CHAPTER III

LIBERTY AND SOCIAL POWER

I

In these pages, I have taken the view that liberty means that there is

no restraint upon those conditions which, in modern civilization, are

the necessary guarantees of individual happiness. There is no liberty

without freedom of speech. There is no liberty if special privilege

restricts the franchise to a portion of the community. There is no

liberty if a dominant opinion can control the social habits of the

rest without persuading the latter that there are reasonable grounds

for the control. For, as I have argued, since each man’s experience

is ultimately unique, he alone can fully appreciate its significance

himself; he can never be free save as he is able to act upon his own

private sense of that interpretation. Unfreedom means to him a denial

of his experience, a refusal on the part of organized society to

satisfy what he cannot help taking to be the lesson of his life.

But no man, of course, stands alone. He lives with others and in

others. His liberty, therefore, is never absolute, since the conflict

of experience means the imposition of certain ways of behaviour upon

all of us lest conflict destroy peace. That imposition, broadly

speaking, is essential to liberty since it makes for peace; and peace

is the condition of continuity of liberty. The prohibitions, therefore,

that are imposed are an attempt to extract from the experience of

society certain principles of action by which, in their own interest,

men ought to be bound. We cannot, indeed, say that all the principles

a given government imposes are those it ought to impose. We can only

say that some principles, by being imposed, are bound up with the very

heart of freedom.

That is the paradox of self-government. Certain restraints upon freedom

add to a man’s happiness. Partly, they save him from the difficulty of

going back to first principles for every step he has to take; they

summarize for him the past experience of the community. Partly, also,

they prevent every opposition of desire from resulting in conflict;

they thus assure him of security. In a sense, he is like a traveller

who reaches a sign-post pointing in many directions. Law helps him

by telling him where one, at least, will lead; and it invites him to

assume that its direction is also, or should be, his destination.

Clearly this will not always be the case. For it to be so, the end of

the law must be his as well, its experience must not contradict his

own. For that contradiction, as a rule, means punishment for him since,

at the end of the road he takes, if it is not the path of the law, he

will find a policeman waiting for him. We must, that is to say, find

ways of maximizing our agreement with the law.

I sought earlier to show that this maximization can only take place

when the substance of law is continuously woven from the fabric of

a wide consent. Here I propose to inquire into certain essential

conditions which determine whether that consent can be obtained.

I propose to inquire, in other words, into that weird complex of

prejudice, judgment, interest, which we call public opinion and to seek

the terms of its adequate relationship to liberty. For if my argument

be valid that a man’s citizenship is the contribution of his instructed

judgment to the public good, and that right action, for him, is action

upon the basis of that judgment, clearly, the factor of instruction

is of decisive importance. Instructed judgment is considered and not

impulsive, ultimate and not immediate. It is a conclusion arrived at

after an attempt to penetrate behind the superficial appearance to

what is truth-seeming. It is a decision made after evidence has been

collected and weighed, distortion allowed for, prejudice discounted.

If, for instance, I am to oppose the State in a matter like military

service, I ought not to do so until I have rigorously examined the

facts upon which I build my principles. And, _mutatis mutandis_, that

is true of every aspect of social activity. The first urgency is

assurance that the facts upon which I base my action are valid.

Now the world of facts which impinge upon each of us is difficult

and complex and enormous. None of us can know all of that world. A

large part of it, it may be in some context a fundamental part, we

have to take on trust from other persons. Obviously, it is of primary

importance that the things we take on trust should correspond with the

reality on which alone a right judgment can be made. My view of the

proper peace-terms that should be made with Germany will be one thing

if I believe that Germans, when at leisure, crucify innocent Belgian

citizens, rape their women, and cut off the breasts of their young

girls; and quite another thing if I believe that the Germans are rather

like other people, decent, kindly, respectable, wanting much the same

things in life as I do myself. My attitude to the nationalization of

the mines will obviously profoundly depend upon, first, the facts in

the mining industry itself, and, second, the facts about the operation

of nationalization in other fields. I cannot, in the vast majority of

the problems I have to decide, make my own inquiries into the facts.

Somewhere, sometime, I have to halt and say, “This man’s report, or

this paper’s account, is a thing I can trust.”

It is because opinion is so vitally dependent upon the truthfulness of

facts that observers have come more and more to insist on the connexion

between liberty and the news.[41] For a judging public is unfree if

it has to judge not between competing theories of what an agreed set

of facts mean, but between competing distortions of what is, at the

outset, unedifying and invented mythology. Things like the incident

of the _Maine_, the Pekin Massacre which never occurred, the Zenoviev

letter, make an enormous difference to what Mr Lippmann has happily

termed my “stereotype” of the environment about which I have to make up

my mind. I bring already to its interpretation a mass of preconceptions

which tend to distort it. If there is prepared for me “evidence”

which has been distilled through the filter of a special interest

the distortion may become so complete as to make a rational judgment

impossible. The English journalist who invented the word “dole” has

built into the minds of innumerable people of the comfortable classes

a picture of the unemployed in England as a mass of work-shy persons,

comfortably lazy and anxious at all costs to live parasitically upon

the taxpayer; the proven fact that less than a fraction of one per cent

really avoids the effort to work is unable to penetrate the miasma of

that stereotype. The newspapers which belong to the Power Trust in

America, the subsidized press in Paris, the journals which must satisfy

Mussolini or suffer suppression, the government newspapers of Communist

Russia, these are all efforts to dictate an environment to the citizen

in order that the stereotype he forms may serve some interest their

owners, or controllers, are anxious to promote. Men may actually go out

to die for purposes in which they profoundly believe, though the cause

which, as they judge, embodies those purposes has not, in fact, the

remotest connexion with it.

We have, in short, the difficulty that the control of news by special

interests may make prisoners of men who believe themselves to be free.

The Englishman who has to form an opinion about a miners’ strike is

not likely to be “free” in any sense to which meaning can be attached

if the facts which he encounters have been specially doctored in order

to make it as certain as possible that he conclude in favour of the

mine owners. A Chinaman who hears that the “Liberal” party in Rumania

has won a victory at the polls, an American who is informed that

London is governed by Municipal “Reformers”, approaches the discovery

of the facts with a body of preconceptions, derived from quite alien

experience, which will make a true judgment of those facts a very

complex matter. In the Conference of The Hague upon reparations in

August 1929, the Italian newspapers continued to paint Mr Snowden as

the Shylock withholding from Italy its due share, while the English

Press was equally unanimous in painting him as the protagonist against

a continental effort to make Great Britain the milch-cow of Europe.

