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True/False
Indicate whether the statement is true or false.

____ 1. Computer science focuses on a broad set of interrelated ideas.

____ 2. Informally, a computing agent is like a recipe.

____ 3. An algorithm describes a process that ends with a solution to a problem.

____ 4. Each individual instruction in an algorithm is well defined.

____ 5. An algorithm describes a process that may or may not halt after arriving at a solution to a problem.

____ 6. An algorithm solves a general class of problems.

____ 7. The algorithms that describe information processing can also be represented as information.

____ 8. When using a computer, human users primarily interact with the memory.

____ 9. Information is stored as patterns of bytes (1s and 0s).

____ 10. The part of a computer that is responsible for processing data is the central processing unit (CPU).

____ 11. Magnetic storage media, such as tapes and hard disks, allow bit patterns to be stored as patterns on a
magnetic field.

____ 12. A program stored in computer memory must be represented in binary digits, which is also known as ascii
code.

____ 13. The most important example of system software is a computer’s operating system.

____ 14. An important part of any operating system is its file system, which allows human users to organize their
data and programs in permanent storage.

____ 15. A programmer typically starts by writing high-level language statements in a text editor.

____ 16. Ancient mathematicians developed the first algorithms.

____ 17. In the 1930s, the mathematician Blaise Pascal explored the theoretical foundations and limits of
algorithms and computation.
____ 18. The first electronic digital computers, sometimes called mainframe computers, consisted of vacuum tubes,
wires, and plugs, and filled entire rooms.

____ 19. In the early 1940s, computer scientists realized that a symbolic notation could be used instead of machine
code, and the first assembly languages appeared.

____ 20. The development of the transistor in the early 1960s allowed computer engineers to build ever smaller,
faster, and less expensive computer hardware components.

____ 21. Moore’s Law states that the processing speed and storage capacity of hardware will increase and its cost
will decrease by approximately a factor of 3 every 18 months.

____ 22. In the 1960s, batch processing sometimes caused a programmer to wait days for results, including error
messages.

____ 23. In 1984, Apple Computer brought forth the Macintosh, the first successful mass-produced personal
computer with a graphical user interface.

____ 24. By the mid 1980s, the ARPANET had grown into what we now call the Internet, connecting computers
owned by large institutions, small organizations, and individuals all over the world.

____ 25. Steve Jobs wrote the first Web server and Web browser software.

____ 26. Guido van Rossum invented the Python programming language in the early 1990s.

____ 27. In Python, the programmer can force the output of a value by using the cout statement.

____ 28. When executing the print statement, Python first displays the value and then evaluates the expression.

____ 29. When writing Python programs, you should use a .pyt extension.

____ 30. The interpreter reads a Python expression or statement, also called the source code, and verifies that it is
well formed.

____ 31. If a Python expression is well formed, the interpreter translates it to an equivalent form in a low-level
language called byte code.

Multiple Choice
Identify the choice that best completes the statement or answers the question.

____ 32. The sequence of steps that describes a computational processes is called a(n) ____.
a. program c. pseudocode
b. computing agent d. algorithm
____ 33. An algorithm consists of a(n) ____ number of instructions.
a. finite c. predefined
b. infinite d. undefined
____ 34. The action described by the instruction in an algorithm can be performed effectively or be executed by a
____.
a. computer c. computing agent
b. processor d. program
____ 35. In the modern world of computers, information is also commonly referred to as ____.
a. data c. input
b. bits d. records
____ 36. In carrying out the instructions of any algorithm, the computing agent starts with some given information
(known as ____).
a. data c. input
b. variables d. output
____ 37. In carrying out the instructions of any algorithm, the computing agent transforms some given information
according to well-defined rules, and produces new information, known as ____.
a. data c. input
b. variables d. output
____ 38. ____ consists of the physical devices required to execute algorithms.
a. Firmware c. I/O
b. Hardware d. Processors
____ 39. ____ is the set of algorithms, represented as programs in particular programming languages.
a. Freeware c. Software
b. Shareware d. Dataset
____ 40. In a computer, the ____ devices include a keyboard, a mouse, and a microphone.
a. memory c. input
b. CPU d. output
____ 41. Computers can communicate with the external world through various ____ that connect them to networks
and to other devices such as handheld music players and digital cameras.
a. facilities c. racks
b. ports d. slots
____ 42. The primary memory of a computer is also sometimes called internal or ____.
a. read-only memory (ROM) c. flash memory
b. random access memory (RAM) d. associative memory
____ 43. The CPU, which is also sometimes called a ____, consists of electronic switches arranged to perform
simple logical, arithmetic, and control operations.
a. motherboard c. chip
b. computing agent d. processor
____ 44. Flash memory sticks are an example of ____ storage media.
a. semiconductor c. optical
b. magnetic d. primary
____ 45. Tapes and hard disks are an example of ____ storage media.
a. semiconductor c. optical
b. magnetic d. primary
____ 46. CDs and DVDs are an example of ____ storage media.
 a. semiconductor c. optical
b. magnetic d. primary
____ 47. A ____ takes a set of machine language instructions as input and loads them into the appropriate memory
locations.
a. compiler c. loader
b. linker d. interpreter
____ 48. A modern ____ organizes the monitor screen around the metaphor of a desktop, with windows containing
icons for folders, files, and applications.
a. GUI c. terminal-based interface
b. CLI d. applications software
____ 49. ____ programming languages resemble English and allow the author to express algorithms in a form that
other people can understand.
a. Assembly c. Low-level
b. Interpreted d. High-level
____ 50. Early in the nineteenth century, ____ designed and constructed a machine that automated the process of
weaving.
a. George Boole c. Herman Hollerith
b. Joseph Jacquard d. Charles Babbage
____ 51. ____ took the concept of a programmable computer a step further by designing a model of a machine that,
conceptually, bore a striking resemblance to a modern general-purpose computer.
a. George Boole c. Herman Hollerith
b. Joseph Jacquard d. Charles Babbage
____ 52. ____ developed a machine that automated data processing for the U.S. Census.
a. George Boole c. Herman Hollerith
b. Joseph Jacquard d. Charles Babbage
____ 53. ____ developed a system of logic which consisted of a pair of values, TRUE and FALSE, and a set of
three primitive operations on these values, AND, OR, and NOT.
a. George Boole c. Herman Hollerith
b. Joseph Jacquard d. Charles Babbage
____ 54. ____ was considered ideal for numerical and scientific applications.
a. COBOL c. LISP
b. Machine code d. FORTRAN
____ 55. In its early days, ____ was used primarily for laboratory experiments in an area of research known as
artificial intelligence.
a. COBOL c. LISP
b. Machine code d. FORTRAN
____ 56. In science or any other area of enquiry, a(n) ____ allows human beings to reduce complex ideas or entities
to simpler ones.
a. abstraction c. module
b. algorithm d. compiler
____ 57. In the early 1980s, a college dropout named Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen built their own
operating system software, which they called ____.
a. LISP c. MS-DOS
 b. Windows d. Linux
____ 58. Python is a(n) ____ language.
a. functional c. interpreted
b. assembly d. compiled
____ 59. To quit the Python shell, you can either select the window’s close box or press the ____ key combination.
a. Control+C c. Control+Z
b. Control+D d. Control+X
____ 60. In Python, you can write a print statement that includes two or more expressions separated by ____.
a. periods c. colons
b. commas d. semicolons
____ 61. The Python interpreter rejects any statement that does not adhere to the grammar rules, or ____, of the
language.
a. code c. definition
b. library d. syntax
1
Answer Section

