Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
The necessity either of raising the quality of representative bodies
or of replacing them not only in administration but in legislation by
bureaucracies of officials appointed by elected or hereditary rulers, is
one that presses on all thoughtful men, and is by no means an academic
question needed to round off this New Republican theory. The necessity
becomes more urgent every day, as scientific and economic developments
raise first one affair and then another to the level of public or
quasi-public functions. In the last century, locomotion, lighting,
heating, education, forced themselves upon public control or public
management, and now with the development of Trusts a whole host of
businesses, that were once the affair of competing private concerns,
claim the same attention. Government by hustings’ bawling, newspaper
clamour, and ward organization, is more perilous every day and more
impotent, and unless we are prepared to see a government _de facto_
of rich business organizers override the government _de jure_, or to
relapse upon a practical oligarchy of officials, an oligarchy that
will certainly decline in efficiency in a generation or so, we must set
ourselves most earnestly to this problem of improving representative
methods. It is in the direction of the substitution of the Jury method
for a general poll that the only practicable line of improvement known
to the present writer seems to lie, and until it has been tried it
cannot be conceded that democratic government has been tried and
exhaustively proved inadequate to the complex needs of the modern state.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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