The Italian, or the Englishman, who wished to obtain a just view of

the issues really at stake there, would have had to engage in arduous

researches into technical material about which he might lack competence

and for which he would certainly not easily find leisure.

Let us remember, too, that our stereotype of the contemporary

environment is only the last phase, so to speak, of the problem. The

psychologists are unanimous in telling us how important for our future

are the impressions we gather in our early years. Clearly, from that

angle, the things we are taught, the mental habits of those who teach

us, are of quite primary urgency. It may make all the difference to the

intellectual climate of a people whether, for instance, the history

learned by children in schools is wide and generous, or parochial and

narrow, whether its teachers cultivate the sceptical mind, or the

positive mind. People who are imprisoned in dogmas in childhood will

have an agonizing struggle to escape from its stereotypes, and they

may well have been so taught that they either, after effort, succumb,

or do not even know that it is necessary to struggle at all. I do not

know how to emphasize sufficiently the quite inescapable importance to

freedom of the content of the educational process.

Teach a child year in and year out that the American Constitution is

the ultimate embodiment of political wisdom and you increase tenfold

the difficulty of rational and necessary amendment by the generation

to which that child belongs. Set him under teachers like those of whom

Professor Harper tells us that seventy-seven per cent “contended that

one should never allow his own experience and reason to lead him in

ways that he knows are contrary to the teaching of the Bible”, and

fifty-one per cent that “our laws should forbid much of the radical

criticism that we often hear and read concerning the injustice of our

country and government”, and the openness of mind upon which reason

depends for its victories will be well-nigh unattainable.[42] Those

only who realize the importance of education will understand how a

Southern audience could go wild with anger over an account, in large

outline untrue, of German atrocities, and yet listen with indifference

to the description of a lynching in their own community so revolting in

its detail as to be unfit almost for transcription. And we must add to

the school influence in childhood, that of the home, the church, the

streets, in the terrible certainty that there are few impressions which

do not leave their trace.

It is necessary, if I may so phrase it, to urge men to live

dangerously. To the degree that their happiness depends upon making

their decisions conform to the facts, they cannot avoid danger. It is

dangerous to leave a child in the hands of teachers who believe that

all experience and reason must be abandoned which does not square with

that recorded in the partly mythical annals of a primitive Semitic

tribe several thousand years ago, or who equate patriotism with

a fervid acceptance of the present political system. The adult is

endangering his happiness if he believes that truth is what Karl Marx

said, or Mussolini tells him, or the inferences of Mr Baldwin which the

latter has in turn drawn from material prepared for him by the Research

Department of the Conservative Central Office. Happiness depends upon

being able to approach with an open mind facts which have been prepared

by independent persons who have no interest in seeing that their

incidence is bent in some particular way. Anything else imprisons the

mind in dogmas which only work so long as that mind does not travel

beyond the narrow confines within which the dogmas work. Once it goes

beyond, unhappiness is the inevitable outcome.

How are we to get independent fact-finding and the open mind? The

answer, of course, is the tragic one that there is no high-road to it.

Partly, it lies in the development of particular techniques, but, most

largely, it lies in the kind of educational methods we use, and this,

in its turn, in the purposes for which those methods are employed.

I entirely agree that a multiplication of independent fact-finding

agencies, as disinterested and impartial about wages and other social

conditions as a medical man in the making of a diagnosis, will take

us some distance.[43] Not, I think, very far; for between the finding

of facts by independent agencies and the driving of them home to the

public are interpolated just those factors of special interest which

are the enemies we confront. I agree, too, that freedom is partly

better served than when a great public organ falls into the hands of

one who, like C. P. Scott with his _Manchester Guardian_, determines

to make news and truth coincide. But men like Mr Scott are rare

enough to make reliance upon their emergence a very dubious ground of

hope. Nor need we deny that the growth of a professional spirit among

journalists, their organization into a profession with standards of

entrance and performance, will add greatly to the chances of solving

the problem. So, also, will the development of specialized journals

of opinion, and new inventions like the wireless. To some extent--not,

I think, a great extent--competitive fact-finding makes for truth.

Outrageous propaganda kills itself; men do not believe the “papers”

because they have found them lying at some point where the facts forced

themselves upon attention.

And so, too, with a training for the open mind in schools. People may

come to see that where the quality of intelligence is concerned, the

second-rate, the dull, the incurious, the routineer, simply will not

do. They may be prepared to make education a profession sufficiently

well paid to attract the highest ability, and sufficiently honourable

to satisfy the keenest ambition. Even now we cannot over estimate

the influence exerted in his generation by a great teacher. Do what

we will, let him teach what he please, the minds with which he is in

contact will go along with his mind, they will learn his enthusiasms,

share his zest in inquiry. It may be Huxley in London, William James

in Harvard, Alain in Paris. Students who have lived with such men

are their spiritual children not less than those who have learned the

habits of a gentleman at Eton or a proper respect for the Emperor of

Japan in Tokio. And, equally, we may learn that a narrow patriotism

in history and politics has social results less admirable than a

quick scepticism built from the sense that our country has not always

been right, our institutional standards not invariably perfect. Our

governors may be willing to admit that one inference from the rebellion

of Washington is the possible legitimacy of rebellion, one inference

even from the new theology of Jesus, that we are sometimes justified in

the making of new theologies. It is even possible that the value of the

power to think may become so much more widely recognized, that we shall

not ask that those who are able creatively to teach this supreme art,

be dismissed because we dislike either what they teach or the opinions

they profess outside the practice of their profession. We may come to

insist upon security of tenure for the teacher even when his principles

of faith do not coincide with those for which we desire the triumph.

Yet these possibilities do not, in themselves, seem to me to confer a

right to optimism if they stand alone. If it pays to spread false news,

let us be sure that false news will be spread. If some special interest

gains by corrupting the facts, so far as it can, the facts will be

corrupted. If a poor educational system strengthens the existing

foundations of power, it will tend to remain poor; if its extension is

costly, those who are to bear the cost will find good reason either not

to extend it, or to proceed at such a snail’s pace that the new way

has no chance of affecting mankind except in terms of geological time.

Our difficulty is the twofold one that propaganda can produce immense

results in a brief space of time and that creative educational change

takes something like a generation before its results are manifest upon

a wide scale. The forces at work to prevent the emergence of truth, the

forces, also, which have every reason to dislike the development of the

mind which seeks for truth, are many and concentrated and powerful.

They do not want the general reporting of experience, but only of that

experience which favours themselves. They do not want the general

population so trained as to prize truth, but only so trained that they

believe whatever they read. In our own day it would not be an unfair

description of education to define it as the art which teaches men to

be deceived by the printed word. Those who profit by that deception

are, at the moment, the masters of society.