TRUE/FALSE

1. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 2

2. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 3
3. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 3
4. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 3
5. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 4
6. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 4
7. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 5
8. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 6
9. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 7
10. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 7
11. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 8
12. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 8
13. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 8
14. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 9
15. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 9
16. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 11
17. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 15
18. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 16
19. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 16
20. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 18
21. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 18
22. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 19
23. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 20
24. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 21
25. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 23
26. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 23
27. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 25
28. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 25
29. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: 28
30. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 30
31. ANS: T PTS: 1 REF: 30

MULTIPLE CHOICE

32. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: 3

33. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 3
34. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 3
35. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 4
36. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 5
37. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: 5
38. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 6
39. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 6
40. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 6
41. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 6
42. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 7
43. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: 7
44. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 8
45. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 8
46. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 8
47. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 8
48. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 9
49. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: 9
50. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 14
51. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: 14
52. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 14
53. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 14-15
54. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: 17
55. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 17
56. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: 18
57. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 21
58. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: 23
59. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 25
60. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: 25
61. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: 30
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is breaking down, and that we have to discover a new, more equable
way of getting the world’s work done.
Certain things stand out pretty obviously. It is clear that in the
times ahead of us there must be more economy in giving trouble and
causing work, a greater willingness to do work for ourselves, a great
economy of labour through machinery and skilful management. So
much is unavoidable if we are to meet these enlarged requirements
upon which the insurgent worker insists. If we, who have at least
some experience of affairs, who own property, manage businesses,
and discuss and influence public organisation, if we are not prepared
to undertake this work of discipline and adaptation for ourselves,
then a time is not far distant when insurrectionary leaders, calling
themselves Socialists or Syndicalists, or what not, men with none of
our experience, little of our knowledge, and far less hope of success,
will take that task out of our hands.[1]
1. Larkinism comes to endorse me since this was written.
We have, in fact, to “pull ourselves together,” as the phrase goes,
and make an end to all this slack, extravagant living, this spectacle of
pleasure, that has been spreading and intensifying in every civilised
community for the last three or four decades. What is happening to
Labour is indeed, from one point of view, little else than the
correlative of what has been happening to the more prosperous
classes in the community. They have lost their self-discipline, their
gravity, their sense of high aims, they have become the victims of
their advantages, and Labour, grown observant and intelligent, has
discovered itself and declares itself no longer subordinate. Just what
powers of recovery and reconstruction our system may have under
these circumstances the decades immediately before us will show.
 §4
Let us try to anticipate some of the social developments that are
likely to spring out of the present labour situation.
It is quite conceivable, of course, that what lies before us is not
development but disorder. Given sufficient suspicion on one side and
sufficient obstinacy and trickery on the other, it may be impossible to
restore social peace in any form, and industrialism may degenerate
into a wasteful and incurable conflict. But that distressful possibility
is the worst and perhaps the least probable of many. It is much more
acceptable to suppose that our social order will be able to adjust itself
to the new outlook and temper and quality of the labour stratum that
elementary education, a Press very cheap and free, and a period of
great general affluence have brought about.
One almost inevitable feature of any such adaptation will be a
changed spirit in the general body of society. We have come to a
serious condition of our affairs, and we shall not get them into order
again without a thorough bracing-up of ourselves in the process.
There can be no doubt that for a large portion of our comfortable
classes existence has been altogether too easy for the last lifetime or
so. The great bulk of the world’s work has been done out of their
sight and knowledge; it has seemed unnecessary to trouble much
about the general conduct of things, unnecessary, as they say, to
“take life too seriously.” This has not made them so much vicious as
slack, lazy, and over-confident; there has been an elaboration of
trivial things and a neglect of troublesome and important things. The
one grave shock of the Boer war has long been explained and
sentimentalised away. But it will not be so easy to explain away a
dislocated train service and an empty coal cellar as it was to get a
favourable interpretation upon some demonstration of national
incompetence half the world away.
It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation,
that the British prosperous and the British successful, to whom
warning after warning has rained in vain from the days of Ruskin,
Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, should be called to account at last in their
own household. They will grumble, they will be very angry, but in the
end, I believe, they will rise to the opportunities of their
inconvenience. They will shake off their intellectual lassitude, take
over again the public and private affairs they have come to leave so
largely in the hands of the political barrister and the family solicitor,
become keen and critical and constructive, bring themselves up to
date again.
That is not, of course, inevitable, but I am taking now the more
hopeful view.
And then? What sort of working arrangements are our renascent
owning and directing classes likely to make with the new labouring
class? How is the work going to be done in the harder, cleaner, more
equalised, and better managed State that, in one’s hopeful mood, one
sees ahead of us?
Now after the experiences of the past twelve months, it is obvious
that the days when most of the directed and inferior work of the
community will be done by intermittently employed and
impecunious wage-earners is drawing to an end. A large part of the
task of reconstruction ahead of us will consist in the working out of
schemes for a more permanent type of employment and for a direct
participation of the worker in the pride, profits and direction of the
work. Such schemes admit of wide variations between a mere bonus
system, a periodic tipping of the employees to prevent their striking,
and a real and honest co-partnery.
In the latter case a great enterprise, forced to consider its “hands”
as being also in their degree “heads,” would include a department of
