I speak as an economist and not as a physical scientist or an engineer. I accept as an accomplished fact, or as a fact in process, that ours is an age of technological advance. I assert that in all this there is only a limited significance unless its benefits come to the masses of the people. The lead that the British nation has given toward industrial democracy over three-quarters of a century through collective bargaining and through the other expressions of the will and desires of the workers is one of the finest achievements of modern civilization. Marching with political democracy and the democratization of education, it represents the most widespread set of benefits, materially and morally, that has come to humanity in our day and the day of our fathers and grandfathers. And I say this in full knowledge of the limited success of the British Labour party while in power in Parliament.

First, the political expression of labour in Britain is a part of the recognized functioning of democracy and as such is freely admitted. Second, the co-operative movement represents in a limited way the democratization of the property institution. Control over the buying and the production is as wide as the membership, and there is no profit running with investment. Third, the organization into unions partakes also of the nature of democracy so far as relations within the unions is concerned. But beyond that, when it comes to dealing with the powerful competing elements in an organized economy, viz., the capital-owning and profit-taking interests, it drops in large measure the democratic methods of discussion and decision and concern for the individual expression of every man. It takes up rather the weapons of the capitalist economy, viz., the concentration of power to drive hard bargains and even to force them upon the other party. Unionism—and I am thinking chiefly of its chief strand, the collective bargaining unionism—assumes a continuing opposition of interest between the propertied and controlling interests on the one hand and labour on the other, and between them battle must be done. That assumption brings in a point of view that is narrower in its compass than a democratic concern for the whole society and a methodology that seeks to elevate a single group with little concern for other sections of the community.