But however thwarted and crippled our public imagination may be, we have still got to do the best we can with this situation; we have to take as comprehensive views as we can, and to attempt as comprehensive a method of handling as our party-ridden State permits.  In theory I am a Socialist, and were I theorising about some nation in the air I would say that all the great productive activities and all the means of communication should be national concerns and be run as national services.  But our State is peculiarly incapable of such functions; at the present time it cannot even produce a postage stamp that will stick; and the type of official it would probably evolve for industrial organisation, slowly but unsurely, would be a maddening combination of the district visitor and the boy clerk.  It is to the independent people of some leisure and resource in the community that one has at last to appeal for such large efforts and understandings as our present situation demands.  In the default of our public services, there opens an immense opportunity for voluntary effort.  Deference to our official leaders is absurd; it is a time when men must, as the phrase goes, “come forward.”

We want a National Plan for our social and economic development which everyone may understand and which will serve as a unifying basis for all our social and political activities.  Such a plan is not to be flung out hastily by an irresponsible writer.  It can only come into existence as the outcome of a wide movement of inquiry and discussion.  My business in these pages has been not prescription but diagnosis.  I hold it to be the clear duty of every intelligent person in the country to do his utmost to learn about these questions of economic and social organisation and to work them out to conclusions and a purpose.  We have come to a phase in our affairs when the only alternative to a great, deliberate renascence of will and understanding is national disorder and decay.

Sec. 6

I have attempted a diagnosis of this aspect of our national situation.  I have pointed out that nearly all the social forces of our time seem to be in conspiracy to bring about the disappearance of a labour class as such and the rearrangement of our work and industry upon a new basis.  That rearrangement demands an unprecedented national effort and the production of an adequate National Plan.  Failing that, we seem doomed to a period of chronic social conflict and possibly even of frankly revolutionary outbreaks that may destroy us altogether or leave us only a dwarfed and enfeebled nation....

And before we can develop that National Plan and the effective realisation of such a plan that is needed to save us from that fate, two things stand immediately before us to be done, unavoidable preliminaries to that more comprehensive work.  The first of these is the restoration of representative government, and the second a renascence of our public thought about political and social things.