act in the interests of the State and on behalf of the nation as a
whole. Its professions, however, have become false and hypocritical. In
the name of the People it seeks its own gain. It has ceased to be a
means to good democratic government, and has grown to be an end in
itself. In its rivalry to other parties, in its struggle for power, in
its scramble for the spoils of office, in its eagerness to secure votes,
it has debased political ideals, it has corrupted citizenship, it has
abandoned truth, it has proclaimed smooth lies, it has betrayed the
State, it has almost destroyed the nation. Happy indeed will it be if
this war, which is revealing to us the hideousness and deadliness of the
party-spirit, enables us to reduce the old parties to their proper place
of subordination to the State.

In addition to the two old parties, however, there are two
comparatively new ones which occupy places of importance in the world of
politics. These are the Nationalist and the Labour parties. Neither of
these professes to make the interests of the State its prime concern.
The one concentrates its energies upon a struggle to advance the cause
of a single nation from among the four that constitute the United
Kingdom; the other devotes itself to the affairs of a single social
class. The existence of these powerful sectional organizations is a
disastrous portent. They stand, not as the old parties do for divergent
views concerning the interests of the State as a whole, but for mortal
schism in the body politic. Never can there be a full return to healthy
national life until means have been found for reabsorbing these and
other incipient schismatic organizations into the unity of the Great
Society.

A third rival to the State has recently come into prominence in the
shape of a number of various non-political corporations which claim to
possess an organic existence independent of, and co-ordinate with, the
State, and thus deny the right of the State to intrude within the
spheres of their operations. The most important are the Syndicalists,
who proclaim the autonomy of the industrial union or guild, and the
Ecclesiastics, who assert the autonomy of the denationalized church.
Both agree in repudiating political control, and in abjuring the use of
political instruments. They rely upon "direct action" of their own, the
one employing the terrors of the general strike to overawe the
community, the other the horrors of hell. Now it may be fre