For we must remember that in these matters we have to concern ourselves

with short-term values and not long-term values. We do not legislate

for some conceivable Utopia to be born in some unimaginable time, but

for the kind of world we know ourselves, for lives like our own lives.

The freedom we ask we have to make. Every postponement we accept, every

failure before which we are dumb, only consolidates the forces that

are hostile to freedom. They themselves realize this well enough. They

have, in the past, fought every step on every road to freedom because

they have seen that the accumulation of small concessions will, in

the end, be their defeat. Everywhere they have been guilty of definite

error, or wrong, they have denied the error or wrong, lest it upset

faith in their own right to power. Not the least powerful to silence,

you will recollect, which persuaded even those who thought Sacco and

Vanzetti innocent was their fear that proof of that innocence might

disturb popular faith in the Massachusetts Courts. The same was true

in the Dreyfus case. The same, on a lesser plane, was true of Mr

Winston Churchill when he sought to deceive the House of Commons over

the treatment of Lady Constance Lytton in prison.[44] Those in power

will always deny freedom if, thereby, they can conceal wrong. And any

successful denial only makes its repetition easier. Had California

released Mooney in 1916, when the world knew he was innocent, it would

have been easier for Massachusetts to have acted justly ten years

later. The will to freedom, like the will to power, is a habit, and it

perishes of atrophy.

The inference I would draw is the quite basic one that in any society

men only have an equal interest in freedom when they have an equal

interest in its results. Where those results are already possessed by

some, they seldom have the imagination to see the consequence of their

denial to others. They will persuade themselves that those others are

contented with their lot, or made differently in nature, so that they

are unfit to enjoy what others possess. There is no myth we are not

capable of inventing to lull our conscience. We see the futility of

action on our part, because we are so unimportant. We see that it would

be dangerous in this particular case, because we have an influence

that, in other cases, might be exerted to useful purpose. We do not

think the time has come for action. We think that action here might

lead to other and quite unjustifiable demands. We would have associated

ourselves with the demand, but those who are making it, or the way in

which it is being made, unfortunately renders this impossible. Life is

so complex and tangled and full, that those who desire to abstain from

the battle for freedom can always find ample excuse. The workman may be

afraid for his job; Babbitt may shrink from being shunned by the group

whose fellowship is his life; it may be the handful of silver, the

riband for the coat, the love of power, the loathing of what freedom

may bring. Whatever the motive of abstention, let us remember that men

think differently who live differently, and that, as they think, so

they build principles of action to remedy what, in their lives, they

find bitter or unjust, to preserve what they find pleasant or right.

We cannot, of course, remedy all experience which makes for a sense

of bitterness or injustice. Things like the betrayal of friendship

are, only too often, beyond the power of organization to affect. But

the sense of bitterness or injustice that comes from bad housing, low

wages, or the denial of an adequate political status, these we are able

to remedy by social action. Or, rather, we are free to move to their

remedy, if we have an equal interest in doing so. If our interest is

unequal, our sense of a need to share with others in action will be

small. Other things will seem more significant or more urgent; and

the need itself will shrink as it obtrudes. The less we live in the

experience of our neighbours, the less shall we feel wrong in the

denial of their wants. Trade unionists appreciate a demand for higher

wages more keenly than employers: the wealthy rentier reads of a strike

in the cotton trade as a newspaper incident, of a railway dispute,

whatever its grounds, as a threat to the community. The sense of

solidarity comes only when the result of joint action impinges equally

on the common life.

We are in the difficulty that every step we take towards freedom is a

step towards the equalization of privileges now held unequally. Those

who hold them are not anxious to abandon what they entail; sometimes

they can even persuade themselves that the well-being of society

depends upon a refusal to surrender them. For them, therefore, the

honest publication of facts, the making of free minds, are simply

paths to disaster. Why should they surrender their weapons of defence?

Why, the more, when many of them do not even suspect that they fight

with poisoned weapons? To explain to a loyal Roman Catholic that he

should tell his children that there is grave reason to deny the truth

of all he believes is to invite him to shatter the foundation upon

which he has built his life. To suggest to the average citizen who

took part in the Great War that his school-books should abandon the

legend that his particular state entered it with the whole-souled

motive of serving justice would appear scandalous simply because he

is honestly unconscious of any other motive. To urge even upon the

public-spirited heir to a great estate the possible duty of acting upon

the principle of Mill’s argument about the laws of inheritance is, at

the best, an adventure in the lesser hope. There was good reason for

the unpopularity of the Socratic temper in Athens.

II

I conclude, therefore, that whatever our mechanisms and institutions,

liberty can hope to emerge and to be maintained in a society where

men are, broadly speaking, equally interested in its emergency and

its maintenance. I accept the insight Harrington had when he insisted

that the distribution of economic power in a state will control the

distribution of its political power. I think James Madison was right

when he argued that property is the only durable source of faction. I

think the perception of the early socialists entirely justified when

they urged that a society divided into a small number of rich, and

a large number of poor persons, will be a society of exploiters and

exploited. I cannot believe that, in such an atmosphere, liberty will

be a matter of serious concern to the possessors of power.

What will concern them is how they can best maintain their power. They

will permit anything save the laying of hands upon the ark of their

covenant. They will allow freedom in inessentials; but when the pith of

freedom is attack upon their monopoly they will define it as sedition

or blasphemy. For if the form of social organization is a pyramid,

men are bound to struggle towards its apex. In a society of economic

unequals, gross unequalities make conflict inherent in its foundations.

The possession of wealth means the possession of so much that makes for

a happy life, beautiful physical surroundings, leisure to read and to

think, safeguards against the insecurity of the morrow. It is, I think,

inevitable that those to whom these things are denied should envy those

who possess them. It is inevitable, also, that envy should be the nurse

of hate and faction. Those who are so denied struggle to attain, those

who possess struggle to preserve. Justice becomes the rule of the

stronger, liberty the law which the stronger allow. The freedom that

the poor desire in a society such as this is the freedom to enjoy the

things their rulers enjoy. The penumbra of freedom, its purpose and

its life, is the movement for equality.

And it is equality that is decried by those who rule. It means

parting with the exercise of power and all the pleasures that go with

its exercise. It means that their wants do not define the ends of

production, their standards do not set the objects of consideration,

their right to determine the equilibrium of social forces is no longer

recognized. Equality, in fact, is a denial of the philosophy of life

which is bred into their bones by their way of living. It does not

seem to me remarkable that they should fight against this denial.

Who of us, on these terms, but would find it difficult to accept as

valid experience which contradicts our experiences, a system of values

which attempts the transvaluation of our own? Who of us but would not

feel that a freedom which seeks radical alteration of the contours of

existence is perverse and dangerous and worthy only to be suppressed?

