Proposals for electoral reform which seem to continue the old intellectualist tradition are still brought forward, and new difficulties in the working of representative government will arise from the wider extension of political power.  But that conception of representation may spread which desires both to increase the knowledge and public spirit of the voter and to provide that no strain is put upon him greater than he can bear.

(Chapter III.—­Official Thought, page 241)

A quantitative examination of the political force created by popular election shows the importance of the work of non-elected officials in any effective scheme of democracy.

What should be the relation between these officials and the elected representatives?  On this point English opinion already shows a marked reaction from the intellectualist conception of representative government.  We accept the fact that most state officials are appointed by a system uncontrolled either by individual members of parliament or by parliament as a whole, that they hold office during good behaviour, and that they are our main source of information as to some of the most difficult points on which we form political judgments.  It is largely an accident that the same system has not been introduced into our local government.

But such a half-conscious acceptance of a partially independent Civil Service as an existing fact is not enough.  We must set ourselves to realise clearly what we intend our officials to do, and to consider how far our present modes of appointment, and especially our present methods of organising official work, provide the most effective means for carrying out that intention.

(Chapter IV.—­Nationality and Humanity, page 269)

What influence will the new tendencies in political thought have on the emotional and intellectual conditions of political solidarity?

In the old city-states, where the area of government corresponded to the actual range of human vision and memory, a kind of local emotion could be developed which is now impossible in a ‘delocalised’ population.  The solidarity of a modern state must therefore depend on facts not of observation but of imagination.

The makers of the existing European national states, Mazzini and Bismarck, held that the possible extent of a state depended on national homogeneity, i.e. on the possibility that every individual member of a state should believe that all the others were like himself.  Bismarck thought that the degree of actual homogeneity which was a necessary basis for this belief could be made by ‘blood and iron’; Mazzini thought that mankind was already divided into homogeneous groups whose limits should be followed in the reconstruction of Europe.  Both were convinced that the emotion of political solidarity was impossible between individuals of consciously different national types.