technical and business instruction for its own people. From such
ideas one passes very readily to the conception of guild-managed
businesses, in which the factor of capital would no longer stand out
as an element distinct from and contrasted with the proprietorship of
the workers. One sees the worker as an active and intelligent helper
during the great portion of his participation, and as an annuitant and
perhaps, if he has devised economies and improvements, a receiver
of royalties during his declining years.
And concurrently with the systematic reconstruction of a large
portion of our industries upon these lines there will have to be a
vigorous development of the attempts that are already being made,
in garden cities, garden suburbs, and the like, to re-house the mass
of our population in a more civilised and more agreeable manner.
Probably that is not going to pay from the point of view of the
money-making business man, but we prosperous people have to
understand that there are things more important and more
profitable than money-making, and we have to tax ourselves not
merely in money, but in time, care, and effort in the matter. Half the
money that goes out of England to Switzerland and the Riviera ought
to go to the extremely amusing business of clearing up ugly corners
and building jolly and convenient workmen’s cottages—even if we do
it at a loss. It is part of our discharge for the leisure and advantages
the system has given us, part of that just give and take, over and
above the solicitor’s and bargain-hunter’s and money-lender’s
conception of justice, upon which social order ultimately rests. We
have to do it not in a mood of patronage, but in a mood of attentive
solicitude. If not on high grounds, then on low grounds our class has
to set to work and make those other classes more interested and
comfortable and contented. It is what we are for. It is quite
impossible for workmen and poor people generally to plan estates
and arrange their own homes; they are entirely at the mercy of the
wealthy in this matter. There is not a slum, not a hovel, not an
eyesore upon the English landscape for which some well-off owner is
not ultimately to be blamed or excused, and the less we leave of such
things about the better for us in that day of reckoning between class
and class which now draws so near.
It is as plain now as the way from Calais to Paris that if the owning
class does not attend to these amenities the mass of the people, doing
its best to manage the thing through the politicians, presently will.
They may make a frightful mess of it, but that will never bring back
things again into the hands that hold them and neglect them. Their
time will have passed for ever.
But these are the mere opening requirements of this hope of mine
of a quickened social consciousness among the more fortunate and
leisurely section of the community. I believe that much profounder
changes in the conditions of labour are possible than those I have
suggested. I am beginning to suspect that scarcely any of our
preconceptions about the way work must be done, about the hours of
work and the habits of work, will stand an exhaustive scientific
analysis. It is at least conceivable that we could get much of the work
that has to be done to keep our community going in far more toil-
saving and life-saving ways than we follow at the present time. So far
scientific men have done scarcely anything to estimate under what
conditions a man works best, does most work, works more happily.
Suppose it turns out to be the case that a man always following one
occupation throughout his lifetime, working regularly day after day
for so many hours, as most wage-earners do at the present time, does
not do nearly so much or nearly so well as he would do if he followed
first one occupation and then another, or if he worked as hard as he
possibly could for a definite period and then took holiday? I suspect
very strongly, indeed I am convinced, that in certain occupations,
teaching, for example, or surgery, a man begins by working clumsily
and awkwardly, that his interest and skill rise rapidly, that if he is
really well suited in his profession, he may presently become
intensely interested and capable of enormous quantities of his very
best work, and that then his interest and vigour rapidly decline. I am
disposed to believe that this is true of most occupations, of coal
mining or engineering, or bricklaying or cotton-spinning. The thing
has never been properly thought about. Our civilisation has grown
up in a haphazard kind of way, and it has been convenient to
specialise workers and employ them piecemeal. But if it is true that
in respect of any occupation a man has his period of maximum
efficiency, then we open up a whole world of new social possibilities.
What we really want from a man for our social welfare in that case is
not regular continuing work, but a few strenuous years of high-
pressure service. We can as a community afford to keep him longer
at education and training before he begins, and we can release him
with a pension while he is still full of life and the capacity for
enjoying freedom. But obviously this is impossible upon any basis of
weekly wages and intermittent employment; we must be handling
affairs in some much more comprehensive way than that before we
can take and deal with the working life of a man as one complete
whole.
That is one possibility that is frequently in my thoughts about the
present labour crisis. There is another, and that is the great
desirability of every class in the community having a practical
knowledge of what labour means. There is a vast amount of work
which either is now or is likely to be in the future within the domain
of the public administration—road-making, mining, railway work,
post-office and telephone work, medical work, nursing, a
considerable amount of building, for example. Why should we
employ people to do the bulk of these things at all? Why should we
not as a community do them ourselves? Why, in other words, should
we not have a labour conscription and take a year or so of service
from everyone in the community, high or low? I believe this would be
of enormous moral benefit to our strained and relaxed community. I
believe that in making labour a part of everyone’s life and the whole
of nobody’s life lies the ultimate solution of these industrial
difficulties.
 §5
It is almost a national boast that we “muddle through” our
troubles, and I suppose it is true and to our credit that by virtue of a
certain kindliness of temper, a humorous willingness to make the
best of things, and an entirely amiable forgetfulness, we do come out
of pressures and extremities that would smash a harder, more brittle
people, only a little chipped and damaged. And it is quite conceivable
that our country will, in a measure, survive the enormous stresses of
labour adjustment that are now upon us, even if it never rises to any
heroic struggle against these difficulties. But it may survive as a
lesser country, as an impoverished and second-rate country. It will
certainly do no more than that, if in any part of the world there is to
be found a people capable of taking up this gigantic question in a
greater spirit. Perhaps there is no such people, and the conflicts and
muddles before us will be worldwide. Or suppose that it falls to our
country in some strange way to develop a new courage and
enterprise, and to be the first to go forward into this new phase of
civilisation I foresee, from which a distinctive labouring class, a class
that is of expropriated wage-earners, will have almost completely
disappeared.
Now hitherto the utmost that any State, overtaken by social and
economic stresses, has ever achieved in the way of adapting itself to
them has been no more than patching.
Individuals and groups and trades have found themselves in
imperfectly apprehended and difficult times, and have reluctantly
altered their ways and ideas piecemeal under pressure. Sometimes
they have succeeded in rubbing along upon the new lines, and
sometimes the struggle has submerged them, but no community has
ever yet had the will and the imagination to recast and radically alter
its social methods as a whole. The idea of such a reconstruction has
never been absent from human thought since the days of Plato, and
it has been enormously reinforced by the spreading material
successes of modern science, successes due always to the
substitution of analysis and reasoned planning for trial and the rule
of thumb. But it has never yet been so believed in and understood as
to render any real endeavour to reconstruct possible. The experiment
has always been altogether too gigantic for the available faith behind
it, and there have been against it the fear of presumption, the
interests of all advantaged people, and the natural sloth of humanity.
We do but emerge now from a period of deliberate happy-go-lucky
and the influence of Herbert Spencer, who came near raising public
shiftlessness to the dignity of a national philosophy. Everything
would adjust itself—if only it was left alone.
Yet some things there are that cannot be done by small
adjustments, such as leaping chasms or killing an ox or escaping
