THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION.
 
 National Reconstruction. 
 
 A Study in Practical 
 Politics and Statesmanship. 
 
 By J. J. Robinson. 
 
 LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, LTD. 
 PATERNOSTER HOUSE, E.C. :: :: 1918.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 Many months ago, in response to a direct invitation 
 
 2 from a source it would have been unpatriotic to 
 
 &) disregard, I set up the framework of this book. It 
 
 >- was accepted by those for whom it was prepared. In 
 
 I July of 1917, it became necessary to write the 
 
 J book. My membership of the Education Committee 
 
 of the British Science Guild, and a life-long 
 
 apprenticeship to organisation and administration of 
 
 various types, may have been provoking causes; but 
 
 to whatever accident the first contact was due, I could 
 
 not turn from a suggestion which led me to a task so 
 
 continuative of the activities and aims of a busy life, 
 
 at a crisis in the history of a country to which I owe 
 
 ,both my activities and my aims. 
 
 3 I am painfully aware of many shortcomings in a 
 
 ^ performance which had to find fulfilment in months 
 
 rn heavily taxed by routine duties and public work. But 
 
 <> I do not wish my offering, such as it is, to lack one 
 
 o recommendation to which it certainly is entitled. 
 
 Whatever is written is the fruit of forty years' 
 
 studentship, in three widely differing provincial areas, 
 
 of the practical politics here advocated, and of 
 
 effective experience with many classes of men and 
 
 most types of service in the United Kingdom, and, to 
 
 a less extent of course, but still to a real extent, in 
 
 more than one European country. 
 
 co Most of the methods here suggested have been 
 
 gpersonally tested and applied. There must exist many 
 
 SJwho, having witnessed the successive applications of 
 
 these methods, will now be able to follow the thread of 
 
 390814
 
 vi. PREFACE. 
 
 purpose and the fabric of development of enterprises 
 which, at the time they knew me, must occasionally 
 have seemed to be borne of passing whims. To 
 those with whom I thus worked I am glad to 
 surrender this harvest of the toils we shared. These 
 began forty years ago in the memorable and beautiful 
 town of Bury St. Edmunds ; they were continued more 
 than two decades back in the North of England. The 
 willing workers who gathered so happily around me in 
 the mining, manufacturing, and shipping centres of 
 Northumberland and Durham, whose aid carried my 
 north-country health campaign to a successful climax, 
 may here share the chief dividend our heavy work 
 brought me. Many friends in Durham City, as in its 
 University and the capitular body of its inspiring 
 Cathedral, which must ever be first with me, may 
 now follow the growth they aided. The last 
 quarter of a century in the South of England, 
 given to more than one type of re-organisation, 
 has permitted such practice in practical politics as 
 could concern itself with the initiation and aid of 
 lecture societies, the organisation of a successful 
 institute for all classes, participation in the administra- 
 tive side of technical and secondary education for a 
 county, and the genesis and assistance of nursing 
 and hospital enterprises. In feudal England in- 
 trusive folk have very often to serve the public against 
 its will, and usually without its full apprehension, a 
 form of service at the time most exhilarating, and in 
 retrospect certainly delightful. I can never be 
 sufficiently grateful for what Saxon England has per- 
 mitted : perhaps some of its residents will take this 
 humble effort in acknowledgment.
 
 PREFACE. vii. 
 
 This book is intended to be preparatory, not 
 adequate ; it designedly offers outlines, rather than 
 details ; it presupposes willing co-operators and a 
 further and a fuller statement ; it does not wish to 
 restrict possibilities to present customs and aptitudes. 
 There are two parts to it. Each part can stand alone ; 
 though one working hypothesis informs both, and both 
 are practicable. On an early page I print the 
 Whewell quotation '(which I found after I had written 
 all the chapters), because it seems very aptly to 
 describe the objective, and in part the method, of 
 National Reconstruction as set forth here. 
 
 Some personal debts have to be paid. I wish first 
 to thank a few writers, quite unknown to me, whose 
 recent work in the Literary Supplements of the 
 " Times " I have watched with deep interest and 
 benefit. When so much of the best of one's thought 
 has been expressed anonymously, a special sense of 
 companionship matures with writers who also are 
 giving of their best anonymously ; on this subject of 
 mine, since 1914 much that is most statesmanlike has 
 appeared week by week in that paper, which has been 
 followed here with abiding content. Then I wish to 
 express my grateful thanks to my friends I name 
 them in alphabetical order, though they know who has 
 helped most Professors R. A. Gregory, F. J. C. 
 Hearnshaw, L. W. Lyde, F. Soddy, and J. Arthur 
 Thomson, who have most kindly looked over proofs, 
 and to whom I am indebted for many most useful 
 criticisms and suggestions. 
 
 My personal studies in military history and science, 
 and the metaphysical tendencies I owe to my fore- 
 fathers, are sufficiently obvious.
 
 viii. PREFACE. 
 
 If others are here aided in the Great Enterprise of 
 Life, and my country can find a use for this book in 
 these her greatest days, ought not a student to be 
 sufficiently rewarded who is still at school, and sees 
 many reasons why he should remain there. 
 
 There is so much to do that can be done and should 
 be done, and so many methods open to so many minds. 
 Ought we not to try any path that may lead to suc- 
 cessful and rewarding duty? 
 
 J. J. ROBINSON.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 THE SAFETY AND DEVELOPMENT OF 
 THE EMPIRE. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE POINT OF VIEW - i 
 
 II. RECONSTRUCTORS AND THE STATE 
 
 LEGISLATURE - 9 
 
 III. THE NEW IMPERIAL FIGHTING 
 
 SERVICES - 23 
 
 IV. THE NEW IMPERIAL FIGHTING 
 
 SERVICES : CONTINUED - - 33 
 V. RECONSTRUCTORS IN AGRICUL- 
 TURE AND MANUFACTURES - 43 
 
 VI. RECONSTRUCTORS AND THE EM- 
 PIRE'S RESOURCES - 53 
 
 PART II. 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 
 RECONSTRUCTOR. 
 
 VII. PERSPECTIVE IN PARTISAN 
 
 POLITICS .... 63 
 
 VIII. FUNCTION IN THE USE OF POWER 75 
 
 IX. THE TACTICAL METHOD OF THE 
 
 CAMPAIGN _ . . gi 
 
 X. SOME POSSIBLE ALLIES 99 
 
 XI. THE RECONSTRUCTOR AS THE 
 
 UNIT OF POWER - 107 
 
 XII. THE USE OF INSTITUTIONS- - 121 
 
 XIII. PUBLICITY AND MASS-SUGGESTION 131 
 
 XIV. THE GOAL OF EFFICIENT SERVICE 141
 
 We do not believe in the omnipotence of a parliament of the 
 scientific world. We know that the progress of discovery can be 
 no more suddenly accelerated by a word of command uttered by a 
 multitude than by a single voice. There is, as was long ago 
 said, no royal road to knowledge, no possibility of shortening the 
 way, because he who wishes to travel along it is the most 
 powerful one ; and just as little is there any mode of making it 
 short, because they who press forward are many. We must all 
 start from our actual position, and we cannot accelerate our 
 advance by any method of giving to each man his mile of the 
 road. Yet something we may do ; we may take care that those 
 who come ready and willing for the road, shall start from the 
 proper point, and in the proper direction ; shall not scramble over 
 broken ground, when there is a causeway parallel to their path, 
 nor set off confidently from an advanced point, when the first 
 steps of the road are still doubtful ; shall not waste their powers 
 in struggling forwards where movement is not progress ; and 
 shall have pointed out to them all glimmerings of light through 
 the dense and deep screen which divides us from the next bright 
 region of philosophical truth. We cannot create, we cannot even 
 direct, the powers of discovery, but we may perhaps aid them to 
 direct themselves ; we may perhaps enable them to feel how 
 many of us are ready to admire their success ; and willing, so 
 far as it is possible for intellects of a common pitch, to minister 
 to their exertions. WHEWELL'S PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS : British 
 Association, June 25, 1833.
 
 PART L 
 
 The Safety and Development of 
 the Empire*
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 THE POINT OF VIEW. 
 
 REVEILLE. 
 
 Sleepers awake ! the night is slowly dying, 
 The dawn is breaking on a thousand hills, 
 The truth is trickling in a thousand rills, 
 The phantoms of the past are swiftly flying, 
 
 The idols ignominiously lying 
 
 Deep in the dust of self-deluded wills, 
 The legendary righteousness that fills 
 Our bosoms with uncertainty and sighing, 
 
 The ignorance that knows not cares not why, 
 The cowardice that trembles at the firing, 
 The selfishness that truckles to a lie, 
 
 The prejudice that interdicts enquiring : 
 Did God give mind then but to dig a grave 
 Wherein to bury all the gifts He gave? 
 
 PHILIP ACTON. 
 
 All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is 
 to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do. 
 THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON (Croker, III., 275). 
 
 This book is an invitation to men and women who 
 believe in the building-up of nations to consider what 
 they can best do to help rebuild their own country, 
 which the War has shaken to its foundations. 
 It seeks to suggest those factors in national and local 
 administration which may help to this end. Such 
 factors may even be regarded as new, in the sense 
 that they have not hitherto been generally used, or 
 indeed to any large extent called upon, since never in 
 the annals of the British Empire has arisen, in its 
 present degree, the imperious need for reconstruction. 
 The book concerns itself, also, with the use of the 
 power which men and women already possess ; and it 
 treats of this use in the actual circumstances of to-day. 
 
 i
 
 2 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 It seeks to face some ascertained facts, and to assist 
 in the performance of some manifest duties. It will 
 be understood that a terse condensed form of ex- 
 pression is imposed by the subject matter and by the 
 conditions of this first essay in a new enterprise. 
 
 " National Reconstruction " is not, perhaps, a happy 
 title : one is loath to use it. But it is convenient ; it 
 is understood, and not infrequently used. Indeed, 
 whether we think of " construction " or of " recon- 
 struction," building is of the core of the matter. I 
 shall therefore speak frequently of "constructors": 
 the facts of life arrange the conditions for us, however 
 we may describe the process. " National Reconstruc- 
 tion " has at any rate one advantage as a title it 
 roughly indicates the contents of this book. 
 
 After the War, the ruined cities and towns of France 
 and Belgium will have to be rebuilt on much the same 
 foundations of rock and of soil as now: their 
 architects will meet the same climatic risks, guard 
 against similar structural stresses, use very much the 
 same class of material, and rear homes for the same 
 types of people. So, in England and any country that 
 shares our fortunes, the work of control and of ad- 
 ministration will have to be wrought with the same 
 materials as heretofore, and with similar tools, to meet 
 similar conditions. There may be new sites; some 
 new building materials ; certainly some new devices ; 
 and many new designs and structural methods. What 
 these may be, Time will decide. It will be our task, 
 as opportunity offers, to work old and new into a more 
 enduring and worthy edifice. 
 
 Let us begin, as Coleridge counsels, by laying open 
 to common view the foundation stones of the edifice,
 
 THE POINT OF VIEW. 
 
 so that friends may not hesitate to trust themselves 
 beneath the roof. For this purpose a few definitions 
 may be given. 
 
 In these pages, then, " National Reconstruction " 
 is taken to mean " the effective application of pro- 
 gressive knowledge to national development," a 
 definition in which each term has its value. For 
 instance, by " Application " is meant the putting of 
 ascertained and competent knowledge into the work of 
 national and local administration to-day and into our 
 own personal duties. Again, by " Progressive know- 
 ledge " is meant that which is known and has yet to be 
 applied, as well as that which has first to be discovered 
 and then applied. " National development " stands for 
 that which stimulates and fixes integrating growth in 
 the units which make up a nation, both in their 
 personal and corporate activities, the things they do 
 for themselves and by themselves, and the purposes 
 they share with others. The sub-title of the book, 
 " A Study in Practical Politics and Statesmanship," 
 better expresses the aim. " Practical " indicates that 
 which touches or is shown in practical or actual use in 
 the life of each of us ; that which is applicable or 
 available; that which is adapted to, or deals with, the 
 common affairs of life. " Politics " stands for the art 
 and science of government, of political affairs, of the 
 right use of power, and of the administration of public 
 affairs in the interest of the safety, prosperity, and 
 peace of the State. Naturally, as politics is the science 
 of the use of power, such a book as this will concern 
 itself chiefly with the actual users of power, the grown- 
 up voting units whose education in the use of their own 
 power must accompany their personal and functional
 
 4 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 development, wherever this process is at work. 
 
 It is not assumed that Man is, or now intends to be, 
 governed by what he calls Knowledge; or, indeed, 
 that he is yet clever enough to know where he is going, 
 or precisely his best available route. The possible 
 contribution of knowledge to national reconstruction is 
 a sufficient programme : may it be found a useful, a 
 stimulating, and sometimes even an entertaining one. 
 
 The point of view from which the book is written, 
 and the method of treatment followed, may be 
 illustrated by a rural anecdote: A Sussex school- 
 master having persuaded a gardener to attend some 
 gardening lectures held in their village, after 
 the third drew from his reluctant informant a 
 report of his experiences. Had he enjoyed them? 
 Yes, he had. Had he learnt anything fresh, anything 
 he did not know before? " Oi caint say as 'ow oi 
 'av. Ye see, sir, it's this waay: wot oi un'erstood oi 
 knew afore; an wot oi didn't know oi didn't un'er- 
 stand." 
 
 A contribution to National Construction must 
 start, then, from the known knowledge and the 
 acknowledged practice, must treat of circumstances 
 as they are to-day, not as they should be or might be. 
 We must apply ourselves to existing conditions, to 
 living men and women and to the institutions in 
 which they gather, for these are known and observable. 
 We must use the materials allotted us, or those we 
 have now allotted ourselves, whatever we may think 
 of them, or they of us. It suffices that they have been 
 given us to speak to, to influence, to work with. 
 
 Construction proposals which begin by antagonising 
 or disestablishing Party Government, Party Churches,
 
 THE POINT OF VIEW. 
 
 Party Groups, or occupational categories that claim 
 political power are not Practical Politics. They 
 absorb only those who run them, or oppose them ; 
 reconstructors have to use them, after studying 
 them, not to abuse them before they have understood 
 them. The nation's business is a " going concern "; 
 and its paramount interests and duties " are the bricks 
 with which we build." In this book, we shall 
 pass in review the duties that fall to reconstructors of 
 the type suggested, in their relations with the National 
 Executive, with political parties, with the Naval and 
 Military services, and with social, institutional, 
 financial, and industrial groups, regarding each as a 
 force in the national life which it is our privilege to 
 serve. " The nation's duties " stand for what is due 
 from us to make our Empire and our native country 
 secure, prosperous, and strong. Commerce, national 
 and natural resources all must be set in fitting 
 perspective: this is attempted in the first part of the 
 book. Construction does not necessarily imply any 
 new "systems": mankind is always throttling such. 
 It does involve, however, that informative instant 
 control over ever-varying, ever-fresh detail which 
 re-shapes systems, discarding them painlessly by 
 growth through new function. Surely in these days, 
 in our Empire at least, construction can work with 
 the flexible intelligence of adjustable wills, not through 
 the violent revolutionary rendings of ignorance and 
 passion. Living Nations have their choice: it must 
 be the one or the other. 
 
 From national administration, the review will pass 
 to the lesser administrative bodies by which most of 
 the country's public work is done, in county, borough,
 
 6 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 rural area. It is sometimes forgotten that England is, 
 in the main, provincial and not metropolitan. In the 
 " country " which is its most characteristic possession, 
 a nation best learns the lessons of corporate life, 
 and the pitfalls and possibilities of what has to be 
 called " government," however difficult it may be to 
 identify it under that label. Here, if we will, we may 
 find apt apprenticeship to a new craft ; here the nation 
 manifests its weaknesses, records its significant 
 failures, and is tutored in a university where degrees 
 reward success, and disgrace follows failure, in 
 assimilating the results of the new learning. Here 
 professions can be put to the test, and the curative 
 discipline of efficiency and fact applied with swift and 
 sure pertinence. Here all that helps development can 
 be studied at close quarters and encouraged : all that 
 hinders development, noted and banned. 
 
 From local administration, the book will pass to the 
 individual unit. !< The more we understand individual 
 things, the more we understand life," to alter Spinoza 
 slightly. Therefore, constructors will concern them- 
 selves with the opportunities, the calls, and the duties 
 of the citizen's daily life. This may be found to be 
 the most characteristic section of the book, as indeed 
 it is that on which most stress is intentionally laid. 
 That there may be Construction we must have con- 
 structors; however faltering its invitation to men and 
 women to share this work, an invitation will be 
 found here. It may well be that the method suggested 
 throughout will recommend itself first in this portion of 
 the book. Propaganda of the customary type is neither 
 counselled nor desired. Attack is. But it is an attack 
 of the " offensive-defensive " type, which is so difficult
 
 THE POINT OF VIEW. 
 
 for enemies to master, and is sometimes illuminating 
 to these enemies when they find themselves defeated. 
 New knowledge on a familiar subject, like the 
 key to a long-baffling problem, works, as does 
 revelation, with the wonder of surprise. Its ally 
 is always the sudden miracle, or that which, at the 
 moment, seems a sudden miracle. The joy which 
 prompted Archimedes to ejaculate " Eureka," was 
 born of revelation ; of such revelation the earth is 
 full to-day, and to the seeker it is always as fresh and 
 convincing as it was to him. 
 
 The method which seems to grow naturally out of 
 the problem and this treatment of it, may well prove 
 both seductive and convincing. The objective of 
 constructors is not distant. It is not theirs to pursue 
 to-day some goal beyond the horizons now visible to 
 them ; nor to seek insurance against a far-off storm 
 which a newer electricity may dissipate. They deal 
 with whatever is at hand ; and they deal with it at once. 
 They lead over to-day's parapet to the nearest hostile 
 trench. Taking the field instantly, they apply the best 
 remedy that is known to-day to the passing distemper 
 of the day. No skilful rose-grower finds it difficult to 
 lead the willing amateur into the better path, and to 
 convince him of the better method, when the problem 
 is how best to grow roses, for the plant does so much 
 of itself when cultivated with knowledge and care. 
 Constructors have a greater plant than this, greater 
 allies, and a nobler goal. 
 
 The definition of " National Reconstruction," if 
 adopted, imposes on us two supreme duties. 
 
 First : Constructors must move into the open, and 
 take all that knowledge has to give, wherever it is
 
 8 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 found. In search for it, and use of it, they must be 
 wholly independent of, though not indifferent to, all 
 partisan, traditional, or empirical points of view. In 
 obedience to their own special method, these can be 
 tolerated, and understood ; but they cannot be allowed 
 to command, save in matters which specifically are 
 reserved to them. Constructors will not construct 
 satisfactorily if they are open to be bribed or bullied ; 
 they must be fearless pioneers, seeking the best 
 knowledge, and using it wherever it is found. 
 
 Second : in their ministry, constructors this is the 
 point of view of the book must understand and co- 
 operate with the aptitudes and the instincts of the free 
 race to which they belong, as these aptitudes and 
 instincts may be now understood, or be later ascer- 
 tained. 
 
 Finally: we are to be constructors, because we 
 believe in development, as applied to living organisms. 
 Growth is one of the great underlying phenomena of 
 living matter ; and we ally ourselves with growth as 
 with the strongest of known powers, qualifying and 
 interpreting the term " growth " as befits the goals 
 to which, as rational human beings, we wish to move. 
 It is suggested, therefore, that, in their work, con- 
 structors ought have regard to the duty of Enterprise 
 individual, social, and national as the condition of 
 growth ; second, to informed and sustained Effort as 
 the method of growth ; and, third, to making 
 reasonably secure the Reward of enterprise and of 
 effort which, biologically and otherwise, establishes 
 growth.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 RECONSTRUCTORS AND THE STATE 
 LEGISLATURE. 
 
 Truth is a point ; the subtilest and finest ; harder than 
 adamant ; never to be broken, worn away, or blunted. LANDOR. 
 
 A man of great knowledge and unweariable perseverance can 
 really, by constantly pressing upon Ministers and departments, 
 do more than a tied and harassed official, to shape public ends. 
 BERNARD HOLLAND, C.B. : Quarterly Review, Oct., 1917, p. 438. 
 
 National construction implies national constructors ; 
 practical statesmanship implies men and women willing 
 to practise it. For the purpose of this and the imme- 
 diately ensuing chapters, it is assumed that there are 
 those who possess the best available knowledge of 
 the day upon the issues with which the electorate will 
 have to deal ; that they will be willing to put it at the 
 disposal of their country if their- country asks for it ; 
 and that an organisation can be set up which shall 
 comprise both those who know and those who have to 
 apply what is known. Thus we shall speak freely 
 of willing " National constructors," since they 
 already exist in large numbers, and we shall suggest 
 in the course of the work one of many possible forms 
 of organisation through which the ends here set forth 
 may be attempted. 
 
 National construction must give everyone a 
 possible contact with it. We propose to take the 
 " contacts " in turn. It is the object of this chapter 
 to suggest the contacts that can here and now be 
 established between those who care for National
 
 io NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 construction as already defined, and the State 
 Legislature. In later chapters a sequence in which 
 national needs may be profitably studied will be 
 suggested ; but neither here nor in any chapter will 
 there be any attempt made, save by occasional 
 illustration, to enumerate the particular Legislative or 
 State administrative proposals construction will 
 require. So many pens have catalogued these; so 
 many organised groups are concerned in propaganda 
 connected with one or other of them, that a popular 
 work intended to suggest practical methods of effecting 
 most, need not advocate any. Its object is far 
 wider; it refers mind to its own enlightenment for 
 truths essential to its own growth ; it suggests 
 methods which are applicable to all creditable objective 
 activities, and are adaptable to the use of all intelli- 
 gences and on most occasions. Resisting classification 
 in any " ism," and reluctant to rank with any " ists," 
 it finds work for those xvho have " isms " of their 
 own, and wish to be counted with the " ists." 
 
 Some potent reconstructors of the British Army, to 
 whom we owe our Empire's narrow insurance from 
 ruin, established their earliest definite relations with 
 the National Executive when Sir Garnet Wolseley 
 entered the War Office as Commander-in-Chief and 
 Reconstructor. He began his duties by asking the 
 then British Government a question. He sat down at 
 his desk, and in writing asked the Cabinet of the day 
 to tell him, also in writing, for what purposes the 
 British Army was maintained by the British Govern- 
 ment, so that he might know for what purposes to 
 train it. It took him weary months to get that answer 
 in the Stanhope Memorandum, the little seed of the
 
 THE STATE LEGISLATURE. 11 
 
 new Imperial Army. No one had asked that question ; 
 at least, no answer to it was to be found by the 
 Commander-in-Chief in the War Office itself. 
 
 Yet was it not the first question to be asked? 
 
 This illustration is used to suggest that practical 
 statesmen, acting for the electorate, may well start 
 by asking for clear statements of objectives in 
 all legislation, and by being men enough to 
 insist on answers for which the people who answer 
 may be held responsible. When the electorate 
 knowing why finds time and chooses the opportunity 
 to ask the questions that appertain to State control, 
 and is strong enough knowing how to get answers 
 from those to whom it entrusts power, the path of 
 efficient workers will be visible, and the nation itself 
 may go forward to its highest duties. But we are a 
 long way from that yet. Meanwhile, may we not try 
 to raise the Parliamentary Question from a Party, and 
 often a petty, Pastime to a Dignified Pursuit? 
 
 The practical work of any constructor in 
 Parliament would then include, as a beginning, in every 
 State proposal that request for a defined objective 
 which is due from the Cabinet, fair to the State 
 Department concerned, just to the electorate, and 
 required by common-sense. No legislative goal that 
 has not been clearly stated can ever be approached 
 intelligently; the compass direction may not always 
 avail, but it is usually worth finding, stating, and 
 examining. Our national history is strewn with 
 failures in war, statesmanship, and commerce, directly 
 attributable to flagrant disregard by our Governments 
 of this determining first-step, the definition of the 
 objective, and it is the earliest duty of honest
 
 12 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 administrators and practical politicians to see that it is 
 always taken. Nothing more swiftly disconcerts 
 Power ignorant of its duty and when has it been 
 equipped for it? than to be asked to state its precise 
 objective, and to face competent examination thereon 
 before action is permitted or pushed. What better 
 aids Power eager to do its work well, or the expert 
 anxious to make his special knowledge available, than 
 an opportunity to state objectives in terms which will 
 make the co-operation of others possible, even if they 
 do not, as they well may, attract or provoke co-opera- 
 tion. It is the duty of constructors to aid development 
 from whatever camp it emerges. 
 
 If this be true where objectives are avowable 
 and avowed, how much more necessary the dis- 
 ciplinary test in cases, much more numerous it is to 
 be feared, where the real objective is concealed, 
 either by design or by sloth. How punishing, too, this 
 weapon when the objective is an unworthy one: the 
 yielding to ignorant and passing prejudice, the 
 capitulation to a popular or propagandist spasm, the 
 acquiescence in a direct or roundabout bid for votes. 
 From time to time all these are necessary to judicious 
 government of the injudicious ; they recall primitive 
 pastimes, the instinctive human traits which make 
 for variety and relieve pressures. Nothing on this 
 flank of sidereal space will probably prevent, for many 
 decades to come, these and similar reminiscences of 
 Man's ancestral prison-house. But constructors 
 will and must do their duty by quietly witnessing 
 against them, and so fixing responsibility where it 
 ought to rest. Such warfare has something of the 
 summoning clarion, surely. What is a more deadly
 
 THE STATE LEGISLATURE. 13 
 
 foe of Ignorance, Falsehood, and Fraud, than 
 the " Question " in the hands of honest and efficient 
 knowledge? Questioning is not a pastime: it is a 
 high and serious enterprise, for the form of the 
 question is often decisive of the answer. When the 
 adequate question is framed by knowledge, how ex- 
 hilarating the " putting " test? These pages could 
 be filled with instances of the deadly use of this most 
 perfect lance when it is wielded by a competent lancer. 
 To change the metaphor, is there any bomb more 
 desolating than Truth, when the fuse is correctly 
 timed, and the bomb accurately thrown? 
 
