190 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
thinking which runs counter to the ideas promulgated by the ruler is 
sternly discouraged. The individual exists simply to carry out those 
ideas, and it will be bad for him if he does not do it. 
Now if such phenomena were only presented to us by foreign peoples, 
they would even then merit our very serious attention ; but he would be 
very blind who did not see the same tendency at work among ourselves. 
We call ourselves a Democracy, and the essence of democracy is that it 
rests upon the free expression of individual thought ; but the rigidity 
of organisation in our political parties has increased during the present 
century to an ominous degree, and with it the application of what is called 
‘ party discipline,’ depriving the individual of all freedom of action and 
speech, whatever freedom of thought he may privately retain. Some 
of those who listen to me would not, I feel sure, have to look far to find 
not merely parliaments or municipal councils, but even education com- 
mittees, in which the vote of every member of a party, on questions 
imperatively demanding free and open discussion and not suggesting 
a division by parties at all, is determined by a previous party meeting, so 
that, whatever the discussion may bring forth, he dare not vote other- 
wise, on pain of being drummed out of his party ; and the spectacle of 
the management of (e.g.) higher education in some great city or county by 
such rigidly organised majorities, most of whose members may never have 
received any higher education themselves, and may have little or no know- 
ledge of schools or of teaching, and yet may not deviate an inch from the 
course marked out for them by their organisers, whatever considerations 
may be urged by persons of experience and independent judgment, is a 
spectacle in which comedy and tragedy are about equally blended. 
It is at least equally serious, that some of the constructors of the imagi- 
nary Utopias which have been most popular with the younger generation 
in the last few years clearly envisage and apparently approve of political 
and educational systems based upon the complete elimination of in- 
dividuality. Mr. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Mr. Wells’ 
delineation of The Shape of Things to Come both assume that it is 
possible to organise individual freedom out of existence ; and the means 
suggested to supplement certain catastrophes, which occur conveniently 
and give the imaginary State-builders a tabula rasa, are violence at the 
beginning and the ruthless crushing out of opposition at all stages. Even 
if the motives of the Government are benevolent to the utmost degree 
(and no one will deny Mr. Wells’ State-builders this merit) the governed 
have no voice in their own lives. ‘ Democracy,’ says Mr. Wells, ‘ asks 
people what they want ; what is required is to te// them what they want, 
and see that they get it.’ His new government, he tells us, was meant 
“to rule not only this planet, but the human will’ ; and education was 
devised accordingly. It is open, of course, to any of us to treat such 
works as nothing more than rather unconvincing pieces of fiction ; but 
the fact that they have found a definite response from a great number of 
young people at the impressionable age of University studentship gives 
them a significance which intrinsically they may hardly merit. 
For the events of our own times have shown that there is more than 
imagination in these pictures ; that it 7s possible in fact so to educate and 
