of what is above the officials, what drives the
officials. It is a palace without living rooms, with nothing but
offices; a machine, as yet unprovided with a motor. No doubt we must
have that organization of officials if we mean to bring about a
Socialist State, but the mind recoils with something like terror from
the conception of a State run and ruled by officials, terminating in
officials, with an official as its highest expression. One has a
vision of a community with blue-books instead of a literature, and
inspectors instead of a conscience. The mystical democracy of the
Marxist, though manifestly impossible, had in it something attractive,
something humanly and desperately pugnacious and generous, something
indeed heroic; the bureaucracy of the Webbite, though far more
attainable, is infinitely less inspiring. But that may be because the
inspiring elements remain to be stated rather than that these
practical constructive projects are in their nature, and incurably,
hard and narrow. Instead of a gorgeous flare in the darkness, we have
the first cold onset of daylight heralding the sun. If the letter of
the teaching of Mr. and Mrs. Webb is bureaucracy, that is certainly
not the spirit of their lives.

The earlier Socialists gave Socialism substance, _rudis indigestaque
moles_, but noble stuff; Administrative Socialism gave it a physical
structure and nerves, defined its organs and determined its functions;
it remains for the Socialist of to-day to realize in this shaping body
of the civilized State of the future the breath of life already
unconfessedly there, to state in clear terms the reality for which our
plans are made, by which alone they can be realized, that is to say,
_the collective mind of humanity, the soul and moral being of
mankind_.

CHAPTER XIII

CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM

Sec. 1.

Such a group of ideas and motives as Socialism, fundamentally true as
it is to the needs of life, and arising as it does from the inevitable
suggestion of very widely dispersed evils and insufficiencies, does
not spring from any one source, nor develop along any single line. It
appears as a smouldering fire appears, first here, then there, first
in one form of expression and then another, now under this name and
now under that.

The manifest new possibilities created by the progress of applied
science, the inevitable change of scale and of the size and conception
of a community that arises out of them, _neces