 More! Unless the electorate and Members of 
 Parliament insist on getting from responsible holders 
 of Power defined objectives, it is difficult to attach 
 to chiefs the responsibility which is the best guarantee 
 of success, the best insurance against fraudulent 
 failure; difficult, also, to assemble and manoeuvre 
 the aiding forces that will co-operate to the stated end. 
 It will not be easy to get objectives thus defined : it is 
 not an easy thing to define an objective, and in public 
 business it is very rarely done. Defined objectives 
 follow vision ; and vision is rare. They imply adequate 
 knowledge of facts, and this is usually picked up after 
 a Bill has been introduced. They compel methods to 
 be challenged, and this impels to the facing of facts, 
 of which there is too little and cannot well be too 
 much. Imagine the change implicit here. What 
 could not a score of able men, adequately informed, 
 effect, and yet be rich in wholesome love of the 
 brethren. How quickly would the vaccine operate! 
 " What is, in writing, your exact object what are 
 you going to try to do?" " What will it cost? "Who
 
 14 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 is to have the Control and who the Administra- 
 tion?" " What does he or she know about the 
 subject matter?" "Are executive appointments to be 
 given to those who have learnt the work, or to those 
 who have to learn it?" " Are we going to pay the 
 latter folk, or are they going to pay us?" " How 
 will you prove to us that the officials do their duty?" 
 " How will you punish them if they do not?" " How 
 did the man to whom you propose to give power get 
 the power he has, and how has he used it?" " Can 
 he govern himself?" " Has he ever governed any- 
 thing else well?" 
 
 In a group of willing workers accepting the policy 
 stated in Chapter i, we shall have the initiatory body 
 for this enterprise. Also, in the Houses of Parliament, 
 as set up to-day and returned by the present or by 
 any probable voting machinery, we have an ad- 
 mirable medium for national apprenticeship to 
 National construction : indeed an ideal instrument, 
 by Time designed and fitted to every freak of fortune 
 or of capacity. No new National Party is desired or 
 desirable : the two words are self-destructive, like many 
 competing projects that will be postponed till the advent 
 of the millenium perhaps when another star is polar! 
 In Parliament we have a convenient starting-point too ; 
 not that our projects really start there. And this not 
 because the National Legislature is the most important 
 part of national organisation to the practical 
 constructor, nor that to which his best work can 
 first be given. It is neither. Rut because it is a 
 school many go to by deputy, to take the prizes and 
 to dodge the penalties. It is "he digestive organ 
 of the body politic, and the '-eoretical embodi-
 
 THE STATE LEGISLATURE. 15 
 
 ment of imagined control ; that in which the 
 voter is epidemically interested, that which he thinks 
 he can, or should, control, that with which he 
 usually wishes to establish some sort of personal 
 relation flattering to his pride, or expansive of his 
 personal or corporate dignity; the temple in which 
 he keeps and dusts or smashes his variable household 
 idols and demons, the Ark of his Covenant from 
 whose altars his imagination may most quickly be 
 reached. It is the Whispering Gallery of the Empire, 
 Why should not Truth whisper in it sometimes? It 
 focusses the administrative interests of every county, 
 country, and class: obviously a domed and attractive 
 theatre for Person and for Propaganda and why not, 
 now, for pertinacious principle? 
 
 It is wholly congenial, also, for the supreme reason 
 that it is the appointed and necessary stage whereon 
 the Powers, Interests, and Passions of the Nation have 
 to adjust and harmonise, however roughly, their com- 
 batant claims, very inadequately and often unjustly 
 no doubt. Without any hope of, as yet, swaying it 
 from its chosen path, in and through it, it is possible 
 to conduct that guerilla warfare of Knowledge directed 
 by dedicated intelligence, which must be the earliest 
 task of any constructor in Parliament. Guerilla 
 chiefs pierce the weak points in the organised arrays; 
 this is the only thing we should be able first to do 
 in Parliament. Guerilla chiefs keep alive the spirit of 
 resistance and of the offensive till the heavier masses 
 can be organised. That is our work, too. Like the 
 Expeditionary Army, they are the spearhead of the 
 developing strength. In war the sudden attack on 
 some unexpected sector schools both friend and foe.
 
 16 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 That is our opportunity as constructors ; our chances 
 will come suddenly, and must be used with guerilla 
 swiftness. Here, we have the convincing pencil, letter, 
 or query, swooping down on some unwary gasbag, to 
 the undoing of wrong and to the augmentation of the 
 gaiety of the nations. For this, what forum more 
 fortunate can there be than each Parliamentary 
 Session, with its ill-defined objectives secreted from 
 half-realised facts. 
 
 The group here assumed would, by constitution and 
 organisation, be possessed of, or be in available touch 
 with, existing scientific knowledge on all matters with 
 which the contemplated legislation deals. There is no 
 scarcity of available knowledge ; all that is needed 
 to-day is the focussing lens; sunlight will do the rest. 
 There are to-day organised bodies whose business it is 
 to keep themselves abreast of that which knowledge 
 gives, for the advancement of their own institutional 
 aims or trade objects. They would be potential allies 
 if not dependable ones always, for they are out for 
 knowledge they can apply to their personal or group 
 ends, and that point of view, being partisan and selfish, 
 is good neither for political sight nor insight: it often 
 suggests, or imparts, a squint. Does any metaphor 
 better describe the familiar phenomena of party 
 legislation : this affection of the sight in which the 
 axes of the eyes are differently directed. Con- 
 structors, in the light of the law to which they appeal 
 and by which they live, on which they depend solely 
 for their vindication and success, while wooing the 
 sources of available knowledge, must bear equal 
 loyalty to the ends for which knowledge is to be sought 
 and used, and to the goal, however distant, which as
 
 THE STATE LEGISLATURE. 17 
 
 constructors they have set before themselves. 
 
 There are many Members of Parliament to whom this 
 exact service is now both open and attractive: they 
 would form the working nucleus in Parlia- 
 ment to which such tasks could be given. These 
 would have behind them, outside Parliament, an 
 explanatory group working for their ends, equipped 
 with their technical ammunition, correlating every 
 available resource in provincial areas, and acting, 
 through many channels, old and new, to be hereafter 
 described, on co-operating self-governing bodies and in 
 the constituencies. How hopeful the strategy; 
 how profoundly entertaining the tactic! No law yet 
 possible to Man will ever prevent Power that rates 
 itself too highly, making gross errors when it acts, 
 as it often does, in obedience to interest of any 
 type. In a free and growing country, shall we ever 
 have the sad desolation of fool-proof State machinery? 
 And while imperfection persists, construction, and 
 laughter and joy in constructing, will persist too ! 
 
 It is well to remind ourselves that the greatest 
 educational force present in man is the freedom he has 
 to play the fool to suffer from it, to join the laugh 
 against himself when he realises it. That way lies 
 sanity and safety. Nothing more quickly illuminates 
 man in essentials than to be compelled to accept his own 
 creed preached against himself, and not mainly, as is 
 our wont, by ourselves for the benefit of others. He 
 who has to make and maintain the instrument to which 
 he entrusts his life is not likely to dally or to doze at 
 the critical jointing. Not for a futile end was it a 
 custom that the mechanic accompanied the aviator on 
 the machine he got ready for him.
 
 i8 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 To Government departments organised on scientific 
 lines, such a group of workers may be of very real 
 value; indeed, it will be unwise for departments, or for 
 any official acting for or with them, to proceed 
 without the help they would be in a position to 
 give. The Government of to-day has made con- 
 struction one of its legislative tasks, beginning with 
 machinery, as is its inevitable temptation. It has 
 in a few years ploughed up more fallow and 
 harnessed the best available knowledge more 
 freely to administrative work than has any preceding 
 Adminstration. And it is unreasonable to suppose 
 that when the stimulus is withdrawn, there will be the 
 same urgency of spirit. That may suit propaganda : 
 nothing in history suggests it. Most necessary, 
 therefore, is it at an early date to gather a nucleus 
 of willing workers to help every Government Depart- 
 ment which is either properly organised, or, being 
 improperly organised by tradition, wishes to bring 
 itself into line with modern needs and opportunities. 
 There are many ways in which help can be given in 
 the Houses of Parliament, and in the areas concretely 
 affected by Acts of Parliament, to baffle interests that 
 have to be fought, to support causes that have to be 
 won. Above all : there is the co-operation of an 
 informed public opinion to be encouraged. In place of 
 the prejudiced and partisan statements of political 
 friends and opponents, the voters must have facts, 
 vital to right decision, presented without selfish bias or 
 the distortion of the partisan. 
 
 One tactical advantage is possessed by workers 
 of this type. By goal and method we would 
 stand outside the institutional, traditional, and
 
 THE STATE LEGISLATURE. 19 
 
 consecrated methods of propaganda in the interests 
 of a Church, a party, an institution, a class, which 
 have done so much to sheathe the individual will in 
 almost impenetrable brass. We are the dedicated 
 servants of all, not the servant of any. And we need 
 not affront the self-respect of Englishmen as 
 propagandists often have to do. We are not out 
 to impose any views on others, to take cash for 
 sectional ends, to ordain, command, or hypnotise in 
 things mortal or immortal. We have bigger game to 
 hunt for men and for the State. Besieged by mission- 
 aries of all types to-day, sacred and secular, courted for 
 his opinion what is that worth? or for his political 
 support what does that avail? the modern elector is 
 prone to set far too high a price on both, and even 
 to abuse the very purposes for which both should be 
 used. With the empirical or the traditional, to 
 be enjoined on others, we have nothing to do. Each 
 man knows, however dimly, that he exists; feels, 
 however feebly, the separate world in which he has to 
 live, for he was born alone, generally lives alone, and 
 has to die alone. The best defend the citadel against 
 propagandist attacks ; long may that passive resistance 
 persist. But man welcomes the revelation that, be- 
 ginning with conviction, within himself, of the worse, 
 opens to him the better, gives him the glad but certain 
 fruit of experience, the added light that follows 
 vindication of new courses and choices by results 
 he can both see and feel. He is on his guard against 
 an advocacy that seeks his support to get its own ends 
 without reference to his needs ; in politics that has too 
 often meant, as he recalls, the power to annex the 
 loaves and fishes and to leave him the empty basket.
 
 ONSTRUCTION. 
 
 e root of much of the sturdy 
 ti platform and pamphlet 
 6et ; and has not this indifference been 
 
 Many decades will pass before we emerge from the 
 slough of selfish propaganda. In days of old, to 
 be a Reformer cost the Reformer the lash, the prison, 
 and the stake. For many years now Reform has 
 been a very profitable industry; it leads to a fixed 
 annual salary, and often to the very considerable prizes 
 reserved for the best players of the game. Democracy 
 may well look askance at men and women who stand 
 to gain personally by the disciplinary practice they 
 wish to prescribe for others. To do things how 
 difficult ! To do them well how profoundly worth 
 while. Are not these articles of our creed? To 
 grow thus, and in this practice, how splendid a 
 faith. So in Parliament, like processes would lead to 
 like ends. There, Opportunity gives the student of 
 the Time his chance, and if he be wise he need not 
 confine his missiles to words. There will be 
 sufficient at any time to welcome the quiet statement 
 of fact, to mark the folly and loss that followed the 
 easier choice. And Nemesis will be there, too, to 
 drive the dagger home. The appeal will be always 
 and everywhere : Choose ye. This is the best we have. 
 Yours the choice the burden and the lesson. You 
 pay the loss ; there is no construction unless you 
 construct. 
 
 Our objective, and method, will obtain equally with 
 regard to the propagandist action foreshadowed as 
 necessary in the constituencies in regard to our own 
 activity : it is safe to aver that they will not have had
 
 THE STATE LEGISLATURE. 21 
 
 anything like it. It should prove novel; and it need 
 not prove dull. It has, indeed, uniquely humanistic 
 and captivating attractions. Why should it not prove 
 effective? Because the imposition of defined and rigid 
 action is barred by the rules of reason and the game, 
 it will not be necessary also to withhold statements of 
 demonstrable fact, or appeals to verifiable data. Nor 
 need we shrink from invitations to hearers to adjust 
 their present points of view, so that new and quite 
 other facts may be apprehended by all of us, facts 
 applicable to the practical problems present with every 
 son of a woman in the audience, and to every woman 
 who hopes to have, or help, a son. In theory and in 
 practice, invitation is as distant from prophetic 
 denunciation as friendly delimitation is from conquest. 
 The guerilla metaphor was earlier used. Is it 
 realised that we operate from a secret base; and this 
 few guerilla chiefs possessed. Our base is movable, 
 adjustable, yet founded on the realities of things 
 as search and work and knowledge reveal them to us. 
 Our communications need never be cut off: we carry 
 our own provender with us, and the Universe itself, 
 always open to its pupils, is our armoury.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 THE NEW IMPERIAL FIGHTING SERVICES. 
 
 Believe me, I know the Prussians. We are destitute of the 
 means for a struggle with them. We have no generals, no men, 
 no material of war. We shall be pounded. Prevost Paradol 
 (French Ambassador at Washington, July, 1870) to Count 
 d'HeYisson. 
 
 DUTY. 
 
 How like a trumpet from the sentinel 
 
 Angel, that standeth in the morning star 
 
 Empanoplied and plumed, as angels are 
 
 Whom God doth charge to watch that all be well, 
 
 Cometh to me thy call, O terrible, 
 
 That, girt, and crown 'd and sworded for Heaven's war, 
 
 S fanciest supreme above the confused jar 
 
 Of shock 'd antagonisms, and the yell 
 
 Of trampled Pain ! Thou of the solemn eyes, 
 
 Firm-fronted Duty, on whose high Command 
 
 My heart waits awed, stretch forth thy harness'd hand, 
 
 And with a louder summons bid arise 
 
 My soul to battle. Hark, the muster roll I 
 
 Thy name is call'd. Forth, thou poor conscript soul ! 
 
 ROBERT, EARL LYTTON. 
 
 Since they are not yet governing the nation, nor 
 wishing to do so, Practical Politicians in consultation 
 will probably find the order in which they have to 
 ponder national activities bearing on the security and 
 development of the Empire, decided for them by 
 causes outside their effective control. The order itself 
 need not now be a matter of debate. 
 
 Whatever else may follow the mobilisation of the 
 best available knowledge for the tasks of construc- 
 tion, no programme is likely to attach to it the 
 informing and reforming intelligences of the Empire 
 
 23
 
 24 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 which does not at once make the Security and Develop- 
 ment of that Empire its first duty. An Empire that is 
 not secure, cannot be either constructed or developed. 
 Protection in the possession of statutory right, in the 
 performance of all reasonable duty, and security to all 
 under its jurisdiction, are the first ends of Government. 
 Governments are paid and tolerated to give these, and 
 they betray their trusts if they do not. Now, Security 
 is ensured to-day (in theory, at least) by the Fighting 
 or Protective Forces of the Empire, and the object 
 of this and the following chapter is to suggest to the 
 electorate why the reorganisation and maintenance of 
 these Forces are the first tasks. Modern war depends 
 upon trained, educated, and efficient brain and will- 
 power, as on applied science and on supplies of 
 natural and artificial products in huge volume; 
 nothing less than the possible mobilisation, on demand, 
 of the full resources of a nation will maintain it in the 
 rank of self-respecting and respected peoples, or 
 prevent it being mastered and overrun. Navies and 
 armies, on land, water, or in the air, pivot on scientific 
 and technical knowledge guided by an adequate sense 
 of history. National ruin, as we have seen, threatens 
 the unscientific, the ignorant, and the undutiful 
 nations, undutiful in the sense that self-preservation is 
 the duty of every nation. 
 
 Facts force this first task upon us, and give us our 
 first great opportunity. At the call of honour and of 
 necessity, the country has, for the first time in her 
 history, waged competent and scientific war in a 
 Continental theatre; and in the instrument she has 
 forged she will possess an asset for construction of 
 unprecedented value. Many of her best and most
 
 THE FIGHTING SERVICES. 25 
 
 energetic wills have been silenced in death ; but 
 sufficient should be left to mobilise an army-corps 
 of constructors. Not all, perhaps not most soldiers, 
 will be able to interpret in terms of national 
 life the experiences they have shared. Many 
 may well be content to have done with war for their 
 day, and to leave to others, or to none, the fulfilment 
 of further national duty. Even so, theirs will be 
 surely an attitude more creditable than that of possible 
 home-stayers in our cosy island whom no national 
 punishment will ever sting into the acceptance of 
 national duty, or waken from traditional and self- 
 complacent theories of a comfortable earth for them- 
 selves as a prelude to a still more comfortable and 
 unmerited continuation. But there will be sufficient 
 workers for good to give the officers we want; 
 sufficient to equip the non-commissioned quotas. And 
 what of the rank and file of immeasurable deeds? 
 Having learnt so much, suffered so much, given so 
 much, trod the tempestuous courts of blind and 
 baffling Death, they will return, knowing more than 
 civilians can of the waste, the thievery, the stench, the 
 stupidity, the self-suppression and greatness, the tests 
 and contacts, the heroism and companionship, the skill 
 and the majestic stimulus of modern war. The 
 machinery of the improvised national makeshift, where 
 it touches the voter and the men for whose fate we all 
 work, will have been shown them. They will know, 
 -as few of their fellows can know, the raucous rules of 
 the terrible game in which they have been often 
 harried, and apparently helpless, pawns. Having 
 learnt new values and tested the old values, they will 
 -be possessed of that invaluable personal compass
 
 26 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 which has made construction possible in the 
 past, and is the chief hope of constructors in the 
 future. To them, and not to the dull ears of the 
 unwitting, will the call to service come with some hope 
 of success; and, in their presence, students who know 
 the story of the military administration of their 
 country may safely make their new surveys and discuss 
 the nation's next and necessary steps. Is that 
 audience to be lost to this generation? Is that asset to 
 be unutilised? 
 
 No national record has been worse treated in this 
 country than naval and military history ; and it is only 
 within the last decades that it has approximated to its 
 own. Better days are coming. Military history has 
 attained professorial rank at the Universities. Even a 
 British Government was roused to decide officially how 
 the battle of Trafalgar was really won, one hundred 
 years after it had been fought, and this when the exact 
 manner of its winning concerned the technical reputa- 
 tion of the chief naval strategist of modern history 
 an Englishman. This belonged to the days of our 
 insularity, to the time when Navy and Army, 
 divorced from the national life, had their own 
 professional and family jargons, when neither 
 Service drew on the best brains, nor could practise 
 in daily routine the best methods of intelligent men. 
 To-day our best of one generation have manned both ; 
 and our best are running both. No class of the nation 
 stands unrelated to the nation's chief duty. There 
 should be audiences to whom can now be made clear 
 the successive lessons our people have had, and the 
 price to be paid when facts are not faced and obvious 
 duty is persistently shirked. There should be speakers
 
 THE FIGHTING SERVICES. 27 
 
 who have seen the price paid, and who know the sure 
 specifics of safety. 
 
 War is not a conjectural art ; and it would help most 
 of us to know very much more about it. What is fiction 
 to its records? What is prophecy compared with its 
 lurid tuition? There has rarely been a modern war 
 certainly not up to 1914 the result of which was 
 not approximately known to students six months 
 before the first shot was fired in it. People do not 
 believe that, because they do not know enough about 
 war to know what to believe or to disbelieve. Wars 
 of the national type introduced by Prussia in 1914, 
 involve obscurer factors, and final decisions may be 
 delayed and complex. But, generically, the rule will 
 hold : it has already been adequately illustrated in this 
 last and greatest of cataclysms. 
 
 The story of England's war-making, as students 
 know, is a story of appalling ignorance of their 
 duty on the part of the political rulers of this country, 
 in that they rarely learnt, or cared to learn, how to 
 make the country's will effective anywhere; nor made 
 that knowledge possible to, and compulsory on, the 
 Navy and the Army they dandled. Their friends have 
 written most of the " history " and hidden most of 
 their failures, or excused them. Is there any other 
 self-respecting modern race of which it can be said, as 
 it can be said of us, that we hired Germans to fight 
 our own family connections, because we were too lazy 
 to do the work ourselves? or that in the battle on 
 which we most pride ourselves as being fought for our 
 Freedom, British soldiers were in the minority, and 
 Germans and Dutch toed the line in superior strength 
 by our side? The Waterloo field-state is well-known
 
 28 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 abroad. Is it known at home? The Boer War estab- 
 lished a much finer precedent in that the dominant race 
 took the load and bore it throughout. Since, then, the 
 country aspires to govern itself, and wishes to believe 
 that it does, it may well be invited to face the 
 unpalatable facts of the past, so that it may cease to 
 do its first duty by deputy, or by the use of subsidised 
 races, as was the handy habit once, but may take its 
 own reins into its own hands, and both make and 
 govern its own Army and its own Navy. Can it claim 
 to govern either, if it does not make either? 
 
 The country has the highest possible incentive 
 thereto, for in most of its warlike records the story of 
 the actual prowess of its fighting representatives 
 and families is superb. The men educated in 
 its Army School have been among the pillars of 
 civilisation. Its roll of successful generals men who 
 have won peace for their country, and safety for 
 prostrate and oppressed peoples is splendid beyond 
 comparison. There is scarcely a device in tactics, 
 or a great strategical conception, which has 
 not been illustrated in a new theatre by British 
 generals and regimental officers, and, were the truth 
 known, many innovations in old theatres are attri- 
 butable to British practical improvisation when facing 
 tests under the compulsion of swift decision. Even 
 the magnificent and flexible conception of movement 
 out of which the Marne deployment grew, if it owed 
 aught to Napoleon's 1806 working hypothesis, was 
 derived primarily from the feat of a scarcely 
 known British officer in distant India. It was 
 Colonel Fullarton* who thus baffled the Mahrattas 
 
 * Fortescue's History of the British Army, Vol. III., p. 494.
 
 THE FIGHTING SERVICES. 29 
 
 in a country they knew, and he did not. In our 
 Army, as the late Colonel Henderson was wont 
 to remind us, this country has the oldest organised 
 white Army that civilisation now knows; the Army 
 with the longes: and most continuous historic record, 
 whose work has been, on the whole, representative 
 of the rule of honour, probity, and peace on the 
 planet. Its Navy for hundreds of years whatever 
 may be said of its buccaneering youth has been the 
 " sure shield " of freedom on the seas. In both 
 Services the personnel have vindicated the aptitudes 
 and merits of a cleanly, decent-minded, and free race; 
 and from both services the nation has drawn at will, 
 and in every need, administrators who have won from 
 the tests of their peace and field occupations, the 
 methods of successful and memorable government in 
 every part of the Empire. 
 
 It would be beyond the purpose of this chapter to 
 recite the reasons why organisation for defence is 
 held to be necessary. They cannot even be sum- 
 marised. To guard against misconception, it may be 
 well to say that there is here no sympathy with the 
 travesties of biological generalisations familiar to 
 German professors. " That organisms rise to higher 
 things not on stepping-stones of their dead selves, but 
 on the dead bodies of all that come in their way"; 
 and that, to quote German statutory war literature, 
 " the war of 1866 between Prussia and Austria was a 
 necessity of the history of the world" because Germans 
 wanted it, are heresies which are prone to occur 
 to men in a hurry to get sanction for sacking. The 
 writer is a lover of peace, and pursues it; but he 
 believes there are evils much greater than war, and
 
 30 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 that capitulation to a- lower type of ideals is one. All 
 prophecies on the future fate of fighting and of non- 
 fighting races are futile. War seems implicit in every 
 English county to-day; and in the faces and hearts of 
 the men and women who inhabit them. Till men 
 know themselves and their medium better not a 
 few men, but most men how is it possible to say 
 what this or that people or family of peoples will 
 want to do next in the assumed generations of 
 unlessoned democracies? Practical politicians must 
 take the facts of life as they are, first, so that they 
 may understand them. In the view of this writer, 
 war is at least as probable as death, 9 birth, 
 marriage, trade disputes, strikes, peaceful picketing, 
 the quarrels of party churches, human greed and 
 credulity, human ideals and love of power, and 
 the probable behaviour of human herds under 
 passionate and still untested ambitions. It would be 
 true, but perhaps not tactful, to say that nothing 
 makes war in the future seem more certain than the 
 ingrained precepts and practices of the pacifists. In no 
 department of political activity are the empirical and 
 the traditional more firmly rooted than in the men- 
 tality of propagandists who have pursued peace 
 before they understood man, and have usually suc- 
 ceeded first in making a war inevitable, and then in 
 nearly losing it. Upon such foundations is mischief 
 built. Let ours be the path of better knowledge and 
 of ascertained duty. Here it is assumed that war, 
 as an instrument of policy, will come within the ambit 
 of national administration for a few generations yet. It 
 may well be that after producing the Twentieth Century 
 Englishman and American, Nature will break her
 
 THE FIGHTING SERVICES. 31 
 
 lathes and stay her tooling; but -perhaps the odds are 
 against this climax. The planet may be destined to 
 be possessed by self-complaisant, self-centred races, 
 each fattening in its own stye. But that seems im- 
 probable also. In the indestructible prose of a military 
 history at last approaching adequacy, warning and 
 guidance are there for all to see. They cannot now be 
 gainsaid. Readers can scout for themselves. The 
 facts can be made patent and potent on any platform. 
 If only the nation knew them, if only the nation could 
 be told them even, practical politicians, in this regard at 
 least, would get a hearing, and might well hope for a 
 test. These are all the practical politician asks. In the 
 light of our terrible losses, in the tragedy of our 
 hideous peril still to be harvested, is either to be denied?
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE NEW IMPERIAL FIGHTING SERVICES: 
 CONTINUED. 
 
 The principle of compulsory military service, obligatory upon 
 every able-bodied male between the ages of sixteen and sixty, is 
 still the fundamental principle of English Law, both Common 
 Law and Statute Law. It has been obscured by the pernicious 
 voluntary principle, which, in the much-abused name of Liberty, 
 has shifted a universal national duty upon the shoulders of the 
 patriotic few. But it has never been revoked or repudiated. 
 It is not National Service, but the Voluntary System, that is 
 un-English and unhistoric. The Territorial Army dates from 
 1908 ; the Volunteers from 1859 ; the Regular Army itself only 
 from 1645. But for a millennium before the oldest of them the 
 ancient defence of England was the Nation in Arms. When will 
 it be so again? F. J. C. HEARNSHAW, M.A., LL.D. 
 
