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

THEORY Of DEMOCRACY 785
Political democracy in fact is not an impediment to, but a
condition of the realization of economic equality;
Liberalism in the widest sense of the word is not the foe,
but the indispensable ally, of Socialism.
This section may appropriately be concluded with a
quotation from John Stuart Mill who, himself an individualist
and a democrat, was in the concluding years of
his life moving rapidly in the direction of what would be
now called Socialism.
"It appears to me that the great end of social improvement
should be to fit mankind by cultivation for a state
of society combining the greatest personal freedom with
that just distribution of the fruits of labour, which the
present laws of property do not profess to aim at. Whether,
when this state of mental and moral cultivation shall be
attained, individual property in some form (though in a
form very different from the present) or community of
ownership in the instruments of production and a regulated
division of the produce will afford the .circumstance most
favourable to happiness, and best calculated to bring
human nature to its greatest perfection, is a question which
must be left, as it safely may, to the people of that time to
decide. Those of the present are not competent to decide
Positive Function of the State in the Ethical Sphere.
To return to the sphere of ethics, it is, I have suggested,
the business of the State to provide that background of
order and security in which alone the individual can live the
good life, as he sees it. Such a background has a negative
and a positive aspect. Its negative aspect is a guarantee
against personal violence and security for possessions; its
positive aspect is the provision of the minimum training
for body and mind which are necessary, if the good life
is to be lived. Training for the body includes hygiene.
In this connection the democrat looks to the State to
establish an adequate drainage and sewage system, hospitals
for the sick, a public medical service, and a minimum