But the most important difficulties raised by the extension of political interest from a very small to a large fraction of the population would be concerned with political motive rather than political machinery.  It is astonishing that the early English democrats, who supposed that individual advantage would be the sole driving force in politics, assumed, without realising the nature of their own assumption, that the representative, if he were elected for a short term, would inevitably feel his own advantage to be identical with that of the community.[81] At present there is a fairly sufficient supply of men whose imagination and sympathies are sufficiently quick and wide to make them ready to undertake the toil of unpaid electioneering and administration for the general good.  But every organiser of elections knows that the supply is never more than sufficient, and payment of members, while it would permit men of good-will to come forward who are now shut out, would also make it possible for less worthy motives to become more effective.  The concentration both of administrative and legislative work in the hands of the Cabinet, while it tends to economy of time and effort, is making the House of Commons yearly a less interesting place; and members have of late often expressed to me a real anxiety lest the personnel of the House should seriously deteriorate.

[81] E.g.  James Mill, Essay on Government (1825), ’We have seen in what manner it is possible to prevent in the Representatives the rise of an interest different from that of the parties who choose them, namely, by giving them little time not dependent upon the will of those parties’ (p. 27).

The chief immediate danger in the case of the two older parties is that, owing to the growing expense of electioneering and the growing effect of legislation on commerce and finance, an increasing proportion of the members and candidates may be drawn from the class of ‘hustling’ company-promoters and financiers.  The Labour Party, on the other hand, can now draw upon an ample supply of genuine public spirit, and its difficulties in this respect will arise, not from calculated individual selfishness, but from the social and intellectual environment of working-class life.  During the last twenty years I have been associated, for some years continuously and afterwards at intervals, with English political working men.  They had, it seemed to me, for the most part a great advantage in the fact that certain real things of life were real to them.  It is, for instance, the ‘class-conscious’ working men who, in England as on the Continent, are the chief safeguard against the horrors of a general European war.  But as their number and responsibility increase they will, I believe, have to learn some rather hard lessons as to the intellectual conditions of representative government upon a large scale.  The town working man lives in a world in which it is very difficult for him to choose his associates.