 A general officer came in from his command at this juncture, 
 and said to the general-in-chief, speaking rapidly and laboring 
 under considerable excitement : " General Grant, this is a crisis 
 that cannot be looked upon too seriously. I know Lee's methods 
 well by past experience ; he will throw his whole army between 
 us and the Rapidan, and cut us off completely from our com- 
 munications." The general rose to his feet, took his cigar out 
 of his mouth, turned to the officer, and replied, with a degree of 
 animation which he seldom manifested : " Oh, I am heartily 
 tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you 
 always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double 
 somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the 
 same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what 
 we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to 
 do." The officer retired rather crestfallen, and without saying a 
 word in reply. GENERAL HORACE PORTER, LL.D. : " Campaigning 
 with Grant," p. 69-70. 
 
 To govern a Navy or an Army demands more than an 
 easy wish, a unanimous resolution by a Legislature. 
 Ignorance, either personal or corporate, can never 
 avail in government. "Government" implies know- 
 
 33
 
 34 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 ledge of the ends or objectives for which both Navy 
 and Army are kept up, and the ability to provide their 
 tools and equipment, to discriminate in selecting 
 competent administrators and executive chiefs, and 
 to get duty done. The electorate, through repre- 
 sentatives, if not directly, must know the functions of 
 both Services, and approximately how each can best 
 perform these; and it must stand possessed of the 
 means by which some approach to adequate fulfilment 
 of duty can be got. If functions are not known, if 
 duty is not faced and exacted, the electorate cannot 
 expect, nor indeed will it deserve, the security in which 
 alone it can practise its own cherished prerogatives. 
 
 There are grave national reasons why nations 
 should forthwith apprehend this part of their busi- 
 ness. We are all politicians to-day, or wish to be 
 thought so. In politics are the seeds of modern 
 wars ; and politicians will make the wars. War will 
 usually be contemplated for the protection of political 
 interests as to which separate race families will feel 
 strongly, may differ tragically, and may want to act 
 hastily, without really knowing very much about deep- 
 seated antagonisms. It may be well, in years when 
 these things come to assize, to have national armies 
 in which voters will have to fight: there will be less 
 risk of untimely haste. War is the servant of policy 
 good or bad according to the pharmacist. Every 
 sound naval and military organisation has and must 
 have, for reasons which cannot be fully stated, a 
 definite national character; it will partake of, and 
 represent, the nation, and be the outcome of racial 
 practices, whatever these may be. Its origin, its 
 methods of maintenance and employment, will be
 
 THE FIGHTING SERVICES. 35 
 
 over-ruled by race-aptitudes, by tradition, by tribal 
 traits all truly national factors. These will assuredly 
 affect, if they do not determine, the strategy for 
 which both Navy and Army will be trained, the tactics 
 to which both will have to be habituated. The Great 
 War has given us striking illustrations in proof; tribal 
 and racial aptitudes emerged at the outset through 
 every crust, and persisted. It is impossible to-day to 
 reconstruct the new Imperial Fighting Services on any 
 lines not national from root to topmost twig, and, as 
 that is so, the nations of the Empire themselves must 
 do the work. They must learn, and they must perfect 
 themselves in, the adequate use of each, so that in any 
 case these instruments may be preserved from untimely 
 abuse. 
 
 How arresting has been the inequality of sacrifice 
 asked for from the generations who made the Great 
 War, saw it, shared it, will live to pay its price 
 -and enjoy its prize ! It may be impossible to 
 adjust inequality. It may be undesirable, for who that 
 knows the stuff out of which man is fashioned would 
 really wish to deprive the pioneer of his peculiar and 
 unpurchasable privilege, the missionary of his un- 
 forgettable risk, the mothers of heroes of the 
 incommunicable laurels? But the electorate, as a 
 maker of an efficient business, is directly concerned in 
 bringing home to every participant in national 
 security, his or her personal responsibility for a share 
 of the national duty that preserves it, and in enlisting 
 all healthy and formative influences on the side of 
 faithful performance. Some will always evade their 
 duty: we want them for warnings. Some will glory 
 in excuses acceptable to their personal comfort: we
 
 36 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 want them as foils to the faithful. Even the extreme 
 individualist has his use; and the anarchist, innocuous 
 or nauseous, is an admirable background to the 
 common virtues the Ten Commandments and Com- 
 mon Sense making these appear even adorable. Let 
 us have all for our tuition; and then let us learn to 
 seek our own errand for our own intense enjoyment. 
 
 It is further suggested to an electorate whose destiny 
 depends on its right use of power, that both (i) in 
 naval and military records and in (2) new democratic 
 routine of naval and military duty, it will be able 
 to graduate in a very efficient university. One illus- 
 tration may be taken. Few gains are of greater 
 practical value to constructors than confidence in 
 the creative and controlling power of the human will 
 over circumstances, if it realises its hour. In every 
 branch of social, commercial, and administrative 
 life, men and women are to be found who invariably 
 capitulate to obstacles they should either overcome or 
 turn to opportunities. To this unfaith, this mental 
 cowardice, we owe so much of the insignificance of 
 corporate achievement in education, in town and 
 county government, in the provident orders, the 
 professions, in politics, and Parliament. Men believe 
 neither in Will nor in Life. Where can men and 
 women best mark the prize of effort, the death- 
 penalties on sloth? Will the records of scientific 
 or artistic enterprise suffice: Palissy's endurance, 
 Pasteur's courage, Darwin's doggedness, Mendel's 
 patience? Galileo's exploits may, for he was 
 caught in religious vortices, and these excite 
 very many, since most are acquainted with the process, 
 active or passive, in imagination or by experience.
 
 THE FIGHTING SERVICES. 37 
 
 Surely it will be easier to heed the portent in the 
 decisions taken in crises by the great soldiers and 
 sailors which exemplify, not daring only, but exactly 
 that combination of competent knowledge and cool 
 resolution to which things terrestrial so often submit 
 themselves as to a master born to sway them. What 
 history is richer than war's in such precedents? Only 
 a few of the most characteristic need be mentioned 
 here. Take the story of Clive before and at Arcot, 
 and at Covrepauk; of Hawke at Quiberon Bay; of 
 Nelson at Aboukir; of Lake in battle-tactics in India; 
 of Moore, in his masterly foiling of Napoleon ; 
 of Wellesley at Assaye and more triumphantly at 
 Salamanca, his chef d'oeuvre, where he packed the 
 prisoned passion of weary and baffled months into one 
 quick decision that, in forty minutes, altered the 
 fortunes of the Peninsula War; of the young Bona- 
 parte in Verona before Arcola, and perhaps even more 
 brilliantly still just before Eckmuhl, in which decisions 
 born of informed and disciplined will triumphed over 
 the apparent fiats of Fate. The Spanish conquest 
 of Mexico pivots on the decision Cortes took in 
 Tlascala, at the darkest hour of his first overthrow 
 and dismay. Had his will then faltered he would have 
 been undone. He made opportunities of his obstacles, 
 and thenceforth Fortune took him by the open hand. 
 When Grant entered the field against Lee, it 
 was evident that to him, as to others, would come the 
 hypnotic test to which Lee had subjected in succession 
 every previous commander of the Army of the 
 Potomac, and that upon his personal reaction thereto 
 would depend the fortunes of the Union. There are 
 few more decisive examples of the exact triumphs for 
 
 391)814
 
 38 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 which Man as distinguished from men has to look, 
 than that which Grant achieved at the end of the 
 second day of the Wilderness, when, after bloody 
 slaughter in thick woods before him, and rumoured 
 ruin on his right and his communications, that excited 
 General of Horace Porter's narrative threw the Lee 
 tradition at Grant's head, only to receive the pent-up 
 discharge which so abashed and astonished him. This 
 was the only pointed reprimand Grant ever admin- 
 istered on active service, General Porter says; none 
 ever tried to hypnotise Grant with Lee after that. 
 Grant's rooted objective, gripped by real will, gave 
 rise on the third day to the southward march, and 
 that meant ultimately Richmond, the Appomattox, 
 one flag from sea to sea, and a great Army fighting 
 for the Free Nations on a world-wide battlefield. It 
 would have been in accord with Potomac precedents 
 if Grant had retreated at the end of the second day. 
 He did not: one human will in a round box of bone, 
 which was sustained throughout a critical day on a 
 raw cucumber, coffee, and a dozen cigars. Subtle 
 chemistry that! Grant was in war a good practical 
 politician : if he could anyhow go forward, he never 
 took a step back. 
 
 If we wish to make quite clear to the typical man 
 what typically human gifts and powers, however 
 obscure, can effect for good, if he will only believe 
 in and study Man, we shall most often have to go 
 to these life and death contests for our vivid and 
 useful illustrations. Theirs is a common language 
 understanded of the people. And what Reference 
 Library greater than that of the Great War's records 
 will any civilised race possess? True, there should
 
 THE FIGHTING SERVICES. 39 
 
 be a recognition of the heroism of the explorer, the 
 irrigator, the road-maker, the health-bringer, the dis- 
 coverer, the apostle; but these work more solitarily, 
 and engage a more limited, if a higher-typed, admira- 
 tion. 
 
 In the routine training of naval and of military 
 service, the race can be taken through most necessary 
 standards by methods at once congenial and aiding. 
 Growth, physical and mental, seems to reside therein. 
 Not that this has been inevitable in the past. 
 That the Services have marred many is indisputable; 
 that some men and women will leave the nation's 
 service worse than they entered it, is undeniable. To 
 draw up an indictment against either routine because 
 of this, is to draw up an indictment against Life. And 
 that we leave to others. Where, save through a service 
 of ordered task and responsibility properly organised 
 as is the premise can the electorate better grip the 
 duties of power and observe the rules which govern its 
 right practice : the intent of discipline ; the apportion- 
 ment of function ; the hierarchy of control ; the import- 
 ance of brains at the top ; the genius of leadership 
 how that is to be commanded or communicated; the 
 sovereignty of the moral over the physical how that 
 is to be gendered and maintained ; the concentration 
 of the whole force of a State on the selected objective 
 how that is to be compelled. All these requirements 
 have to be understood and met in war ; and all are vital 
 to every national undertaking as such. 
 
 A few more questions and inferential answers. 
 
 Is the new Imperial Army to possess the Empire or is 
 the Empire to possess it? If the latter, what do we 
 mean by possession and how can we see that we
 
 40 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 exercise it? -Surely by knowledge, character, and will, 
 the terrestrial trinity. 
 
 Are we going to control the military spirit or is it 
 going to control us? Why not the first? 
 
 Throughout the past, success has generally attended 
 naval and military operations wherever the methods 
 of efficient men have been followed: the study 
 of the facts first, the selection of the right objective, 
 the provision betimes of the necessary instruments, 
 ordinary care and skill in the recognition of obvious 
 duty, and ordinary willingness to perform it in time. 
 This country actually accomplished one such task 
 in the despatch of the Expeditionary Force. What 
 has been done can be done again. No miracles are 
 asked for nor are they needed. The performance of 
 duty suffices. 
 
 What of the Future? 
 
 Is it to be supposed that the art and science of war 
 for war is and will remain as much an art as a science 
 have naught beyond this last clumsy and riotous 
 expression, these monstrous masses of ignorant and 
 drilled hordes such as the mediaeval superstitions and 
 the fears of a group of shabby white men have 
 tortured us with? Even before the war, writers and 
 generals saw the days returning when much 
 smaller armies, really well trained, really well equipped, 
 and well led, would transform strategy, and would 
 newly illuminate tactics. What a few, with brains and 
 a field-gun, could do against numbers was seen at 
 the Couronne 1 de Nancy ; and what would have been 
 the fate of the German invading right had the British 
 Force, set in its path, been equipped with adequate 
 artillery and reinforcements, both flanks safe, covering
 
 THE FIGHTING SERVICES. 41 
 
 an impregnable sea base, in a position from which the 
 Kaiser would have had to expel it, or to acknowledge 
 defeat. So far as tactics went, there was no reason, 
 other arms being equal, why any German infantry 
 divisions should ever have broken into a position 
 manned by riflemen such as those of the Expeditionary 
 Force. Is the day of the small efficient and mobile 
 striking force gone? Will not a League of Nations 
 have to create one?
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 RECONSTRUCTORS IN AGRICULTURE 
 AND MANUFACTURES. 
 
 Nature to be mastered must be served. BACON. 
 
 The essence of science consists in putting a clear question to 
 Nature and wresting a clear answer from her. Nature. 
 
 The'ry thinks Fact a pooty thing, 
 
 An' wants the banns read right ensuin'; 
 
 But Fact wun't noways wear the ring, 
 Thout years o' settin' up an' wooin'. 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 Agriculture and Manufactures each the visible ap- 
 plication of available knowledge to national possessions 
 and resources may well come next among the 
 enterprises in which our new method may be 
 tested, and our objective illustrated. These concern 
 by far the larger number of participants in the work of 
 the Empire, and any such group as that premised here 
 must look for allies among them, and must exist to 
 serve them. It would be our duty to co-operate in all 
 efforts which seek for and apply new knowledge, 
 open new paths to development, or confirm progress 
 in older paths. It will surely be well to have a 
 central body of willing originators who know by actual 
 tests that on this planet it is necessary to run 
 very fast to keep in the same place; and that in the 
 uses to which we put our soils, our seeds, our 
 machines, our staffs, nothing can be more im- 
 portant than that the country should be aided to see 
 essential facts, to get the grit to face them, and 
 then to orient wills and methods to the determined 
 
 43
 
 44 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 objective. It will be no mean or trivial gift to our 
 time to enrol willing workers among those entrusted 
 with the control and conduct of these industries, who 
 will, with us, have regard, so far as legislative action 
 is concerned, to the supreme factors making for 
 enterprise, effort, and reward in any. Nor 
 will that task be light. In undertakings where the 
 empirical and traditional dominate, and with very 
 much justification claim homage, it will be often 
 difficult to see the facts with which we shall have 
 to deal, even if we wish to see them; and still more 
 difficult to get others to see them who may not 
 desire to do so. Has land yet surrendered its 
 potentiality or charm to its temporary owners; or 
 materials their chemistry to commerce? Personal or 
 traditional interest or bias gives indirect observation 
 rather than direct, and direct observation usually 
 yields the best targets. Many of the facts on which 
 progress depends are not known; most of these 
 facts certainly have yet to be discovered. Of 
 those that are known, many are not yet sufficiently 
 understood to make it possible to interpret their full 
 significance to popular or to administrative assemblies. 
 It will need a very wide and yet intimate 
 acquaintance with human wills and administrative 
 methods generally, to concentrate present available 
 knowledge, as students possess it, upon any 
 legislative change demanded by agricultural or indus- 
 trial combinations, or proposed in their behalf 
 by the Legislature. But the available artillery of 
 knowledge exists: that cannot be questioned. The 
 armed and equipped gunners have long ago 
 mobilised and debouched in column of march on all
 
 AGRICULTURE & MANUFACTURES. 45 
 
 the open highways. Surely an organisation which 
 can deploy the batteries on new battlefields should 
 not be beyond our fashioning. Science here is not 
 as a relish. It is one of the needs of life. Practical 
 politicians with this knowledge at their disposal 
 must steadily pursue their special aims : if others profit 
 by the aid we give, that is their business ; what we give 
 is our business. It is ours to let it be known that we 
 can get at the available facts desired as to-day's 
 knowledge places them ; that, though these may not 
 suffice for ultimate ends, they may be sufficient for any 
 next step Parliament, or any agricultural or industrial 
 group, is likely to be able to take or make. There are 
 many cases, obviously, in which even simple questions 
 as to consequences cannot yet be answered. Years of 
 research were needed to trace Beri-Beri to polished 
 rice. The victory of bracken over heather is a tragedy 
 in many parts of Scotland. But how is bracken to be 
 kept down? Muddling through is often excusable, 
 is sometimes the best practicable wisdom, and, as has 
 been already suggested, from revelation by error and 
 vindication by use practical politicians look for potent 
 aid. But this makes more, and not less, necessary, 
 the ministry proposed : it is the informed scientific man 
 who will be most likely to find the new path. It is 
 ours also to see, if such a chance and the need 
 come, that some of our facts are thrown like 
 pebbles into the swiftly circling wheels of error, 
 so that the machine may be temporarily pulled 
 up and some time won for consultation. Being 
 diamondiferous in character, the stone will take some 
 crushing. If it comes to a fight, even that, in a free 
 Empire like this, should give a sporting chance of
 
 46 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 victory and the glory of the shock to those who cannot 
 be bought, will not be bullied, and should not tactically 
 be beaten though how that would be managed is a 
 detail which concerns battle-field generalship, and can 
 only there be revealed. 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, co-operation with Government 
 departments and the popularisation in constituencies 
 of their best scientific work are both essential. 
 Certainly the prospect in this regard seems very 
 hopeful to-day. The recent action of the State in 
 Agriculture and Industry has been most illuminating 
 to all who have seen it or shared it in what to avoid 
 as much as in what to imitate. What the Empire can 
 do when it faces the facts resolutely is now manifest; 
 what it has to be on its guard against, the paralysis of 
 individual function by costly office interests and sterile 
 slavery, is no less patent. Through a Publicity 
 Branch, through many existing channels by which 
 provincial bodies can be reached directly, our workers 
 should be able to assist Government department, 
 permanent official, the much-harried reformer per- 
 plexed among obscurantists, and the ever-patient 
 public which pays for all it gets and for more than it 
 gets ! Where the ends for which we move are not 
 regarded or practised, there we should operate as a 
 beneficent irritant: each session should, on matters 
 of soil or stuff, afford opportunity to a race so swift at 
 criticism as is ours, and so traditionally apt at missile- 
 throwing. 
 
 Readers will realise that existing Legislatures in the 
 Empire are organised primarily for Power; and of 
 the exact and devastating chemistry of mere Power we 
 are becoming painfully aware. They are not organised
 
 AGRICULTURE & MANUFACTURES. 47 
 
 for knowledge, not even for its use, much less 
 for the application of progressive knowledge to 
 the development of the Empire. And from this 
 original and determining handicap, Legislatures cannot 
 for centuries escape. Therein rests the challenge of 
 Time to the practical statesman, to the scouts of good 
 and of efficiency. Therein is our* inestimable and 
 memorable opportunity. Power of this type is in- 
 capable of right vision and, therefore, of superior 
 action. Both are prerogatives of quite other attributes. 
 What has been the type and content of the knowledge 
 which has been the passport to Imperial and Depen- 
 dency posts in the Empire? and how much has that 
 had to do with the lands in which these officials have 
 worked, or with the language, history, geography, and 
 national ideals of the peoples whom they are paid to 
 interpret to us? Why so much playing at our national 
 tasks when they are so full of happy unattempted 
 work? 
 
 It is common ground that accurate knowledge is 
 being acquired and applied by those responsi- 
 ble for Agriculture and Industry. Particularly 
 during the war have methods been revolutionised by 
 responsible people working in both. Even to sum- 
 marise what has been done here would transcend our 
 limits. Chemistry is to-day the Harbinger of Divi- 
 dends. The gunpowder of self-interest is quick 
 enough to impel traders and landowners to profitable 
 changes, and those who know the directing facts 
 need only now and then touch a trigger. But is it 
 realised by the electorate that the fields untilled 
 exceed the fields tilled, even in such weather-worn 
 industries as land and mechanical production? The
 
 48 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 Earth is the oldest machine known to us, and is yet 
 brutally misused and misunderstood. Is Chemistry 
 the only science that can come to the aid of the manu- 
 facturer? What of the geographer, the geologist, the 
 historian, the economist, the psychologist, the 
 naturalist? Is it realised that the loss of some 
 national industries of ours can be traced to the neglect 
 of ascertained facts which some possessed at the 
 time loss was risked, though no inquiry sought 
 them and no propaganda published them? The seer's 
 vision of disbelief, even though one went forth from 
 Hades to tell the news, has been paralleled not once 
 but a dozen times in the history of British agriculture 
 and of British trade; yet the culprits at the time had, 
 doubtless, quite strong views on the government of the 
 Nation and drank most loyally to the King. 
 
 Without an ever alert and active assimilation of new 
 truth and its focussing for instant action, progress of 
 any general and effective type will in the future be 
 far too slow for safety in a competitive world. 
 And in one direction will constructors have to 
 be especially open-eyed and vigorous. Professor 
 R. A. Gregory, in his book "Discovery: the Spirit 
 and Service of Science" (Macmillan and Co., 1916), 
 gathers into twelve chapters the facts and influences 
 which to-day exemplify the making and ministry of 
 accurate knowledge. This volume seeks to apply 
 some things there written ; and to its ammunition 
 campaigning readers are respectfully directed. Here 
 we take a striking passage from Mr. Gregory's 
 tenth chapter, to make clear one danger from which 
 constructors may aid to preserve the electorate. 
 His book is full of instances in which scientific
 
 AGRICULTURE & MANUFACTURES. 49 
 
 investigations carried on with the single motive of ac- 
 quiring new knowledge have often led to results of great 
 practical value. Then Mr. Gregory goes on: "Such 
 applications are however only incidental, and in the 
 world of science they provide no test of the importance 
 of the work done. The practical man judges scientific 
 research from the point of view of its direct service to 
 humanity, or that of money-making capacity; and he 
 considers that people who devote their lives to studies 
 having neither of these profitable objects in mind are 
 wasting their time and abusing their intellectual 
 faculties. It comes as a surprise to most men to be 
 told that, in scientific circles, usefulness is never 
 adopted as the standard of value ; and that even if not 
 a single practical result is reached by an investigation, 
 the work is worth doing if it enlarges knowledge or 
 increases our outlook upon the universe. This 
 proposition, of course, leaves the practical man cold; 
 yet it is all that science desires to offer in justification 
 of its activities. While the discovery of truth remains 
 its single aim, science is free to pursue inquiries in 
 whatever direction it pleases; but when it permits 
 itself to be dominated by the spirit of productive 
 application, it becomes merely the galley-slave of 
 short-sighted commerce. Almost all the investigations 
 upon which modern industry has been built would have 
 been crushed at the outset if immediate practical 
 values had determined what work should be under- 
 taken. Science brings back new seeds from the 
 regions it explores, and they seem to be nothing but 
 trivial curiosities to the people who look for profit 
 from research, yet from these seeds come the mighty 
 trees under which civilised man has his tent, while
 
 So NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 from the fruit he gains comfort and riches." 
 Is this too hard a lesson? 
 
 Must not practical politicians give the universe 
 & chance to reveal something to them? Men have 
 tried for thousands of years to interpret the universe 
 by that which they themselves surmise, and have 
 made a sorry business of it sometimes. The " House 
 that Jack Built " has fallen in the mire. It is well 
 to let the great Sleeping Partner take a hand in our 
 education. From Research, endowed and sustained, 
 Agriculture and Industry to-day have more to look 
 for than from any other source whatsoever. With- 
 out it, they will be unable to reach the goal of even 
 their mundane hopes ; certainly, they will be unable to 
 do their potential duty by their time. 
 
 Provincial as well as Metropolitan aiding groups 
 must be assembled. The United Kingdom is 
 specialised in soil and in the products won from 
 it; in the minerals that reappear in manufac- 
 tures; in the geographical and geological content of 
 areas; in the traditional or inherited aptitude of 
 workers. It is difficult to make effective the contact 
 between the Legislature and the Constituencies without 
 Provincial workers established in regional areas. 
 Some such organisation is here suggested. Once the 
 function is recognised, development may follow. 
 
 To this part of our work properly belongs the co- 
 operation with labour, which will in agriculture, 
 or in industry, make effective our faith in the duty of 
 enterprise on the part of the participants, and in the 
 justice of adequate reward. Witness must also be 
 borne to the truth that the sustained effort through 
 which all living units attain their ends, must be
 
 AGRICULTURE & MANUFACTURES. 51 
 
 reproduced in man, and by man, if he, too, is to attain. 
 Nothing better than enterprise, as a duty and a 
 deliverance, sets up growth; nothing better than 
 persistent effort, wrought into a habit, reveals the 
 right method ; and what better than adequate reward 
 confirms Growth? Those who have worked with the 
 workers, served them, managed them, in philanthropic 
 efforts or in positions of trust, who have learnt 
 their difficulties and disabilities, know that however 
 much workers have sometimes sinned, economically 
 and productively, they have been sinned against 
 systematically, by those who, whether through in- 
 difference, or ignorance, did much to make life 
 difficult, disappointing, and sometimes even destruc- 
 tive. It is idle to hope that an end can be put to 
 these frailties; even if the workers get all the power 
 they promise themselves, they will probably be far 
 from their goals. But some practical demonstrating 
 witness must be borne to the idiocy of all such sinning, 
 by whomsoever practised; some way out must be in- 
 dicated when a way out is desired. In the atmos- 
 phere of studentship and discipleship to our obvious 
 chances herein sought, both may come. The two 
 great tendencies of our time are the scientific tendency 
 and the democratic tendency: our thesis is that their 
 respective developments, apart as they may seem, are 
 essentially correlated.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 RECONSTRUCTORS AND THE EMPIRE'S 
 RESOURCES. 
 
 Most of the leisure of the men of every nation is spent in 
 rounds of reiterated actions ; if it could be spent in continuous 
 advance along new lines of research in unexplored regions, vast 
 progress would be sure to be made. GALTON. 
 
 Those governments are the most flourishing and stable which 
 have the fewest idle youths about the streets and theatres. 
 LANDOR (Diogenes and Plato Conv.). 
 
 Practical politicians in and out of Parliament 
 should be acceptable allies to the contingents who 
 are to-day concerned, in State Departments and out- 
 side them, in ascertaining and developing as oppor- 
 tunity offers the available material resources of the 
 Empire. Able pens and powerful interests are here 
 engaged, and it is not likely that there will be any 
 failure of motive power for some years to come. 
 There are elements of national safety even here 
 which powerful interests might easily overlook, and 
 there will be scope for watchfulness and need for 
 prompt publicity everywhere. In this chapter brief 
 mention has to be made of quite other resources of the 
 Empire. Napoleon's dictum as to the relation be- 
 tween the moral and the physical forces in war is 
 quoted ad nauseam, especially by those who show 
 little apprehension of, or practical care for, the moral 
 forces, and the human folk who manifest them. They 
 will not have sufficient regard, that is, to the elements 
 which determine morale ; nor will they obey the plainest 
 of prohibitions nor respond to the most biting of 
 
 53
 
 54 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 incentives. Disease and death act decisively, what- 
 ever is done or omitted by man. Those who watch 
 these tutors usually get the better tuition. Surely 
 chief among the resources of the Empire are the 
 human beings who are temporarily in possession of 
 it and responsible for it. Surely, too, it is one of the 
 foremost duties of the State to see that its future is 
 not handicapped more than is unavoidable by the 
 feckless stupidity which waits on ignorance, and 
 that, so far as the State can aid such ends, 
 healthy life is possible in healthy homes, young life is 
 sheltered from unnecessary poisons, and adult life is 
 accompanied by adequate reward for enterprise and 
 at least a modicum of permitted leisure. 
 
