To
me it seems to resemble the policy of the wolf towards the lamb.[54]
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.
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