aim of its maintenance as a whole) to promote the maximum individual development of each geographical unit within its bounds. And as with the factory or the slum at home, it is clear that this maximum of individual development will not be secured by allowing each unit to pursue its own ends without reference to the welfare of the whole. The central idea of the old Liberalism, hostile as it was to the development of the State within these isles, was therefore naturally unsympathetic to the deliberate organization of the Empire over sea.

Conservatives as Caretakers.

Has then the nation become Conservative? Not in the least. The pleasant mannered young gentlemen of no occupation, the portly manufacturers and the estimable country squires who sit on the Conservative benches, as every one who knows them personally will admit, no more share the feelings of the new England of the town electorate than does Sir William Harcourt. Far from having learnt to "think in communities," there is no satisfactory evidence of their having, in politics, learnt to think at all. Their very triumph is not their own. They are elected, not in order to put Conservatism into power, but in order to keep Gladstonianism out. Two advantages, indeed, they have, which make their election possible. The modern Conservative candidate is politically a man without prejudices. No abstract principle forbids him to listen sympathetically to any proposal for reform. Hence he seems on the platform less belated than the nineteenth century Liberal, with his stock of shopsoiled principles at full price. And, most useful of all at the present juncture, the modern Conservative, unlike the Gladstonian Liberal, is quite happy and ungrudging in paying out the Imperialist commonplaces which convey to a constituency a stimulatingly blusterous impression that he is conscious of the British Empire as a whole. Into this blusterous impression the enthusiastic voter is allowed to read as much consciousness as he himself has attained to of Imperial rights, duties and interests in the sphere of world politics. This, however, is mere hustings manner. Conservative cabinets at work, like Conservative members in the House of Commons, show themselves no more in accord with the new England of the twentieth century than do the Liberals. When the question is one of making any more effective use of the State departments, Sir Michael HicksBeach is as old-fashioned as Sir William Harcourt. As to our Presidents of the Local Government Board, they are about as much at home in twentieth-century municipal affairs as King James the First would be in a modern trade arbitration. Whether they are called Fowler, Chaplin, or Long, makes no difference that is discoverable by the provincial town clerks or the chairmen of the committees of the London County Council; all alike are impenitent decriers of the magnificent social structure that is rising all over the country, ignorant of their duties, missing their great opportunities, and naturally hostile to any extension of the local government activity which has already far outgrown their knowledge and capacity. In the efficiency of the War Office and Admiralty, the

elector has, to put it as moderately as possible, no more confidence to-day than he had in the nineteenth century. It may be an injustice to meritorious ministers in humbler station, but there is every reason to believe that the British public takes Lord Salisbury as the type of his own Government. Now Lord Salisbury simply does not believe in the possibility of improvement in human affairs-a view which is rather the philosophy of an independent income and a peerage than of the mass of electors existing in obviously improvable circumstances.

The Party of National Efficiency.

It appears, then, that without some new grouping of the elec torate, without the inspiration of some new thought, no virile and fecund Opposition, let alone an alternative Government, is conceivable. No front Opposition Bench can be really effective-still less can it cross the floor of the House of Commons-unless it expresses, not alone the views of its own political partisans, but also the inarticulate criticism of the mass of the community. Outside the narrow ranks of the "political workers" of either party, the millions of citizens are quietly pursuing their ordinary business-weavers at the loom, mechanics at the lathe, teachers in the schools, ministers of religion toiling in the slums of our cities, doctors going their rounds, manufacturers at their mills, merchants and bankers journeying daily to their offices, patient investigators working out scientific problems, public-spirited men and women struggling "gegen die Dummheit on Town Councils and School Boards. It is these men's judgments on public affairs, these men's impressions and aspirations, which, in the England of to-day, give force and backing to the words of statesmen. And if now we inquire what it is that comes into these men's minds when they read their newspapers, when they, in their particular callings, impinge on some corner of public administration, or when, in their own lives, some public disaster comes home to them, there is but one answer. They are not thinking of Liberalism or Conservatism or Socialism. What is in their minds is a burning feeling of shame at the "failure" of England-shame for the lack of capacity of its governors, shame for the inability of Parliament to get through even its routine business, shame for the absence of grip and resourcefulness of our statesmen, shame for the pompous inefficiency of every branch of our public administration, shame for the slackness of our merchants and traders that transfers our commercial supremacy to the United States, shame for the supineness which looks on unmoved at the continued degradation of our race by drunkenness and gambling, slum life, and all the horrors of the sweated trades, as rampant to-day in all our great centres of population as they were when officially revealed fifteen years ago. This sense of shame has yet to be transmuted into political action. The country is ripe for a domestic programme, which shall breathe new life into the administrative dry bones of our public offices. The party and the statesmen whom these men will support, the leaders for whom they are hungering, are those who shall convince them that above all other considerations they stand for a policy of National Efficiency.