from the roof of a burning house. You have to decide upon a certain
course on such occasions and maintain a continuous movement. If
you wait on the burning house until you scorch and then turn round
a bit or move away a yard or so, or if on the verge of a chasm you
move a little in the way in which you wish to go, disaster will punish
your moderation. And it seems to me that the establishment of the
world’s work upon a new basis—and that and no less is what this
Labour Unrest demands for its pacification—is just one of those large
alterations which will never be made by the collectively unconscious
activities of men, by competitions and survival and the higgling of
the market. Humanity is rebelling against the continuing existence of
a labour class as such, and I can see no way by which our present
method of weekly wages employment can change by imperceptible
increments into a method of salary and pension—for it is quite
evident that only by reaching that shall we reach the end of these
present discontents. The change has to be made on a comprehensive
scale or not at all. We need nothing less than a national plan of social
development if the thing is to be achieved.
Now that, I admit, is, as the Americans say, a large proposition.
But we are living in a time of more and more comprehensive plans,
and the mere fact that no scheme so extensive has ever been tried
before is no reason at all why we should not consider one. We think
nowadays quite serenely of schemes for the treatment of the nation’s
health as one whole, where our fathers considered illness as a blend
of accident with special providences; we have systematised the
community’s water supply, education, and all sorts of once chaotic
services, and Germany and our own infinite higgledy-piggledy
discomfort and ugliness have brought home to us at last even the
possibility of planning the extension of our towns and cities. It is
only another step upward in scale to plan out new, more tolerable
conditions of employment for every sort of worker and to organise
the transition from our present disorder.
The essential difficulty between the employer and the statesman in
the consideration of this problem is the difference in the scope of
their view. The employer’s concern with the man who does his work
is day-long or week-long; the statesman’s is life-long. The conditions
of private enterprise and modern competition oblige the employer to
think only of the worker as a hand, who appears and does his work
and draws his wages and vanishes again. Only such strikes as we
have had during the past year will rouse him from that attitude of
mind. The statesman at the other extremity has to consider the
worker as a being with a beginning, a middle, an end—and offspring.
He can consider all these possibilities of deferring employment and
making the toil of one period of life provide for the leisure and
freedom of another, which are necessarily entirely out of the purview
of an employer pure and simple. And I find it hard to see how we can
reconcile the intermittency of competitive employment with the
unremitting demands of a civilised life except by the intervention of
the State or of some public organisation capable of taking very wide
views between the business organiser on the one hand and the
subordinate worker on the other. On the one hand we need some
broader handling of business than is possible in the private
adventure of the solitary proprietor or the single company, and on
the other some more completely organised development of the
collective bargain. We have to bring the directive intelligence of a
concern into an organic relation with the conception of the national
output as a whole, and either through a trade union or a guild, or
some expansion of a trade union, we have to arrange a secure,
continuous income for the worker, to be received not directly as
wages from an employer, but intermediately through the
organisation. We need a census of our national production, a more
exhaustive estimate of our resources, and an entirely more scientific
knowledge of the conditions of maximum labour efficiency. One
turns to the State.... And it is at this point that the heart of the
patriotic Englishman sinks, because it is our national misfortune that
all the accidents of public life have conspired to retard the
development of just that body of knowledge, just that scientific
breadth of imagination which is becoming a vital necessity for the
welfare of a modern civilised community.
We are caught short of scientific men just as in the event of a war
with Germany we shall almost certainly be caught short of scientific
sailors and soldiers. You cannot make that sort of thing to order in a
crisis. Scientific education—and more particularly the scientific
education of our owning and responsible classes—has been crippled
by the bitter jealousy of the classical teachers who dominate our
universities, by the fear and hatred of the Established Church, which
still so largely controls our upper-class schools, and by the entire lack
of understanding and support on the part of those able barristers and
financiers who rule our political life. Science has been left more and
more to men of modest origin and narrow outlook, and now we are
beginning to pay in internal dissensions, and presently we may have
to pay in national humiliation for this almost organised rejection of
stimulus and power.
But however thwarted and crippled our public imagination may
be, we have still got to do the best we can with this situation; we have
to take as comprehensive views as we can, and to attempt as
comprehensive a method of handling as our party-ridden State
permits. In theory I am a Socialist, and were I theorising about some
nation in the air I would say that all the great productive activities
and all the means of communication should be national concerns
and be run as national services. But our State is peculiarly incapable
of such functions; at the present time it cannot even produce a
postage-stamp that will stick; and the type of official it would
probably evolve for industrial organisation, slowly but unsurely,
would be a maddening combination of the district visitor and the boy
clerk. It is to the independent people of some leisure and resource in
the community that one has at last to appeal for such large efforts
and understandings as our present situation demands. In the default
of our public services, there opens an immense opportunity for
voluntary effort. Deference to our official leaders is absurd; it is a
time when men must, as the phrase goes, “come forward.”
We want a National plan for our social and economic development
which everyone may understand and which will serve as a unifying
basis for all our social and political activities. Such a plan is not to be
flung out hastily by an irresponsible writer. It can only come into
existence as the outcome of a wide movement of inquiry and
discussion. My business in these pages has been not prescription but
diagnosis. I hold it to be the clear duty of every intelligent person in
the country to do his utmost to learn about these questions of
economic and social organisation and to work them out to
conclusions and a purpose. We have come to a phase in our affairs
when the only alternative to a great, deliberate renascence of will and
understanding is national disorder and decay.
 §6
I have attempted a diagnosis of this aspect of our national
situation. I have pointed out that nearly all the social forces of our
time seem to be in conspiracy to bring about the disappearance of a
labour class as such and the rearrangement of our work and industry
upon a new basis. That rearrangement demands an unprecedented
national effort and the production of an adequate National Plan.
Failing that, we seem doomed to a period of chronic social conflict
and possibly even of frankly revolutionary outbreaks that may
destroy us altogether or leave us only a dwarfed and enfeebled
nation....
And before we can develop that National Plan and the effective
realisation of such a plan that is needed to save us from that fate two
things stand immediately before us to be done, unavoidable
preliminaries to that more comprehensive work. The first of these is
the restoration of representative government, and the second a
renascence of our public thought about political and social things.
As I have already suggested, a main factor in our present national
inability to deal with this profound and increasing social disturbance
is the entirely unrepresentative and unbusinesslike nature of our
parliamentary government.
It is to a quite extraordinary extent a thing apart from our national
life. It becomes more and more so. To go into the House of Commons
is to go aside out of the general stream of the community’s vitality
into a corner where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a
specialised Assembly which is at once inattentive to and monstrously
influential in our affairs. There was a period when the debates in the
House of Commons were an integral, almost a dominant, part of our
national thought, when its speeches were read over in tens of
thousands of homes, and a large and sympathetic public followed the
details of every contested issue. Now a newspaper that dared to fill
