Functional socialism

GENESIS 19

must live down its unhappy reputation; for, after all, it is the right word. The present antipathy will disappear when culture becomes our common heritage —a heritage of leisure, in which the human being shall know beauty and truth.

The logic of functional devolution tends to the ultimate institution of the tripartite or threefold state—the House of Commons, the House of Industry and the House of Culture. Being myself a natural conservative, disliking change for change’s sake, I was not a little disquieted when this conclusion was forced upon me. But, on consideration, I saw that it involved little more than the healthy transformation of a State already threefold, for that is what the British Constitution is to-day. We have the Crown, the Lords and the Commons. But the Crown has now changed its métier. It has become, legally and in increasing practice, the connecting link, essentially a symbol, common to Great Britain and the Dominions. The Lords are now by common consent moribund. They merely await translation to the Elysian Fields, where they can discuss nod/esse oblige, which so many of them forgot when on earth. Moreover it is easy to argue that, in fact though not in form, they have been for centuries the Economic Chamber of the Realm. Through many generations, they have kept watch and ward over the economic system which made them what they were. What they were; but what they have ceased to be. Their substitution, therefore, by a living reality, the House of Industry, is in the tradition. The British Constitution