Harold J. Laski

Jones is not merely Jones, but also a miner, a railwayman, a cotton operative, an engineer.

But its error was not to see that the community is not merely a mass of discrete individuals.

It assumed that each of these, given liberation from the special privilege of the ancien régime, had the full means of happiness at his disposal; it accepted, in a word, the principles of Benthamite radicalism as absolute.

But it never understood either the fact of trade unionism or the philosophy of trade unionism.

English Liberalism has suffered eclipse because, broadly speaking, it was unable to discover an industrial philosophy suitable to the wants of the new electorate.

The result was that the knowledge at the disposal of Liberals and Conservatives, the significant experience upon which they could draw for the making of their policy, was always more narrow than the area of the problems they had to meet.

It rose to power largely because there was no room in the leadership of the historic parties for self-made men who had not sought success either as lawyers or as business men.

These, where they emerge in the people, will always seek the means of their satisfaction.

There is no method known of confining character and energy and ability to their own ranks.

But that, in the end, always means that the vital power of the people is absent at the moment when it is most required.

They dwarf the masses that they may the better contemplate the stateliness of their own state.

The development of the total resources at their disposal is postponed to the preservation of their interest and convenience.

In each case, a blind government confronted men who knew how to formulate their wants, and to organize their attainment.

The success of the Puritan Rebellion and the American Revolution was built upon the fact that, in each case, the exercise of power had been a habit of the general population; in the one case in the management of Nonconformist Churches, in…

An aristocracy, in a word, deprives its subjects of character and responsibility; and as the revolutions of 1848 so clearly demonstrated, while they can destroy, they have never been taught how to create.

It develops a sense of indignation because its interests are neglected; but it does not know how to attach its indignation to the right objects or, when so attached, how to remedy the ills from which it suffers.

Its depression of the people has the dangerous effect of persuading the latter of its necessary inferiority.

It does not know how to act wisely at the very moment when it most requires wise action.

An aristocracy, in a word, is the prisoner of its own power, and that the most completely when men begin to question its authority.

It may be generous, charitable, kind; but the surrounding principle of those qualities is always their exercise as of grace and not in justice.

It is so accustomed to the idea of its own superiority, that it is resentful of considerations which inquire into the validity of that assumption.

It tends to think them unimportant if they are urged tactfully, and dangerous if they are urged with vigour.

An aristocracy, whether of birth, or creed, or wealth, always suffers from self-sufficiency.

The energy and capacity of which it might make use are not released for action; and the concentration of effective power in a few hands means that the wishes, opinions, needs, of the majority do not receive sufficient consideration.

They realized, first, that in any society where power is gravely unequal, the character and intelligence of those at the base is unnaturally depressed.