The distinction here indicated between industries that can and should be “socialized” in ownership and control and those which cannot and should not, is one of the most important economic lessons to be learnt in our time. More and more, as I shall show, it has affected my own economic thinking, and my political attachments. For loosely but sincerely attached to Liberalism before the rise of a Labour Party, I formally resigned my membership when during the War Liberals of the Government abandoned Free Trade. The only time I stood for Parliament was in the 1918 election when I conducted a hopeless campaign as an Independent. Though since then my sympathies have been with the Labour Party, I have never felt quite at home in a body governed by trade union members and their finance, and intellectually led by full-blooded Socialists. For neither section of this Labour Party avowedly accepts that middle course which seems to me essential to a progressive and constructive economic government in this country. It may be that Socialism under its present leadership is shedding the dogmatism of its early shape. But it still seems a long way from the formulation of a policy which commands the intellectual assent and the moral enthusiasm needed to break the indifference and traditional servitude of the mass of an electorate unaccustomed to thinking and subject to the wily propaganda of “vested interests” in moments of real or fabricated crisis.
