Excerpt from Towards Social Democracy? A Study of Social Evolution During the Past Three-Quarters of a Century, Vol. 1
The sketch here reproduced, of the course of development of social organisation during the past three-quarters of a century, was written seven years ago. It is impossible to read it to-day without asking in what way the persistent "stream of tendencies" that we detect between 1840 and 1914 is likely to be affected by the Great World War.
One thing seems plain. In so far as the changes of the last three-quarters of a century represent a development from an economic and political Individualism to an increasingly Collectivist organization of society, the movement will certainly go on from one end of the world to the other, probably with continuous acceleration. To speak only of this country, the war has brought us appreciably nearer to the Nationalisation of the Railways, Canals, and Coal supply, if not also of merchant shipping. Agriculture will not escape some local and experimental national intervention, for discharged soldiers and otherwise. The Government will inevitably be driven to reclaim for collective administration a quite unexpectedly large proportion of the tribute incomes of rent and interest that the landlords and capitalists fondly thought to be their own. The public control of mobile capital (which will certainly not again be quite free to flow whither it pleases), and of such requisites of increased national production as indispensable minerals, the plant and organisation of "key industries" and "essential trades," is evidently destined to be greatly increased.
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