its columns mainly with parliamentary debates, with a full report of
the trivialities, the academic points, the little familiar jokes, and
entirely insincere pleadings which occupy that gathering would court
bankruptcy.
This diminishing actuality of our political life is a matter of almost
universal comment to-day. But it is extraordinary how much of that
comment is made in a tone of hopeless dissatisfaction, how rarely it
is associated with any will to change a state of affairs that so largely
stultifies our national purpose. And yet the causes of our present
political ineptitude are fairly manifest, and a radical and effective
reconstruction is well within the wit of man.
All causes and all effects in our complex modern State are
complex, but in this particular matter there can be little doubt that
the key to the difficulty lies in the crudity and simplicity of our
method of election, a method which reduces our apparent free choice
of rulers to a ridiculous selection between undesirable alternatives,
and hands our whole public life over to the specialised manipulator.
Our House of Commons could scarcely misrepresent us more if it
was appointed haphazard by the Lord Chamberlain or selected by lot
from among the inhabitants of Notting Hill. Election of
representatives in one-member local constituencies by a single vote
gives a citizen practically no choice beyond the candidates appointed
by the two great party organisations in the State. It is an electoral
system that forbids absolutely any vote splitting or any indication of
shades of opinion. The presence of more than two candidates
introduces an altogether unmanageable complication, and the voter
is at once reduced to voting not to secure the return of the perhaps
less hopeful candidate he likes, but to ensure the rejection of the
candidate he most dislikes. So the nimble wire-puller slips in. In
Great Britain we do not have Elections any more; we have
Rejections. What really happens at a general election is that the party
organisations—obscure and secretive conclaves with entirely
mysterious funds—appoint about 1,200 men to be our rulers, and all
that we, we so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is, in
a muddled, angry way, to strike off the names of about half of these
selected gentlemen.
Take almost any member of the present Government and consider
his case. You may credit him with a life-long industrious intention to
get there, but ask yourself what is this man’s distinction, and for
what great thing in our national life does he stand? By the
complaisance of our party machinery he was able to present himself
to a perplexed constituency as the only possible alternative to
Conservatism and Tariff Reform, and so we have him. And so we
have most of his colleagues.
Now such a system of representation is surely a system to be
destroyed at any cost, because it stifles our national discussion and
thwarts our national will. And we can leave no possible method of
alteration untried. It is not rational that a great people should be
baffled by the mere mechanical degeneration of an electoral method
too crudely conceived. There exist alternatives, and to these
alternatives we must resort. Since John Stuart Mill first called
attention to the importance of the matter there has been a systematic
study of the possible working of electoral methods, and it is now
fairly proved that in proportional representation, with large
constituencies returning each many members, there is to be found a
way of escape from this disastrous embarrassment of our public
business by the party wire-puller and the party nominee.
I will not dwell upon the particulars of the proportional
representation system here. There exists an active society which has
organised the education of the public in the details of the proposal.
Suffice it that it does give a method by which a voter may vote with
confidence for the particular man he prefers, with no fear whatever
that his vote will be wasted in the event of that man’s chance being
hopeless. There is a method by which the order of the voter’s
subsequent preference is effectively indicated. That is all, but see
how completely it modifies the nature of an election. Instead of a
hampered choice between two, you have a free choice between many.
Such a change means a complete alteration in the quality of public
life.
The present immense advantage of the party nominee—which is
the root cause, which is almost the sole cause of all our present
political ineptitude—would disappear. He would be quite unable to
oust any well-known and representative independent candidate who
chose to stand against him. There would be an immediate alteration
in type in the House of Commons. In the place of these specialists in
political getting-on there would be few men who had not already
gained some intellectual and moral hold upon the community; they
would already be outstanding and distinguished men before they
came to the work of government. Great sections of our national life,
science, art, literature, education, engineering, manufacture, would
cease to be underrepresented, or misrepresented, by the energetic
barrister and political specialist, and our Legislature would begin to
serve, as we have now such urgent need of its serving, as the means
and instrument of that national conference upon the social outlook
of which we stand in need.
And it is to the need and nature of that Conference that I would
devote myself. I do not mean by the word Conference any gathering
of dull and formal and inattentive people in this dusty hall or that,
with a jaded audience and intermittently active reporters, such as
this word may conjure up to some imaginations. I mean an earnest
direction of attention in all parts of the country to this necessity for a
studied and elaborated project of conciliation and social co-
operation. We cannot afford to leave such things to specialised
politicians and self-appointed, self-seeking “experts” any longer. A
modern community has to think out its problems as a whole and co-
operate as a whole in their solution. We have to bring all our national
life into this discussion of the National Plan before us, and not
simply newspapers and periodicals and books, but pulpit and college
and school have to bear their part in it. And in that particular I would
appeal to the schools, because there more than anywhere else is the
permanent quickening of our national imagination to be achieved.
We want to have our young people filled with a new realisation
that History is not over, that nothing is settled, and that the supreme
dramatic phase in the story of England has still to come. It was not in
the Norman Conquest, not in the flight of King James II. nor the
overthrow of Napoleon; it is here and now. It falls to them to be
actors not in a reminiscent pageant but a living conflict, and the
sooner they are prepared to take their part in that the better our
Empire will acquit itself. How absurd is the preoccupation of our
schools and colleges with the little provincialisms of our past history
before A.D. 1800! “No current politics,” whispers the schoolmaster,
“no religion—except the coldest formalities. Some parent might
object.” And he pours into our country every year a fresh supply of
gentlemanly cricketing youths, gapingly unprepared—unless they
have picked up a broad generalisation or so from some surreptitious
Socialist pamphlet—for the immense issues they must control, and
that are altogether uncontrollable if they fail to control them. The
universities do scarcely more for our young men. All this has to be
altered, and altered vigorously and soon, if our country is to
accomplish its destinies. Our schools and colleges exist for no other
purpose than to give our youths a vision of the world and of their
duties and possibilities in the world. We can no longer afford to have
them the last preserves of an elderly orthodoxy and the last
repository of a decaying gift of superseded tongues. They are needed
too urgently to make our leaders leader-like and to sustain the active
understandings of the race.
And from the labour class itself we are also justified in demanding
a far more effectual contribution to the National Conference than it
is making at the present time. Mere eloquent apologies for distrust,
mere denunciations of Capitalism and appeals for a Socialism as
featureless as smoke, are unsatisfactory when one regards them as
the entire contribution of the ascendant worker to the discussion of
the national future. The labour thinker has to become definite in his
demands and clearer upon the give and take that will be necessary
before they can be satisfied. He has to realise rather more generously
than he has done so far the enormous moral difficulty there is in
bringing people who have been prosperous and at an advantage all
their lives to the pitch of even contemplating a social reorganisation
that may minimise or destroy their precedence. We have all to think,
to think hard and think generously, and there is not a man in
England to-day, even though his hands are busy at work, whose
brain may not be helping in this great task of social rearrangement
which lies before us all.
 SOCIAL PANACEAS

