these affairs.

Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose

immediate interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor,

increase employment, and make better terms for the working-man

tenant and working-man purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt

constructive minded, but the mass of the following is naturally

suspicious of education and discipline, hostile to the higher

education, and-except for an obvious antagonism to employers and

property owners-almost destitute of ideas. What else can it be?

It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation and

difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and

organising power. It favours the nationalisation of land and

capital with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process;

but, on the other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of

individuals which is implied by military service is steadily and

quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it. It is only in

recent years that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the

huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is still a

very marked tendency to step back again into that multitudinous

assemblage.

For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.

Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified

crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these

other parties. It is the party against the predominating interests.

It is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the

party of decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and

planless association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so

constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to

hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilised state.

Essentially it is the party of criticism, the "Anti" party. It is a

system of hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at times

an elusive common soul. It is a gathering together of all the

smaller interests which find themselves at a disadvantage against

the big established classes, the leasehold tenant as against the

landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and the

moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small

employer as against the demoralising hospitable publican, the man

without introductions and broad connections against the man who has

these things. It is the party of the many small men against the

fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for loving

the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer is

doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but it

resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages

common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the

king. The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege"

because it represents no class advantages, but it is also the party

that is on the whole most set against Collective control because it

represents no established responsilibity. It is constructive only

so far as its antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than

its jealousy of the state. It organises only because organisation

is forced upon it by the organisation of its adversaries. It lapses

in and out of alliance with Labour as it sways between hostility to

wealth and hostility to public expenditure…

Every modern European state will have in some form or other these

three parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and

unsympathetic party of establishment and success, the rich party;

the confused, sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small,

struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a

third party sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes

reuniting with it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses,

the proletarians, Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to

Republican and Democrat, for example, and you have the conditions in

the United States. The Crown or a dethroned dynasty, the

Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions,

the personalities of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and

confuse the self-expression of these three necessary divisions in

the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the

less for that…

And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;-the ideas go

on-as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in

some great brain beyond our understanding…

So it was I sat and thought my problem out… I still remember

my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like

clouds dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course,

couldn't hold a party together alone, "interests and habits, not

ideas," I had that now, and so the great constructive scheme of

Socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily

claimed only by this collection of odds and ends, this residuum of

disconnected and exceptional people. This was true not only of the

Socialist idea, but of the scientific idea, the idea of veracity-of

human confidence in humanity-of all that mattered in human life

outside the life of individuals… The only real party that

would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that in the

entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive

attack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and