conomic relations with a view to maintaining the conditions of the good
life. Trade unions have grown and are still steadily growing in size and
importance. For a large portion of the nation loyalty to a trade union
has become the most obvious form of collective loyalty or general will.
This has been accompanied by an inevitable decrease in what we may call
territorial loyalty. The result of the increase in means of
communication and the growth of large towns has been that men's common
interests as members of the same trade or as employees in the same
workshop are coming to mean more and to constitute a greater common bond
between men than their common interests as dwellers in the same
locality. The trade union has often a more live and real general will
than the Parliamentary constituency. Men's aspirations and ideals for
their common life are being expressed more truly through trade union
organizations than through Parliament. The growth in the prestige of
organized labour is therefore coincident with a decay in the prestige of
Parliament. Parliament, however, based on a local sub-division of the
nation, is at present the only political organization of the nation.
Trade union organization, as a political organization, has no
constitutional authority, and all the general will which it represents
can find no regular national expression. The result is that it either
uses the territorial organization by getting men who really represent
their Trade Union elected as members for Parliamentary local
constituencies, to the detriment of both the territorial and the trade
union organization, or acts as an _imperium in imperio_ by making
demands on and issuing ultimata to Parliament. We seem to be approaching
a crisis where the trade unions are asking whether they will allow the
state to exist.

This is obviously an unsatisfactory state of affairs. What is the cure
for it? Differentiation of functions, as I have said, will not help us
here. Some writers have maintained that vocational organization should
concern itself with industrial or economic matters, the state, as we
know it, with political matters. But can we possibly distinguish between
industrial and political matters? If the aim of politics is to regulate
men's actions in the light of men's common interests, the action of a
trade union is in its essence political. Its differentiation from
government is that it is concerned with the common interests of a few
rather than t