(June, 1912)

To have followed the frequent discussions of the Labour Unrest in

the Press is to have learnt quite a lot about the methods of popular
thought. And among other things I see now much better than I did
why patent medicines are so popular. It is clear that as a community
we are far too impatient of detail and complexity, we want overmuch
to simplify, we clamour for panaceas, we are a collective invitation to
quacks.
Our situation is an intricate one, it does not admit of a solution
neatly done up in a word or a phrase. Yet so powerful is this wish to
simplify that it is difficult to make it clear that one is not oneself a
panacea-monger. One writes and people read a little inattentively
and more than a little impatiently, until one makes a positive
proposal. Then they jump. “So that’s your Remedy!” they say. “How
absurdly inadequate!” For example, I was privileged to take part in
one such discussion in 1912, and among other things in my diagnosis
of the situation I pointed out the extreme mischief done to our public
life by the futility of our electoral methods. They make our whole
public life forensic and ineffectual, and I pointed out that this evil
effect, which vitiates our whole national life, could be largely
remedied by an infinitely better voting system known as Proportional
Representation. Thereupon the Westminster Gazette declared in
tones of pity and contempt that it was no Remedy—and dismissed
me. It would be as intelligent to charge a doctor who pushed back the
crowd about a broken-legged man in the street with wanting to heal
the limb by giving the sufferer air.
 The task before our community, the task of reorganising labour on
a basis broader than that of employment for daily or weekly wages, is
one of huge complexity, and it is as entirely reasonable as it is
entirely preliminary to clean and modernise to the utmost our
representative and legislative machinery.
It is remarkable how dominant is this disposition to get a phrase, a
word, a simple recipe, for an undertaking so vast in reality that for all
the rest of our lives a large part of the activities of us, forty million
people, will be devoted to its partial accomplishment. In the presence
of very great issues people become impatient and irritated, as they
would not allow themselves to be irritated by far more limited
problems. Nobody in his senses expects a panacea for the
comparatively simple and trivial business of playing chess. Nobody
wants to be told to “rely wholly upon your pawns,” or “never, never
move your rook”; nobody clamours “give me a third knight and all
will be well”; but that is exactly what everybody seems to be doing in
our present discussion. And as another aspect of the same
impatience I note the disposition to clamour against all sorts of
necessary processes in the development of a civilisation. For
example, I read over and over again of the failure of representative
government, and in nine cases out of ten I find that this amounts to a
cry against any sort of representative government. It is perfectly true
that our representative institutions do not work well and need a
vigorous overhauling, but while I find scarcely any support for such a
revision, the air is full of vague dangerous demands for aristocracy,
for oligarchy, for autocracy. It is like a man who jumps out of his
automobile because he has burst a tyre, refuses a proffered Stepney,
and bawls passionately for anything—for a four-wheeler, or a
donkey, so long as he can be free from that exploded mechanism.
There are evidently quite a considerable number of people in this
country who would welcome a tyrant at the present time, a strong,
silent, cruel, imprisoning, executing, melodramatic sort of person,
who would somehow manage everything while they went on—being
silly. I find that form of impatience cropping up everywhere. I hear
echoes of Mr. Blatchford’s Wanted, a Man, and we may yet see a
General Boulanger prancing in our streets. There never was a more
foolish cry. It is not a man we want, but just exactly as many million
men as there are in Great Britain at the present time, and it is you,
the reader, and I, and the rest of us who must together go on with the
perennial task of saving the country by firstly, doing our own jobs
just as well as ever we can, and secondly—and this is really just as
important as firstly—doing our utmost to grasp our national purpose,
doing our utmost, that is, to develop and carry out our national plan.
It is Everyman who must be the saviour of the State in a modern
community; we cannot shift our share in the burthen; and here
again, I think, is something that may well be underlined and
emphasised. At present our “secondly” is unduly subordinated to our
“firstly”; our game is better individually than collectively; we are like
a football team that passes badly, and our need is not nearly so much
to change the players as to broaden their style. And this brings me, in
a spirit entirely antagonistic, up against Mr. Galsworthy’s suggestion
of an autocratic revolution in the methods of our public schools.
But before I go on to that, let me first notice a still more
comprehensive cry that has been heard again and again in this
discussion, and that is the alleged failure of education generally.
There is never any remedial suggestion made with this particular
outcry; it is merely a gust of abuse and insult for schools, and more
particularly board schools, carrying with it a half-hearted implication
that they should be closed, and then the contribution concludes. Now