The Pagan felt that of the Christian, the Catholic of the Protestant,

the landowner of the merchant. The new power which seeks its place in

the sun is inevitably suspected by the old with whom it claims equal

rights.

The equality will be denied, and, with it, the freedom to claim

equality. Inevitably, also, the right to freedom will be maintained,

and the two powers will, sooner or later, mass their forces for battle.

I know no instance in history in which men in possession of power

have voluntarily abdicated its privileges. They say that reason and

justice prevail; but they mean their reason and their justice. They are

prepared to coerce in the hope of success, and they are prepared to die

fighting rather than to surrender. It is the result of such a way of

life that the ideal of freedom is inapplicable to matters upon which

there is urgent difference of opinion between the rulers and their

subjects. It is impossible for reason to prevail if men are prepared to

fight about the consequences of its victory. And if they are prepared

to fight there is no room in the society for freedom since this is

incompatible with habits of violence.

Any society, in fact, the fruits of whose economic operations are

unequally distributed will be compelled to deny freedom as the law

of its being; and the same will be true of any society in process

of forcible transition from one way of life to another. Cromwellian

England, Revolutionary France, Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, each

of these, of set purpose, made an end of the pretence that freedom was

a justifiable object of desire. In each, it was proposed to maintain

some particular form of social organization at any cost; to inquire

into the cost might result in doubt of the value of the effort; and

the value of that freedom which releases reason was therefore denied.

A revolutionary state, of course, makes the position peculiarly clear.

But it is not merely true of the revolutionary state.

In England, or France, or Germany, there is no freedom where the

fundamentals of the society are called into question, if their rulers

think that this may cause danger to those questions. The government

may decide that William Godwin is innocuous; but it will not hesitate

to convict Tom Paine--in truth far less drastic--of high treason. The

cause of this attitude is, I think, beyond discussion. If freedom seeks

to alter fundamentals, freedom must go; and freedom can hardly help

but concentrate on fundamentals in a society distinguished by economic

inequality. I do not need to point out to you the extraordinary

timidity of society before subversive discussion of property-rights,

nor to insist upon the complicated legal precautions that are taken

for its defence. You have only to examine the attitude in which Labour

combinations are approached by those who possess economic power, as

instanced, for example, by the use of the injunction by American

judges,[45] to realize that the main purpose of limitations on freedom

is to prevent undue encroachments upon the existing inequalities.

We announce that we are open to conviction in matters of social

arrangement. But we take the most careful steps to see that our

convictions are not likely to be overthrown.

For the chance that reason will prevail in an unequal society is

necessarily small. It is always at a disadvantage compared with

interest, for, to the latter, especially in property matters, passion

is harnessed, and in the presence of passion people become blind to

truth. They see what they want to see, and they select as truth that

which serves the purpose they desire to see prevail. The preparation

of news for the making of opinion is, indeed, extraordinarily like the

old religious controversy in which men hurled text and counter-text

at one another. The real problem was one of proportions; but the

protagonists altered the proportions that the material might the better

serve their cause. Some years ago, a Labour Delegation returned from

Russia with a statement about its character from Peter Kropotkin. A

leading capitalist newspaper in London printed all those parts of it

which attacked the Russian régime; and the leading Labour newspaper

printed those parts of it favourable to the Bolshevik experiment. The

readers of the first were, therefore, satisfied with the knowledge

that an eminent anarchist heartily disliked Bolshevism; and the

readers of the second were heartened by discovering that so eminent a

friend of freedom was nevertheless prepared to support a Dictatorship

as favourable to freedom. You will remember that Luther and Calvin were

always prepared to abide by the plain words of Scripture; but each was

careful, at critical points, to insist that his own interpretation

alone possessed validity. In that atmosphere, a solution which strikes

opposing controversialists as just is not, at least easily, to be found.

This, I suggest, is the kind of environment any plea for freedom

must meet in the modern state. Discussion of inessentials can be

ample and luxurious; discussion of essentials will always, where it

touches the heart of existing social arrangements, meet at least with

difficulty and probably with attack. It will find it extraordinarily

hard to organize supporters for its view, if this opposes the will of

those in authority. In wartime, any plea for reasonableness is at a

discount; and it was at a discount in England during the general

strike when the government sought at once for the conditions of a

belligerent atmosphere. Attack an interest, in a word, and you arouse

passion; arouse passion, especially where property is concerned, and

the technique of _raison d’état_ will sooner or later be invoked. But

liberty and _raison d’état_ are mutually incompatible for the simple

reason that _raison d’état_ is a principle which seeks, _a priori_, to

exclude rational discussion from the field. It seeks neither truth nor

justice, but surrender.

It is a technique, I think, which almost always comes into play when

dangerous opinion is challenged by the state. A good instance of this

is afforded by the trial of the British Communists in 1925. No one

could seriously claim that their effort constituted a serious menace

to the state, for they were a handful among millions, and there was

not even evidence that their propaganda met with any success. Yet

their condemnation was a foregone conclusion, granted the terms of the

indictment. And the habits of power were interestingly illustrated by

the judge who presided over the trial. He had conducted the case with

quite scrupulous fairness, and had shown no leaning to one side or the

other until the jury had rendered its verdict. He then made an offer

to the defendants that if they would abandon their belief in Communism

he would adjust the sentence in the light of that abandonment. He made

the offer, I do not doubt, in the utmost good faith and an entirely

sincere conviction that Communist opinions are morally wicked. But

that attitude was precisely similar to the Roman offer to the early

Christians: they could avoid the arena if they would offer but a

pinch of incense on the pagan altar. It was precisely similar to the

willingness of the Inquisitor to mitigate his sentence where there

is confession of heresy and repentance. Mr Justice Swift seemed to

have no realization at all that the defendants were Communists in the

light of an experience of social life which, for them, was as vivid

and compelling as the Christian revelation to its early adherents;

that the offer he made to them was mitigation of punishment in return

for the sacrifice of their sincerity; that the state, for him, was

Hobbes’ “moral God” at whose altar they must do reverence. His views,

of course, were the natural expression of his own experience of life,

and, without doubt, sincerely held; but they implied an inability

imaginatively to understand alien experience which is pathetic in the

limitation it involves. And perhaps the supreme irony in the situation

was the fact that to be tried as Communists was, for the defendants,

perhaps the supreme test of truth to which their faith could be

submitted.

When Plato, in the _Laws_, set out a revised version of his ideal

policy for application to the real world about him, he surrendered his

demand for the complete communism which had distinguished his Utopia.

