the conditions of the good life.  Trade unions have grown and are still steadily growing in size and importance.  For a large portion of the nation loyalty to a trade union has become the most obvious form of collective loyalty or general will.  This has been accompanied by an inevitable decrease in what we may call territorial loyalty.  The result of the increase in means of communication and the growth of large towns has been that men’s common interests as members of the same trade or as employees in the same workshop are coming to mean more and to constitute a greater common bond between men than their common interests as dwellers in the same locality.  The trade union has often a more live and real general will than the Parliamentary constituency.  Men’s aspirations and ideals for their common life are being expressed more truly through trade union organizations than through Parliament.  The growth in the prestige of organized labour is therefore coincident with a decay in the prestige of Parliament.  Parliament, however, based on a local sub-division of the nation, is at present the only political organization of the nation.  Trade union organization, as a political organization, has no constitutional authority, and all the general will which it represents can find no regular national expression.  The result is that it either uses the territorial organization by getting men who really represent their Trade Union elected as members for Parliamentary local constituencies, to the detriment of both the territorial and the trade union organization, or acts as an imperium in imperio by making demands on and issuing ultimata to Parliament.  We seem to be approaching a crisis where the trade unions are asking whether they will allow the state to exist.

This is obviously an unsatisfactory state of affairs.  What is the cure for it?  Differentiation of functions, as I have said, will not help us here.  Some writers have maintained that vocational organization should concern itself with industrial or economic matters, the state, as we know it, with political matters.  But can we possibly distinguish between industrial and political matters?  If the aim of politics is to regulate men’s actions in the light of men’s common interests, the action of a trade union is in its essence political.  Its differentiation from government is that it is concerned with the common interests of a few rather than the common interests of all.  The difference between a trade union and a parliamentary constituency is that the sub-division of the general common interest which each represents rests on a different basis of division.  The whole community might as well be organized by vocations as it now is by localities.  There would seem to be certain advantages in both principles of differentiation, and one obvious practical solution of our present difficulties is that the supreme organ of government should in its two chambers represent the nation as organized on both principles, vocational and territorial.