I have taken this account from the official report. I have been told by New York people that these commissions have shown few signs of life. This does not, however, seem to me to detract from the value of the plan as a suggestion, or as indication of what is seen to be advisable if not yet wholly practicable. The New York charter provides for Local Improvement Boards as connecting links with the central government, but these I am told have shown no life whatever. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE OCCUPATIONAL GROUP ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XXVIII POLITICAL PLURALISM -------------- ALL that I have written has been based on the assumption of the unifying state. Moreover I have spoken of neighborhood organization as if it were possible to take it for granted that the neighborhood group is to be the basis of the new state. The truth of both these assumptions is denied by some of our most able thinkers. The unified state is now discredited in many quarters. Syndicalists, guild socialists, some of the Liberals in England, some of the advocates of occupational representation in America, and a growing school of writers who might be called political pluralists are throwing the burden of much proof upon the state, and are proposing group organization as the next step in political method. To some the idea of the state is abhorrent. One writer says, “The last hundred years marked in all countries the beginning of the dissolution of the State and of the resurrection of corporate life [trade unions etc.].... In the face of this growth of syndicalism in every direction, ... it is no longer venturesome to assert that the State is dead.” Others like to keep the word “state” but differ much as to the position it is to occupy in the new order: to some it seems to be merely a kind of mucilage to keep the various groups together; with others the state is to hold the ring while different groups fight out their differences. Still other thinkers, while seeing the open door to scepticism in regard to the state, are nevertheless not ready to pass through, but, preserving the instinct and the reverence for the unity of the state, propose as the most immediate object of our study how the unity can be brought about, what is to be the true and perfect bond of union between the multiple groups of our modern life. All these thinkers, differing widely as they do, yet may be roughly classed together as the upholders of a multiple group organization as the basis for a new state.