 That very much has been done and can be 
 done by State action is commonly agreed. There 
 are responsibilities which must be shouldered 
 by the community as a whole. Individuals cannot 
 be responsible for the pranks of infective germs 
 which attach themselves to chance-met strangers, and 
 are born on the premises of some sanitary sinner against 
 the common weal. Only the State can equip and hunt 
 the pack that will get the better of infective pests. It 
 is the duty of the State to keep Health hedges intact, 
 and to make new ones where new ones are needed. 
 It is the duty of the State to declare war on Dirt and 
 Disease, for it alone possesses the power and the 
 right to exact obedience to health's behests. What 
 has been done in Panama against the fevers which 
 have filled immeasurable cemeteries, what has been 
 done in India and Africa under the goading of pioneer 
 scientific research, can be done in other parts of the 
 Empire against similar foes, the malignant and, we are
 
 THE EMPIRE'S RESOURCES. 55 
 
 told, the increasing armies of the microbic enemies of 
 Man. An electorate which sees these risks will ask for 
 such insurance against them as is possible. When 
 the Empire emerges from a struggle in which it has 
 had to mobilise resources world-wide in their scope, it 
 will have to face other forces which have also mobilised 
 planetary resources against Man. We are told by 
 students that in the fight against the microbe, now 
 being waged only by skirmishers on man's side, 
 it is not at all certain Man is going to come out final 
 victor. He has mastered larger enemies on land and 
 sea, and in the air: he has yet to win against the 
 Protean and persistent foes of whose existence he has 
 only lately become aware, and against which much of 
 the formal strategy and tactics of his past may prove 
 futile. 
 
 It is estimated that nine-tenths of the work of 
 the doctors of all ranks is trying to remedy and 
 cure easily preventable disease. Wages, housing, 
 health, child-welfare, leisure, importunately knock 
 at our doors. We have covered the land with 
 palliatives : lunatic asylums, sanatoria, prisons, 
 reformatories, inebriates' homes, retreats. We 
 have endowed unemployment, malingering, sickness, 
 unthrift, and crime, not always intentionally, but 
 ordinarily as was the case with the Insurance Act 
 because we were in too great a hurry to do some- 
 thing to learn how to do anything rightly, and often 
 because in any State action the guilty alike with the 
 guiltless have to be helped. 
 
 It will long be impossible to get the Legislature, in 
 the palliative matters of this type it generally affects, 
 to withhold its legislative hand from matters that it
 
 56 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 does not understand ; but in all discussions precedent 
 to Bills and incident to their passing, a knowledge 
 group should be swift in service of great contributory 
 value. Adequate inquiry pressed from quarters which 
 could not be gainsaid whether these existed we do 
 not aver would have made impossible some of the 
 wild mis-statements of the Insurance Act propa- 
 ganda; and steady insistence on the definition of the 
 exact objective, and scrutiny as to how that was to be 
 attained by the clauses before the House, would have 
 saved this country millions of money, and a great many 
 worthy folk up and down the country a wilderness of 
 wasted hours given to administration made farcical 
 by the State itself. Only a Pyramid of Punch could 
 do justice to the toil of administrators obeying the 
 orders of Administrative Departments of State. By the 
 way, will not constructors make an Administrative 
 " Punch " a propagandist pleasure? Ours has been 
 said to be, by not a bad judge, the most individual 
 race the world has ever seen; it does not want spoon- 
 feeding. It wants to have the chance given it to win 
 its own way to sanity, to health, and fertile leisure, 
 and not to be more heavily penalised by clumsy inter- 
 ference than is really necessary for the upbringing of 
 the wholly helpless. Wages have more to do with 
 housing than have bye-laws ; and if cottages could be 
 built by those who would build for those who could pay, 
 birth-rates would go up. 
 
 Accepting frankly, with these reservations, the pal- 
 liative action of the State, can we invite the electorate 
 to call for a courageous State campaign in Prevention : 
 the first should not inhibit the second. And it is 
 here that constructors will find their opportunities.
 
 THE EMPIRE'S RESOURCES. 57 
 
 We possess, or we can possess, the directions Nature 
 herself has given us for our ongoing : ours it is to see 
 that these get a hearing. When some wise Govern- 
 ment administrator launches his lucid remedy in an 
 overlooked Blue Book, we may help to make it the 
 'Common property of the Nation which pays him, and for 
 which he labours. When some Department, obstructed 
 in Parliament in a timely application of a decision 
 to which a State Commission has brought many, 
 still waits for public opinion to fill the sails, we should 
 step in to do what we can to help. We should give a 
 platform to every pioneer of better days and better 
 ways who has found some pathway out of the 
 detestable marshes of failure, futility, and avoidable 
 death, which trouble the wisest as the most foolish. 
 When we know as much about human origins and 
 types, the certain conditions in which health delights, 
 and the assured ditches of death, as we do about 
 the cabbages and potatoes we cultivate, we may 
 then learn that much the same laws obtain in the 
 growth of each, and we shall look to our State Depart- 
 ments to take the field on our behalf against our most 
 open as our most secret foes. Only State funds, or 
 assured freedom from anxiety to get a living and bring 
 up a family, can make it possible for some of the best 
 brains Nature sends, to aid us. We endow many 
 things and many men given up to pursuits which will 
 not affect the right use of one hour. 
 
 Nor is the time for this campaign other than 
 propitious. When has the State, in preventive medi- 
 cine, learnt more, attempted more, and wrought more 
 than in the Great War? Three decades of experience 
 have been crowded into forty months : daring attacks
 
 58 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 and flank movements. Are these to be wasted? 
 Assuredly not. Whatever happens to some improvised 
 departments, their won and hoarded experience should 
 be available for the push in the next great war for 
 sufficient wages, for health, sanity, healthy towns, and 
 adequate leisure. 
 
 As will be understood, mention of particular or of 
 possible legislative proposals already called for, 
 promised, or needed, has been intentionally withheld. 
 That is neither necessary here nor would it be prudent. 
 It is not necessary because any such enumeration must 
 assume the form and precision of a programme, and a 
 programme is barred by the matter and the method of 
 this book. It would quintuple its size; it would blur 
 its message. Responsibility for legislative proposals 
 attaches in the first place to legislators, and not to 
 outsiders, and it is hugely inconvenient and hampering, 
 here as elsewhere, for people to neglect responsibility 
 which is theirs, and then to assume, and interfere with, 
 responsibilities belonging to others. This ends generally 
 in evasion of duty by those who should do it ; and in its 
 muddling by those who meddle. Practical politicians 
 are asked to learn and to mind their own business 
 first ; then to see that others act similarly. They are 
 not governing the country yet ; and can best help 
 by understanding how it is governed and aiding those 
 who govern. "Aiding" does not inhibit initiative! 
 Again, it would not be prudent to set forth such a 
 programme. Those really interested in the public 
 welfare cannot always announce, in a country of usually 
 clever and sometimes cunning men, the exact routes 
 they propose to take to their goals. There is a serious 
 and continuing campaign to be undertaken here; not
 
 THE EMPIRE'S RESOURCES. 59 
 
 a " demonstration " to be organised. Good and 
 Intelligence should have their strategy and tactics as 
 well as prejudice, chartered stolidity, and evil.
 
 PART IL 
 
 The Development of the 
 Reconstructor*
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 PERSPECTIVE IN PARTISAN POLITICS. 
 
 A political club can have no durable leader : there must be one 
 for each passion. NAPOLEON. 
 
 To govern by a party is sooner or later to put oneself in its 
 power. NAPOLEON. 
 
 Being in company with Addison, Steele, Secretary Craggs, and 
 Sir Robert Walpole, they engaged in a dispute, whether a 
 secretary of state could be an honest man. Whiston, being 
 silent, was asked his opinion, and said, " he thought honesty 
 was the best policy, and if a minister could practise it, he would 
 find it so." To which Craggs replied, " It might do for a 
 fortnight, but would not do for a month." Whiston demanded 
 " If he had ever tried it for a fortnight." To which he, making 
 no answer, the company gave it for Whiston. WHISTON'S SON. 
 
 We pass from the co-operation which organised 
 progressive knowledge is in a position to offer the State 
 and other bodies, to the service due to, and from, the 
 electorate which creates and maintains the State. Is 
 it not clear that, from a national application of the best 
 available knowledge the State Executive is debarred? 
 It may make some use of it within the scope of its 
 own opportunities. It cannot, save in a Slave State, 
 impose its use on the Nation as a whole, nor can it 
 induce its full use by this Nation within the restricted 
 ambit of State power. That is the prerogative of the 
 individuals who comprise the Nation, so long as ours 
 remains a free race. It is of their voluntary accept- 
 ance of national duty, their realisation of their own 
 power, we have now to treat. On the mentality of the 
 electorate the " security and development of the 
 Empire" must in the last resort depend. Knowledge 
 
 63
 
 64 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 of the facts, willingness to learn fresh facts, the right 
 selection of objectives, punctual performance of the 
 duty of the moment, determine democratic efficiency 
 to-day and regeneration to-morrow. 
 
 i. Concern should first be had to the chief adminis- 
 trative political need of the day : the better education of 
 all grown-up men and women who now possess power, 
 from the casual worker to the peer of the realm. 
 
 2. Government by party should be made more 
 useful than it is, by illustrating to the electorate the 
 risks of such an adulterated activity ; and by developing 
 perspective in regard to it and the political careers it 
 encourages. 
 
 3. Politics being the science of the use of power, 
 the progress of any politician, or of any group of 
 politicians, is to be tested mainly by the use made by 
 either, of power already possessed. 
 
 This chapter deals with the first two. 
 
 i. If there is one State or individual activity more 
 canvassed or canvassable to-day than another, it is 
 the compulsion that adults and the State exercise over 
 young life: the children and youth of the Nation. 
 " Education " to-day inevitably connotes the habits 
 and the ideas which grown-up people wish to impose 
 on children and youths, or pay other people to try 
 to impose on them, this being the accepted and 
 traditional method by which living Generations hope to 
 make coming Generations better than themselves : the 
 word " hope " will suggest the inevitable connection 
 with human credulity. It is not intended here to 
 discount in any way the significance of constructive 
 proposals to be applied by those who have grown-up, 
 to young people dependent upon their intro-
 
 PARTISAN POLITICS. 65 
 
 ducers and instructors for food, shelter, clothing, 
 and upbringing, and possibly therefore not equipped to 
 exercise active partnership control over diction or 
 doses. Of passive partnership or "resistance" is 
 there not an abounding plenteousness ? Education in 
 this restricted sense is left to other pens, and to the 
 publishers, professions, and exponents deeply con- 
 cerned with its upkeep ; it is never likely to lack 
 champions. Has it not a Government Department to 
 itself? 
 
 What is here suggested is that the chief administra- 
 tive need of to-day is not so much the instruction of 
 children and young men and women, as the educa- 
 tion of workers and administrators, the real civilisation 
 of the comfortable and of the wage-earning 
 classes. Education in this sense takes the amplitude 
 of a national duty applicable to all, which is exactly 
 what is implicit in Practical Politics. 
 
 It is the "grown-ups" who father or mother the 
 children, decide for them, and present them with, 
 many of the avoidable handicaps which mar and maim. 
 It is the grown-ups who, usually from neglect of the 
 known or the knowable, fail to win from the human 
 beings they bring into life the response which 
 they confidently look for from the vegetables in their 
 gardens, though the human material is incalculably 
 more attentive and adaptable. We to get out of an 
 indictment form it is no pleasure to use do not 
 often care to learn the methods, open to us, by which 
 we may " breed out " of our descendants the 
 hereditary taint due to the primeval barbarism of the 
 race, maintained as it has since been by many 
 influences. The nurture and the admonition of the
 
 66 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 laws of health and of right living are far from our 
 search, though on these depend our prospect of a nation 
 of " vigorous self-reliant men, knit to one another by 
 innumerable ties, into a strong and elastic organisa- 
 tion." Adults run our homes, our institutions, our 
 educational and religious activities, our political 
 parties, our clubs, our villages, towns, and counties. 
 Power therein is wholly ours so far as power exists. 
 On us the responsibility rests; there is no gainsaying 
 it, though no student would wish to urge that 
 responsibility beyond a legitimate range. It suffices 
 that we have the power, all the power there is, that 
 the use of that power is our best school, and that on 
 this use, rather than on polemics we play with, 
 the destinies of the coming generations pivot. 
 Although it is part of an honest man, says Aristotle, 
 not to search for greater certainty than the thing 
 will permit, surely we shall find sufficient certainty 
 here to go to bed by : the simile is pertinent. 
 Because we cannot do everything, that is no reason 
 why we should omit that which we can do, or shirk 
 the duty of learning to do it better. Professional 
 teachers are in no doubt as to the real obstacles in 
 the path of progressive knowledge: which is the 
 more stubborn, the parent or the educational 
 administrator, they would find it difficult sometimes to 
 decide. In any event the child is not an enemy: he 
 may be an obstacle. It is the grown-up who snipes, 
 rather than supports, the school. Those who, up and 
 down the country, wish now to put their knowledge at 
 the service of the communities wherein they reside, are 
 in no uncertainty as to the identity of their chief 
 opponents. The rank and the file of the electorate,
 
 PARTISAN POLITICS. 67 
 
 the lower middle classes and the working classes, 
 sit entrenched across the path of progress. In the 
 main they can only be served by concealing the 
 service ; they are quite happy in their present pre- 
 occupations, and only positive discomfort of some sort 
 will move them. Yet reform must come through them. 
 If a business is doing badly, we do not first examine 
 the worksheets of the apprentices ; and if fraud inhabits 
 the " commercial office " we do not dismiss the errand 
 boy. Those who have studied the tooling of Nature 
 in successive generations of man, enthrone clean- 
 living, straight-thinking, punctual performance of duty, 
 enterprise in control of the forces within and without 
 us, as vital to efficiency in any one generation that has 
 to breed the next. Each generation most obviously 
 receives from its predecessor a heritage which it did 
 nothing to earn. Unless it be currish and ingrate, it 
 will wish to leave that heritage no worse. Perhaps one 
 day a generation of minds will recognise the obligation 
 to make the race better for its turn at driving, as we 
 know it can. Knowledge shows the way. Experience 
 marks the route with milestones. Will not some of us 
 be to-day's guides? 
 
 2. Neither this generation nor the next is likely to 
 take the parties of the old type seriously. War 
 and its revelation of national error have depolarised 
 some phrases and incinerated some refuse. The party 
 man and the party chief will long be reminded of 
 the pain which we have had to suffer, the price we 
 had to pay, for their neglect adequately to insure 
 against the failure of their own policy. That is ever a 
 bad omission for fallible folk to make, and war has 
 convicted political parties of it, as it convicted the
 
 68 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 John Popes, the King Josephs, and the Brunswicks, 
 of blindness to strategical risks which was 
 attributable to the same fault. There are some 
 diplomatic documents which will confound British 
 party prophets for a few decades. A huge debt will 
 teach the race the folly of playing at politics in place 
 of learning them, of governing countries, or of 
 allying ourselves with them and sharing their risks, 
 before their origins or their races have been even 
 superficially studied. 
 
 Knowledge has been said to be the soul and form 
 of politics. What is the soul and form of partisan 
 politics? Surely not knowledge. The voting machine 
 has many virtues : its output keeps the country 
 mobile and makes places and peers and a few 
 men. If it was intended to shut out Ignorance, 
 Impudence, or Fraud, it must be admitted that 
 it has proved a poor sort of sieve. There may 
 be nothing better for a foundation; but let us see 
 where that foundation begins and ends, for bogs 
 are hereabouts. Voters are very far yet from selecting 
 their Parliamentary candidates : candidature depends, 
 like courtship, upon propinquity, money, age, and 
 property, and the less said about knowledge on either 
 side the more easy the agent finds the preliminaries. 
 Even in delegated candidature, where organised 
 bodies choose leaders, routine and the order of the 
 truck in the train largely promote the emerging man. 
 The raison d'etre of the representative system is that 
 it represents, or should do, all types of character and 
 all orders of brain. Man's vestigial organs are 
 biologically significant and illuminating, and we have 
 their exact counter-parts in the frame and functions
 
 PARTISAN POLITICS. 69 
 
 of our constitutional organisations. Ordinarily, the 
 great interests take in charge the representation 
 of the people. It is not their business to know how 
 to govern a nation, nor are they prone to learn. They 
 are more solicitous that the nation should not govern 
 them, and that they should share the legitimate 
 fruits of power and chances to use or abuse them. 
 According as the Party of Progress or the Party of 
 Order seems to promise the better investment, so do 
 some interests shift from side to side. The process is 
 illustrated at any General Election, and knowledge and 
 veracity have not often been accused of too intimate 
 connection therewith. Man has never yet achieved 
 high rank in the logistics of Truth : and no reputations 
 are imperilled when we admit that. The exhibition 
 propagandist, critical and emotional, which we get at a 
 General Election, is sporting, reminiscent of ancestral 
 hunting, and not a little funny. 
 
 It will one day seem odd that partisan politics should 
 ever have been allowed to dominate the lives and 
 leisure of otherwise judicious thinkers. Passions have 
 more to do with the movement of votes than has 
 judgment and who argues with passion? Instinct 
 sways more than reason and who quarrels with 
 instinct? Tradition weighs heavier than initiative, 
 and " you have to dig deep to bury your daddy." 
 
 Against none of these will constructors tilt : enough 
 if they put them on an occasional film. They may point 
 out, for instance, the disappointment and discourage- 
 ment we bring upon ourselves and our descendants by 
 our disregard of the super-tax that has always to be 
 paid for concerted effort above the price we have to 
 pay when we use individual effort. The illusion
 
 70 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 that there is some magic of wisdom in numbers which 
 does not reside in one person, some mysterious efficiency 
 in a crowd or in what a crowd thinks however 
 educated or drilled it may be which is not in one, 
 dies hard. We hear what we think we vote for. But 
 do we realise the chain of acts between the vote and 
 its result, and as a consequence the exact Time value 
 and worth-content of the vote? National decisions 
 are generally given on a variety of issues, 
 more or less mixed and all highly complex, 
 which it is impossible to state correctly to any 
 constituency. Nor, if they were so stated, is there a 
 possibility of any one issue being identically conceived 
 or understood by all. Man proposes, but the Universe 
 disposes. Each man sees his own world. A political 
 leader has to appeal at once to the largest 
 number of assentors, and his statements have to be 
 understandable by the most backward. They have to 
 be phrased with extreme simplicity : one might say, 
 stupidity. National assent to a group of measures 
 must, like a Roman bridge, find its base in wide 
 spreading foundations of stupidity animated by 
 instinct. An Act of Parliament can be little other 
 than the high-water mark of average stupidity, wiser 
 than could be expected of the source from which it 
 comes, but much inferior to the best available thought, 
 and years below the best practice, of the best men of 
 the time. 
 
 It is strange that the manifest irrationality of the 
 very valuable representative device, should not of itself 
 guard the electorate against imputing fetish-force to it. 
 Is it really possible for any man to represent any other 
 man? Indeed, in how many instances can men or
 
 PARTISAN POLITICS. 71 
 
 women adequately represent themselves? 
 
 To know how best to govern a country involves 
 previous study of its physical, economical, and moral 
 conditions, demands a knowledge of the external 
 circumstances which affect its inhabitants, as of the 
 internal economy which is the result of the play of 
 their passions and their wills. Thus it is well to 
 know of any country the subject of our discussion, its 
 climate, its surface levels, the proportions of 
 its woodland and arable and pasture land, all 
 of which influence the habits of the people. It is 
 desirable to know its soils and their possibilities, its 
 harbours, minerals, and sea and land crops, to be 
 thoroughly acquainted with its allies and enemies, its 
 roads, waterways, and railways, and their effect on 
 commerce, industry, and labour. Its markets, home 
 and foreign, its legal and banking systems, its chief 
 industries and their origins and potentialities must be 
 studied. We must know, too, whence the race came, 
 of what families it is compacted, must understand 
 why the nation accepts certain theological systems and 
 rejects others, why it adopts certain modes of thought 
 and ostracises others, why its women follow the 
 fashions and are true to its faithless men, and its men 
 preach, smoke, write, drink, acquire, love, hate, lie, 
 and gamble. 
 
 Finally, assuming this knowledge has been pondered, 
 we have yet the most difficult task to essay. 
 Politicians seek to govern men. They must, there- 
 fore, be able to govern themselves, and thus to be 
 able to know men. How many of us know the man or 
 woman we have spent half a lifetime with? And if we 
 know not them, how can we know others whom we
 
 72 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 have never seen? There are many politicians to-day 
 no doubt; is it possible that they are not politicians? 
 
 Within our lifetime science has changed the inter- 
 pretation of that past from which we draw instruction 
 and guidance. Every year some current political 
 issue assumes a different aspect as fresh facts emerge. 
 We are beginning to follow round the world, not our 
 priests and our kings and our pet political theories, 
 but our wheat, our live-stock, our medicinal plants, our 
 sports, our methods of soil cultivation, our microbic 
 foes ; these last have decided, and may again decide, 
 the failure and the death of Empires. 
 
 To sum up : practical politicians need not do anything 
 to displace or to annul the partisan political creed of 
 any member of any existing political party. They will 
 prefer men and women to remain in the mental or 
 occupational worlds that have been decided for them, 
 or chosen by them. Men work best in familiar 
 conditions, and it is very important that friction 
 in things that do not matter very much should be 
 avoided where real work has to be done. They will 
 accept loyally the decisions arrived at from time to 
 time in General Elections, not because these are likely 
 to be either wise or true, but because some decisions 
 are imperative, and, as these will be usually of 
 the next step variety, and will be decided more often 
 by instinct than by reason, they will probably be as 
 affirmative and safe as any that are possible in the 
 known conditions. We have high authority for the 
 statement that " wayfaring men, though fools " shall 
 not always err. This will make it easy for practical 
 politicians to belong to these parties themselves, as 
 they must, to work with them and through them, while
 
 PARTISAN POLITICS. 73 
 
 at the same time they will be on their guard, knowing 
 the game, against attaching too much importance to 
 the unimportant, and thus neglecting their own 
 inimitable chances of learning their own business and 
 minding it. They will themselves only spend five 
 hours in deciding what to do in the five minutes 
 they enjoy in a polling booth when they go. And 
 they will not spend half the evenings of the year 
 discussing things they are not doing with people 
 who could not do them if they were given the task. 
 If their opinion is asked, it may well be given quickly, 
 so that each may go about his own business and attend 
 to the machinery that will ensure this being done 
 extremely well. In short, constructors will encourage 
 better perspective in an adulterated activity.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 FUNCTION IN THE USE OF POWER. 
 
 Let us not forget, when we emulate Germany's efficiency, that 
 the supreme interest of the State is to train its citizens to that 
 right judgment in all things which alone can save a nation 
 from moral and intellectual disaster when it is called upon to face 
 the responsibilities of power. PROF. W. G. DE BURGH : Edin- 
 burgh Review, April, 1917. 
 
 Riches are almost always abused without a very extraordinary 
 grace. BISHOP WILSON, quoted in "Culture and Anarchy" 
 (Matthew Arnold), page 135. 
 
 More Men? More Man ! It's there we fail : 
 Weak plans grow weaker yit by lengthenin'; 
 
 Wut use in addin* to the tail 
 
 When it's the head's in need o' strengthenin'? 
 
 LOWELL. 
 
 We arrive at the third point mentioned on page 64, 
 and consider the use of power. Constructors must 
 necessarily have greater regard to the use of power 
 than to those who are power's actual possessors. In 
 any year there are numerous claimants to be " the 
 dominant power in the State " : in that galley we must 
 not trouble to row. Now the claim is occupational, as 
 when one Chairman of the Labour Party said that 
 " the first item of the Labour programme was to make 
 the Labour Party the dominant, the directing, and the 
 controlling power in the State." Other occupational 
 interests have used much the same rhetoric. Then it 
 is economic, as when the financial interests move 
 glacially. We need not antagonise any of these. It 
 is only required to recognise them; and, perhaps, to 
 adopt Mr. Roosevelt's tactic, to " speak politely 
 
 75
 
 76 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 and carry a big stick." The real point is that, as 
 constructors, we need not care very much what folk 
 make themselves, or call themselves, at any time the 
 dominant power in the State. They will not get there 
 easily, and whenever they do get there, they will be 
 hugely uncomfortable. The struggle for power does 
 not concern constructors; they study the quality of 
 power, and are alert as to its right use. 
 
 Experience has shown that at most times and in most 
 places those who possess power have generally been 
 unequal to their tasks, have often made a very 
 unsatisfactory use of power, and have had to be fought 
 by the nation's best sons. The history of civilisation 
 up to 1917 is the history of power in unfit hands. Not 
 because men who have power are often any worse 
 than those who have it not, but because, as yet, 
 from the best use of power man is barred by 
 ignorance, and by his governing passions. While 
 power is sometimes educating in the individual, 
 it is a lure too dire for a class. The world 
 never yet has seen a body of men with class 
 interests and instincts Pagan or Christian 
 who can safely be trusted with power. It is from 
 mere acts of power divorced from justice that all the 
 great crimes of history have sprung. The right use of 
 power is so difficult, so little studied, so rarely learnt, 
 that those who possess power are bound, in the present 
 prevailing ignorance, to abuse it almost as often as they 
 use it. Only the operative caution which makes the 
 " next step " clear, keeps the best users on the path. 
 Even when dominant classes possess knowledge of the 
 wise use of power, there is not often the will to use it 
 aright; power itself has degrading tendencies. It is
 
 FUNCTION & POWER. 77 
 
 the most subtle of the temptations and the most 
 powerful of the poisons. No man is tested until he is 
 in a position to do what he likes, when he likes, and as 
 he likes, and it is usually then that the characteristics 
 of the fox, the monkey, the hyena, and the tiger re- 
 emerge. 
 