there is no outcry at the present time more unjust or—except for the
Wanted, a Man clamour—more foolish. No doubt our educational
resources, like most other things, fall far short of perfection, but of
all this imperfection the elementary schools are least imperfect; and I
would almost go so far as to say that, considering the badness of their
material, the huge, clumsy classes they have to deal with, the
poorness of their directive administration, their bad pay and
uncertain outlook, the elementary teachers of this country are
amazingly efficient. And it is not simply that they are good under
their existing conditions, but that this service has been made out of
nothing whatever in the course of scarcely forty years. An
educational system to cover an Empire is not a thing that can be got
for the asking, it is not even to be got for the paying, it has to be
grown; and in the beginning it is bound to be thin, ragged, forced,
crammy, text-bookish, superficial, and all the rest of it. As reasonable
to complain that the children born last year were immature. A little
army of teachers does not flash into being at the passing of an
Education Act. Not even an organisation for training those teachers
comes to anything like satisfactory working order for many years,
without considering the delays and obstructions that have been
caused by the bickerings and bitterness of the various Christian
Churches. So that it is not the failure of elementary education we
have really to consider, but the continuance and extension of its
already almost miraculous results.
And when it comes to the education of the ruling and directing
classes, there is kindred, if lesser reason, for tempering zeal with
patience. This upper portion of our educational organisation needs
urgently to be bettered, but it is not to be bettered by trying to find
an archangel who will better it dictatorially. For the good of our souls
there are no such beings to relieve us of our collective responsibility.
It is clear that appointments in this field need not only far more care
and far more insistence upon creative power than has been shown in
the past, but for the rest we have to do with the men we have and the
schools we have. We cannot have an educational purge, if only
because we have not the new men waiting. Here again the need is not
impatience, not revolution, but a sustained and penetrating criticism,
a steadfast, continuous urgency towards effort and well-planned
reconstruction and efficiency.
And as a last example of the present hysterical disposition to scrap
things before they have been fairly tried is the outcry against
examinations, which has done so much to take the keenness off the
edge of school work in the last few years. Because a great number of
examiners chosen haphazard turned out to be negligent and
incompetent as examiners, because their incapacity created a cynical
trade in cramming, a great number of people have come to the
conclusion, just as examinations are being improved into efficiency,
that all examinations are bad. In particular that excellent method of
bringing new blood and new energy into the public services and
breaking up official gangs and cliques, the competitive examination
system, has been discredited, and the wire-puller and the influential
person are back again tampering with a steadily increasing
proportion of appointments....
But I have written enough of this impatience, which is, as it were,
merely the passion for reconstruction losing its head and defeating
its own ends. There is no hope for us outside ourselves. No violent
changes, no Napoleonic saviours can carry on the task of building the
Great State, the civilised State that rises out of our disorders. That is
for us to do, all of us and each one of us. We have to think clearly,
and study and consider and reconsider our ideas about public things
to the very utmost of our possibilities. We have to clarify our views
and express them and do all we can to stir up thinking and effort in
those about us.
I know it would be more agreeable for all of us if we could have
some small pill-like remedy for all the troubles of the State, and take
it and go on just as we are going now. But, indeed, to say a word for
that idea would be a treason. We are the State, and there is no other
way to make it better than to give it the service of our lives. Just in
the measure of the aggregate of our devotions and the elaborated and
criticised sanity of our public proceedings will the world mend.
I gather from a valuable publication called Secret Remedies, which
analyses many popular cures, that this hasty passion for simplicity,
for just one thing that will settle the whole trouble, can carry people
to a level beyond an undivided trust in something warranted in a
bottle. They are ready to put their faith in what amounts to
practically nothing in a bottle. And just at present, while a number of
excellent people of the middle class think that only a “man” is wanted
and all will be well with us, there is a considerable wave of
hopefulness among the working class in favour of a weak solution of
nothing, which is offered under the attractive label of Syndicalism.
So far I have been able to discuss the present labour situation
without any use of this empty word, but when one finds it cropping
up in every other article on the subject, it becomes advisable to point
out what Syndicalism is not. And incidentally it may enable me to
make clear what Socialism in the broader sense, constructive
Socialism, that is to say, is.
 SYNDICALISM OR CITIZENSHIP?

