Parliament and Democracy (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Parliament and Democracy<br><br>I wrote "Parliament and Revolution" to set out the general attitude which I thought the Independent Labour Party should adopt in the controversy between democracy and dictatorship as the means of establishing the Socialist State, and I wrote frankly confessing that I had no fine-spun theories of academic logic to explain or defend, but that I dealt with what seemed to me to be the difficulties in action which the two policies involved. "When is a revolution not a revolution and a dictatorship not a dictatorship" this, like similar problems which have recently appeared in political writings and have been discussed with all the nimble evasions of Schoolmen, was, candidly, no concern of mine. So soon as a body of men act upon mere words, they will discover that events pay little regard to verbal distinctions, and finely conceived schemes of things have no substance but the bricks and mortar which the theorists would conceal.<br><br>In dealing with the problems which men in action have to face, I indicated that certain changes ought to be made in our representative machinery. At the present time we have two sections in conflict-one declaring for regional representation, and for that alone, and the other for occupational representation, and for that alone: one basing its conception of government upon citizenship and the other upon industrial function. These are really not mutually exclusive, however much their ardent advocates try to make them so. They ought to be assimilated.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.