 Constructors, then, are not concerned so much 
 with actual holders of power, as with the use made 
 of power by those who hold it. If those who hold 
 power have proved unable sometimes to discharge its 
 responsibilities, we shall not necessarily transfer our 
 allegiance and aid to some other people who have 
 not power but want it very badly, just in the hope that 
 they too in their turn, though perhaps much worse 
 equipped, will escape the fault that has proved fatal 
 to others. The programme of any party or group 
 clamorous for power, leaves the practical statesman 
 tranquil : he knows the business too well to be 
 drawn from the trail which he means to follow. 
 He concentrates his attention on the right use 
 of power where its use can be tested and corrected, 
 for he perceives that progress has usually been the 
 fruit of power, or gift, well used, and of duty done. 
 Also, does he see that little good can be expected 
 from one man fighting another for power which both 
 may misuse. Why should the one man get that which 
 he blames the other man for having? Rather does the 
 practical statesman discern, that the man who has 
 power, can be better compelled to do what is right by 
 his power, if he is vigilantly watched by one who 
 already has done his duty by his own power. 
 
 This brings us to the Function of the constructor, 
 the " Unit of Power " ; and to the study of Function.
 
 78 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 To-day we have to reorganise a nation at peril of 
 defeat, economic if not military, by racial types who 
 may use a quite different form of gregarious organisa- 
 tion against us; and it is essential, therefore, that we 
 confront them as practised performers ready to meet 
 their best, not as amateur experimenters. Biologically, 
 to "organise" means to furnish with organs 
 harmoniously co-operant and adapted to the essential 
 conditions of life ; to integrate while differentiating ; to 
 develop progressively as an organism. And this 
 biological sense of the word may well be emphasised 
 when each is surrounded by "organisations" in private 
 and business routine, in philanthropic pursuit or pastime, 
 which will never be suspected of any such " content." 
 As practical politicians it is especially necessary to 
 be possessed of our biological meaning, for by it we 
 must test our use of the powers we possess, en route 
 to the goal of national duty. The nature and range 
 of the construction possible will then become much 
 clearer to us ; its conditions, risks, and probable 
 achievement will be apparent ; we shall see easier 
 where our personal initiative begins and ends, where 
 corporate initiative begins and ends, where, too, the 
 administrative action of the State to ensure simultaneity 
 is indispensable. It is safe to say that in most of these 
 preliminaries to a right appreciation of facts, and to 
 their successful use, many of us have nearly every- 
 thing to learn. In knowledge, scientific practice, and 
 rational initiative in government, the race is as 
 notoriously deficient, as it is efficient in its aptitude for 
 improvisation and rising to a great occasion. 
 
 A general knowledge paper in matters that concern 
 most of those who have in the past elected or consti-
 
 FUNCTION & POWER. 79 
 
 tuted the local governing bodies of our towns, counties, 
 and countries, may illustrate the purpose of this 
 chapter, and clinch its appeal. Readers can add other 
 questions to these, and perhaps put some of their own 
 fashioning to themselves. True : it is easy to ask 
 questions which none can answer ; that is not the aim 
 here. These questions, however unpleasant they may 
 seem to some, are asked in the interest of truth and 
 lucidity, as also in the interest of necessary brevity, 
 and to bring home to each of us our own possible 
 participation in national progress and national politics. 
 The obstacles which exist are suggested intentionally, 
 that we may turn them to opportunities and thus earn 
 the waiting revelation. 
 
 Will Members of Parliament, having first found out 
 themselves, tell their constituents the extent and the 
 nature of the control they exercise over national ex- 
 penditure, and what influence they possess, or ever 
 exercise, in national administration? If "None" 
 has to be written in these columns, will they explain to 
 their constituents what they do, and why they do it? 
 
 Why do not the Permanent Institutions of the 
 Country hold annual Policy Conferences, charged with 
 the task of keeping these institutions responsive to the 
 needs of every generation, so that henceforth an 
 institution may occasionally be reformed from within 
 by friends, rather than from without by opponents? 
 
 Will our Churches (clergy and laity) explain 
 satisfactorily to themselves (i) what it is they are 
 accomplishing to-day in national construction 
 with the sacred buildings, the traditions, and the 
 opportunities they stand possessed of; (2) explain 
 to others why some of their teachers know so little,
 
 8o NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 and teach so little, of the ascertained fresh scientific 
 knowledge as to the origin and possibilities of the 
 men and women out of whom all churches have to be 
 edified in each generation? There has been a re- 
 markable development in the unmoral powers available 
 to Man. Have the ethical institutions, whose duty it 
 is to help Man to use these, or to discourage his 
 abuse of them, developed proportionately to the need? 
 Rather, are they not decades behind the need? 
 
 Will the professions that levy fixed fees for 
 service, and exact maximum fees when they can get 
 them, exact reasonable efficiency from all members, and 
 compensate the victims of deliberate neglect or 
 culpable ignorance? 
 
 In how many private businesses to-day, managed by 
 their owners, or by people appointed by and directly 
 responsible to their owners, is the " till " the only 
 debtor and creditor account kept? How many thieves 
 have been seeded and harvested thereby, and how 
 many millions have been lost to the community by 
 traders who have failed, or have made arrangements 
 with their creditors? What would be the number of 
 bankruptcies and liquidations if it was penal to trade 
 without periodical accountancy? How many of the 
 culprits held strong views on national finance ; if they 
 did, do they now see what unpractical politicians they 
 were? 
 
 Will the Provident Orders tell themselves the exact 
 number of local branches, electing their own officers 
 and managing their own local finances, which are 
 virgin in the sense that they have not been robbed by 
 their own officers? 
 
 Will the Directors of Companies call to mind the
 
 FUNCTION & POWER. 81 
 
 defalcations of servants, brought about, not so much 
 by subtle scheming on the servant's part, as by 
 directorial ignorance of, or inattention to, the 
 business of direction? Will a reference to the records 
 of H.M. Prisons be of any service here? 
 
 What does the Charity Organisation Society's 
 record reveal of misappropriated funds and of the 
 spoliation of the well-to-do ignorant? Will the 
 philanthropic workers in big towns in the Metropolis, 
 for instance tell us the number of inefficients 
 they have annually endowed? It has been said, with 
 some truth, that it is almost impossible to administer 
 honestly any charity in London : the ways of cadgers 
 are so diversified, it is so difficult to trace them from 
 haunt to haunt, and the Father of Lies has so many 
 filial folk. In this regard London stands, as it were, 
 as a " wen " apart. Victims can be there created 
 without check, and nowhere is it easier to make a 
 show of philanthropic fussiness do duty for fruiting 
 faith. 
 
 In how many industries in the provinces do those 
 who conduct them 
 
 (1) Meet to become aware of, and to discuss, 
 functional trade developments made necessary by 
 radical external variations in practice? 
 
 (2) Sit in conference with the employed men through 
 whose co-operation alone their trade developments can 
 mature? 
 
 How many committees of public bodies act under 
 intelligent, or intelligible, terms of reference and 
 delegation from their originating bodies? and in how 
 many cases is regard had to the necessary distinction 
 between " control " and " administration?" Who
 
 82 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 will examine, in the definition and application of these 
 terms, members of Education Committees of Counties 
 and County Boroughs? 
 
 Of what value is any opinion on educational policy 
 or administration held by members of Education 
 Committees who either detest education or are 
 indifferent to it? How can the expenditure of public 
 money on education be wisely entrusted to such men? 
 What is the record of the Selection Committees of the 
 County Councils of England in this matter? 
 
 How many School " Governors " govern the schools 
 in their charge, or know how to govern them? 
 
 In how many popularly-elected governing bodies 
 does the professional expert employed control the 
 Council; and is that good for the expert? In how 
 many cases does the Council control the expert; and 
 is that good for the Council ? 
 
 Is there any working hypothesis applicable to the 
 following? If not, why not? 
 
 (1) What is the true objective in the education of 
 girls? 
 
 (2) What should be the real objective in the making 
 of a successful school? 
 
 (3) What is the office and function of a chairman of 
 a public-money-spending body? Is he the exponent 
 and depositary of .committee policy, or a policeman out 
 of uniform keeping external order, and letting policy 
 take care of itself? 
 
 In how many churches this surely is a non-political 
 question which all readers can ponder are the 
 routine duties of the congregation, the office-bearers, 
 and the ministrants, promoting the biological growth 
 which we are seeking? Yet is there any country in the
 
 FUNCTION & POWER. 83 
 
 world richer than our own in sacred poem, anthem, 
 tune, continuous historic tradition of site, building, 
 ritual or its absence, and reserves of available learning, 
 the storied treasures of great memories and great 
 triumphs? English religious freedom has favoured 
 hymnal development, and augmented the variety 
 and the richness of the companioning music. In 
 worship the work of the week still should happily 
 focus; there, surely, our work stands to be tested. 
 There do we follow our own foibles and preferences, 
 and exercise choices most personal to ourselves. By 
 their use, then, we are to be judged. Appraised 
 by any high or attainable standard, what can be 
 said of our share in the work, vocal, penitential, 
 expository, auditory? This question is pressed 
 because it is non-party, non-sectarian, and most 
 pertinent to the thesis. It is usually easy, after a 
 service is over, to mark the participants who have done 
 their duty inside their church on any Sunday morning. 
 Those who have put something of their own into the 
 service have generally got something out; those who 
 have withheld their own contribution (and all can 
 make some) have come " empty away." The 
 process is patented. Ordinarily, we can only expect 
 out of life what we put into it : a little less sometimes, 
 because energy has to run the machine. Fortunately, 
 from us is hidden the greatness of our own 
 contribution when this is loyally made, and hence 
 we are often surprised by the volume that is returned 
 to us. If we knew more, we should be able to weigh 
 the constituents perhaps; but thought is not yet 
 ponderable! If obstacles confront us in an activity so 
 vital to our personal peace and weekly war, are they
 
 84 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 going to conquer us, or shall we not conquer them, 
 and learn something worth knowing about this 
 wonderful matter of government? Indeed, can our 
 churches be constructed for every generation as they 
 should be on any other method than that which 
 stands true in the biological world, and is certainly 
 demonstrable on the plane of thought. 
 
 Will parents sometimes ask themselves whether 
 they are not poisoning the wells of life for their 
 children by the manner in which they speak of others, 
 and behave between themselves, in the home? 
 
 Finally: how, in the interests of growing boys and 
 girls, can we diminish the number of disappointed, 
 disillusioned, and often rather ugly old men and women 
 who cumber our streets and homes, giving life so poor 
 an advertisement and darkening with clouds so many 
 of the horizons of the young? 
 
 These questions arise from the practical experience 
 of one human observer; facts which can be attested, 
 justify each. 
 
 In all these cases, the principals have for years 
 contributed the rank and file, often the leaders, of 
 our political parties in parochial, provincial, and city 
 areas. They have held, expressed, and acted upon, 
 opinions on issues of a national type far removed from 
 their personal knowledge, or the exercise of the personal 
 functions they might have practised at home. They 
 have been loyal subscribing members of political socie- 
 ties, spent one, perhaps three, evenings a week chatting 
 over distant strategies with persons of equal dexterity, 
 and coming to conclusions about the destinies of people 
 they have never met, and could not talk to if they did 
 meet them. They have assembled in periodical
 
 FUNCTION & POWER. 85 
 
 conferences and passed resolutions which have either 
 filled the wastepaper baskets of Cabinet Ministers or 
 been used as cards in a transitory " hand " in the 
 House. It is not suggested that they should dispense 
 with any of these political pre-occupations or amuse- 
 ments. It is quite an amusement to watch them 
 and to write about them here in good humour, 
 too. All are essential to the growth of a nation 
 which, like the individual organism, is sometimes 
 prone to psychological indigestion, and has to get 
 rid of its products. (When we do not know what we 
 want, does it very much matter what we get?) 
 All that is suggested, out of respect for the 
 humour and habit of wondering man, is that it is 
 essential to add to these pastimes the performance of 
 preliminary duty, so that pastime may be transmuted to 
 useful service within the unit, and, through the unit, 
 to the body politic. If we cannot do the work that 
 lies at hand, pleading for a new form and a new voice, 
 how on any imaginable working hypothesis can we 
 hope to become skilful in the use of power more distant, 
 perhaps as yet undiscovered? 
 
 It is unreasonable to assume that the folk of our 
 towns, or its counties, are making the best use of 
 their present chances, or doing their duty by their own 
 communities. They are not. There is often little 
 ambition to learn the best, or even to follow the better. 
 Still, there are many persons who seek to do both. 
 There are thousands of active men and women 
 who give their lives to the good works which 
 keep our national life sane and sweet, so 
 far as it is either; there are institutional activities 
 with which constructors will always find it easy
 
 86 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 to co-operate, for they are constructing to-day as 
 well as they know how. And in the special objec- 
 tives we possess as constructors, in the wide-angle 
 lens we use, tactical advantages are ours which we 
 must and can use. We can get the facts faced some- 
 times ; the exact local objective stated ; the conditions 
 ascertained and followed on which Nature probably 
 allows a solution. All things that exist, suggest 
 thought before they came into being. Why not begin 
 with thought in our campaigns, the best new thought 
 and not the worst old one, the thought, too, that seeks 
 the end itself first and not some personal, class, or 
 partisan need? 
 
 There are town councillors who live and die with- 
 out realising the regional conditions geographical, 
 industrial, social, political out of which their towns 
 sprang : their human instincts just suffice for battling, 
 their class interests for schooling. There are County 
 Councils which have not yet grappled with some of 
 their most important public responsibilities as one body 
 with a corporate policy : fission is there always, and it is 
 generally geographical and " representative." The 
 members represent geographical areas, and it is a 
 tug of war between areas. Government by com- 
 mittee abounds in humour ; in the hands of popularly 
 elected councils it is often an evergreen comedy. 
 Sometimes it is so tragical that silence is the only 
 sedative. 
 
 The attribution of power to mechanical method 
 is the chief source of failure ; and that arises from 
 inability to grip our own power. The articles of 
 the delusionary creed are known : there is some- 
 thing occult in the decision of a committee, some
 
 FUNCTION & POWER. 87 
 
 greater wisdom than that which resides in any one 
 member of it. Is not this flat heresy? Not that 
 committee is always " a noun of multitude which 
 signifies many but does not signify much"; but that 
 any decision arrived at, and understood, by twelve 
 people, must usually be below the level of the ablest 
 minds of the twelve, which the others might probably 
 have had for the asking. Union, again, still connotes 
 strength. Has any proverb been responsible for more 
 error? It quite as often connotes weakness; and 
 when the power of a union is vested in what is called a 
 " representative," as for convenience it must be, union 
 often spells a weakness disastrous to the repre- 
 sented group. It may be beheaded at one blow by a 
 man abler than its chosen. There were never so many 
 representative groups in our towns and counties as 
 there are to-day, groups acting in the interests of sects, 
 industries, and professions. These are sure to in- 
 crease, for they are necessary. Everywhere, then, we 
 have men, officers of these groups, who by reason of 
 their office claim a power they would not think of 
 claiming as individuals. " I represent 40,000 of " 
 this, that, or the other, is one of the missiles thrown at 
 administrators, or at private persons who are for the 
 moment brought into contact with the organisations 
 represented. It is highly necessary sometimes that 
 this usurped power should be challenged, and reduced 
 to its legitimate and appropriate exercise. It does 
 not really exist, and should not be allowed more 
 power than belongs to it as a handy and adaptable 
 fiction. It lets down most of those who manoeuvre 
 with it ; and betrays many who create masters through 
 its usurpations. There is less danger from it if the true
 
 88 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 danger is seen. 
 
 It is certain that difficulties they do not now 
 appreciate, will confront aspirants to practical politics 
 of the type here suggested. Some will sit down 
 acquiescent in powerlessness over things given them to 
 do, still preferring to exert the assumed power, which 
 custom has made so familiar, in party issues where its 
 exercise is mainly imaginative and their personal 
 responsibility can be assumed or doffed at will. Still, 
 it is the duty of the constructor to take himself, 
 and to urge others to take, the footpath way, and 
 to work with the allies who are mobilisable. It is 
 ours to insist, always and everywhere, and to use 
 our every task to enforce our plea, that to do things 
 that are worth doing is difficult, and that it is because 
 difficulties are not recognised, studied, and mastered, 
 that efficient action, personal, corporate, or national, 
 is to-day's exception rather than its rule. In service 
 control and business and public life, slovenly thought 
 and action, and a loose and a low standard of 
 knowledge and of aim, are tolerated and general. 
 
 No student of the use of power expects any- 
 thing else than difficulty and frequent failure. This 
 neither depresses nor daunts. It immensely stimulates. 
 The strategical and tactical objective here is the 
 recognition of essential difficulty, so that problems 
 may be faced with the seriousness of soldiers confront- 
 ing a seemingly impregnable position. If we think a 
 problem easy which is in itself far more difficult than 
 it has entered into our minds to conceive, are we 
 likely to persevere to a solution; shall we not stop 
 when some untoward rebuff tumbles the tower of 
 our self-confidence to the dust? If we know
 
 FUNCTION & POWER. 89 
 
 that it must be difficult, and approach it with the 
 extreme care of a chemist at a laboratory analysis, is it 
 not more likely that we shall see, from point to point 
 in the darkness, where safely to put each painful foot, 
 consolidating each gained trench as we advance into 
 No Man's Land against Ignorance and Incompetence. 
 What we know is not momentous ; how we use that 
 which we know is. The final issues can be left; they 
 are not our business ; enough for us the task and the 
 glory of our day. 
 
 We learn the use of Power through Function; but 
 we must first get to grips with the Function.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE TACTICAL METHOD OF THE 
 CAMPAIGN. 
 
 Bear in mind the object is to drive the enemy south ; and to do 
 this you want to keep him always in sight. Be guided in your 
 conduct by the course he takes. GENERAL GRANT to SHERIDAN, 
 August 5, 1864 : " Sheridan Memoirs," I., p. 465. 
 
 In this and the next chapter an effort is made to 
 describe the method by which the purposes set out 
 can be attempted. What is true of the campaigns of 
 any great generals should be true, also, of ours. Given 
 the right type of organisation at the outset, and 
 competent leadership applying an adequate policy, 
 tactical details are decided as circumstances permit. 
 Napoleon, Wellington, Moltke, for instance, made it 
 their business to be possessed of as many as possible 
 of the factors that gave mobility in war theatres; 
 they were richly equipped in the resources of their art ; 
 and they were of a fearless and independent mental 
 mould. They so dealt with the problems of movement 
 and contact, that they were usually able to establish 
 fighting touch with most of the chances of success in 
 their favour. Fighting touch once established, their 
 actual tactics on the battlefield met and used the 
 hundred circumstances of the day. " What are your 
 plans?" asked Lord Uxbridge, the Second-in-Com- 
 mand, of Lord Wellington, as Waterloo began. 
 "Plans! I have no plans. I shall be guided by 
 circumstances." Yet, months earlier, Wellington had 
 selected that position to answer the problem Fate put 
 to him in June, 1815. 
 
 91
 
 92 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 Here, also, the policy once gripped, the circum- 
 stances of the day will produce the plan. Ought not 
 Knowledge to have its policy and its exhilarating 
 touch; its judicious "assembly," and its pungent 
 " attack?" 
 
 What, then, is the "right type of organisation'* 
 assumed to be necessary to attempt the agreed policy? 
 Can we get a glimpse of the tactics it will make 
 possible? 
 
 It is an administrative nucleus of scientific men, 
 administrators, political students, and statesmen, in 
 close touch with all departments of national research, 
 public or private, and able to obtain the best available 
 accurate information upon any administrative project 
 which becomes vital in any year; resolute, also, to 
 use this fearlessly and with devotion to the service 
 of the country. These conditions imply united action 
 between the possessors of knowledge, special and 
 technical, and politicians and administrators who use 
 it, or ought to be got to use it, in national or provincial 
 enterprises. There are many living to-day who 
 know and use. But, ordinarily, these persons are in 
 two different camps, and are likely so to remain. 
 They differ widely in outlook and in function, and the 
 divergencies will not grow less with the fuller 
 specialization which is inevitable with national develop- 
 ment. 
 
 No sympathy must be assumed with the view that 
 there is something in a scientific training, as popularly 
 understood, which prevents a man from being a good 
 administrator. In any sphere, close contact with the 
 facts of life, interpreted by the human imagination and 
 will, nnd tested by experience, will rarely unfit a man
 
 TACTICAL METHOD OF THE CAMPAIGN. 93 
 
 for any human activity open to administrators, will 
 often fit him superbly for them. There is not much 
 construction to be hoped for unless an extended use is 
 made, and at once, of the scientifically-trained men, 
 and scarcely anything possible to wage-earners and the 
 professions unless they listen to and profit by the 
 scientific tutelage which yearly augments in volume. 
 It is to those who have been taught to face facts and 
 to grapple with concrete problems, that constructors 
 will address themselves with most success in the 
 political audiences of the future. 
 
 The new work projected will appeal powerfully, it is 
 hoped, to scientific men and women, using "scientific" 
 in the widest connotation. They will be its bulwarks. 
 But for the immediate purposes of the originating 
 activity, a closer-textured " cell " is necessary. And 
 the heart of this cell must be the man of scientific 
 research, who will be immersed in his own task, and 
 have little time to spare for the service of a public to 
 whose ears he would use an impeding jargon, in 
 whose behoof he would often have to learn an 
 obstructive dialect. Such a man is not often an 
 administrator, nor likely either to care to be one 
 or to make an efficient one. He works with 
 a tiny and delicate pencil, not with a house-painter's 
 brush. Again, in this work he has a special 
 prerogative; quite a different type of task is 
 obligatory on him. It may be true that in administra- 
 tion the future must enlist competent delegation of 
 authority in the odd process we call government, 
 rather than " representation," which is rapidly being 
 reduced to its shrunken and proper dimensions among 
 civilised folk. But in the domain of that pro-
 
 94 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 gressive knowledge on which our work is based, 
 delegation generally is impossible. Its possessors 
 cannot delegate. But they can do the work that is 
 here demanded of them. They can state, some of them, 
 the best that is known ; they may be able to communi- 
 cate that, many of them; in any case they will be able 
 to answer questions and to suggest them, upon the 
 highest issues before the nation. On such helpers we 
 shall rely for what may be termed our " Prerogative 
 of Pounce " on error. Just as Germany for a century 
 made it her business to obtain the Prerogative of 
 Pounce, with her racial domination in view, so we, 
 with a far higher aim, must hold a weapon which on 
 occasion will enable us, not perhaps inevitably to 
 overcome this or that foe, but at the worst to get a 
 hearing for knowledge on any vital issue in any year. 
 That surely is obligatory on Knowledge, else why is 
 Knowledge given? 
 
 On such scientific aid we shall have to depend, 
 also, for enabling us to hold our own, as and when 
 the test comes, against efforts to capture the 
 organisation itself for class, partisan, or dynastic 
 ends, for dynasties rule in interests quite as fre- 
 quently as in the purlieus of Courts. So handy and 
 adaptable a machinery as ours might be very aiding 
 to a Political Group, if it could be captured ; to a 
 Party, if it could be bullied, bamboozled, or bribed; 
 to sectional propagandists, if it could be commanded 
 or commandeered. The scientific Consular Guard must, 
 so to speak, hold the key of the position; they can 
 always decline to help any end meaner than that for 
 which they are working; without them the springs 
 of new strength would be cut off. Their share as
 
 TACTICAL METHOD OF THE CAMPAIGN. 95 
 
 constructors need not be exacting: it would be con- 
 sultative chiefly, and, where organised rather than 
 personal effort would need to be called on, organisa- 
 tions through which they can act already exist. There 
 is no fresh burden, then, laid upon busy scientific men 
 and women which they cannot probably now meet 
 without disturbing a day's classes or a laboratory test. 
 
 The share of the administrators and politicians and 
 willing workers is different. They would be Members 
 of Parliament, workers for all progressive movements 
 in touch with current needs, and sometimes not 
 knowing where to turn for a " tip " that will propel a 
 good cause one stage further. The need we set out to 
 meet, the character of the aid provided, impose the 
 very simplest and most elastic of organisations upon 
 the Central body. Two or three administrators or 
 politicians or educated amateurs, who could give time 
 to this part of the work and get in touch at will with 
 other administrators, alone or grouped, would not 
 find the task of a Nerve Exchange of Information and 
 Suggestion beyond their power; the efficiency ratio of 
 the machine could be kept high. That would suffice 
 at the outset. It is probably a mistake of the modern 
 organiser that a committee sitting in consultation or 
 in conversation (with or without cigars), is always 
 and everywhere operative for wisdom. Constructors 
 can reveal quite as much in administration as in 
 science: Huxley's parallel between extinguished 
 theologians and the strangled snakes about the cradle of 
 Hercules, is true of British cults of organisation. 
 
 London, however handy for legislative touch, is not 
 functioned for provincial touch. Hence other centres 
 would have to be chosen where areas are possessed
 
 96 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 of characteristics strongly differentiated. The general 
 fluid type of organisation projected would be adjustable 
 to most needs and opportunities, and whenever contact 
 existed, and action was called for, the plan would 
 suggest itself to those in control at the time. There 
 are only a few parties to most action ; they all exist in 
 our case; the race excels in compromise and adapta- 
 tion; and a constructive organisation would link 
 them all up, and perhaps put the power of the Universe 
 behind the effort. For we work with nothing less 
 than irresistible reserves, if we can but get at them. 
 The getting at them is our precise business in this part 
 of our enterprise. 
 
 In regard to provincial administration, as distinct 
 from that which concerns the State Legislature, 
 constructors could ponder a new method of which 
 delegation is the key. Wherever they touched 
 national or provincial administration, they would 
 begin by working through competent persons 
 operating from a definite base, and with definite 
 and discriminating objectives. New committees 
 with new branches are taboo, at first. We have far 
 too many now. They are the minor soporifics of 
 the representative system, itself the major. Nearly 
 every active adult and intelligent person is on some, 
 many are on dozens, and there are a few folk in every 
 county who seem to live on, or by, them. It must, 
 indeed, be one of the perturbations of the overseers in 
 the next sphere to find some familiar diversion for 
 Earth's insistent committee-men to share. Without 
 this pastime, what will they do there? Why should 
 constructors, with duties so many and so difficult on 
 so many committees, create others of their own, when
 
 TACTICAL METHOD OF THE CAMPAIGN. 97 
 
 the community throws at their heads coverts for 
 their shooting over? The constructor, as a willing 
 worker, will be able to report needs to headquarters, 
 to keep these informed as to the vital and 
 imminent local needs, and to be the instrument through 
 which the necessary and significant hint can be 
 received, and interpreted. It would be an exhilarating 
 experience for any active member of any public body 
 to try membership of this movement for a spell. H'e 
 might not soften Pharoah's heart, but he could play 
 with plagues, and occasionally he might have the rare 
 joy of imposing a devastating Nile mouth crossing. 
 
