and combinations will not help to identify in this confusion that Community for whose sake you and I are expected to repress our antisocial tendencies. The community, like the State, has no welfare apart from the welfare of the individuals of whom it is composed. Even those, however, who recognise this are nearly always driven to fall back into comfortable servitude to the idea against which they rebel. For the difficulty of deciding in the first place who are the members of the community; and, secondly, what is to be done when their interests conflict (as they certainly will), drives the boldest spirit back to abstract terms, and reincarnates the dangerous doctrine that one

section of conflicting interests- presumably the less violent but only too often the most valuable sectionmust be subordinated in 'the interests of the community.'

And there is another danger in the modern idea of the great community diverse and unified. It is not only anarchic, it also opens up fields of tyranny to hosts of fictitious social selves. We have seen how revulsion against the tyranny of the State-idea led to the view that the other forms of association are as much aspects of the community as the territorial State. But every such form of association may in its turn become personified and undemocratic. A conspicuous instance at the present time is afforded by the condition of the Trade Union movement. The idea of association on the basis of common labour, or labour in a common industry of a self-governing society of fellow-workers, becomes incarnate in the Trade Union. For awhile all is well. The prosperity of the Trade Union and the prosperity of its members are, at least, as nearly identical as the prosperity of Athens and the prosperity of the Athenians. But in process of time the Union grows in size and strength, and becomes personified. The rank-and-file worker at his bench acts under orders from officials who are as external to him as Mr Lloyd George is to you and me, and in obedience to these instructions he subordinates his immediate interests to the good of the Union. It is not impossible that a situation may arise in which almost every member is found to be sacrificing his welfare to the tyranny of the personified self, to the good of the Union. Here is self-government indeed! In such a case rebellion cannot be far removed. And in the Trade Union movement there are already signs of a disruption. The Shop Stewards' movement has arisen from an effort to destroy the autocracy of the centralised institution, and to reinterpret the Union once more in the only terms in which it can be intelligible-the lives of the individual workers. The full-time Trade Union official having become absorbed in the mire of officialdom and divorced from his constituents, it becomes apparent to the rank-and-file that the Trade Union is not a self-governing institution. The Shop Stewards' movement represents a reversion to the primitive, and the only genuine, conception of democracy. The people to be governed