THIS little volume is a reproduction of six articles which appeared some little time ago in the columns of the Times. I know nothing about the authors except what can be gathered from their own writing. But the articles from the outset arrested my attention, as they doubtless did that of many others, by their originality and breadth of view, and so I read on with steadily growing interest and sympathy. The suggestions of the writers appeared to me to deserve more than a cursory perusal, and I am glad that they are now to be given to the public in a permanent form.
The tremendous upheaval caused by the war has led to great searchings of heart, and the air is full of bold and sometimes rather wild speculation about fundamentals. ‘It is not often in our history,’ as some one has recently said,* ‘that the nation has found time to think. Now, by a curious paradox, while the flower of her youth and strength are fighting for her freedom and her life, the others have a chance of thinking out the best use to which that life and freedom can be put when they are safe once more. Indeed at the present time activity is as marked in the field of ideas as it is in the field of war.’
[* ‘Report of the Committee of the Privy Council on Scientific and Industrial Research,’ p. 19. ]
What is characteristic about that activity is its unusual freedom from the shackles of dogma and convention. It may be said—using the word in no party sense—that we are all Radicals to-day, all prepared to entertain, and to judge dispassionately on their merits, proposals which only a few years ago would have seemed wildly revolutionary. But with all this speculation going on, much of it excellent in quality, there is some danger of distraction. There is a limit to what can be done, all at once, to alter the bases, social, economic and political, of our national life. We seem to be more than ever in need of synthesis, of some unifying principle, else we may easily find ourselves pursuing a number of ends which, though perhaps individually commendable, are incompatible with one another. Hence we have cause to be grateful to any one who seeks, like the authors of this volume, to cover the whole field, to see all the main objects of the new national endeavour in their relation to one another, and to find principles by which they can be worked into a coherent scheme.
So bold an enterprise has the faults of its qualities. No human mind can be equally familiar with the ins and outs of all the large and diverse questions here brought under review.
And it is no disparagement to the authors of this volume to say that they seem to me less at home in dealing with the constitutional and political aspects of their subject than with the economic and social. Not that their handling of the former is without merit and interest. I, of all men, should be the first to welcome their clear perception that the problem of reconstruction is not merely a British but an Imperial problem, and their advocacy of ‘the development of the present British Parliament into an Imperial Parliament with oversea representatives,’ leaving the purely local concerns of the United Kingdom to be dealt with by subordinate assemblies. Nor am I any less in sympathy with their attitude to our outworn party divisions—the ‘bilateral system of conflict about false issues,’ now happily in abeyance, and never, let us hope, to be revived in its old insincerity. As that system has been found an intolerable encumbrance in time of war, it would certainly be no less wasteful and futile when we come to deal with the colossal problems which the return of peace will bring. If these problems are to be tackled with any prospect of a good result, the stereotyped old parties have got to disappear and to make room for fresh groups, whose members will be bound together by a genuine agreement of opinion on the live issues of the new age, not by a mechanical and meaningless acceptance of the shibboleths of a dead past. That this necessary regrouping would be assisted by a change in our methods of election, and especially by the adoption of what is known as ‘proportional representation,’ is a point on which our authors lay particular stress. ‘The sane method of voting is known as Proportional Representation with large constituencies and the single transferable vote, and it is as reasonable and necessary that the country should adopt it as soon as possible as that it should adopt the right types of aeroplane and the best sorts of gun. The advantage of this method is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of demonstration.’ That is a strong statement, though personally I do not disagree with it. But I find more difficulty in accepting another and even more drastic reform, which the writers advocate with equal insistence, namely, the substitution of ‘occupational’ for local constituencies. And without going into the merits of this proposal, about which much might be said by way of criticism, it is in my humble opinion evident that the attempt to run two such radical changes concurrently is quite impracticable. Nor do our authors attempt to show us how the simultaneous adoption of these two new principles could be made to work. In this as in other portions of their schemes of constitutional change there is indeed much that is ingenious and attractive. But I cannot help feeling that we are sometimes getting rather far away from the immediately possible. I doubt whether the writers have much experience of actual politics. In their excursions into that region, so inhospitable to philosophy, they do not seem to have their feet quite on the ground.
Very different is the impression made upon my mind by the chapters which deal with the industrial future. The breadth of view and boldness of imagination, which are the great merits of the whole treatise, are in this portion of it buttressed by a familiarity with existing conditions and a close touch with fact. Opinions may differ about many of the arguments of the writers. But no serious student of the subject can fail to benefit from contact with their ideas or to recognise the insight, the grasp, and the architectonic quality of their work. They are not scratching the surface of the question, but going to the root of it. In following their lead the reader will find himself constantly at the centre of the problem, not wandering in the outskirts and on the fringes of it. And I shall be greatly surprised if he does not feel, when he puts down the book, that it has saved him from pursuing m.any false scents and has shed new light upon the few big essential points, on which it has caused him to concentrate his attention.
On none of these points is the case of the writers more clear and convincing than When they are pressing home the intimate connection between the reform of our educational system, now so loudly demanded—which aims at much more and better teaching of science—and such a reorganisation of our great national industries as will enable us to make good use of the increased number of men of scientific training whom our schools and colleges are asked to turn out. ‘To educate without creating opportunity,’ as they truly say, ‘is to set a bonus upon the export of national ability.’ I will not try to summarise their argument, which is already quite sufficiently condensed. The reader will be much better employed in studying it in their own words. But it may be interesting to point out how remarkably their contention on this head is reinforced by the recently published Report—from which I have already quoted—of the Committee of the Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. In that Report, a remarkable document far above the average of official productions of its class, the opinion is expressed that ‘a good deal of the inertia which British manufacturers have shown towards research may have been due to a realisation, partly instinctive perhaps, but partly based on experience, that research on the small scale they could afford (the italics are mine) was at best a doubtful proposition.’ And again, ‘Our experience up to the present leads us to think that the small scale on which most British industrial firms have been planned is one of the principal impediments in the way of the organisation of research, with a view to the conduct of those long and complicated investigations which are necessary for the solution of the fundamental problems lying at the basis of our staple industries.’
Here we have precisely the same insistence on the ‘importance of scale’ which the reader will find repeatedly illustrated in the following pages. The words I have just quoted might be paralleled by a number of passages in this volume. I will quote only one: ‘Though a million pound business may be easily able to sustain and profit by fifty chemists, of whom one now and again makes a paying discovery, it does not follow that a hundred thousand pound business can profitably sustain any chemists at all, much less keep up a laboratory for five. Although a State containing a number of big businesses may maintain a multitude of industrial scientific investigators employed in them, it does not follow necessarily that another State, although it contains many more businesses and those of greater aggregate value, can, if they are businesses of a smaller scale individually, employ any investigators at all. It certainly does not reflect unfavourably upon either the intelligence, the energy or the patriotism of the business men in the small-scale-business country, and it is high time that that sort of blame, which entirely confuses the issue, ceased.’