THE FUTURE STATE.

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LV, Issue 37, 11 May 1934, Page 4

THE FUTURE STATE.

Out of the welter of economic confusion, financial difficulties and industrial disasters is to emerge the new state. Just as the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the industrial revolution, so the present critical years of the present century were portion of the revolution out of which the new state would emerge. Mr Walter Elliot, British Minister of Agriculture, in a recent; address, made reference to this great change and the part which the British people were to play. The new state, he said, would be one in which the people as a whole would have a great deal more spare time on their hands than they had today. He hoped that those whose time was all spare at present, the unemployed, would have less. But the machine State, the scientific State, would continue to produce unemployed. If they left them out in the cold, their numbers, willy-nilly, would continue to rise. If- they absorbed them into the body politic, production would no longer' be a full-time job for every adult citizen, as it was in Great Britain in the nineteenth century. Their main task, both economic and psychological, would be in those colossal adjustments. The stresses and strains of the new era were so terrific that an attempt to solve their problems within ( smaller areas of the world was more likely to succeed than within larger. Economic nationalism was denounced by many people who had not really applied their minds to the problems involved, and who spoke of it as a disease instead of a symptom of the coming of the leisure State. The Britain before them was not the capitalist England or Scotland of the nineteenth century, any more than it was feudal England or Scotland. Before they could make much progress with the new State, they had to resolve the clash between liberty and security at home, just as they had to resolve the clash between peace and justice abroad. He stood for organisation at home and for collective action abroad.

Later in his address he declared that the march of science was producing the phenomenon, loosely called economic nationalism, and then went on to say: Home development would inevitably be one of the keynotes of the age immediately before them. But it would have to be, not in order to grow rich, but in order to live fully and reasonably. Agriculture was the first industry to grasp the necessity for economic self-discipline, economic self-government, if that change was to be secured. The nation as a whole was only beginning to grasp the necessity, but it was grasping it successfully. It would thereafter have to grapple with the still more exacting task of psychological selfdiscipline when it attempted to utilise the spare time, the leisure, which that further development would demand. "We are tackling the questions of to-day with no violent change of policy such as it would seem has been necessary in the United States. We have tackled them with no violent revolution, such as apparently was found necessary in Germany or in Russia. Yet I think we have got as far along the road as any of those three. The great problem in our changing times is whether we can keep the pace of adaptation quick enough to keep abreast of changing circumstances."