“Is a railway porter a railway porter first and a man afterwards, or

is he a man first and incidentally a railway porter?”
That is the issue between this tawdrification of trade unionism
which is called Syndicalism, and the ideals of that Great State, that
great commonweal, towards which the constructive forces in our
civilisation tend. Are we to drift on to a disastrous intensification of
our present specialisation of labour as labour, or are we to set to
work steadfastly upon a vast social reconstruction which will close
this widening breach and rescue our community from its present
dependence upon the reluctant and presently insurgent toil of a
wages-earning proletariat? Regarded as a project of social
development, Syndicalism is ridiculous; regarded as an illuminating
and unintentionally ironical complement to the implicit theories of
our present social order, it is worthy of close attention. The dream of
the Syndicalist is an impossible social fragmentation. The transport
service is to be a democratic republic, the mines are to be a
democratic republic, every great industry is to be a democratic
republic within the State; our community is to become a conflict of
interwoven governments of workers, incapable of progressive
changes of method or of extension or transmutation of function, the
whole being of a man is to lie within his industrial specialisation,
and, upon lines of causation not made clear, wages are to go on rising
and hours of work are to go on falling.... There the mind halts,
blinded by the too dazzling vistas of an unimaginative millennium.
And the way to this, one gathers, is by striking—persistent,
destructive striking—until it comes about.
Such is Syndicalism, the cheap Labour Panacea, to which the more
passionate and less intelligent portion of the younger workers,
impatient of the large constructive developments of modern
Socialism, drifts steadily. It is the direct and logical reaction to our
present economic system, which has counted our workers neither as
souls nor as heads, but as hands. They are beginning to accept the
suggestions of that method. It is the culmination in aggression of
that, at first, entirely protective trade unionism which the individual
selfishness and collective shortsightedness and State blindness of our
owning and directing and ruling classes forced upon the working
man. At first trade unionism was essentially defensive; it was the
only possible defence of the workers, who were being steadily
pressed over the margin of subsistence. It was a nearly involuntary
resistance to class debasement. Mr. Vernon Hartshorn has expressed
it as that in a recent article. But his paper, if one read it from
beginning to end, displayed, compactly and completely, the
unavoidable psychological development of the specialised labour
case. He began in the mildest tones with those now respectable
words, a “guaranteed minimum” of wages, housing, and so forth, and
ended with a very clear intimation of an all-labour community.
If anything is certain in this world, it is that the mass of the
community will not rest satisfied with these guaranteed minima. All
those possible legislative increments in the general standard of living
are not going to diminish the labour unrest; they are going to
increase it. A starving man may think he wants nothing in the world
but bread, but when he has eaten you will find he wants all sorts of
things beyond. Mr. Hartshorn assures us that the worker is “not out
for a theory.” So much the worse for the worker, and all of us when,
like the mere hand we have made him, he shows himself unable to
define or even forecast his ultimate intentions. He will in that case
merely clutch. And the obvious immediate next objective of that
clutch directly its imagination passes beyond the “guaranteed
minima” phase is the industry as a whole.
I do not see how anyone who desires the continuing development
of civilisation can regard a trade union as anything but a necessary
evil, a pressure-relieving contrivance, an arresting and delaying
organisation begotten by just that class separation of labour which in
the commonweal of the Great State will be altogether destroyed. It
leads nowhither; it is a shelter hut on the road. The wider movement
of modern civilisation is against class organisation and caste feeling.
These are forces antagonistic to progress, continually springing up
and endeavouring to stereotype the transitory organisation, and
continually being defeated.
Of all the solemn imbecilities one hears, surely the most foolish is
this, that we are in “an age of specialisation.” The comparative
fruitfulness and hopefulness of our social order, in comparison with
any other social system, lies in its flat contradiction of that absurdity.
Our medical and surgical advances, for example, are almost entirely
due to the invasion of medical research by the chemist; our naval
development to the supersession of the sailor by the engineer; we
sweep away the coachman with the railway, beat the suburban line
with the electric tramway, and attack that again with the petrol
omnibus, oust brick and stonework in substantial fabrics by steel
frames, replace the skilled maker of woodcuts by a photographer,
and so on through the whole range of our activities. Change of
function, arrest of specialisation by innovations in method and
appliance, progress by the infringement of professional boundaries
and the defiance of rule: these are the commonplaces of our time.
The trained man, the specialised man, is the most unfortunate of
men; the world leaves him behind, and he has lost his power of
overtaking it. Versatility, alert adaptability, these are our urgent
needs. In peace and war alike the unimaginative, uninventive man is
a burthen and a retardation, as he never was before in the world’s
history. The modern community, therefore, that succeeds most
rapidly and most completely in converting both its labourers and its
leisure class into a population of active, able, unhurried, educated,
and physically well-developed people will be inevitably the dominant
community in the world. That lies on the face of things about us; a
man who cannot see that must be blind to the traffic in our streets.
Syndicalism is not a plan of social development. It is a spirit of
conflict. That conflict lies ahead of us, the open war of strikes, or—if
the forces of law and order crush that down—then sabotage and that
black revolt of the human spirit into crime which we speak of
nowadays as anarchism, unless we can discover a broad and
promising way from the present condition of things to nothing less
than the complete abolition of the labour class.
That, I know, sounds a vast proposal, but this is a gigantic business
altogether, and we can do nothing with it unless we are prepared to
deal with large ideas. If St. Paul’s begins to totter it is no good
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