 The Reformer to-day on provincial bodies is very 
 much bothered by selfishness, apathy, and ignorance; 
 and, in the absence of fresh knowledgeable interests, 
 apathy is normal. A constructor in touch with the heart 
 of things is in no such case. He is himself adjacent to 
 the inexhaustible ; and in his contact with others he 
 allows for the nature and pose of man. The situation 
 therefore awakens him, and stimulates his inventiveness 
 so that knowledge may not be wronged. Though 
 that may sometimes seem to be inevitable, it should 
 not often be necessary. Englishmen generally prefer 
 the better, if they see it or can be got to see it. This 
 last is the goal of the constructor, and the sporting 
 spirit of his colleagues will sometimes aid. Altogether, 
 a wide acreage of human opportunity sprouts with 
 promise and good humour. 
 
 True to our objective and to our special method, we 
 need not at the outset plan much further than for the 
 linking of provincial areas to London headquarters, and 
 for willing worker membership in the areas themselves. 
 After function comes the form of growth. Delegation
 
 98 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 of specified tasks to efficient units; the supply to such 
 units of sufficient ammunition, are the inexpensive and 
 effective beginnings of provincial work within the 
 range of the provincial areas; the coalescing of 
 units working at the face of the seam, so to speak, and 
 therefore in touch with every phase of local need, will 
 suggest a local organisation if one is required later. 
 It is our tactical method that contact between demand 
 and supply should be as intimate and as varied as is 
 life in the individual; for this method the willing 
 worker is the sufficing unit. He knows, he sees, he 
 can apply his weapon. The method has been already 
 tested by the writer, and with success. 
 
 There are other possibilities open to constructors 
 in consultation. The country possesses many 
 organisations to-day with aims similar, though none 
 with an objective so novel and so powerful, and a 
 method so hopeful. These should welcome us. In- 
 deed, it may be possible for constructors to annex, 
 or be annexed by, one of these existing organisations 
 ready to prefer our method to their own.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 SOME POSSIBLE ALLIES. 
 
 I believe that among human institutions, that of private 
 property next to personal liberty has had most to do with the 
 uplifting and the physical and moral improvement of the human 
 race. MR. TAFT, Ex-President of the United States. 
 
 The world 's the book where the eternal Sense 
 
 Wrote his own thoughts ; the living temple where, 
 Painting his very self, with figures fair 
 He filled the whole immense circumference. 
 
 Here then should each man read, and gazing find 
 Both how to live and govern, and beware 
 Of godlessness ; and, seeing God ail-where, 
 Be bold to grasp the universal mind. 
 
 But we tied down to books and temples dead, 
 Copied with countless errors from the life, 
 These nobler than that school sublime we call. 
 
 O may our senseless souls at length be led 
 To truth by pain, grief, anguish, trouble, strife ! 
 Turn we to read the one original ! 
 
 CAMPANELLA (Tr. by J. A. SYMONDS). 
 
 What sort of reception does an effort of this type 
 merit in a free and, approximately, an educated 
 country? What does it involve? Where can it look 
 for Allies? 
 
 i. It seeks to displace nothing that cannot very 
 well be spared, and ought not now to be dead. 
 
 2. It comes to fulfil the good work for which the 
 dour efforts of past centuries have made ready the 
 mind of man, and modern science has brought within 
 reach of personal and corporate action. 
 
 3. The tactic is of the simplest, for it consists 
 in giving an intensely practical purpose to existing 
 aims. 
 
 99
 
 ioo NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 4. It depends originally upon a few who wish to 
 seize their chance, while they yet live, to stamp 
 efficiency on as many of the activities of To-day as 
 they can influence. 
 
 5. It gives present and effective duty to thousands 
 of willing workers, now caught in baffling coils of 
 administration and shorn of pleasure and usefulness. 
 
 6. There is nothing in the programme that imposes 
 delay : the chess-board is set for the game, and all 
 the openings are available. 
 
 7. There are few political or administrative 
 problems imminent which are not susceptible of instant 
 service. Indeed, most are dependent upon such 
 action as this. 
 
 8. It can be started with less money than would 
 buy a few first-rate equine sires. Its positive dividends 
 need not be miserly; and the experience of a 
 quinquennium would suffice either to justify the opening 
 plan, or to yield a better. The work has to be done 
 somehow; why should not knowledgeable folk have a 
 hand in it? 
 
 Whence will come our Allies? 
 
 First, from those who are aware of inefficiency 
 and its cost, have a high standard of efficiency them- 
 selves, and are without suitable opportunities to affect 
 national and provincial administration. These are a 
 host. 
 
 Second, from all new and energetic idealistic and 
 Labour groups, the Labour Party particularly, who 
 intend to use the voting machine and numerical 
 superiority to vary the present distribution of power, 
 and to acquire the physical and other comforts power 
 seems to them to purchase.
 
 SOME POSSIBLE ALLIES. 101 
 
 In the first, and larger and stronger group if 
 they know how to use their power, would be assembled 
 the Navy and Army Reformers, the chiefs of the 
 Fighting Services, the professionally educated and 
 technically equipped classes, statesmen and politicians, 
 and the active principals of all ranks in the Churches. 
 They are working for the best as they see it ; why 
 should they not be more closely related to legislation 
 and to administration? 
 
 In the second, outside social idealistic groups, would 
 be assembled the advocates of change and reform we 
 ' use the phrase for convenience among the wage- 
 earning classes, and the best of their leaders. 
 
 For the idealistic groups, so valuable and so provo- 
 cative, it is not too much to say that no method has 
 ever been presented to them which offers greater 
 opportunities for their own development in right 
 practice in the interests of the communities they seek 
 to serve. 
 
 As to the Labour Party, and the groups into which 
 it is divided, we have seen that with the ambitions 
 of any Party to acquire dominating power in State, 
 constructors cannot be concerned. That sort of 
 Kaiserism has cost so much lately, too, that it is likely 
 to be out of favour with thoughtful workers for a long 
 time, especially in an old and still dignified country 
 where democrats can, and usually do, behave as 
 gentlemen. It is patent, also, that with Labour as 
 an occupational delusion, constructors cannot have 
 very much in common. The notion that all the men 
 who earn wages in all the countries must have the 
 same type of terrestrial nourishment and exercise, 
 mental and physical, or necessarily belong to the
 
 102 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 same century, may be Linnaean ; it bears no real 
 relation to roots. But it would be grossly unfair to 
 the forces behind organised British Labour to father 
 either of these phantoms upon them, or to allow these 
 aims, even where they are followed by persons, to 
 keep asunder workers who cherish other aims held in 
 common. 
 
 With all workers of worthy types we have one 
 common bond. Enterprise must companion know- 
 ledge, and from workers we look for aid in 
 encouraging enterprise. The Empire is a reservoir of 
 unrealised potential capacity. At need, out of a 
 British regiment it has always been easy to get men 
 ready for most tasks that fall to an invading force in 
 occupation ; and to-day, out of our free race, it would 
 be as easy to train men and women for any known 
 service needed by town or by State. The material 
 will never fail us : chiefs may fail the material. By 
 some means enterprise has to be encouraged in every- 
 one who has gift, time, or labour to offer. Sustained 
 effort in the best working years of life has to become 
 the rule and not the exception, not in the cause of 
 production only, though that is vital, but for the sake 
 of the developing differentiation of function natural 
 and pleasurable the development, in short, of the gift 
 of life itself. Also, it will not be rational to expect 
 enterprise or effort, unless reward is assured by the 
 laws and customs of man as frequently as it is by the 
 practice of Nature. 
 
 Now, in these three Enterprise, Effort, Reward 
 the wage-earning and salary-earning classes are more 
 deeply, more tragically, concerned than others. Not 
 only because they have suffered most from discourage-
 
 SOME POSSIBLE ALLIES. 103 
 
 ment of the first and absence of the third, but 
 because they have usually given freely of the second. 
 The skilful differentiation of function, which to us 
 means progress, depends wholly upon the presence 
 to-day of all three. All workers will have to 
 work harder than ever, more intelligently than ever, 
 more efficiently than ever, to gain the possession 
 and control of security, leisure, and comfort, so 
 that they may become personally abler and more 
 powerful units than they admittedly now are. For 
 much of the sterility of their own efforts after 
 political, personal, and occupational power, the 
 workers have themselves to thank: they have to learn 
 that the laws of development pay no regard to 
 class whims or prejudices, and that mean aims, idle- 
 ness, selfish and unclean pleasures, wherever prac- 
 tised, arrest growth. The fruits of excess rot im- 
 partially, in monkey, baby, man. The fruits of use 
 ripen in all alike, and these are the harvests of the 
 constructor. There are many businesses to-day which 
 owe their success to one man's enterprise in 
 design, device, or patent: he has often been the 
 one man who has not been rewarded. There are 
 businesses which induce enterprise in every worker 
 and participant, and reward it in them ; such practice 
 might become the honoured habit of commerce and of 
 national administration. It is idle to expect progress 
 on any other lines; and unless those in control learn 
 this, argument and time are alike wasted on them. 
 They must be left to the painful penalty of rottenness. 
 
 All who are practically employed in the use of tool, 
 machine, method, principle as applied to action, win 
 opportunities, denied to others, of finding new and
 
 104 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 necessary improvements and adjustments : on them, 
 in short, revelation attends. It is futile to expect 
 this revelation unless men give their best to their 
 work, and companion it with sustained effort till 
 effort becomes happily ingrained in their being. It is 
 unwise to demand either if Reward is denied. The 
 selfish exploitation of human brains must end, 
 lest men turn and rend. It is absurd to suppose 
 that the workers of any group will always permit 
 the injustices which commercial greed hardens into 
 custom. No self-respecting race will submit to such 
 longer than it is compelled to by force, and if it has to 
 take force as the remedy for them, the guilt of any 
 error must be shared by those who provoked 
 the explosion. Already many refuse to populate 
 the planet till conditions such as they are 
 entitled to obtain are attainable; and though it is 
 Utopian to expect many to take a path the strong few 
 now take, it may be well for the workers everywhere 
 to know that there are sure paths, such as they have 
 not yet trodden, for obtaining that to which they are 
 entitled. But for most, for the many, the tricolour 
 Enterprise, Effort, Reward will suffice for to-day and 
 the day after. 
 
 It is certain that the Labour Party cannot succeed 
 on party lines where all other parties fail; they 
 may do better possibly they would but they may do 
 worse. No more than others can they vary the root 
 conditions, and they may be quite as slow as some 
 others have been in learning these. Whether the 
 leaders and the rank and file of the Labour Party use 
 us or not, concerns them chiefly : we are ready now 
 and always to help any and everyone, for that is the
 
 SOME POSSIBLE ALLIES. 105 
 
 atmosphere we breathe. 
 
 With regard to the other classes, much can be 
 indicated in a few questions. 
 
 i. Can officers, naval and military, hope practi- 
 cally to interest the electorate in national defence 
 unless the closest national touch is established with it, 
 and a civilian organisation is used as the nerve? 
 
 2. Can scientific men hope to vaccinate a popula- 
 tion with their aiding lymphs unless they get efficient 
 probes and use them? 
 
 3. Can solitary professors, and watertight pro- 
 fessions, hope to play their part in the outer world of 
 darkness unless they aid to give professional know- 
 ledge, zeal, and craftsmanship, a much more extended 
 practice? What instrument better than an administra- 
 tive unity of knowledge and of character can they use? 
 
 4. Where can the leaders of the Churches, per- 
 plexed by the burden of imperfect organisation and 
 buffeted by changes in human whim, find better allies 
 for their own healthy development and adjustment to 
 need, than in those who, in aim and method, seek to 
 be true to the highest revelation of To-day? 
 
 5- How can the Triflers and there are some; and 
 the Dabblers and there are many easier get purpose 
 into their muscles and assimilativeness into what 
 brains they have, than by joining in this, the most 
 entertaining of human pursuits. 
 
 6. Will the old people who find the world getting 
 dirtier, smaller, and more undesirable the longer 
 they live in it, take a turn with the artists who keep 
 fresh to the very end, with the students of the in- 
 exhaustible whom the inexhaustible never disappoints, 
 with the craftsmen who, long after craftsmanship is
 
 io6 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 denied them, still keep their faith undimmed, and joy 
 in the craftsmanship of others which they have taught 
 themselves to understand? 
 
 Does it look as if willing constructors in any British 
 county need be very solitary, or very idle?
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE RECONSTRUCTOR AS THE UNIT 
 OF POWER. 
 
 The present life was rated from the first at the low value 
 which has ever since been assigned to it in Christian teaching. 
 The Church's great teachers have never thought this life desirable 
 for its own sake. If they have weighed its joys against its 
 sorrows, it was to bring out the heavy balance on the side of 
 pain. REV. J. GAMBLE : Quarterly Review, January, 1917. 
 
 PUBLIC OPINION. 
 
 If Conscience be sole regent of man's soul, 
 Whose thoughts and will are but her ministers, 
 Needs must she disallow the enforced control 
 Of thoughts she thinks not, and of wills not hers. 
 This Soul-made Conscience is a Queen, whose cold 
 Strict sceptre rules her hidden realm, alone ; 
 That Crowd-made Conscience is a harlot bold, 
 That own'd by many, yet is no man's own; 
 This Conscience is responsible for one ; 
 That Conscience irresponsible for any ; 
 Wrong done by all men is the deed of none ; 
 That's no man's virtue which is made by many : 
 Since, therefore, God no Corporate Soul hath made, 
 How shall this Corporate Conscience be obey'd? 
 
 ROBERT, EARL LYTTON. 
 
 The clearest light is ever necessary to guide the most important 
 actions. Whatever the world may opine, he who hath not much 
 meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, 
 may possibly make a thriving earth-worm, but will most 
 indubitably make a blundering patriot and a sorry statesman. 
 BERKELEY, altered by Coleridge, in "The Friend." 
 
 We have reached the mobile and mobilisable unit of 
 power: the constructor, who is the automobile of 
 construction. This chapter is solely concerned there- 
 with. If we wish, we can all be constructors, 
 or there is nothing in construction worth writing 
 
 107
 
 io8 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 about. It must now be clear, too, that however large 
 our army of willing workers, however diverse each 
 personal equipment, there is work for all : to-day's task 
 for to-day's man. Unless those who assert that, can 
 both suggest the tasks and demonstrate them, they are 
 unfit for their self-imposed duty. 
 
 The methods so far reviewed have had special 
 reference to activities to which we are necessarily 
 committed when we work with others, either in the 
 reluctant and inchoate medium of the State Legislature, 
 or the somewhat adhesive Flanders mud of provincial 
 and local administration. The definition and pursuit 
 of objective, and the tactical policies indicated, accom- 
 pany the corporate life which engages so much of the 
 study of the student and extends the lucubrations of 
 successive philosophers and commentators. They 
 have not much to do with the root of all power and 
 knowledge: our own separate minds, or the apparatus 
 we temporarily permit ourselves to name mind, for 
 want of the better word the Future will award. 
 
 Why should we be constructors, then? 
 
 The constructor builds, surely, because he believes 
 in the immediate business in hand and wants 
 to aid it, because he trusts the materials with which 
 he constructs, has confidence in the tools available, 
 and desires to be an operative, rather than a cere- 
 monial, mason. 
 
 The message of the first quotation at the head of this 
 chapter finds no championship here. Whatever 
 rational explanation of its origin and practice may be 
 urged and admitted, the revelation since wrenched 
 from Nature has now dethroned it. Nature 
 interpreted to an apprehending power which
 
 THE UNIT OF POWER. 109 
 
 will not be denied, has long belied that theory, else 
 the planet would have been a silent tomb centuries 
 gone. Most living things prefer life to death and 
 fight desperately for it, and it is surely desirable; that 
 something so combatively cherished should be the 
 subject of sane trust, of sober-minded and con- 
 tinuous experiment, of loyal co-operation. In a book 
 intended for a work-a-day world, it is impossible to 
 follow metaphysicians in their hunt for " ultimates " 
 and their definition of them, tempting though that 
 would be to this writer. The quest for reality by a 
 temporary manifestation of it, must always be 
 hazardous. The working hypothesis behind this 
 chapter can be stated in a very few sentences. It is 
 held that the indwelling power within us, that which 
 apprehends phenomena which do not apparently 
 apprehend us, must always, for human ends, be 
 different from, and superior in kind to, all such 
 phenomena, not subject to them but subjecting them 
 to it. Do we want more than that to walk by: each 
 day's march is rewarding, and its gained light is 
 sufficient for the next day. It is assumed, nay 
 believed, here, that Life is the greatest of all gifts, the 
 supreme investment, the most august experiment we 
 have the chance of making, that Duty born of gratitude 
 for it should be the spring of action and the inspirer of 
 persisting search. 
 
 It is not intended to discuss new or old theories 
 of vitalism, or of any other " ism." The appeal is 
 from one human consciousness, that is in any event 
 quite aware of itself, to another human consciousness 
 that which reads this page. All that life means to 
 each must be felt and expressed in terms of that
 
 no NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 consciousness, for we have nothing else with which 
 to know or to act. Why should we not invest it with 
 the dignity that seems native to so remarkable a 
 planetary phenomenon, a dignity which all the best 
 that has been said, thought, or lived, has always 
 affirmed, which science to-day illustrates more 
 copiously than historic time was ever cognisant 
 of. Obviously, if we do not regard life as worth 
 having, or as worth serving, or human development 
 as possible, we have no place among constructors. 
 We may jaunt with the Complaisant Endurables, who 
 tolerate a world much better than any they could 
 make, in the hope of greater dividends in another than 
 they have been able to earn here; or we may even 
 drill with the destroyers of mankind. It matters not 
 which. One thing is certain : there is no place for us 
 in this company of constructors. When, too, we think 
 of the great tasks ahead, may we not ask ourselves if 
 these tasks can ever be peremptory to those who have 
 not convinced themselves, by personal test and joy in 
 the working, that the fight is one to which they are 
 impelled by every pulse of being, every call of gratitude 
 for unearned gift, every conception of duty and of, as 
 yet, unrealised revelation? Can any be an efficient 
 soldier in home, town, county, country, regiment, 
 church who thinks and acts with a distorted unworthy 
 conception of what life is, and can be made, or pro- 
 foundly doubts its method and its goal? 
 
 It has seemed so difficult to many, trained and 
 sheltered in traditional creeds and perhaps too much 
 possessed by them, to realise and to trust this unique 
 consciousness of personal identity, and the profundity 
 of personal revelation, that a familiar illustration may
 
 THE UNIT OF POWER. in 
 
 be welcome. It is impossible, probably, to learn the 
 price each generation has to pay for the base-born 
 fears of previous generations, for their mental 
 cowardice, for their surrender to superstitious 
 abnormalities. A dead weight in respect thereof has 
 to be lifted, by loyal living for light and in the light. 
 The nature of that dead weight is not susceptible of 
 treatment here. But with personal and customary 
 assessments of it, it is possible to deal in suggestive 
 summary. 
 
 Many of us have already read a book more than 
 once: it may have happened that we read it at 7; 
 again at 14; again at 40. In regard to one or two of 
 the boys' classics, it is certainly true that what 
 amused at 7 was unnoticed at 40; what was not seen 
 at 7, almost frightened at 40. The book, any similar 
 book, is a different thing each time it is read at widely, 
 separated dates. Yet its type has not changed : it is 
 the same book. Recall the world in which we lived 
 at 8, at 14, at 21, at 30: to-day. Very much the same 
 world really, yet how changed for us ; not in any respect 
 the same world, if we judge by our own consciousness. 
 A stage further. It took some men thousands of years 
 to demonstrate that the earth went round the sun : yet 
 it always did. Eras passed before men knew what the 
 stars were : yet stars have looked down on man from 
 the first. The external universe remains much what 
 it was when ancient Britons had political arguments 
 and cracked each other's skulls; yet how 
 differently it is regarded. Radio-activity existed before 
 Genesis or Neolithic man. The change is personal and 
 indwelling in man himself; acquisitive and accumula- 
 tive in the race. We see the world we are ; and none
 
 H2 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 other. Thanks to Science, and to these certainties, we 
 know, as know we must, that there are probably as 
 much more value and beauty in the visible universe, 
 and in the conditions in which we daily operate, 
 wherever we live, as have yet been disclosed. Nay, 
 why not treasures even greater? 
 
 May we not conclude, all too hastily, that we have 
 plumbed the depths of our days so monotonous 
 and, we think, so uninteresting forgetting that the 
 monotony and want of interest are within ourselves, 
 that it is empty heads which make empty worlds, 
 the dull, incurious, inert, animal unawakened 
 consciousness which deprives these days of articulate 
 speech and act, and our lives of dignity, of enterprise, 
 and of strength? 
 
 Do we not, some of us, base our working hypotheses 
 of life on the pathology of a civilisation? Is that 
 prudent? True, disease and defeat have to be studied 
 and understood, since that is the task of a being, 
 who, judging from past successes, is born to 
 master them. But ought we to allow this task to blind 
 us to the larger certainty? Ought we to continue, 
 under the influence of erroneous chronologies and out- 
 grown human interpretations, to rank Death, for 
 instance, as Lord of Life, and not an equal gift with 
 the Birth it accompanies? The forces that make for 
 life have won, as yet; it cannot be futile or foolish to 
 seek tuition from them. Most generations have 
 made those which succeeded them richer in that 
 complexity of opportunity and of function, out 
 of which greater and better things may reasonably be 
 hoped for. All that science tells the listening and 
 appreciative ear continues to-day the message and the
 
 THE UNIT OF POWER. 113 
 
 serene strength of prophetic seer since seership left 
 records; and few who have pondered life will doubt 
 that seership accompanied vision long before records 
 began. The light widens even as we live! Have 
 \ve not already outpassed the Tennysonian " red 
 in tooth and claw with ravine " interpretation 
 of Nature's unerring economy in the use of living 
 tissue, that supreme achievement of an unknown 
 chemistry, that choicest patrimony of the material 
 world. We too are called to be workers in a living 
 universe, and why should we be afraid of Life, or shirk 
 its duties? 
 
 What is the application of this to the constructor and 
 his duty? 
 
 We find ourselves in a world we know we did not 
 create, members of a society we know we have done 
 nothing to bring to the state in which we see it, 
 partakers in stores of food grown by others, guarded 
 by others, made accessible by others, living in houses 
 not built with our labours, sheltered, fed, adopted into 
 the human family long before we have established any 
 right to attention by merit of our own, members of 
 a nation made by the travail, blood and tears of ances- 
 tors we can never thank, and sometimes do not wish 
 to thank. We are surrounded by opinions we do 
 not in the least assent to, with many things settled 
 for us : our race, our home (for no one chooses, so far 
 as we yet know, the home to which he or she is born), 
 our religion, or our lack of it. Indeed, most 
 of our thoughts and acts are suggested, outside or 
 within us, by forces of whose origin we probably know 
 nothing that we can put on paper or talk about in 
 public debate.
 
 n 4 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 It is clear that we live each in his own world, 
 and that by some fiat it is impossible to get 
 others, even friends or wife, to stay very long in 
 that world without visiting their own on their 
 own account. The majority are, very fortunately 
 perhaps, born to labour for a living. Opportunities 
 for so doing are created by the love and activity of 
 others, but the burden mainly falls on ourselves. Our 
 first duty consists in getting foothold on the earth, 
 clothes for our bodies, food for our nutrition, a roof 
 over our heads: it is an admirable discipline. Still, 
 the struggle for necessaries does not monopolise 
 even our earliest years of manhood, and we are 
 faced by many demands to exercise the curious 
 power of choice dwelling within us. As we have 
 often been told, and as experience proves, we are 
 asked to decide in what world we shall live, what we 
 shall do with our leisure, what friends we shall 
 make, what targets we shall aim at, to what use we 
 shall turn the opportunities or the obstacles of daily 
 life. We leave school to enter school. Our education 
 proceeds apace when we can get what we want, in 
 things ever so minute. Here we are Lords and 
 Commons of our own states ; here we fix our draught of 
 water, our gunnery power, our markmanship, our value 
 in a society that seems to be built on unequal values 
 and to be by them maintained. The more we realise 
 our own identity, the more clearly we see that the 
 nature of our own kingdoms is determined by what we 
 really are ourselves, by gifts original and bestowed, 
 and by the attitude of our minds towards them and a 
 world outside. It is not necessary to say here and now 
 for anyone else what that attitude should be. It
 
 THE UNIT OF POWER. 115 
 
 suffices that much of the propagandist work 
 of a constructing organisation would concern itself 
 with revealing to each the extent of these personal 
 kingdoms, usually very poorly governed, yet rich in 
 resources of political instruction and discipline. 
 
 If we watch a plant growing, we see that progress 
 depends on the success with which, at the actual point 
 of contact with water, air, or soil, its own mechanism 
 absorbs food. The work has to be done on its own 
 premises and by its own engine power. Is not 
 development just like that with each of us? If we 
 would know anything worth communicating about life, 
 we must live and grow ; and how can we better grow 
 than by the application of our will and being to the 
 absorption of food, knowledge, discipline, and crafts- 
 manship from the circumstances of every day. It must 
 be our task to do our own duty, whatever it is, as well 
 as we can do it, and to do it better every year. Two 
 additional dividends will be ours. The instrument will 
 perfect itself. If we drive mind and body regularly 
 and wisely, both work together more harmoniously and 
 become more efficient executants of our purpose. As 
 man or woman, we become more efficient for our own 
 ends when we have done something so often and so 
 well that we do it well automatically. Then the mind 
 ceases to trouble about it: the machine runs by itself, 
 and we are free to acquire some new power which in 
 its turn becomes automatic. " The function of routine 
 in religion as elsewhere is to clear the way for action." 
 The other dividend, and to the practical politician the 
 more useful, is the power thus acquired of knowing 
 when other people do their work well; the efficient 
 man at any trade discerns the slacker as soon as he
 
 n6 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 sees him move at a task. That is why it is worth 
 learning to meet any creditable task that comes in our 
 way : it helps us to see the other good work done by 
 good men ; it arms us against pretence in speech and 
 act. 
 