But he was still emphatic enough about the need for equality to lay

it down that no member of his state should possess property more than

four times in amount of that owned by the poorest citizens. The ground

of that drastic conclusion was quite clear in his mind. Great economic

inequalities are, as he saw, incompatible with a unity of interest in

the community. There is no common basis upon which citizens can move to

the attainment of kindred ideals. The lives of the few are too remote

from the lives of the many for disagreement about social questions to

be possible in terms of peace, if the ultimate organization of the

society is not to be changed. The remoteness means that the few will

always fear the invasion of their privilege, and the many will envy

them its possession. It is not only, as I have said, that men think

differently who live differently; it is, essentially, that men think

antagonistically who live so differently. That antagonism is bound to

result in violence unless the domination of the many by the few is

almost complete, or is tempered by so continuous a flow of concession

as results, in the end, in the effective mitigation of the inequality.

There cannot, in a word, be democratic government without equality; and

without democratic government there cannot be freedom.

For the real meaning of democratic government is the equal weighing

of individual claims to happiness by social institutions. A society

built upon economic inequality cannot attempt that sort of measure.

Consciously or unconsciously, it starts from the assumption that there

is a greater right in some claims than in others. It cannot be said

that response to claims is made in terms of justice. The nature of

economic inequality is a compulsion to respond to effective demand,

and this pays no regard to science on the one hand, or to need upon

the other. It thinks only of the presence of purchasing power and not

of its connotation in terms of social purpose. The whole productive

scheme is thereby tilted to the favour of those who possess the power

to make their wants effective. There is cake for some before there is

bread for all. The palace neighbours the slum. And those who find that

their wants do not secure attention are, inevitably, tempted to an

examination of the moral foundations of such a society. Their interest

drives them to demand its reconstruction in terms of those wants.

Liberty means, in such a context, the power continuously to exercise

initiative in social reconstruction. The whole ethos which surrounds

their effort is that of equality. They search for freedom for no other

end but this.

I do not need to remind you that most observers who have sought

to estimate the significance of the democratic movement have seen

that equality is the key to its understanding. That was the case

with Tocqueville; it was the case with John Stuart Mill; and, in a

famous lecture which reads now as though it was the utterance of a

prophet,[46] it was the case, also, with Matthew Arnold. Broadly, their

insight converged towards a recognition of three important things. They

realized, first, that in any society where power is gravely unequal,

the character and intelligence of those at the base is unnaturally

depressed. The community loses by this in two ways. The energy and

capacity of which it might make use are not released for action; and

the concentration of effective power in a few hands means that the

wishes, opinions, needs, of the majority do not receive sufficient

consideration. An aristocracy, whether of birth, or creed, or wealth,

always suffers from self-sufficiency. It is inaccessible to ideals

which originate from without itself. It tends to think them unimportant

if they are urged tactfully, and dangerous if they are urged with

vigour. It is so accustomed to the idea of its own superiority, that it

is resentful of considerations which inquire into the validity of that

assumption. It may be generous, charitable, kind; but the surrounding

principle of those qualities is always their exercise as of grace and

not in justice. An aristocracy, in a word, is the prisoner of its own

power, and that the most completely when men begin to question its

authority. It does not know how to act wisely at the very moment when

it most requires wise action.

It is not only that any aristocracy becomes unduly absorbed in the

consideration of its own interests. Its depression of the people

has the dangerous effect of persuading the latter of its necessary

inferiority. It is unable to carry on its own affairs with order

and intelligence. It does not know how to represent its wants with

decision. It develops a sense of indignation because its interests

are neglected; but it does not know how to attach its indignation to

the right objects or, when so attached, how to remedy the ills from

which it suffers. An aristocracy, in a word, deprives its subjects of

character and responsibility; and as the revolutions of 1848 so clearly

demonstrated, while they can destroy, they have never been taught

how to create. The success of the Puritan Rebellion and the American

Revolution was built upon the fact that, in each case, the exercise

of power had been a habit of the general population; in the one case

in the management of Nonconformist Churches, in the other in the

governance of local legislatures and township meetings. In each case, a

blind government confronted men who knew how to formulate their wants,

and to organize their attainment. But, in general, aristocracies do

not provide their subjects with this opportunity. Their own effort is

substituted for popular effort, their own will for the popular will.

The development of the total resources at their disposal is postponed

to the preservation of their interest and convenience. They dwarf the

masses that they may the better contemplate the stateliness of their

own state. But that, in the end, always means that the vital power of

the people is absent at the moment when it is most required.

The third weakness of aristocracies is their inevitable impermanence.

There is no method known of confining character and energy and ability

to their own ranks. These, where they emerge in the people, will always

seek the means of their satisfaction. From this angle, few things are

so significant as the history of the British Labour Party. It rose

to power largely because there was no room in the leadership of the

historic parties for self-made men who had not sought success either as

lawyers or as business men. The result was that the knowledge at the

disposal of Liberals and Conservatives, the significant experience upon

which they could draw for the making of their policy, was always more

narrow than the area of the problems they had to meet. The lives of

the typical Labour leaders of the second generation, Keir Hardie, Mr

Ramsay MacDonald, Mr Arthur Henderson, invariably show a period where

the regretful decision has to be taken against further co-operation

with a party which cannot see the needs they see, which does not

desire service to the ideals they seek to serve.[47] And men such as

these make articulate in the minds of all who have a sense that their

interests are neglected not only the fact of negligence, the demand,

therefore, for satisfaction, but also the search for the principles

whereby satisfaction can be attained. Their insight into an emphasis

to which little attention has been paid grows by the volume of the

experience they encounter into a movement; and those who have permitted

the interest to be neglected find that the old battle-cries no longer

attract its allegiance even when they are given new form.

It is curious to note that not even the impact of defeat gives this

lesson its proper perspective to the defeated. English Liberalism has

suffered eclipse because, broadly speaking, it was unable to discover

an industrial philosophy suitable to the wants of the new electorate.

It served admirably the requirements of the manufacturer and the

shopkeeper who were enfranchised in 1832. It gave them freedom of

trade, liberty of contract and full religious toleration. But it never

understood either the fact of trade unionism or the philosophy of

trade unionism. Its attitude to citizenship was atomic in character.

It saw the community as a government on the one side, and a mass of

discrete individuals on the other. It assumed that each of these, given

liberation from the special privilege of the _ancien régime_, had the

full means of happiness at his disposal; it accepted, in a word, the

principles of Benthamite radicalism as absolute. But its error was not

to see that the community is not merely a mass of discrete individuals.

