pany, some needed enlargement of existing Municipal or
State enterprise by lateral expansion--such are the sole springs of
action. In this way the Municipalization of public services,
increased assertion of State control over mines, railways, and
factories, the assumption under State control of large departments
of transport trade, proceed without any recognition of the guidance
of general principles. Everywhere the pressure of special concrete
interests, nowhere the conscious play of organized human
intelligence!...

"My object here is to justify the practical utility of 'theory' and
'principle' in the movement of Collectivism by showing that
reformers who distrust the guidance of Utopia, or even the
application of economic first principles, are not thrown back
entirely upon that crude empiricism which insists that each case is
to be judged separately and exclusively on its own individual
merits."

Mr. Hobson then proposes his collectivist program, which he rightly
considers to be not Socialist but Liberal merely--and we find it more
collectivistic, radical, and democratic than that of many so-called
Socialists. Moreover it expresses the views of a large and growing
proportion of the present Liberal Party. Then he concludes as follows:--

"If practical workers for social and industrial reforms continue to
ignore principles, the inevitable logic of events will nevertheless
drive them along the path of Collectivism here indicated. But they
will have to pay the price which shortsighted empiricism always
pays; with slow, hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable
false starts and backslidings, they will move in the dark along an
unseen track towards an unseen goal. Social development may be
conscious or unconscious. It has been mostly unconscious in the
past, and therefore slow, wasteful, and dangerous. If we desire it
to be swifter, safer, and more effective in the future, it must
become the conscious expression of the trained and organized will
of a people not despising theory as unpractical, but using it to
furnish economy in action."[134]

Practically all "State Socialists" hold a similar view to that of Shaw
and Webb. Mr. Wells even, in his "First and Last Things," has a lengthy
attack on what he calls democracy, when he tells us that its true name
is "insubordinat