 Is it not sometimes forgotten that men and 
 women normally have more wealth than they know 
 how to spend wisely ; more health than they can 
 employ usefully ; more leisure than they use in 
 becoming civilised ; more of power, or of what may be 
 termed " gift " in the sense that they did not make it 
 themselves, than they either recognise or are thankful 
 for, in every walk of life and in most of the climates. 
 There are those who take all that life gives them, and 
 never even thank their parents for introducing them to 
 life ! There is more beauty, more goodness, more 
 laughter and sunshine born into this wonderful world 
 of ours let us go to a school and see for ourselves 
 than we know how to, or care to, learn to aid and 
 appreciate. Like snails we drag our slow lengths over 
 the most beautiful things born to the planet, tem- 
 porarily surrendered to our power, often leaving them 
 the worse for our passage, if not actually destroying 
 them therein. It was not of the ordered wisdom of 
 practical and effective life that young Tamlane* said: 
 " And all our wants are well supplied 
 
 From every rich man's store; 
 Who thankless sins the gifts he gets 
 
 And vainly grasps for more." 
 Who is there that is not, or has not been, " rich " 
 
 *" The Young Tamlane " : Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. 
 Sir Walter Scott, Vol.' II., 332.
 
 THE UNIT OF POWER. 117 
 
 in the deep sense ? What a lucid phrase that is : to 
 " sin our gifts," or ungratefully to hold them in light 
 esteem. 
 
 Has not this point of view an express bearing 
 upon construction? 
 
 The splendour of man's achievements on the earth 
 is due to efforts of the few who, whether clever or not, 
 by faith or sight use rightly and develop powerfully 
 the gifts with which they have been honoured. We all 
 have some. Wherever we test achievement and 
 appraise progress, that is the verdict. Wherever we 
 trace failure and retrogression, loss, weakness, 
 disaster come through the abuse of gift. And the 
 greater the gift the more seems to hang upon its use: 
 the greater the penalty or the gain. 
 
 If, therefore, it is right to concentrate attention on 
 the perception and right use of knowledge, will, 
 possession, or opportunity, to thus regard our life's 
 experience as abounding in gifts of this type insuffi- 
 ciently recognised or inadequately used, we are the 
 constructors, the practical statesmen, when we bend 
 our efforts, and urge others to bend theirs, to the right 
 use of opportunities as they are given: if, 
 abandoning to others the assertion of dubious "rights," 
 we base our creed and practice on duty all round, and 
 use duty as the offensive weapon with which to compel 
 others to do theirs by us. Nor is that a vain and 
 futile weapon. No sword is sharper or of more 
 tenacious and flexible steel. If it can induce or compel 
 the right use of knowledge and power, the democracy 
 will stand victor over it itself, as over all else. Can it 
 ever do this unless it makes the fulfilled duty the 
 right use of its own power the platform for the
 
 n8 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 assertion of its rights? 
 
 Can nations be regenerated on fictions? Can the 
 structure of a nation's well-being be built on any other 
 foundation than that which roots and obtains the 
 well-being of the individual, and permits him to bring a 
 better plant to enrich a better garden? 
 
 And for the individual, what is a wise proportion 
 between the clamorous claims upon his mentality 
 and every-day energy; how shall he adjust his 
 hours aright between the games he plays and the 
 duties he could really attempt and achieve? 
 Some such division has to be made ; some such propor- 
 tion has to be fixed and observed if efficient life is the 
 goal. The witness of this chapter should be clear. 
 The life of sensation, of personal action in imme- 
 diate surroundings, the life we have lived to-day and 
 will live to-morrow, without being conscious of one- 
 tenth part of its endowment, its purpose, its promise, 
 its light, that life which occupies nearly all our days 
 and some of our nights : that is the kingdom which 
 the constructor vitalises first for himself. Here he 
 would be student, master, sower, and harvester, for in 
 his harvests he makes other harvests possible and takes 
 away from no man that which is his. His richness of 
 life and his power enhance life in all around him. That 
 life of the imagination which plays with other people's 
 business and life to the exclusion of the study of our 
 own, the acts we frame for others, or bar them from, 
 the quick judgments we arrive at with regard to 
 things we shall never know and people we shall never 
 meet that is the kingdom which the constructor would 
 circumscribe very carefully in his own life, for his own 
 usefulness and illumination. Therein is he established
 
 THE UNIT OF POWER. 
 
 in power. To quote Kipling: 
 
 With great things charged he shall not hold 
 
 Aloof till great occasion rise, 
 But serve, full-harnessed, as of old, 
 
 The days that are the destinies. 
 
 He shall not plead another's act, 
 Nor bind him in another's oath 
 
 To weigh the Word above the Fact, 
 Or make, or take, excuse for sloth. 
 
 The yoke he bore bhall press him still, 
 And long-ingrained effort goad 
 
 To find, to fashion, and fulfil 
 
 The cleaner life, the sterner code.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE USE OF INSTITUTIONS IN 
 STATESMANSHIP. 
 
 The existing institutions .... are not the best ; they are 
 not just ; and in respect to you, personally, O brave young man ! 
 they cannot be justified. . . . But they do answer the end : 
 they are really friendly to the good, unfriendly to the bad ; they 
 second the industrious and the kind ; they foster genius. They 
 really have so much flexibility as to afford your talent and 
 character, on the whole, the same chance of demonstration and 
 success which they might have if there was no law and no 
 property. EMERSON, " The Conservative." 
 
 Him I would call the powerful man who controls the storms of 
 his mind and turns to good account the worst accidents of his 
 fortune. The great man ... is somewhat more. He must be 
 able to do this, and he must have an intellect which puts into 
 motion the intellect of others. LANDOR (Diogenes and Plato 
 Conv.). 
 
 Now that we have studied the unit of power, and 
 the attitude of our minds to our personal problems 
 the root of this book it is necessary to review one or 
 two of the difficulties in the path of the active 
 constructor, who accepts the initiative suggested, and 
 wishes to exercise himself in statesmanship. 
 
 One difficulty will often be connected with, and 
 arise directly out of, the representative institutions of 
 the country. An institution may preserve for each 
 generation much that is good, but a price has always 
 to be paid for the institutional form. This chapter 
 suggests that if we try to identify the price that is 
 paid, we shall better be able to use institutions as 
 helpful instruments.
 
 122 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 The readiest contact offered, or put within our reach 
 is, and must be, that of our party: political, ecclesias- 
 tical, scientific, esoteric, social, occupational. Of 
 these, the first and the last will have the sharpest 
 edges and the most penetrative point ; and may 
 will serve as chief illustrations. After what 
 has been earlier said, it suffices, in regard to these 
 activities, to remind the practical politician that 
 if he keeps his vision and his sense of propor- 
 tion he will keep his feet. He will then serve his 
 party where it can be fitly served ; he will not be used 
 by it for purposes that will hurt him or others. He 
 has to be a judicious co-operator and colleague, not a 
 dupe or a door-mat. There is no party in the Empire 
 for which he should dirty his nature, commit 
 an injustice against a neighbour, or break the 
 Golden Rule. There cannot be in a party anything 
 for his use better than the development of his own 
 consciousness through corporate action in ways that 
 satisfy his sense of justice. He may permit better 
 men, and men of commanding personality, to influence 
 him in matters of which he has no personal cognisance ; 
 he will be prepared to pay his penny and yield 
 allegiance to a party view sometimes, as an omnibus 
 generalization which makes for convenience and pro- 
 pulsion in that which copper-coinage can buy. But 
 he will not yield because the party view, as a 
 corporate view, is much better than his own since 
 that is illusory; and he will get out of the omnibus 
 when it nears his destination. He need not go to its 
 garage with it. That is why it is an omnibus. 
 
 Our political parties and social groups are necessary 
 to the identity of the flocks into which we are
 
 THE USE OF INSTITUTIONS. 123 
 
 gathered ; to the preservation of instinctive and 
 ancestral habit; to the ascent of the ambitious from 
 the oleaginous to the Olympian. Cash maintains their 
 machinery, and they impose by advertisement, both of 
 which permit a prudent fixity of objective : it pays 
 to keep them up. Also are they the weapons of the 
 honest worker and seeker, of the practical adminis- 
 trator, and of the patriot. They are, in short, much 
 what we wish to make them, when we know how to 
 make anything. Why not make them the reliable and 
 efficient tools of practical politicians : the servants, not 
 the masters, of our ends. We cannot remain outside 
 them with comfort: most of us will wish to meet 
 in them. How necessary, then, to study them, and 
 how much easier to do this, if we keep them, 
 so far as we can, within their habitually effective 
 spheres of influence. There is no reason why workers 
 belonging to different, and even to opposing political 
 groups, should not be intimate personal friends, if each 
 understands the nature and the range of political 
 differences in a civilised country, and is true to his 
 own best hypothesis of life. Where this understanding 
 is not, heat rather than light is engendered by contact 
 of opposites. In the many grades of enlightenment 
 between, there is room for more appreciation of 
 each other's aims than often now obtains. Those 
 who in opposing parties are out for "graft," may be 
 left to fight each other. They usually counteract each 
 other. 
 
 Another difficulty it is very real and oppressive 
 just now is the Phrase. This chapter could be filled 
 with the artificial and captivating jingles which are 
 often made to do duty for facts and for reasoning from
 
 124 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 facts. They are the chatter of the generalise^ 
 which he tries to exchange for our hoarded 
 thought. We hear of some " new Order," the " new 
 Science," the " new Light," which is an old disorder, 
 illusion, or darkness, made palpable to those who had 
 forgotten the former superstition. The perusal of 
 books on " reconstruction " set the writer paralleling 
 the phrases of some quite recent, and, as they surmise, 
 advanced British writers on this subject, with the 
 aims and methods of a German professoriate who 
 ignored factors of civilisation they themselves lacked : 
 " World universities," " world power," " world 
 culture," " world revolution," " world peace," " col- 
 lective will," " collective ideals," " self-deter- 
 mination," " democratic control," " voice of the 
 people," " rights of man," " peacedom," " wardom," 
 "bureaucracy," "average mind," the "money- 
 cult," " the super-man," " the super-mother," 
 "pacifism," "militarism," the "will to prevail," 
 the "will to power," "Labour," "science of 
 power " all slippery and unsubstantial playthings of 
 the human brain, visualising some living order which 
 is assumed to have form and power outside personal 
 consciousness. 
 
 " Cults " in topical literature are as freely 
 announced in reference to economics, sociology, phil- 
 anthropy, and faiths, as they were thousands of years 
 ago in the swarming river valleys of the fertile East, 
 when sun, moon, and stars, and vagrant visitants 
 from space gave rise to cults many and com- 
 bative: the soap-bubbles of the fecund imagina- 
 tion of Nilotic and Euphratean man. There are 
 men and women to-day who lighten the load of
 
 THE USE OF INSTITUTIONS. 125 
 
 life by phrases, and get a living out of them ; revolu- 
 tions have been made for phrases and by them ; and 
 most of the abominable crimes of history are wrought 
 in vindication of some apparently innocuous aspiration. 
 We meet with phrases everywhere : many are obsessed 
 by them. Why not watch and study them, 
 testing them as occasion offers. We may, indeed 
 we must, sometimes play with them, for they are very 
 buoyant and dainty. Like soap-bubbles, they rise 
 from the surface of our thought, reflecting equally the 
 light of a hundred years, as of the newest and 
 tiniest of burners. But they are not self-luminous ; 
 they lift no weights ; they are uncertain guides. 
 These pets of Proteus (see how the habit persists), 
 these perfumes of a laboratory synthesis, are for our 
 amusement, and not our edification. Propagandists 
 revel in phrases: which are indeed their stock-in-trade. 
 It is the tricksy colour of the artificial " fly " which 
 tempts the impulsive fish; it so cunningly resembles 
 the titbit he swallowed aforetime. Too late he 
 realises, as does the reader when he tries the much- 
 advertised specific, that ills are more stubborn than 
 they seem. Scientific fishing began with " angling 
 with the appetite " of the fish. Have we grown much 
 since ? 
 
 When we come to established institutions those 
 with ordered organised life, we are confronted by 
 obstacles which more intimately concern us than 
 do political parties or popular phrases. Especially 
 in the provinces, which we have seen are really the 
 country, institutional life is of prime moment. The 
 established institutions of the country divide us into 
 families. They bit and bridle the wild among the sons
 
 126 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 of men; they steady the eager; they baulk the 
 best. Controversies within them, and arising 
 out of them, are the very breath of our nostrils 
 one with the weekly wage, the Sunday dinner, the 
 monthly cheque, and that baronetcy on the horizon. 
 Rooted in the past, they are the mother of memory 
 and of memorable children. To use and not abuse 
 them, we must understand them. " The great fault 
 of political writers," says Lord Morley, " is their too 
 close adherence to the forms of the system of state 
 which they happen to be expounding or examining. 
 They stop short at the anatomy of institutions, and do 
 not penetrate to the secret of their functions." This 
 writer does not suggest that he anatomises here. This 
 is not the place nor the time for anatomy. He seeks 
 to review some characteristics which should make the 
 paths of practical politicians easier, and efficiency in 
 corporate effort more feasible. 
 
 Let us attempt an illustration from our religious 
 institutions. If these can be treated with the reverent 
 care necessary, and with even a slight measure of 
 success, one compass direction (in statesmanship, not 
 in religion), may be clearer. 
 
 Is it not obvious that no church can live as a 
 religious body, and as a terrestrial institution based on 
 money-giving and property holding as are the chief 
 Christian churches unless there are many, perhaps a 
 majority, in it to whom it is the chief expression 
 of terrestrial wisdom and the authoritative 
 promise of celestial life? To them the mandate 
 is supreme and authentic. The outsider may 
 easier see the rough external walls than the inner 
 aisles; and judge from dripping guttering than from
 
 THE USE OF INSTITUTIONS. 127 
 
 aureate altars. But the inner worshipper is content 
 with what he sees. Could he truly worship if he did 
 not feel that, within, he does touch a power, not 
 himself, which quickens his spirit? Surely there 
 must be some such human bricks in every structure 
 Faith builds, and the spirit of man wishes to inhabit. 
 There are, in each church, also, many who are fully 
 aware of the price to be paid for any human institu- 
 tion, who see its many imperfections in their right 
 relations, and all in the dim twilight of earth. Each 
 true, and, so to speak, committed, worshipper in any 
 nave should understand the depth of the loyalty another 
 feels to quite a different form. He should understand, 
 in all controversies, that for which the other must 
 fight and will fight; and he can adjust his conduct to 
 the call. Fighting may be necessary; but it need not 
 be foul. Those who do not think human institutions 
 are divine in form and habit, whose faith has, as they 
 think, larger wings, at least know this building neces- 
 sity, and can make allowances for it. These are not 
 likely to miss the spiritual bond which unites all who 
 follow the spiritual quest. 
 
 It is suggested here that footpath progress 
 and that is all we can attain will be easier, if we 
 regard such institutions as ministering servants rather 
 than as executive and ruling masters. They are here 
 because man created them, and lives by them. They 
 will die when man can do better without them than 
 he can do with them, if ever that time comes. Where 
 would any institution be, if those who uphold it 
 vanished from the earth? It has been seen that there 
 may be little in any of them that the human mind or 
 soul does not give, or does not receive. How, then,
 
 128 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 can we so far forget ourselves and our great destinies, 
 as to quarrel about that which is in itself 
 transitory and obsequious to the spirit of man? We 
 do not quarrel about chisels- -which is the sharper; 
 about wells which yields the purer water ; about 
 rifles which has the higher muzzle velocity. We 
 differ true. And we test to decide the issues. But 
 till these can be decided, we lay weapons aside. 
 We do not browbeat each other with the opinions of 
 people who never saw a chisel, could not analyse 
 water, nor name the points of a rifle. To the reverent 
 and equipped mind, testing of institutional life in its 
 influence on the individual is not impossible. It may 
 not be easy to test many institutions thus. It is not 
 necessary : we have only to test those with which we 
 have personally to do. If we do not like them, we need 
 not pay attention to them, and no institution would live 
 long if men and women were born, lived, wrought 
 nobly and died, outside it. But, like them or not, we 
 have to work with them ; we most of us live in them 
 and through them ; we possess them or are possessed 
 by them. Surely it is best to seek the serving grace 
 which shares the throne,* and then to let the 
 test of the day show which is the better constructor 
 for his time, the better builder of his own character 
 and life, the truer fulfiller and friend of the lives of 
 those who love the law and the light. The sharper 
 chisel, the purer water, and the best marksman are 
 rarely in need of explanatory apologists, or of appeals 
 to traditional authority. 
 
 * Cui servire est regnare : the original of " Whose service is 
 perfect freedom." Collect, Book of Common Prayer.
 
 THE USE OF INSTITUTIONS. 129 
 
 Why spend time over non-essentials, or even over 
 essentials which will not operate under any rule known 
 to, or possible on, the earth, while so many un- 
 regarded tasks call for daily ministration close at 
 hand? Our beneficent and necessary institutions 
 belong to man's apprenticeship, obviously ; why not 
 trust them as useful tools and use them as tools? Can 
 they be anything else just yet? 
 
 The history and practice of any established institu- 
 tion are as much matters of research as is the Osmia 
 bee or cancer; and are subject to the same rule of 
 revelation. Man has no reason to be ashamed of his 
 past considering his past. And the agencies by which 
 he has lifted himself, or been lifted by great influences 
 he cannot wholly measure, are not to be slighted, 
 schooled, or submerged to suit the passing whims of 
 passing days. There is no need to shrink from 
 appreciative inquiry; there can be no peril in learning 
 about the roots out of which our present has come, 
 and all our futures are to be fashioned.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 PUBLICITY AND MASS-SUGGESTION. 
 
 The people is a beast of muddy brain 
 
 That knows not its own force, and therefore stands 
 
 Loaded with wood and stone ; the powerless hands 
 
 Of a mere child guide k with bit and rein : 
 One kick would be enough to break the chain ; 
 
 But the beast fears, and what the child demands 
 
 It does ; nor its own terror understands, 
 
 Confused and stupefied by bugbears rain. 
 Most wonderful ! with its own hand it ties 
 
 And gags itself gives itself death and war 
 
 For pence doled out by kings from its own store. 
 Its own are all things between earth and heaven ; 
 
 But this it knows not ; and if one arise 
 
 To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven. 
 
 CAMPANELLA (Tr. by J. A. SYMONDS). 
 
 Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let 
 us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. PRESIDENT 
 LINCOLN, Feb. 27, 1860. 
 
 It is this domineering temper of the sensual world that creates 
 the extreme need of the priests of science, and it is the office and 
 right of the intellect to make, and not to take, its estimate. 
 EMERSON. 
 
 Some summary references must be made to the 
 prevalent use and abuse of Publicity, and to its 
 intimate connection with Suggestion. Special diffi- 
 culties and special opportunities exist here for 
 constructors ; and these ought to be mentioned before 
 we pass from institutional use and abuse. 
 
 It is impossible now to attempt anything beyond a 
 treatment which shall be indicative and illustrative; 
 readers can themselves find appropriate parallels. 
 
 Publicity and Propaganda are frankly accepted, with 
 all their implications : that must be made quite clear.
 
 i 3 2 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 Practical politicians themselves will freely use both, 
 look for co-operation from others who are using them, 
 and study most carefully all abuses thereof before they 
 pass judgment upon them. In their own statesman- 
 ship, they may work under a new impulse and follow a 
 new tactic ; but the use will be there. 
 
 Nor can there be any dubiety preached or practised 
 in regard to the advantages publicity has brought 
 in the past, and may bring in the future. In 
 democratic countries, as in autocratic countries, it has 
 vindicated itself. In so far as the interest and co- 
 operation of honest, intelligent, and active persons 
 have been engaged and encouraged in almost any 
 corporate activity, or administrative function, develop- 
 ment has followed almost inevitably. It should be the 
 personal and corporate aim of practical politicians to 
 arouse fresh interest of this type, and to augment a 
 co-operation already fruitful. 
 
 The purpose of this chapter is complementary. It 
 suggests that there are new risks in regard to pub- 
 licity, new dangers arising from propaganda, risks and 
 dangers accompanying the great extensions that have 
 been made in the range and influence of both in recent 
 decades. If these are stated, even cursorily, practical 
 politicians may find their own objectives and methods 
 exactly fitted to the needs of their time. 
 
 Some of these risks are obvious : to mention them 
 is to arm against them. It is to their existence that 
 we owe that " fog of influence " in what is called 
 "public opinion," to which even the "fog of war" 
 is transparent. Most newspapers and periodicals, 
 propagandist pamphlets and speeches, bear their birth- 
 marks on their brows : knowledge and intelligence will
 
 PUBLICITY & MASS-SUGGESTION. 133 
 
 ask for little outside help in allowing for bias, for 
 prejudice, and for partisan preferences. But it is well 
 to recall the conditions in which such Publicity obtains. 
 The search for facts of moment, and their adequate 
 presentation, are not the chief objects of any popular 
 Press. It is as easy to start a newspaper and 
 to maintain it, to write a sermon or a pamphlet and to 
 print both, as it has been to start a private school. 
 And sometimes as injurious! Large circuses and 
 large circulations have much the same genesis, call for 
 much the same type of management, and attract much 
 the same audiences. It is just as easy as ever it was, 
 and as usual, for Publicity and Propaganda to be 
 profitably used by the selfish, the ignorant, the 
 fraudulent, and the intentionally evil. There is no 
 saving grace in the printed word or advocate's speech 
 apart from the knowledge, duty, and active love of the 
 brethren it manifests. People who get others to do 
 their growing, or their thinking, for them, have to pay 
 a heavy price for sloth. Even those who wish to learn 
 the truth in regard to matters of which they are not 
 personally cognisant, sometimes forget that it is ex- 
 tremely difficult to make clear to most of the readers 
 of the popular Press, anything which is definitely new 
 and true. 
 
 But the special risk which concerns the practical 
 politician is the relation which exists between 
 Publicity and Suggestion. No technical contribution 
 to so intricate a subject can be attempted here; nor 
 indeed any reference which will not be in harmony with 
 the practical working aim of the book. A few familiar 
 illustrations, perhaps in a new setting, should suffice 
 to show the nature of the risk, and to make it possible
 
 134 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 to ponder the safeguard contemplated. 
 
 While as yet scientific psychological investigators 
 are in the dark as to the genesis of hypnotism, the 
 nature of suggestion, and the resources of the 
 subliminal self, generations of active men and women, 
 and human institutions, have been putting the human 
 faculty of suggestibility to real and binding service. 
 It is at the root of institutional work in form and 
 practice, of all political propaganda, of personal 
 advocacy, and of commercial caprices and successful 
 advertising. Men and women are operating with it 
 to-day in every land, and in most types of civilisation. 
 Their opportunities have grown with the passing of the 
 years; the spoken and the printed word have probably 
 become more and not less puissant as men and women 
 have had their imaginations stimulated, and their 
 curiosity aroused. The medium has become much 
 more responsive; there are more who are interested 
 in turning the new pliability to account. In the mass 
 perhaps the term mass-suggestion may be conveniently 
 employed here it has wrought wonderful triumphs for 
 good, and abysmal crimes. Civilisation has found in 
 human suggestibility a gunpowder magazine, all 
 the more unstable at times because even the con- 
 stituents of the explosive mixtures are not yet 
 known, though men have learnt how to make and 
 to fire a fuse. From the imposed interest to the 
 madness of crowds there is often but one step. 
 When M. Thiers brought the body of Napoleon I. 
 back to its majestic sarcophagus where even German 
 princes were wont to whisper lest they should waken 
 him he was laying the foundations of the second, 
 and the meaner, Empire. When in the fulness of
 
 PUBLICITY & MASS-SUGGESTION. 135 
 
 time French Republicans allowed a vote for the 
 Presidency of the Republic to be taken by plebiscite, 
 they made certain the success of the bearer of the 
 best-known name the most widely-advertised patent 
 medicine. France took it; and found it fatal. 
 Napoleonism is still vital, and we may not yet have 
 seen its last manifestation in England. Each quin- 
 quennium brings a fresh illustration thereof. When 
 the many have to vote for one, and personal knowledge 
 and wise selection are alike barred by the circum- 
 stances of the election, it is inevitable that he or she 
 whose name has been most often on the lips of the 
 people will head the poll. The best advertised specific 
 is chosen, if all can have a voice in its selection. As 
 men and women are constituted to-day, that much 
 advantages the quack. Quacks, like scavengers, have 
 their uses, and may be tolerated. They need not be 
 endowed and obeyed. 
 
 Man is gregarious : he likes to be in a crowd and to 
 feel with one. Why should he not recognise that he 
 is here the possible victim of an attractive and insidious 
 epidemic, either in his own personal case when he 
 succumbs to his pet hypnotist, or in his corporate 
 life when he capitulates to some passing and prevalent 
 fever of opinion which for the moment obsesses him. 
 If in his own case he sees the risk, he will, in the 
 other, test his guides as he tests the men to whom he 
 trusts his gold or his reputation. And if that is 
 not possible, he will at least insure sufficiently against 
 the ruin of error. He will realise that here his own 
 knowledge and his own control are reduced to vanish- 
 ing point, and that he should not put too precious a 
 cargo into a helmless ship. History and knowledge
 
 136 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 would carry him further. They would tell him that 
 those who have been clothed with institutional rule, 
 or entrusted with the power of many gathered into the 
 hands of one, have sometimes been criminal, very 
 frequently stupid, and almost always inadequately 
 equipped for the efficient discharge of their duties. 
 To imagine that others are going to do his own work 
 for him as well as he can do it for himself ; and that, 
 if he permits them to try, he will probably get gold 
 for his silver and never a false coin from the mints 
 of man, is to be credulous rather than believing, 
 slovenly rather than caretaking, in a world where even 
 the faithful and the careful are often beaten in battle, 
 and the credulous and the slovenly must perforce be 
 sometimes overwhelmed. 
 
