220 ENGLISH SAGA

character of the British working-class movement. Its intellectual
leaders set up the state as the deus ex machina which was to rescue
society from the abuses of individualism. But the state is an
abstraction and its supremacy can only be exercised through
individuals. If the state is to be all powerful, the individuals who
exercise its authority must be all powerful, too. To a Latin,
German or Russian socialist, accustomed from birth to the ideal
of an overriding centralised despo,tism, there was nothing repug-
nant in such a daim. But in England, the traditional home of
individual liberty, a proposition that restored to a state official
the power of the Stuart kings was disquieting. To argue that
. this omnipotent Whitehall would in turn be controlled by the
elected representatives of the people was merely to say that un-
controlled power should rest in the hands of whoever could
persuade or hoax the electorate into entrusting it to them. It
might be a party caucus, it might be a popular dictator. It might
even be the very capitalist whom the new state power was de-
signed to suppress.

The early socialists in their enthusiasm for their thesis did not
detect the weakness in their remedy. Their emotional appeal to
the masses, and even more to their middle-class sympathisers,
was to that love of liberty .which the capitalist monopoly over
the work and daily life of millions had outraged. Yet by attack-
ing the private ownership of property they struck unconsciously
at the foundation on which in the historic polity of England's
individual liberty had always rested. Because the privilege of
ownership had ceased to be widespread as in the past and had
become restricted to the few, they supposed that its destruction
would extend the freedom of the many.

They forgot that, apart from economic liberty, political
liberty has little meaning. Only so long as a man knows that he
can defy superior power and still support himself and his loved
ones is he a free man,,. Without that knowledge, whatever his
standard of living or theoretical status, he is a kind of slave. And
when all power is vested in the state and the state is the owner
both of the workers' homes and the means of production, private
liberty becomes a rather nebulous thing. There was little
enough liberty for the workers under the rule of the nineteenth-
century joint-stock capitalist, except, of course, the liberty to
starve. But in the Fabian paradise which was to take its place,
though there might be a great deal more comfort, there was to