The Abolition of Sweating.

For such a policy of National Efficiency, there can be no other starting-point than the condition of the people. To-day, in the United Kingdom, there are, Sir Robert Giffen tells us, not fewer than eight millions of persons, one-fifth of the whole population, existing under conditions represented by a family income of less than a pound a week, and constituting not merely a disgrace, but a positive danger to our civilization. These are the victims of "sweating" in one or other of its forms, condemned, as the House of Lords' Committee emphatically declared, to "earnings barely sufficient to sustain existence; hours of labor such as to make the lives of the workers periods of almost ceaseless toil; sanitary conditions injurious to the health of the persons employed and dangerous to the public."

The first and most indispensable step towards National Efficiency is the healing of the open sore by which this industrial parisitism is draining away the vitality of the race. There is no doubt about the remedy, no uncertainty among those who have really worked at the problem. We have passed through the experimental stage of factory legislation, and we now know that it is no mere coincidence that these eight millions of persons correspond almost precisely with the sections from whom we have hitherto withheld the effective protection of the Factory Acts. The statesman who is really inspired by the idea of National Efficiency will stump the country in favor of a "National Minimum" standard of life, below which no employer in any trade in any part of the kingdom shall be allowed to descend.

The National Minimum.

He will elaborate this minimum of humane order-already admitted in principle in a hundred Acts of Parliament-with all the force that eloquence can give to economic science, into a new industrial charter, imperatively required, not merely or even mainly for the comfort of the workers, but absolutely for the success of our industry in competition with the world. With the widespread support which this policy would secure-not only from the whole Trade Union world and the two millions of organized co-operators, but also from ministers of religion of all denominations, doctors and nurses, sanitary officers and teachers, Poor Law administrators and modern economists, and even the enlightened employers themselves—he would be able to expand our uneven and incomplete Factory Acts into a systematic and all-embracing code, prescribing for every manual worker employed a minimum of education, sanitation, leisure and wages, as the inviolable starting-point of industrial competition*.

Housing the People.

But factory legislation alone, however effective and complete, can secure a "moral and material minimum" only so far as the

*For a complete exposition of this policy, in which are discussed all difficulties, see Industrial Democracy, by S. and B. Webb (Longmans, London, 1898); or, more briefly, The Case for the Factory Acts, with preface by Mrs. Humphry Ward (Grant Richards, London, 1901, 2s. 6d.). See also Fabian Tracts No. 50, "Sweating: its Cause and Remedy"; No. 67, "Women and the Factory Acts"; and No. 83. "State Arbitration and the Living Wage."