 There is an exaggerated receptivity fostered by the 
 rapidity of modern interchange of thought and commu- 
 nication of stimulus, which manifests itself ordinarily 
 in what is called crowd-consciousness, though that is 
 an unsatisfactory term. Sometimes, by the guidance 
 of common sense, it must register on the right 
 target; more often it fulfils itself in spasms of ill- 
 directed energy and in crimes, both of which have to 
 be expiated later. Europe is living through diverse 
 types of these visitations, and readers will find no lack 
 of illustrations for themselves. It greatly concerns 
 the practical politician to-day to diagnose the possible 
 epidemic, and to protect himself against it. As 
 we move from personal receptivity and its realities 
 " our echoes roll from soul to soul, and grow for ever 
 and for ever " to the more facile exaggerated form 
 of receptivity which is allowed to dominate 
 thought and action to-day, so do we move from the
 
 PUBLICITY & MASS-SUGGESTION. 137 
 
 authentic to the spurious, from the ascertainable to the 
 wholly contingent and illusory, from the rational to the 
 irrational and the instinctive. So do we move from 
 that which is most human to that which is least human 
 in man, from the highest revelation to that which is 
 nearest the raw material out of which man has been 
 so marvellously and so benevolently moulded. 
 
 The methods of the German infantry attack; the 
 imposed discipline of great Churches; the fancy 
 franchises of the occupational categories at home 
 and abroad; some avowed ideals of the European 
 Press, are less unlike each other generically than they 
 appear to be on the surface. They probably illustrate 
 respectively the vice, the virtue, the mediocre mean, 
 and the most prevalent mischief, of the phenomenon. 
 In essence they owe their origin to the apparently 
 fathomless suggestibility of human nature. They 
 work with like instruments, and by much the same 
 methods of direct and conscious imposition of state- 
 ment and idea. They differ as use and abuse differ, 
 in the intention or objective of the directing minds at 
 the top : there, and there chiefly, do we touch the issues 
 of civilization. 
 
 The practical politician who accepts the goal and 
 the method herein described, is better armed than most 
 can be against the misuse of this gift of Nature, and 
 will be most prompt in its use. Those who are 
 easily influenced by suggestion at the will, intentioned 
 or not, of others, are often those who are themselves 
 defective in knowledge. The defect* may be 
 quantitative or qualitative: i.e., it may consist in 
 the lack of knowledge or of firmly established 
 
 *" Encyclopaedia Britannica," Vol. 26, p. 49.
 
 138 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 beliefs about the subject of the proposition, 
 or it may consist in the lack of systematic 
 organisation of such knowledge as the mind possesses. 
 "The well-trained mind is relatively insuggestible, 
 firstly, because it possesses large stores of knowledge 
 and belief; secondly, because this mass of knowledge 
 and belief is systematically organised in such a way 
 that all its parts hang together and mutually support 
 one another." That epitomises a national army, 
 and the movement of an organised field force to which 
 the liberties of any nation and the guardianship of 
 Good may be entrusted. It should characterise 
 quite as accurately the enterprises of constructors 
 who have learned the miracle of growth through 
 the use of Function. When will it describe 
 the mentality of our democracy? Shall we be safe 
 from the Day of No Judgment till it does? In any 
 case, the first steps have been shown to be possible. In 
 proportion as any mind knows something well has 
 not that brick been laid so far is it equipped with a 
 shield against the grosser forms of suggestion in things 
 that have to be done to-morrow morning. So far as it 
 learns its own business, and minds it, it will be 
 illuminated as to other businesses and some other 
 minds. As it realises the complexity and wealth of 
 its own being, and the dangerous possibilities of mental 
 hysteria in what are called mass movements, so will it 
 be immune to the hypnotism of tyrants and exploiters, 
 so will it be able to welcome the truer inspiration from 
 the truer guide. In the present state of man's ignor- 
 ance, we may yet have to fight much mass-suggestion 
 as we would fight a malignant fever : we certainly must 
 watch it as we would watch a beast as yet untamed.
 
 PUBLICITY & MASS-SUGGESTION. 139 
 
 Is not that the exact duty that has fallen to our race 
 in these our greatest days? It is not ours to judge 
 between our enemies and ourselves, but their use and 
 our use of this powerful weapon is contrasted for all 
 to see. What more imperious mandate can an 
 honest white race ask for, than that which is 
 implicit in this last challenge of the hypnotised 
 generations of Germany to-day : the disciplined 
 victims of mass-hypnotists who avowed their practice 
 and announced their goal. By them, every form of 
 suggestion, whether by institution or by publicity, has 
 been used in turn and in unison to degrade Man 
 below the brutes. No man who respects himself, or 
 others, can ever capitulate to a tyranny so base, or 
 consent to abandon the earth to a philosophy 
 so essentially inhuman and degrading the new White 
 Slavery, indeed. If by any legitimate means open to 
 men he can end it end it he will. 
 
 The Lower Art which describes the practice much 
 better than does the " Black Art " is with us to-day 
 as of yore, and its continuance can be traced in that 
 which it has left behind it, and that which still 
 illustrates it: fetish, medicine-man, witchcraft, 
 infallible human prepossessions, the obsession of num- 
 bers, efficiency by the forcible imposition of one type 
 of it, appeals to superstition, credulity, prejudice, and 
 passion, secret societies of all types, and Germanism 
 out of Germany. It can only be mastered by the 
 Higher Art: the right use of the gift of Life and the 
 courageous personal development of all its highest 
 powers.
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 THE GOAL OF EFFICIENT SERVICE. 
 
 It fortifies my soul to know 
 
 That, though I perish, Truth is so. 
 
 That howsoe'er I stray and range 
 
 Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. 
 
 I steadier step when I recall 
 
 That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall. 
 
 A. H. CLOUGH. 
 
 Education of the kind which is of any practical value in the 
 government of a nation means the teaching of human motives, of 
 humanising ideas, of some system whereby the majority of 
 electors can distinguish the qualities of honesty and common- 
 sense in the candidates they wish to elect. I do not pretend to 
 say what that system may be, but I assert that no education 
 which does not lead to that kind of knowledge is of any practical 
 use to the voting majority of a constitutionally governed 
 country. MARION CRAWFORD, in " Saracinesca. " 
 
 Beyond all question, Sir John Moore was the very best trainer 
 of troops that England has ever possessed. His system . . . 
 rested on one principle, that every officer should know his duty 
 and do it, and should teach his men their duty likewise. . . The 
 details of the actual movements in which he exercised them were 
 immaterial ; the essence of this training was the cultivation in all 
 ranks of that self-reliance which springs from knowledge. 
 Fortescue's History of the British Army, Vol. VI., page 410. 
 
 Has not the policy of the First Chapter been 
 attempted and its programme prepared however 
 inadequately? A new factor in the national life has 
 been suggested in definite relation to State responsi- 
 bilities, to provincial and local self-governing bodies, 
 to the present corporate enterprises of our peoples, 
 and to the daily duty of each of us. All have been 
 viewed from the point of view of the security and 
 development of the Motherland, which are the first 
 
 141
 
 142 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 political goals of practical statesmen; and, after 
 pondering the How and the Why, we have reached, 
 and appealed to, the driving power itself, and 
 described some of the difficulties initiators have to 
 understand. 
 
 Some readers may not find it easy to reconcile the 
 Committee use first suggested with the delegation 
 method which is later preferred. As one working 
 hypothesis informs both, any such inconsistency is 
 probably more superficial than real, and should yield 
 to the personal pondering without which little can be 
 won from any book on this most difficult of subjects. 
 
 Early chapters avowedly do imply some Committee 
 organisation, active and consultative, and the writer is 
 sufficiently bent on victory not to define it more closely 
 in this preliminary study. But why is Committee use 
 thus indicated? Because these chapters contemplate 
 interference, as occasion offers, with national adminis- 
 tration, and national administration is conducted 
 through the greatest of Committees: the Houses 
 of Parliament. To be able to illustrate afresh 
 when Committees can be used or be dispensed 
 with, it is necessary, in a world of Committees, 
 to indicate both in affirmative and convincing 
 practice. This implies some form of organisa- 
 tion ; but a prudent politician is not compelled to 
 disclose the details of his method, if these are barred 
 by the conditions of the campaign. If a plan were 
 set forth here, if "terms of reference" were 
 elaborated, what guarantee has any newly-formed 
 group of workers that these will not be imposed on 
 it as fresh chains, like the "constitutions" of 
 public bodies, scientific and other, the trust deeds of
 
 THE GOAL OF EFFICIENT SERVICE. 143 
 
 churches, the rules and bye-laws of societies instru- 
 ments of delay, by which those who cannot know 
 all may check the progress of many who might 
 otherwise learn. Do we not know the type of 
 mind to which are due the interminable discussions on 
 mechanism which prevent some machines from moving, 
 yet always make it possible to carry a motion for 
 adjournment. In this enterprise the need of each year 
 will bring a new administrative problem, and the 
 knowledge of each year will contribute to any staff the 
 fresh available aid. We must have that staff, because 
 staff work has to be done, in circumstances and with 
 contacts where only staffs can be of use. 
 
 Later chapters concern each man's business and 
 tests in practical statesmanship, looked at from the 
 personal standpoint. They suggest that a better 
 method of local and area administration may be intro- 
 duced by practical politicians, the key to which is 
 "delegation," though, for reasons above stated, that 
 method is not yet fully described. 
 
 There is no inconsistency between the two. 
 
 As much as 75 per cent., probably, of the 
 constructive work indicated in this book can be 
 effected, if constructors wish, without any new 
 organisation, and none would be better pleased than 
 the writer if this were to be first achieved. That 
 is about the percentage of time, labour, and brains 
 which should be given to practical, as differentiated 
 from necessarily co-operative or partisan, politics. 
 
 Though all these chapters were written amid many 
 perturbations in months of terrible fighting, no 
 extensive references have yet been made to the war. 
 No such references are possible now ; but one summons
 
 144 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 to the nation seems to rise imperiously, alike from the 
 war's welter as from the subject matter of this book. 
 
 There have been many other foul and brutal 
 abuses of power before this latest betrayal of Man by 
 a Prussianism working through a raptorial caste. 
 But past history is still a closed book to most, and a 
 dead book to some; and reconstructors will draw their 
 best ammunition to-day from the wreck of the old 
 Europe and the rebuilding of the new. This 
 history is open : let us keep it so. In Germany's 
 case to mention one of many implications is it not 
 possible to mark that the virtues of a great race 
 may be made of none avail, if the executive power to 
 which it commits itself is neither civilised nor able, 
 if the many neither care to learn how power is 
 exercised, nor how executive betrayal of trust can be 
 prevented betimes? In Italy, Spain, Russia, France, 
 our own country, how blind must be the student of 
 power whose political discoveries, for his own practice, 
 fail now because his material is scanty ! 
 
 It may be difficult to get general readers, or popular 
 audiences, to realise that Germany's intensive cultiva- 
 tion of war is neither the most dangerous nor perhaps 
 the most considerable of her contributions to human 
 experience and possibilities. There will be both 
 time and opportunity to review her military failures 
 in the first great modern war she waged against first- 
 rate and martial races. There may not be very much 
 time nor very many opportunities to interpret the 
 political and economic portents, which have been, and 
 still are, the more menacing. 
 
 Europe has had a previous and a similar vac- 
 cination of a milder type of this experimental plague.
 
 THE GOAL OF EFFICIENT SERVICE. 145 
 
 Stupidity in power gave French revolutionary 
 armies and the Napoleonic regime their chances, and 
 both did very much to make modern Europe. France 
 and the French armies, whatever the cost to them, 
 quickened the inert masses of the Continent and taught 
 the dull folk of the Central plains how to sting. 
 Their drums made even the Berliners prance, and 
 Goethe saw the first act of the new drama. Hoche, 
 Dampierre, Marceau, Kleber, Lannes, Davout, 
 Desaix, Clausel, Ney to mention some of the more 
 creditable did not perhaps realise what they were 
 building. Nevertheless they built, and for a century. 
 So the modern German foray on the same military 
 model, may well lead to the New Europe in which 
 the sharpest battling of the new Empires will begin 
 when the war-propellers no longer hum. Surely, it 
 must be patent that the modern German army is 
 but the child of something more momentous; the 
 instrument of a policy springing from a nation's loins, 
 which mastered and moulded the people; and that, 
 in the practice thereof, Germans have attempted and 
 achieved a Germanism which, after the war, will 
 and must remain a perpetual challenge to other 
 nations more loosely organised, less sternly schooled 
 by the disciplinary education Germany subjected 
 herself to for national ends. It is not unlikely that 
 great victories and great defeats, suffered and 
 shared, may unify her politically-linked peoples as 
 nothing else could. She may have to buy her future 
 Empire (as a German judge told the writer, in 1911, in 
 Austria) in " blood and tears "; but it may very well 
 come to her. Whatever happens to her own armies and 
 her rulers, the German people will remain, and there will
 
 146 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 be other generations living in every European country 
 who have learned that, in some of the availing powers 
 of earth, the Germans are their superiors, better 
 educated, more enterprising industrious and thorough, 
 filled with consuming and driving energy, able to work, 
 and to make others work, beyond the anticipations of 
 temporary ally or of deadly foe. Are we not opposed by 
 a special type of gregarious development which de- 
 mands as much from us in politics and economics as it 
 already has exacted in the knowledge and practice of 
 war. 
 
 Ought we to assume that the development of 
 Germanism (their own word) will be arrested by the 
 war ; the war has not been its most successful achieve- 
 ment so far. May it not even be aided by the war? 
 Let us assume that it will be aided, as seems probable. 
 It may be said that it need not be hostile to our 
 Empire, though some students assume that it is bound 
 to be. But it is certain that, whether it is hostile or 
 friendly will not be in our power to decide. Which- 
 ever it is, this too is certain : it will not be met and 
 shared, or met and mastered, by anything less in- 
 dustrious and zealous than itself. By no machinery of 
 voting, or credence given to empirical ignorance, can 
 the slothful, the ignorant, and the disorganised close 
 the highways of the world against the energetic, the 
 educated, and the organised. New Europe and its 
 nationalities will have to learn as much from Germany 
 as Germany will have learnt from her own creed. 
 In any probable event the path is not going to be 
 smoother for this Empire than it has been in the past. 
 
 The wheel has come full circle, and both the 
 Infamous States and the Famous States can mark the
 
 THE GOAL OF EFFICIENT SERVICE. 147 
 
 divide; so far, it is folly at the top of the rawer 
 civilisation which has yielded a breathing space to the 
 older. We have in England another day dawning 
 which we may dedicate to knowledge and to duty. 
 
 To-day two opposed ideals are at deadly war ; and 
 war is not going to put ours down. 
 
 Will peace? Has not any State that wishes to be 
 Famous, to become stronger and more efficient in the 
 use of all legitimate terrestrial power, than any State it 
 holds to be Infamous? Is it necessary for the 
 moral, to be the more stupid, man? Is it possible for 
 him to win if he ordinarily is? If Right is Right, ought 
 we not to live for it, work for it, die, if need be, for it. 
 Ought we not to learn how to win with it? That 
 honesty and knowledge should capitulate to dishonesty 
 and ignorance, is futile folly abhorrent alike to 
 Christian grip and common sense. " The strong man 
 armed keepeth his palace." 
 
 The new Empire, then, has to be a more efficient 
 Empire than the older one has been, has to make a 
 better use of its gifts and opportunities. How can it 
 become more efficient, unless it uses to the full both 
 knowledge and duty? 
 
 Is it not the very urgent business of the 
 Empire to breed, to train, and to use more efficient 
 men and women ; and to see that high use is the goal 
 in corporate and State enterprises always and every- 
 where. Readers can get the definition of " efficiency " 
 in a dictionary : like sympathy, if man finds it nowhere 
 else, he can always find it there. We add to that, 
 here, that the relentless, selfish, and dominating use of 
 power to which Germanism has accustomed us, is 
 barred, however temporarily successful against the
 
 148 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 ignorant it may sometimes be. There has been far too 
 much Germanism of this type in British politics, 
 British business, and British social life : there is too 
 much of it now. The Germans are not the only 
 pirates ; and much that we associate with German aims 
 has been seen and noted in British towns. Knowledge, 
 office, function, duty, have been betrayed for many 
 decades by many persons, in both Empires. 
 
 It is not to be assumed that in any British country 
 efficiency is seriously sought by any very large number 
 of people. It is sought by individuals, and here and 
 there by trading companies whose fortunes depend upon 
 enterprise and honest methods. It is sought by suc- 
 cessful individual traders, by efficient generals and 
 admirals, where these are allowed to attempt it. 
 But of its price, its conditions, and its chief reward, 
 the people generally have neither been taught nor 
 shown enough. It is time some organisation existed 
 to seek efficiency, to practise it, to suggest it, and to 
 exact it when it can, from every administrative unit. 
 Grit and grip are necessary to-day in the government 
 of the country and of ourselves. 
 
 In the efficient use of public monies, and of public 
 time for which the public purse pays, in the con- 
 servation of Imperial resources, in the routine dis- 
 charge of routine Imperial duty when no one else sees 
 what is being done, in the service of the State in home 
 department and distant posts, there is patriotic service 
 of the highest value to be rendered to the community 
 to-day, duty to be done and the truth to be spoken. 
 Democracy has to set a new standard, and to employ 
 those who will work to see that it is maintained. 
 
 Particularly after an orgy of State extrava-
 
 THE GOAL OF EFFICIENT SERVICE. 149 
 
 gance, so penalising, so destructive, the very lust of 
 waste, will the aid of constructors be essential. 
 There is every prospect, too, that the very development 
 of bureau activities, the monstrous regiments of 
 people paid to get other people to do things, will raise 
 administrative perils and penalties from which some 
 such action as this book contemplates can best save the 
 State. The demand for new Ministries, for new laws, 
 and for new men, can easiest come as a matter of fact 
 does often come from those who do not know how to 
 make present ministers do their work, and present 
 administrators administer old laws. 
 
 In provincial administration, the preliminary 
 task before the electorate is the simplification of the 
 machinery by which popularly-elected bodies attempt 
 to do the work belonging to them. It will be 
 necessary to begin with County Councils, who are 
 often the worst sinners. Upon these comparatively 
 new bodies the State has cast responsibilities the most 
 onerous and diverse, and though they have often tried 
 to learn the new duties, it is beyond the power of 
 any State Department to create the will to work, and 
 the capacity to work, as swiftly as it can impose new 
 tasks and vote new bribes to get tasks attempted. 
 Nor is it easy for members of these bodies in a 
 decade to change the mental and administrative habits 
 of a life-time. It is rare for County Councils 
 to-day to be efficient : and what is true of them is true 
 of local self-governing bodies generally. Though these 
 transact some necessary business, and occasionally 
 achieve a triumph, few ordinarily give themselves the 
 chance to acquire efficient methods of work; their 
 service is marred by ludicrous and avoidable in-
 
 I 5 o NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 efficiency. 
 
 The time has come when the democracy must 
 be provoked to study how best to adjust the old 
 machinery to modern needs, so that popular and 
 skilful interest may be fixed and not discouraged, 
 and the ends obtained for which public money is so 
 freely voted. With most of the popularly-elected 
 bodies, " control " means constant interference by 
 those who do not know with those who do, and wasted 
 days on truly comical committees, many of whose 
 members, unable to check waste at the main they 
 might control, join sub-committees to chase a few errant 
 and leaky taps, and open a dozen new ones as they go. 
 Must we not realise that power resides in units ; that 
 tasks exist in units ; and that on the intimate application 
 of the unit of power to the task-unit the efficiency-ratio 
 depends. Wherever efficient work is done, men and 
 women who try to be efficient are doing it. Where 
 these units are not, there failure has its throne. 
 
 To expect efficiency in local self-government from 
 prevalent ideals and practices, is to draw cheques on 
 the Universe which it has never yet honoured. 
 
 Is not the instrument on which so much depends 
 worthy of a better fate than that which now befalls it? 
 Will not the democracy see that in this, as in 
 other departments of national development, it moves 
 towards the better? 
 
 Unless we are effectual ourselves, unless we 
 do that to which we put our hands, how can 
 we usefully proceed to ponder the efficiency of 
 others. It is not that the call comes to all to pursue 
 excellence: that is the craft of the few. "The majority 
 of things to be done are common things, and are quite
 
 THE GOAL OF EFFICIENT SERVICE. 151 
 
 well enough done when commonly done." " The 
 great end of life is not knowledge but action." 
 (Huxley). It is within the range of common duties, 
 those we accept or have to accept, that efficiency can 
 by most of us be sought; and if only this standard 
 is pursued, its assured and automatic raising 
 will accomplish much for the race. On those, 
 however, who exercise political power or administra- 
 tive power, or are ambitious to govern their fellows as 
 so many are, a sterner accountability rightly rests. 
 In so far as they set standards for others, or exact 
 standards from others, or interfere with the standards 
 of others, they are in honour bound to be attentive to 
 their own, and to see that these bear examination and 
 can be vindicated. 
 
 The quotation from Mr. Marion Crawford at the 
 head of this chapter, will not now present any insuper- 
 able difficulty. The power he wishes to obtain to select 
 aright, or to select the better, is most to be desired. 
 Could we but communicate it as a racing tip, or fashion 
 it as a " system," to write a battered word, how 
 popular this chapter would be and how foolish ! Is 
 it not clear that usually none can discern honesty and 
 common-sense in others who is a stranger to either, 
 and that it is only by the painful acquirement of real 
 knowledge, and the practise at home of real power, 
 that voters will be able to get any compass-direction 
 from within to help them in outside choices. If they 
 follow the practice here suggested, it will suffice, in 
 daylight hours and tests, to separate the worse from 
 the better. If the difference is at any time too slight 
 for discrimination, the less perilous the difficulty. Of 
 one thing a voter may be sure. If he or she chooses one
 
 152 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 to grab for a class, let them not wonder if the chosen 
 grabs for himself. An army can fight only in the way 
 it has been trained to fight; a prize-fighter only as he 
 has been taught ; in choosing, the chooser can use only 
 the compasses to which he has accustomed himself, 
 and only on the chart he knows. 
 
 Of all phantasies is not the most futile that which 
 permits men who have never faced their duty or tried to 
 do it, who know little of probity, personal purity, or 
 high purpose, in their own lives, to imagine that they 
 can bridle excess in others by Act of Parliament or 
 borough bye-law, or that to them can be given any 
 other license than that which will enable them to cut 
 their own throats? In this matter of government we 
 have to learn ourselves to master the medium with 
 which we work, so that we may both recognise the 
 better artists in it and follow ourselves the better art. 
 
 Periodically many write of, or talk about, the need 
 for leaders, or for a Great Man, to rescue us from 
 some disastrous bog into which we have unwittingly 
 tumbled. Why not, much more sensibly and suitably, 
 try the private practice which creates an atmosphere 
 in which a leader can emerge, and bestows a vision 
 which reveals Greatness at our elbow? Is it in leaders 
 and in Greatness that we fail, or in the capacity to 
 discern, to permit, and to follow either? 
 
 To get competent national and provincial ad- 
 ministration, the country must somehow find a 
 use for, and use generously, all the vital 
 forces of each generation : its adaptability, its 
 inventiveness, its most industrious workers, and all 
 that is offered by knowledge, skill, capital, moral and 
 spiritual goads and gifts, and the sense of duty in a
 
 THE GOAL OF EFFICIENT SERVICE. 153 
 
 man. None can be safely dispensed with. Upon 
 their harmonious corporate working depends growth. 
 It is idle to assume that anything approaching 
 equality of treatment, or sensible perspective in the 
 matter of encouragement, yet obtains in regard to these 
 elements. No country where an electorate really cared 
 for knowledge, or understood how it has to be 
 wrested from the Universe, could or would enthrone 
 traditional ignorance as we enthrone it to-day, or 
 remain content with an empirical practice which has 
 long outgrown its aforetime usefulness. The statistics 
 of national expenditure on brains, inventions, and 
 character, are adequately and shamefully eloquent; the 
 mental atmosphere of our political and social clubs, 
 of many middle class homes, of our provincial towns, 
 is as palpable as a London fog, and as dense. These 
 betrayals are flaunted in days when means abound 
 in torrential force, and are similarly spent; when, too, 
 the painful ascent of man can be measured in the 
 mapped milestones of his laborious acquirement of 
 some new tool or some new method which an inventive 
 and superior mind was the first to find : articulate 
 speech, fire, the bow and arrow, pottery, domestic 
 animals, the drum, iron, writing, gunpowder, mariner's 
 compass, paper and the printing press, the Copernican 
 theory, spinning and weaving, Newton, Faraday, 
 Darwin, spectrum analysis, radium and wireless, the 
 new physics, and the Modern Quest. 
 
 All the old things that are true, all the new and 
 memorable things that await us, to be found to be 
 older than historic time and greater than the dreams 
 of the wisest among us all come, and must, it seems, 
 come, from this partnership of Man with the Universe
 
 154 NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 he inhabits. 
 
 Why should it not be an intelligent, a forceful, a 
 self-reliant, and a victorious partnership? Why should 
 not men have the courage and the capacity of their 
 cause? To those who personally apprehend and share 
 it, the partnership is already clear and convincing in 
 aim and method, for whatever at any time a race is 
 held to imagine, individual men and women know: 
 they preserve the seed of the future flower and praise 
 its fragrance before it has budded. To them its 
 fragrance is a permitted promise. Patiently, as though 
 their patience " had the key of Heaven," they go 
 forward to the gardens where these flowers have 
 always bloomed.
 
 Oh, to be found among that sacred band, 
 
 Who from the dawn of soul first bowed the head 
 In deepest adoration ; then, star-led, 
 
 Fought ignorance and sloth; in every land 
 
 Flanked Power's supreme betrayals; turned the hand 
 Of tyrant Might up-raised to crush ; the bread 
 Of sunny hope broke for the child of dread ; 
 
 And reared Heaven's halls upon Earth's molten sand. 
 
 To them the unsung splendours of the past 
 Belong. They were the Oracles of Good, 
 The Scouts of God, to instant service prone. 
 
 Whether Time's mischiefs did their strength outlast, 
 Or the world hearken, by His truth they stood: 
 Their joy to follow Light back to Light's throne. 
 
 J. J. R. : January i, 1915.
 
 1918. 
 
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