PUBLIC INTERESTS AND 1 111/1 ACT.
IN what we have written in the article which precedes this we have regarded the matter purely from the doctors' point of view, but that is not because there is not a great deal still to be said from the public standpoint. For example, the revolt of the doctors after the Bill has passed, and all the confusion, worry, and waste that such a revolt must occasion, is due in no small measure to the way in which the measure was rushed through Parliament, and the public mind was confused and perplexed by the passion generated by the use of the Closure. A business- like Minister in charge of the Bill or a Cabinet really mindful of the national interests would have insisted that in a case of this kind, where it was not possible to coerce the doctors into accepting service, the Bill must not pass until terms had been arranged which it was practi- cally certain that the majority of doctors would accept. As we see now, instead of there being a practical certainty as to acceptance, there is something very like a practical certainty of non-acceptance. This is what comes of a great revolutionary measure being placed in the hands of a politician whose object is to get a Bill through at all costs and with whom a sound Bill is a secondary consideration. 'We do not want to be unnecessarily offen- sive to Mr. Lloyd George, but it is no good blinking the fact that the trouble has arisen from the following facts. He rushed into the Bill without due consideration. When he found, as he soon did, that he was in for a much more difficult job than he had imagined, he would not, or as he would probably say could sot, risk " owning up," admitting his folly and withdrawing his Bill. Instead of that he in effect took the line that, having started upon the measure, his political career would be ruined unless he got his Bill through in some shape or other. From that moment the whole situation was changed. The object became not to pass the best Bill but to save Mr. Lloyd George from a legislative fiasco which he believed would be deeply injurious to him. Anything was better than failure in the _light of day. But it may be said: "This must be an unjust charge because Mr. Lloyd George must have known that it would be even worse for him to get a Bill through and then for the Bill to break down than to withdraw it and make a second attempt." Those who argue thus know very little of the Parliamentary politician of to-day. Demagogic legislators of the type of the Chancellor of the Exchequer are in a double sense " men of the. moment." They may be described as " immediatists," for what they look to first of all is an immediate triumph, or at any rate the avoidance of an immediate failure. Everything is to be done to prevent that. They are quite willing to take the chance of getting out of the difficulties of the future when those difficulties arise. " Somehow or other," they argue, " I shall be able to avoid the blame if only I can save my face now." In the first place they trust to the extraordinary forgetfulness of the public. Besides, they can always lay the blame of the bad working of a measure upon the diabolical machinations of their opponents. Then, too, they rely, if the muddle they have made is only big enough, on the feeling of the community that the tangle must be straightened out somehow or other, and that the interests at stake are too great for people to say, " You have made your bed yourself and you must lie on it." " I shall manage somehow if only I can avoid an obvious defeat." That is the motto of the votaries of the New Statesmanship.
How appalling is the mess and muddle the Insurance Act is going to create is well set forth in a long article entitled "Mr. Lloyd George's Root Mistake," which is to be found in the Daily Mail of Wednesday. We have found ourselves largely out of sympathy with the manner in which the Daily Mail has pressed its opposition to the Act, but we are bound to say that the article in question is a most useful and powerful exposition of the capital defects of the measure. It brings out clearly and fairly the terrible waste which must take place and the consequent injury to the nation. It shows that Mr. Lloyd George's fundamental error, an error due to a reckless desire to appear to be giving a great boon to the people rather than a real desire to help them, is to be found in the fact that provision for relief in sickness was already provided for a great part of the working population. Only a proportion of between 10 and 20 per cent. of the population, the writer in the Daily Mail calculates, were actually uninsured against sickness in some form or other. The writer shows not only the injury which will be done to voluntary effort, but the terrible waste of the national resources which must take place under the Act. This is a matter very little thought of, and yet it is one of vast importance. Economic waste, that is, setting men to do work and pay- ing them for doing what is unnecessary, is a crime against society, an injury which is bound to come home to roost, and bound also to fall upon the poorest part of the popu- lation. People console themselves by thinking that, after all, the money is not destroyed, but only redistributed, and that if you raise vast sums in taxation you pay it out again in doles, allowances, or salaries. Those doles, allowances, or salaries, they argue, are spent by their recipients, and are good for trade. That is a fallacy, or rather a half-truth. No doubt the money is spent, but in the process of collec- tion and redistribution there is waste—waste on a great scale—and that waste can never be made. good. The money which would have fructified in the pockets of the indi- viduals who pay the taxes when it is placed in the dead hand of the State ceases to be fertile. It is sterilized, or at any rate paralyzed. It only does half the work of which it is capable. Men, as we have said before, are set to do work which is not necessary, and therefore are being kept in what is economically idleness by the true workers. It is no answer to say that so are the men whose work is to provide luxuries, for these so-called luxuries are incentives to human energy. No man has ever been, or will ever be, able to draw a scientific distinction between luxuries and necessaries. To listen to a Wagnerian opera is in one sense to indulge in the purest of costly luxuries. In many cases, however, it is the carrot in front of the nose of the human animal, and greatly adds to his working power. The active instead of the passive attitude towards work is the source of that increased production which we all desire in order that there should be more to go round. Human energy will never be increased through armies of officials or through those temptations to malingering which are found scattered broadcast throughout the Government measure. Depend upon it, the passage of the Insurance Act was an evil day for the country as a whole, and, especially in fact, though not in appearance, for the poor. If it comes into operation in its present form it will be repented of in sackcloth and ashes, but unfortunately that repentance will not be of avail when once it is at work. Not even the gods upon the past have power.
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