i6 
rLAND & WATER 
August 2, 1917 
of dictatorship, thougTi we carefully avoid giving it that 
name. We have no alternative but to put ourselves in the 
hands of our leaders, good or bad as they may be, and to 
entrust our destinies to their keeping — at least the only 
alternative is that of prompt defeat by any antagonist who 
was fighting under a unitary command. 
The three years under review have indeed seen the growth 
of a body called the Union of Democratic Control, but I 
imagine that it must have galled the members of this body to 
observe that there never was less democratic control in the 
country than there is at the present moment. It has dimin- 
ished by leaps and bounds ; even the control of Parliament 
has become ineffective, until at last the directing power has 
fallen into the hands of a small group of men. Formally 
responsible to the people, these men are virtually irresponsible 
for the time being. They have put us — I believe for our 
own good — under discipline, they control the services of the 
State, they even fix prices and regulate supply and demand — 
to say nothing of taxation which we have to accept in the form 
in which ' it is imposed. The individual voter has become a 
nonentity. He nmst do what he is told and pay up what he is 
bidden — all maxims of "no taxation without representation," 
and such like, notwithstanding. In the meantime women have 
won the vote ; and though this looks like another triumph for 
democracy, we must not forget that so long as the present 
conditions remain' in force the women, like the men, will be 
unable to make effective use of the votes they are to have. 
Of course it may be said that this temporarv suspension 
of popular power has itself been conceded by the people for 
the special purpose of carrying on the war, and that our dic- 
tators are able to dictate onlv because the people have given 
them permission so to do for the time being. This, I think, 
is true ; but it is also true that for a people to give up power, 
even for a short time, is one thing and to get it back again is 
another. This may not prove so easy, for many reasons 
Tlie Use" of Power 
One is that institutions (or individuals) when once they have 
acquired power are usually tenacious in retaining it, and are 
very apt to forget or even to defy the conditions on which it 
was originally entrusted to them. Another is that many of 
those who thus surrendered their power may not be eager to 
get it back. They may and often do come to the conclusion 
that on the whole things are better managed when they are 
left in the hands of a few highly qualified and efficient men. 
As.to this much depends on whether the men in question show 
thenriselves to be highly qualified or not. If, for example, 
our present rulers make a great success of the undertakings 
they have now on hand and prove their efficiency by the 
results'of their actions, I should expect that the kind of Govern- 
ment under which we have agreed to hve during the war, and 
^hich is not strictly speaking democratic, would stand a 
fair chance of being continued for some time to come. It is 
t£y?_-that up to date these men have not been sufficiently 
successful in giving confidence to this prediction. But the end 
IS no t yet . Our rulers have still a chance, if they are able to take 
It,- of producing results which will give a considerable 
impetus to the beUef in one-man rule, thereby weakening the 
central article in the democratic creed. At this point the 
outlook for democracy is confused and obscure. 
I observe that many of our political thinkers, especially 
those with socialistic proclivities, are pointing with a good 
deal of satisfaction to the immense increase of State control 
which the war has rendered necessary. They point to the 
results of " England's Effort " as they have been described— 
for quite another purpose— by Mrs. Humphry Ward and 
other writers, and they draw from all this an object-lesson 
designed to show us what the State could do in times of 
peace. Many of them clearly anticipate that this system of 
State control, to which we have become habituated by three 
years of close experience of its working, will remain 
m force after the war and will be applied on a larger 
scale than ever to the solution of our social problems 
as a whole. Now this, of course, is conceivable if we 
suppose that the people will consent to make the tem- 
porary system of the war into a permanent institution for 
all time. But if we assume that they will refuse to do this, 
and insist on the restoration of parliamentary control and the 
settlement of State action by popular voting, then I venture 
to think the argument would' fall to the ground. 
The whole systen 1 of control ?.nd discipline under which we are 
now Hving would be impossible if every item of it had to be 
first submitted to the popular vote, and will become im- 
possible as soon as the power of the vote is restored. 
It is easy enough to fix the price of potatoes if you empower 
a,. potato-expert to fix it and agree to abide by his 
decision. But if you make the price into a matter for 
public discussion^ and give every citizen the right to bring 
torthresolutionsaadamendmentsastowhatin his opinion the 
price should be.^and wait, until the matter has been thrashed 
out and all the •'contending parties have settled their differ- 
ences, it is clear that all the potatoes will have gone rotten 
long before a decision is arrived at. This kind of thing is 
precisely what has happened to the Irish question, and what 
would happen all round if every matter of State control were 
taken out of the hands of the few and restored to the hands of the 
many. Indeed it has been happening, though not infrequently 
overlooked, throughout a very long period in the history of our 
legislation. Most of the measures that are passed into law do 
not represent what the people want, nor what any section 
of it wants, but only so much as is left over of what is wanted 
when the various contending parties have exhausted their 
rhetoric. The statute-book of the realm is a. collection of 
these residua — we call them compromises. This result is prob- 
ably the best attainable under the circumstances. But if anyone 
will take the trouble to study the whole process of which it is the 
result, he will soon see that this would never lead to any such 
system of State control as that under which we are now living. 
To get that we should have to trim our sails to another tack 
which would soon carry us into regions where democratic 
principles do not obtain. 
Many-Sided Progression 
Democracy, as we all know, means a free field for inno- 
vators. But it does not follow that there will be much 
innovation under democracy. The reason of this is that 
innovators, when they are given a free field, have a tendency 
to get in each other's way and to arrest each other's efforts. 
Political thinkers are iii the habit of depicting the course of 
our history as the result of a conflict between the forces of 
order and the forces of progress. To this they ought to add 
the far more serious conflict which goes on between the forces 
of progress themselves, which is of course greatly to the ad- 
vantage of those who stand by the old order. 
Progress is not a like-minded thing. It is a many-minded 
thing, a jostle of tendencies and ideas, and often comes to an 
issue which none of the combatants intend or desire. The three 
years of war have brought this out in a very remarkable 
way— the way of contrast. On the one hand they have shown 
the like-mindedness of the democracies of the world in their 
determination to make good the essential principle of demo- 
cracy—which is the right of all peoples to be governed by 
their own ideas of what they want . On the other hand they have 
shown with equal clearness that outside the sphere of war aims 
no great people now in existence knows precisely w/;^/ it wants, 
nor has any definite conception of the end and aim of its 
life. In the light of these three years modern civilisation 
stands out as a thing which satisfies none of the peoples who 
have been parties to its creation. And yet when the questibn 
is raised. What would satisfy them ? you either get no answer 
or— which amounts to the same thing— ten thousand divergent 
answers. 
Now before any people can make up its mind how it wants 
to be governed it must first know how it wants to live — for 
the one thing depends on the other. The past three years 
have been forcing us back on this prior question, and the 
future of democracy turns on the answer it may receive. 
My own conviction is that the life we all want to live cannot 
be expressed in political terms at all, and that . the greatest 
mistake in the past has been the attempt so to express it. 
■ My faith in democracy is not based on the belief that it 
automatically gives us what we want. Nor do I think that 
it protects us from the disastrous consequences of not knowing 
what we want. But it does give us a chance to find out. 
And part of the discovery has been clearly made during the 
last three years. The democratic peoples have come to 
realise, as never before, that they want to live at peace with 
one another and with all the world. War may be wanted by 
war-lords, kaisers, dynasties, armies, governments, but by 
the people — No! The discovery — or rather this new real- 
ization of a familiar truth — is of immense importance. It 
defines the first task of democracy. It provides a practical 
starting point for the new era. 
But will that new era dawn ? It will not, if the Germans are 
suffered to win the war. 
The Fourth Year of War 
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