is being widely adopted.

Indeed, there are some who contend that we ought frankly to accept this
development and universalise it, basing our political organisation upon
what they describe (in a blessed, Mesopotamic phrase) as "functional
representation." The doctrine seems to have, for some minds, a strange
plausibility. But is it not plain that it could not be justly carried
out? Who could define or enumerate the "functions" that are to be
represented? If you limit them to economic functions (as, in practice,
the advocates of this doctrine do), will you provide separate
representation, for example, for the average-adjusters--a mere handful
of men, who nevertheless perform a highly important function? But you
cannot thus limit functions to the economic sphere without distorting
your representation of the national mind and will. If you represent
miners merely as miners, you misrepresent them, for they are also
Baptists or Anglicans, dog-fanciers, or lovers of Shelley,
prize-fighters, or choral singers. The notion that you can represent the
mind of the nation on a basis of functions is the merest moonshine. The
most you can hope for is to get a body of 700 men and women who will
form a sort of microcosm of the more intelligent mind of the nation, and
trust to it to control your Government. Such a body will consist of men
who follow various trades. But the conditions under which they are
chosen ought to be such as to impress upon them the duty of thinking of
the national interest as a whole in the first instance, and of their
trade interests only as they are consistent with that. The fundamental
danger of functional representation is that it reverses this principle,
and impresses upon the representative the view that his trade is his
politics.

But it is useless to deplore or condemn a tendency unless you see how it
can be checked. Why has this representation of economic interests become
so strong? Because Parliament is the arena in which important industrial
problems are discussed and settled. It is not a very good body for that
purpose. If we had a National Industrial Council charged, not with the
final decision, but with the most serious and systematic discussion of
such problems, they would be more wisely dealt with. And, what is quite
as important, such a body would offer precisely the kind of sphere
within which the representation of interests as such would be altogether
wholesome and useful; and, once it became