Jones is not merely Jones, but also a miner, a railwayman, a cotton

operative, an engineer. As one of these, he has interests to be jointly

promoted and jointly realized. A philosophy of politics that is to

work must find a full place in the state for organized workers to whom

freedom in the industrial sphere is, in its fullest implications,

as urgent and as imperative as freedom in the sphere of politics or

religion.

The Liberal Party did not see this until it was too late. Built largely

on the support of the Nonconformist business man, the interests it

understood were essentially his interests; and to recognize the

implications of trade unionism, as Keir Hardie and his colleagues

did, was to invade the interests upon which it was able to count for

allegiance. It was forced, obviously unwillingly, into concessions

like the Trades Disputes Act of 1906; but its policy, as the detailed

history of the process of social legislation from 1906 to 1914

makes clear was, so far as it could, to mitigate social inequality

by recognition of individual claims, and to build machinery for

their satisfaction which continued to neglect the fact of trade

unionism. When, after the war, the remarkable growth of the Labour

Party showed how vast was the decline of the Liberal hold upon the

working-classes, the Liberal leaders were driven, by the need of

self-preservation, to the invention of industrial principles likely to

prove attractive to trade unionists. But these wore the air of being

produced for the occasion; and they did not fit into the character

of Liberal Leadership. For the latter was quite unable to attract to

its ranks either working-men candidates or trade union support; and

the emphatic declaration of a Liberal politician that his party could

not join the ranks of Labour because the latter was built upon the

trade unions showed how unreal was the body of industrial principles

which Liberalism had developed.[48] It remained an atomic philosophy

applicable to a world in which employer and worker confronted each

other, as individuals, on equal terms. The assumption was unjustified;

and the way lay open for the consolidation by Labour of its growing

hold upon the workers. Liberalism remained a middle-class outlook,

admirable in its exposition of basic principle, but incapable of

adjusting principle to a medium with which its supporters were largely

unacquainted.

In an interesting passage[49] Lord Balfour has drawn attention to the

fact that the success of the British Constitution in the nineteenth

century--it is worth adding the general success of representative

government--was built upon an agreement between parties in the state

upon fundamental principles. There was, that is, a kindred outlook upon

large issues; and since fighting was confined to matters of comparative

detail, men were prepared to let reason have its sway in the realm of

conflict. For it is significant that in the one realm where depth of

feeling was passionate--Irish home rule--events moved rapidly to the

test of the sword; and the settlement made was effected by violence and

not by reason. That was the essence of the Russian problem. The effort

to transform a dull and corrupt autocracy into a quasi-constitutional

system came, like the efforts of Louis XVI at reform, too late to

affect men who had already passed beyond any possibility of compromise

with the idea of monarchical power. The concessions which the autocracy

was prepared to offer did not touch the fringe of what the opposition

regarded as nominal. Nor was that all. Post-war Russia illustrated

admirably the truth of Mill’s insistence that “a state which dwarfs its

men in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands,

even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great

thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery

to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it

nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine

might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”[50]

III

I conclude, therefore, that the factor of consent is not likely

effectively to operate in any society where there is a serious

unequality of economic condition; and I assume, further, that the

absence of such consent is, in the long run, fatal to social peace.

I do not deny that men will long postpone their protest against that

absence; there are few wrongs to which men do not become habituated

by experience, few, therefore, which, after the long passage of time,

they will not be persuaded are inherent in nature. But such habituation

is never permanent; sooner or later someone arises, like the child in

the fairy-story, to point out that in fact the emperor is naked. If

attention is drawn to some need which is widely experienced, the denial

that the need is real by those who have not experienced it, will not

prove effective. Workingmen never found it easy to believe that long

hours of work or low wages were the essential conditions of industrial

leadership in the nineteenth century. Few Nonconformists sympathized

with Burke’s attitude to parliamentary reform. Few American trade

unionists see in the use of the injunction by the courts a method of

preserving social peace in terms of a strict impartiality between

capital and labour. Opponents of Mussolini are not moved by his plea

that he thinks only of the well-being of Italy. Russian working-men

have probably been often tempted to the view that their Bolshevik

masters mistake Communist dogma for social truth.

To satisfy experience, in short, we must weigh experience as we move

to the making of decisions. We cannot rule it out because it is not

ours; that is the error of autocracy which insists upon the _a priori_

rightness of its own experience. We have to regard experience as

significant in itself and seek to come to terms with it. If it is

mistaken in the implications it assumes, we have to convince it of

its error. Our business, hard as it is, is the discovery of that need

in the experience which must be satisfied if successful government is

to be possible. For successful government is simply government which

satisfies the largest possible area of demand. It is not mysterious

or divine. It is simply a body of men making decisions which, in the

long run, live or die by what other men think of them. Their validity

as decisions is in that thought if only because its content is born

of what the decisions mean to ourselves. All of us are inescapably

citizens, and, at some point, therefore, the privacy in which we seek

escape from our obligation as citizens, will seem unsatisfying. A

crisis comes which touches us; a decision is made which contradicts

something we happen to have experienced as fundamental; we then judge

our rulers by the fact of that denial, and act as we think its terms

warrant.

This, as I think, is the real pathway to an answer to the kind of

problem which students of public opinion like Mr Lippmann have posed.

They are right in their analysis of the constituent factors in its

making, especially in their emphasis of the difficulties we confront

in making that opinion correspond to the realities it must satisfy.

They are right, further, I believe, in their emphasis upon the vital

connexion between truthful news and liberty; nor do I doubt that

some of the remedies they propose would have the valuable effect

of increasing the degree of truth in the news. But all of them, I

think, miss out the vital fact that truthful news is dangerous to a

society the actual contours of which its presentation might seriously

change. It would have been a different war in 1914 without propaganda;

the history of political parties would have been different if the

principles they announced were measured by their application to total

and not to partial experience. It only pays to print the truth when

the interest responsible for publication is not prejudiced thereby. My

point has been that in an unequal society that prejudice is inevitable.

And that prejudice, in its basic implications, is incompatible with

liberty. For what it does is to emphasize some experience at the

expense of other experience, to enable one need to make its way while

another need remains unknown. The policy of censorship during the war

meant that everyone anxious for its prosecution to the end had ample

opportunity to express his view; the pacifist, the Christian, the

believer in peace by negotiation, found it extraordinarily difficult

to speak. Clamant opinion was, as always, taken for actual opinion;

and policy, particularly in the making of peace, was built upon the

assumption that no other opinion existed save that which made itself

heard. To any observer with a grain of common sense, it was obvious

that no treaty would be possible of application save as it impressed

Germany as just, and that where, when the glow of war had gone, Germany

resisted its application, a public opinion would not easily be found to

demand the imposition of penalties. Nothing is more dangerous in the

taking of decisions than to assume that because people are silent, they

have nothing to say.

