Government
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1928.tb02318.x |
| Published date | 01 January 1928 |
| Author | Graham Wallas |
| Date | 01 January 1928 |
Lover
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By
PROFESSOR
GRAHAM
WALLAS
[
Innzigurnt
Address
to
the
Imiifute
for
the
Session
1927-28]
URING
the last hundred years, in
all
the civilized communities
of
the world, the functions of Government have changed from being
mainly negative into being mainly positive, that is to say, Governments
have come to be engaged not merely in preventing
wrong
things from
being done, but in bringing it about that right things shall be done.
The cause of this change is in the main the growing complexity
of
human society resulting from scientific discovery.
It
is
because the
village carrier has turned into
a
vast railway system, the miller’s wheel
into
a
vast system of electric power, the village money lender
or
the
private bank of the market town into
a
vast system of international
credit, that Governments have found theniselves compelled to become
positive. Even Sir Ernest Benn, than whom
I
suppose there exists no
more wholehearted opponent of the idea
of
Government control, began
an attack upon the expansion of Government by saying,
“
We have
accepted as
a
nation the view that
it
is the duty
of
the State
to
do things.”
Now the main difierence between
a
State which has to
do
things and
a
State which has to prevent things being done, arises from the fact
that the prevention
of
wrongdoing can be carried out by one man with
disciplined human instruments merely carrying out his orders.
A
negalive Government only requires courage and consistency in its
officials
;
but
a
positive Government requires a constant supply
of
invention and suggestion, and invention and suggestion take time.
One man cannot in
a
given time
do
all the invention that is required
in
that time, any more than one bee can in
a
year secrete all the wax which
is necessary for the building up of
a
year’s honeycomb.
In England the eighteenth-century Government may be taken
as
the
pattern,
in
some ways
a
successful pattern, of what
I
have called
a
negative
Government.
It
engaged with great vigour in national defence
both
on land and sea, and in the raising by taxation of the funds necessary
for
national defence. The rest-trade, industry, health, education-it left
either to private persons, or
to
local corporations which had no definite
connection with the central State. The historical turning-point where
the State began
to
find that it
must
undertake the business
of
invention
and suggestion, came with the Reform
Bill
of
1832,
and with the social
legislation, as we now call it, which followed that Reform
Bill.
The
Factory Act
of
1833,
the new
Poor
Law of
1834,
the new Municipal Act
3
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