Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/30

 26 its promoters in Parliament, to be a democratic measure—nor a first step towards democracy. It proceeded from the aristocracy and was, at the time, consistent with aristocratic government. But something happens with all these beginnings. They have laws of their own being. They tend to fulfil themselves. Their sequel turns out to be the very thing which their authors disclaimed. Man acts; natural law fulfils his action. Thus the offspring of Whiggism is Liberalism, and the child of a reforming aristocracy is democracy. Social organisation being for the wellbeing of the whole community, the will to which it is obedient in its actions must in the end be the will of the community directly expressed by majority rule. The political sovereignty by which alone the organisation can act tends to be democratic.

The last century in England is known as the century of individualism, because during its two middle quarters in particular the pendulum swung far towards the extreme of individual liberty of the atomic or mechanical kind. The community as an organic unity, as the medium through which individual liberty has to be expressed, became a shadow. The oscillation passed from the hampering organisation of feudalism to the desolating anarchy of laissez-faire.

But even during the nineteenth century communal action did not disappear; towards