Yet that is the underlying assumption of much of our social life. We

emphasize opinion which satisfies those in power, we discount opinion

which runs counter to it; above all we take it for granted that silence

and consent are one and the same thing. Every one of these attitudes

is a blunder; especially is it a blunder, for which we pay heavily,

in matters of social importance. It is extraordinarily dangerous, for

example, to assume that English public opinion disapproved the General

Strike because Mayfair was indignant, the _Morning Post_ hysterical,

and Sir John Simon coldly hostile; for Mayfair and the _Morning Post_,

even with Sir John Simon, do not constitute English public opinion. Our

difficulty is that they will be taken to constitute it when it is to

the interest of government to do so. Such an equation is serious, and

may well be fatal, to any who think of social peace as a thing really

worth while to preserve.

We must remember, too, what goes along with a process of this kind.

Those who lament the ignorance of public opinion too often forget

that in an unequal society it is necessary to repress the expression

of individuality. Every attempt at such expression is an attempt

at the equalization of social conditions; it is an attempt to make

myself count, an insistence on my claim, an assertion of my right

to be treated as equal in that claim with other persons. To admit

that I ought to have that freedom is to deny that the inequality

upon which society rests is valid. And, accordingly, every sort of

devious method, conscious and unconscious, is adopted to prevent my

assertiveness. The most subtle, perhaps, is the denial of adequate

educational facilities; for what, in fact, that does is to prevent me

from knowing how to formulate my claim effectively, and unattention

is the price I have to pay for my ineffectiveness. My claim, then,

however real or just, because it is clumsily presented fails to secure

the consideration it deserves. Or, again, the view of a group may be

simply discounted where it fails to please the holders of power. We

are impressed, for instance, when we hear that a government, say that

of Mr Lloyd George, is solid in its determination not to give way to

the miners; we assume a careful weighing of the facts and a decision

taken in the light of their total significance. But when we hear that

the miners are solidly behind their leaders, we feel that this is a

clear case of ignorant and misguided men being led to their destruction

by agitators enjoying the exercise of power. The whole machinery of

news-making is directed to the confirmation of that impression;

and the chance that the miners’ claim will be considered equally is

destroyed by the weight which unequal economic power attaches to the

case against that claim. The opinion represented by the miners is not

objectively valued. It is the victim of a process of valuation the

purpose of which is to prevent, so far as possible, an alteration of

the _status quo_; and, _mutatis mutandis_, this is true of all claims

which seek alteration in a significant degree.

Now it is, I think, unquestionable that in an unequal society, the

effort of ordinary men to attain the condition we call happiness is

hampered at every turn. The power of numbers is sacrificed to the

interest of a few. The truth of the facts which might make a just

solution is distorted for a similar end. Freedom, therefore, in an

unequal society has no easy task as it seeks realization. For its

search is not to realize itself for its own sake, but for what, as it

is realized, it is able to bring. We seek religious freedom for the

truth our religion embodies. We seek political freedom for the ends

that, in the political world, we deem good. We seek economic freedom

for the satisfaction brought by making an end of the frustration to our

personality an irrational subordination implies. Men do not, I believe,

resent an environment when they feel that they share adequately in its

making and in the end for which it is made. But they are bound to be

at least apathetic, and possibly hostile, when the sense is wide and

deep that they are no more than its instruments. That is the secret of

the profound allegiance trade unionism is able to create. Its members

see in its activities the expression of the power for which they

are individually searching. Few states--it is surely a significant

thing--have ever won from their subjects a loyalty so profound as the

Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, or the trade unions in the cotton

trades. Even the blunders of their leaders meet with a pardon far more

generous than would be extended to the political heads of the state.

The reason lies in the degree to which the trade union expresses the

intimate experience of its members. And until the policy of the state

meets that experience with similar profundity conflict between the

government and the trade union will rarely involve the desertion by

the members of the association they have themselves made. What the

government will represent as disloyalty to the state will seem to trade

unionists a service which is freedom.

The point I am seeking to make was summarized with the insight of

genius by Disraeli when he spoke of the rich and poor as in fact two

nations. For the poor, their voluntary organizations evoke the same

kind of impassioned loyalty as a nation struggling to be free is able

to win from its members. Anyone who reads, for example, the early

history of bodies like the miners’ unions, and seeks to measure the

meaning of the sacrifices men were willing to make on their behalf,

will realize that he is meeting precisely the same kind of temper

as he can parallel from the history of the Italian struggle against

Austria or of the Balkan fight against Turkish domination. What Keir

Hardie did for the miners of Ayrshire, what Sidney Hillman has done

for the garment workers of America, are as epic and as creative, in

their way, as the work of Garibaldi and Mazzini. The latter must have

seemed at Vienna just as wrong and as unwise as Keir Hardie seemed to

the mineowners fifty years ago, or Hillman to the garment manufacturer

accustomed, in the classic phrase, to “conduct his own business in his

own way.” The point in each case is the important one that power is

challenged in the interest of self-government; that the focal point of

conflict is an inability on the part of those who govern to interpret

the experience of their subjects as these read its meaning; with the

result, again in each case, that the imposition of an interpretation

from without leaves those upon whom it is imposed with the sense that

their lives and their happiness are instruments and not ends.

What is the outcome of it all? For me, at least, essentially that a

society pervaded by the fact of unequality is bound to deny freedom

and, therefore, to provoke conflict. Its values will be so distorted,

its apparatus for magnifying that distortion so complete, that it is

blinded to the realities which confront it. We do not need to go far

for proof. The daily newspaper, the novel, the poet, all confirm it.

Compare Macaulay’s glorification of Victorian progress with the picture

in Carlyle’s _Chartism_, or Dickens’ _Hard Times_. Set the resounding

complacency of Mr. Gladstone’s perorations against the indignant

insight of William Morris and Ruskin. Think of the America of President

Coleridge’s speeches, and the America as bitterly described by Mr

Sinclair Lewis. Remember that Treitzschke’s eulogy of blood and iron

is a picture of the same Germany as that which Bebel and Liebkneckt

sought to overthrow. Guizot’s era of the _juste milieu_ is the period

of Proudhon and Leroux, of Considerant and Louis Blanc, all of them,

however mistakenly, the protagonists of a just society. Men think

differently who live differently. If we have a society of unequals,

how can we agree either about means or ends? And if this agreement is

absent how can we, at least over a considerable period, hope to move

on our way in peace?

An unequal society always lives in fear, and with a sense of impending

disaster in its heart. The effect of this atmosphere is clear enough.

