tacit or expressed, against the normal man.  Quite apart from the danger of unsympathetic and fatally irritating government there can be little or no doubt that the method of making men officials for life is quite the worst way of getting official duties done.  Officialdom is a species of incompetence.  This rather priggish, teachable, and well-behaved sort of boy, who is attracted by the prospect of assured income and a pension to win his way into the Civil Service, and who then by varied assiduities rises to a sort of timidly vindictive importance, is the last person to whom we would willingly entrust the vital interests of a nation.  We want people who know about life at large, who will come to the public service seasoned by experience, not people who have specialised and acquired that sort of knowledge which is called, in much the same spirit of qualification as one speaks of German Silver, Expert Knowledge.  It is clear our public servants and officials must be so only for their periods of service.  They must be taught by life, and not “trained” by pedagogues.  In every continuing job there is a time when one is crude and blundering, a time, the best time, when one is full of the freshness and happiness of doing well, and a time when routine has largely replaced the stimulus of novelty.  The Great State will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of the stale official.  On that score of the necessity or versatility, if on no other score, I am flatly antagonistic to the conceptions of “Guild Socialism” which have arisen recently out of the impact of Mr. Penty and Syndicalism upon the uneasy intelligence of Mr. Orage.

And since the Fabian socialists have created a widespread belief that in their projected state every man will be necessarily a public servant or a public pupil because the state will be the only employer and the only educator, it is necessary to point out that the Great State presupposes neither the one nor the other.  It is a form of liberty and not a form of enslavement.  We agree with the older forms of socialism in supposing an initial proprietary independence in every citizen.  The citizen is a shareholder in the state.  Above that and after that, he works if he chooses.  But if he likes to live on his minimum and do nothing—­though such a type of character is scarcely conceivable—­he can.  His earning is his own surplus.  Above the basal economics of the Great State we assume with confidence there will be a huge surplus of free spending upon extra-collective ends.  Public organisations, for example, may distribute impartially and possibly even print and make ink and paper for the newspapers in the Great State, but they will certainly not own them.  Only doctrine-driven men have ever ventured to think they would.  Nor will the state control writers and artists, for example, nor the stage—­though it may build and own theatres—­the tailor, the dressmaker, the restaurant cook, an enormous multitude of other busy workers-for-preferences.  In the Great State of the future, as in the life of the more prosperous classes of to-day, the greater proportion of occupations and activities will be private and free.