GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

POLITICS
of enjoying high quality intcllcr^ial pleasures. In order
that die community might achievt 'excellence in this sense
it was, be thought, necessary that the laws should be
framed and the social scene set by those who were intellectually
superior to the average. Mill's constitutional
proposals represent an attempt to combine these two
requisites.
The following quotation will indicate the nature of the
compromise which Mill suggested between these two
conflicting principles:
"Nothing but the restriction of the function of representative
bodies within these rational limits, will enable
the benefits of popular control to be enjoyed in conjunction
with the no less important requisites (growing, ever more
important as human affairs increase in scale and complexity)
of skilled are no
legislation and administration. There
means .of combining these benefits except by
separating the functions which guarantee the one from
those which essentially require the other; by disjoining
the office of control and criticism from the actual conduct
of affairs, and developing the former on the representatives
of the Many, while securing for the latter, under strict
responsibility to the nation, the acquired knowledge and
practised intelligence ofa specially trained and experienced
Few."
The scheme has obvious advantages from the point of
view of the efficient conduct of public business. For the
function of law-making and the transaction of public
business Parliament it is on all hands admitted is an
extremely clumsy body. To quote from Shaw's Preface
to The Apple Cart:
11
Government, which used to be a comparatively simple
affair, to-day haul to manage an enormous development of
Socialism and Communism* Our industrial and social
life is set in a huge communistic framework of public
roadways, streets, bridges, water supply, power supply,
lighting, tramways, schools, dockyards, and public aids
and conveniences, employing a prodigious army of police,