These oligarchies of the party organisations have now been evolving for two centuries, and their inherent evils and dangers become more and more manifest.  The first of these is the exclusion from government of the more active and intelligent sections of the community.  It is not treated as remarkable, it is treated as a matter of course, that neither in Congress nor in the House of Commons is there any adequate representation of the real thought of the time, of its science, invention and enterprise, of its art and feeling, of its religion and purpose.  When one speaks of Congressmen or Members of Parliament one thinks, to be plain about it, of intellectual riff-raff.  When one hears of a pre-eminent man in the English-speaking community, even though that pre-eminence may be in political or social science, one is struck by a sense of incongruity if he happens to be also in the Legislature.  When Lord Haldane disengages the Gifford lectures or Lord Morley writes a “Life of Gladstone” or ex-President Roosevelt is delivered of a magazine article, there is the same sort of excessive admiration as when a Royal Princess does a water-colour sketch or a dog walks on its hind legs.

Now this intellectual inferiority of the legislator is not only directly bad for the community by producing dull and stupid legislation, but it has a discouraging and dwarfing effect upon our intellectual life.  Nothing so stimulates art, thought and science as realisation; nothing so cripples it as unreality.  But to set oneself to know thoroughly and to think clearly about any human question is to unfit oneself for the forensic claptrap which is contemporary politics, is to put oneself out of the effective current of the nation’s life.  The intelligence of any community which does not make a collective use of that intelligence, starves and becomes hectic, tends inevitably to preciousness and futility on the one hand, and to insurgency, mischief and anarchism on the other.

From the point of view of social stability this estrangement of the national government and the national intelligence is far less serious than the estrangement between the governing body and the real feeling of the mass of the people.  To many observers this latter estrangement seems to be drifting very rapidly towards a social explosion in the British Isles.  The organised masses of labour find themselves baffled both by their parliamentary representatives and by their trade union officials.  They are losing faith in their votes and falling back in anger upon insurrectionary ideals, upon the idea of a general strike, and upon the expedients of sabotage.  They are doing this without any constructive proposals at all, for it is ridiculous to consider Syndicalism as a constructive proposal.  They mean mischief because they are hopeless and bitterly disappointed.  It is the same thing in France, and before many years are over it will be the same thing in America.  That way lies chaos.  In