I will proceed with quotations from Mr. Barker, because the view of a historian of thought is weightier than anything I could say. "But collectivism also demands in the second place expert government. It demands the 'aristocracy of talent' of which Carlyle wrote. The control of a State with powers so vast will obviously need an exceptional and exceptionally large aristocracy. Those opponents of Fabianism who desire something more revolutionary than its political 'meliorism' and 'palliatives' accuse it of alliance with bureaucracy. They urge that it relies on bureaucracy to administer social reforms from above; and they conclude that, since any governing _class_ is anti-democratic, the Fabians who believe in such a class are really anti-democratic. The charge seems, as a matter of fact, difficult to sustain. Fabians from the first felt and urged that the decentralisation of the State was a necessary condition of the realisation of their aim. The municipality and other local units were the natural bodies for administering the new funds and discharging the new duties which the realisation of that aim would create. 'A democratic State,' Shaw wrote, 'cannot become a Social Democratic State unless it has in every centre of population a local governing body as thoroughly democratic in its constitution as the central Parliament.' The House of Commons he felt must develop 'into the central government which will be the organ of federating the municipalities.' Fabianism thus implied no central bureaucracy; what it demanded was partly, indeed, a more efficient and expert central government (and there is plenty of room for that), but primarily an expert local civil service in close touch with and under the control of a really democratic municipal government. It is difficult to say that this is bureaucracy or that it is not desirable. Many men who are not Fabians or Socialists of any kind feel strongly that the breathing of more vigour and interest into local politics, and the creation of a proper local civil service, are the great problems of the future.