mistake not, to follow the true line long since indicated by Carlyle. He will then find powers rallying around him and accompanying him from victory to victory, which he will never secure, or permanently secure, by plunging along the Radical line of advance in the direction of anarchy. The temptations to take that fatal line, to-day strong, will be stronger. Mr. Chamberlain and the agrarian Radicals are shaking themselves free from Whiggery and Liberalism. Ere long that party will have a free hand. When that day arrives the Tories must adopt one of three courses: unidea'd Conservatism; a fatal imitation of Radicalism; or a bold promulgation of the doctrine that waste labour has a right to employment-a doctrine which carries this Conservative corollary: that the State has a right to control the labour which it employs.

CHAPTER XI.

STATE-EMPLOYED LABOUR.

MOREOVER, there are great if vague and indefinable tendencies now operating in the minds of the people which are distinctly favourable to the adoption of such a policy as the essential principle of the Tory Democracy. The old doctrine of laissez faire is discredited and dead. Mr. Herbert Spencer will not galvanise it into life. Men generally expect that the State will prove itself a more potent and direct factor in the march of civilisation and progress than it has ever been before. There is a growing disposition to regard the State in a beneficent and paternal character, and to expect that when its children ask for bread it will not give them a stone. The child looks to his father for advice, control, and support, and the people of these countries, especially the poor and the distressed, are becoming more and more willing to accept the filial view of their position in relation to

the Government. Many, I have no doubt, will stand back horror-struck from the consequences of the acceptance by a political party of such great, new, and far-reaching doctrines as I have asserted to lie at the root of the Tory Democracy. The course will not be plain sailing, no doubt. In revolutionary times what course is? Conservatism, which laughed at Carlyle proposing these doctrines for its acceptance, is now being driven towards them by necessity and the stern logic of events. Without them it cannot appeal to the labouring classes as against Radicalism and land confiscation. That the State cannot employ men and get good work out of them is absurd in view of the history of England. Who founded, built up, and to-day maintain England's mighty empire but men employed by the State? Who, to-day, but State-employed men, will face death and mutilation for the honour and interest of their employers? So far are the theories favourable to individualism, private enterprise, etc., from being true, that I assert the very contrary. The State, the Nation, will get better work out of its employees than any private individual will get out of his. We are not to regard in this context those routine departments where men, shrouded from the public eye, and lazily overlooked by lazy State officialism, waste or absorb the public treasure, though even here there is honest and good work done. Look rather at those departments where the State is in

earnest and which act under the light of publicity: peninsular campaigns, assaults of Redans, the patient endurance of cold, hunger, and fatigue, the beautiful discipline of the regiment or of the man-ofwar. The agencies by which England conquered for herself the British Empire, and to-day maintains it against the world, are, I think, equal to the task of draining a bog, planting a hill-side, or stitching trousers for the workers. We talk of waste lands, lost opportunities, etc., but here is the waste labour of England rotting in slums and alleys, loafing with its hands in its pockets, sinking daily into the abyss of vice, pauperism, and crime. It is as if around the neck of the living, industrious Englishman were hanged a corpse, which he drags laboriously at every step, with the horror as well as the weight of which he is nigh foredone.

Consider, then, that the bold adoption of this principle as a fundamental principle in our constitution, viz., that every unemployed person has a right to employment, means the abolition of the poor-rates, and the cessation of that heavy drain on the community which is caused by the charitable relief of indigence. Our waste labour gets itself supported in some way, by poor-rates, by alms, or by thievery. A man is a wealth-consuming as well as a wealth-producing machine. When it is complained that the State cannot stand such an ex

tension of its sphere of activity this fact must be remembered, as also the kindred fact that at present a large proportion of our public expenses are caused by the necessity for the maintenance of repressive and controlling agencies, in order to prevent our waste and our vitiated labour from preying on the wealth of the community.

If, through the power of the Tory Democratic party, the State undertakes as a solemn responsibility the duty of employing any and every unemployed citizen, bending all its energies to that task, and shaping all its machinery so as to support or at least not interfere with the work, difficulties will disappear, and great and permanent advantages become on every side apparent. There are in these countries many great and necessary works which private enterprise will not undertake, but which for the State would be highly remunerative. Private enterprise must see its way to a speedy and substantial reward. The State can wait. Private enterprise can consider only the material returns. The State will regard matters from a higher and more generous point of view, knowing that a nation's true wealth consists in happy homes and upright, loyal citizens. For example, no joint-stock company will plant forests, there is no immediate return, and in calculating the results of extensive drainages or reclamations, cannot consider the national benefits arising from

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