Functional socialism

158 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

FUNCTIONAL INDUSTRY

We shall sink yet deeper in the commercial quagmire unless we realize that industry must now be organized on a functional basis; that financial control must yield to functional control; that the pursuit of politics, rightly understood, is an affair of the spirit; that politics must neither hamper industry nor permit industry to distract those higher concerns of citizenship which constitute the political mandate. In short, that industry and politics, since they move on different ambits, must be constitutionally and legally separated. The true vision of the future is an autonomous industry guarding and developing our economic life to the end that, as a people, we shall achieve a spiritual and cultural life. A great and momentous adventure in simple division!

THE ELEPHANT AND THE WHALE

For several generations we have been sedulously taught to look to politics to solve our social and industrial troubles. A century or more ago, in a less complex society, no doubt Parliamentary methods sufficed. But our national life to-day is too complicated, too penetrated with incongruous problems, to admit of any solution by any single authority, particularly when, as is obvious, neither our political machine, nor its personnel, can deal with industrial developments, which have now passed far beyond its purview. The elephant cannot struggle with the whale; they move in different elements: in like