conditions of employment are concerned. Even more than in the factory, the Empire is rooted in the home. How can we build up an effective commonwealth-how, even, can we get an efficient army-out of the stunted, anæmic, demoralized denizens of the slum tenements of our great cities? Can we, even as a mere matter of business, any longer afford to allow the eight millions of whom I have already spoken-the "submerged fifth" of our nation-to be housed, washed, watered worse than our horses? It it not clear that one of the first and most indispensable steps towards National Efficiency is to make really effective that "National Minimum" of sanitation which is already nominally compulsory by law? This means a great extension of municipal activity in town and country. It means a new point of view for the Local Government Board, which must cease to do evil and learn to do well, by dropping its lazy routine of obstruction and discouragement, and rousing itself to be prompt with its stimulus, eagerly oncoming with its help, and, when necessary, swift and ruthless with its compulsion. For the Local Government Board has, though no President seems to be aware of it, an even higher duty in sanitation than stimulus and help. It is the guardian of the National Minimum. To it is committed the great trust of seeing that no single family in the land is denied the indispensable conditions of healthy life. So far as house accommodation, ventilation, good drainage and pure water are concerned, Parliament has long ago embodied this National Minimum of sanitation in universally applicable Public Health Acts, which it is the duty of the Local Government Board to enforce upon local authorities just as drastically as these ought to do upon individuals. Can anything be more preposterous in a business nation than to allow (as a succession of Presidents of the Local Government Board have long allowed) one locality after another, merely out of stupidity, or incapacity, or parsimony, demonstrably to foster malignant disease and bring up its quota of citizens in a condition of impaired vitality? Why does not the Local Government Board undertake a systematic harrying up of the backward districts, regularly insisting, for instance, that all those having death-rates above the average of the kingdom shall put themselves in order, improve their drainage, lay on new water supply, and insure, by one means or another, a supply of healthy houses sufficient to enable every family to comply with the formula of "three rooms and a scullery" as the minimum necessary for breeding an even moderately Imperial race? Every medical officer knows that it is quite possible, within a generation after the adoption of such a genuine enforcement of the National Minimum of sanitation, to bring down the average death-rate by at least 5 per 1,000, and the sickness experience by at least a third. The equivalent money gain to the community would be many millions sterling. A single friendly society, the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows, would, it has been calculated, save a quarter of million annually in benefits alone. I measure my words when I say that the neglect of the Local Government Board to enforce even the existing legal National Minimum of sanitation causes, each year, more deaths than the most calamitous of our wars.

Raising the Standard of Life.

A Ministry really inspired with a passion for National Efficiency would, however, know how to use other instruments besides compulsion. The Government must set itself to raise the standard of life. This is specially the sphere of local initiative and corporate enterprise, of beneficent competition rigorously stopped by law from the downward way, but freed, stimulated and encouraged in every experiment on the upward way. We have seen how the Local Government Board has necessarily to be always coercing its local authorities to secure the National Minimum; for anything beyond that minimum the wise Minister would mingle premiums with his pressure. He would, by his public speeches, by personal interviews with mayors and town clerks, and by the departmental publications, set on foot the utmost possible emulation among the various local governing bodies, as to which could make the greatest strides in municipal activity. We already have the different towns compared, quarter by quarter, in respect of their death-rates, but at present only crudely, unscientifically and perfunctorily. Why should not the Local Government Board avowedly put all the local governing bodies of each class into honorary competition with one another by an annual investigation of municipal efficiency, working out their statistical marks for excellence in drainage, water supply, paving, cleansing, watching and lighting, housing, hospital accommodation, medical service, sickness experience and mortality, and publicly classifying them all according to the result of the examination? Nay, a Ministry keenly inspired with the passion for National Efficiency would call into play every possible incentive to local improvement. The King might give a "Shield of Honor" to the local authority which had made the greatest progress in the year, together with a knighthood to the mayor, and a Companionship of the Bath to the clerk, the engineer and the medical officer of health. On the other hand, the six or eight districts which stood at the bottom of the list would be held up to public opprobrium, whilst the official report on their shortcomings might be sent by post to every local elector, in the hope that public discussion would induce the inhabitants to choose more competent administrators.

Grants in Aid.

If honor and shame fail to appeal to the ratepayers of our most backward communities, there remains the potent lever of pecuniary self-interest. For England has, almost without being aware of it, invented exactly that relationship between central and local government which enables the greatest possible progress to be made. To let each locality really manage its own affairs in its own way-the anarchic freedom of American local administration-is not only to place an intolerable burden upon the poorer districts, but also to give up the all-important principle of the enforcement of a National Minimum. On the other hand, to subject the local authorities to the orders of a central government-the autocratic Minister of the Interior of continental systems--would be to barter away our birthright of local self-government for the pottage of bureaucratic administration. The middle way has, for half a century, been found