We have only to examine the history of France after the death of Louis

XIV to realize exactly what it implies. Everyone who seeks to penetrate

below the surface sees some vast calamity ahead. It may be a visitor

like Chesterfield, a timid lawyer like Barbier, an ex-minister like

D’Argenson, a philosopher like Voltaire. The government itself, and

those with whom it is allied, has a perception that something new is

abroad. They fear the novelty and they seek to suppress it, in the

belief that a bold front and an adequate severity will stem the tide of

critical scepticism. But neither boldness nor severity can stem that

tide. The government falters for a moment on the verge of concession:

there is an hour when the ministry of Turgot seemed likely to

inaugurate an era of conciliation. It is too late because the price of

conciliation is the sacrifice of precisely the vested interests with

which the government is in partnership. So the ancient régime moves

relentlessly to its destruction. It is forced to consult those whose

experience it had never taken into account in the hope of salvation;

and they find that, if they are to fulfil, they must also destroy.

That is, other things being equal, the inevitable history of such

societies. Their mental habits resemble nothing so much as the

horrified timidity which persuaded Hobbes to find in despotism the

only cure for social disagreement. They are afraid of reason, for this

involves an examination into their own prerogative and, as at least

probable, a denunciation of the title by which it is preserved. They

are afraid of concession, because they see in it an admission of the

weakness of their case. They magnify scepticism into sedition and they

accuse even their friends who doubt the virtue of severity of betraying

the allegiance which is their due. They cannot see that men will not

accept the state as the appointed conscience of the nation unless they

conceive themselves to possess a full share of its benefits. They

minimize the sufferings of others, because they do not have experience

of them, and they magnify their own virtues that they may gain

confidence in themselves. They distort history, and call it patriotism;

they repress the expression of grievance and call it the maintenance

of law and order. In such a society, the governors appear to their

subjects as dwellers in another world; and communication between them

lacks the vivifying quality of fellowship. For the truth of one party

is never sufficiently the truth of another for the members to talk a

common language. Every vehemence becomes a threat; and by a kind of

mad logic every threat is taken as an act of treason. The society is

unbalanced because justice is not its habitation. Even its generosity

will be resented because it has not known how to be just.

I do not want to be taken as implying that violence is the inevitable

end. I only argue that the irrefutable and inherent logic of a

society where the gain of living is not proportioned to its toil

is one of which violence is the inevitable end. We have never any

choice in history except to follow reason wholly or, ultimately, to

expect disaster; and as we approach that ultimate, the temper of the

society will be what I have described. For the rule of reason in a

community means that a special interest must always give way before the

principles it discovers. And the rule of reason is the only kind of

rule which can afford the luxury of freedom. That is, I think, because

an admission that the claims of reason are paramount makes possible the

emergence of a spirit of compromise. The basis of the society being

just, men are not prepared for conflict over detail; but when the basis

itself is unacceptable, conflict over detail is magnified into a fight

over principle. In such a temper, men are always discussing with their

backs on the edge of a precipice. Social discussion becomes Carlyle’s

ultimate question of “Can I kill thee or canst thou kill me?” Every

utterance is necessarily a challenge; and suppressed because so taken;

every association is a conspiracy and attacked because so imagined.

The only way to avoid so poisonous an atmosphere is to be prepared to

surrender what you cannot prove it is reasonable to hold. But, human

nature being what it is, men do not easily surrender what they have the

power to retain; and they will pay the price of conflict if they think

they can win. They do not remember that the price of conflict is the

destruction of freedom and that with its loss there go the qualities

which make for the humanity of men.

IV

I spoke a little earlier of the sense of national freedom; and these

lectures would be even more incomplete than they are unless I sought to

dwell briefly on what such freedom means. Let me take here as my text

a sentence from John Stuart Mill which might well stand as the classic

embodiment of one of the outstanding ideals of the nineteenth century.

“It is” he wrote “in general a necessary condition of free institutions

that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with

those of nationalities.” I do not need to remind you of the commentary

history has written upon that text. In its name were accomplished the

unity of Italy and Germany, the breakup of the Turkish and Russian

empires, the separation of the Baltic peoples from the domination of

Russia. The economic motive apart, no principle has been more fruitful

of war than the demand for national freedom. Even yet, the day of its

power is far from ended; for every misapplication of Mill’s principle

in the peace treaties of 1919 has raised problems of government

which the world will find it difficult to solve without the bloody

arbitrament of the sword.

Now nationality is a subjective conception that eludes definition in

scientific terms. As an Englishman, I can feel in my bones the sense of

what English nationality implies; I feel intimately, for instance, the

things that enable me to claim Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Dickens

as typically English, without being able to put into words the things

that make them so. Every factor to which nationality has been traced,

race, language, common political allegiance, is an excessive simplicity

which betrays scientific exactitude. It is true that nationality is

born of a common historic tradition, of achievement and suffering

mutually shared; it is true, also, that language and race, and even a

common political allegiance, have played their part in its formation.

It is obvious that there is something exclusive about nationality,

that the members of any given nation have a sense of separateness from

other people which gives them a feeling of difference, of uniqueness,

which makes domination by others so unpleasant as to involve profound

discomfort to a point which may involve, even justly involve,

resistance to that domination. But the fact remains that nationality is

a psychological phenomenon rather than a juridical principle. It is in

the former, not the latter, sphere that we must seek to meet its claims.

Mill’s principle, if carried to its logical conclusion, would mean

that every nation has a title to statehood. I want you to think what

that implies. The modern state is a sovereign state, and in terms of

that title no will can bind its purpose but its own. The legal meaning

of sovereignty is omnicompetence. The state may, as it please, make

peace or war. It can erect its own tariffs, restrict its immigration,

decide upon the rights of aliens within its borders, without the duty

of consulting its neighbours, or paying any attention to principles of

justice. States have done all these things. There is no crime they have

not been prepared to commit for the defence or the extension of their

own power. A different moral code has been applied in history to their

acts from what we insist upon applying to individual acts, and it is,

quite definitely, a lower moral code. The history of the nation which

becomes a state and insists upon the prerogatives of its statehood

is a history incompatible with the terms upon which the maintenance

of peace depends. That exclusive temper which, as I have argued, is

the root of nationality means a measurable loss of ethical quality in

those international relations which are concerned with questions of

power. You have only to remember the acts which, during the war, states

attempted against one another amid the applause of their subjects to

realize that the recognition of national unity as a state means the

destruction of private liberty and the violation of international

justice, unless we can find means of setting some limit to the powers

of which a nation-state can dispose.

I am particularly concerned with the exercise of those powers on

their economic side. The nation-state is expected to protect the

activities of its citizens outside its own boundaries. Its prestige

becomes associated with its power to act in this way. So Germany

supports the Mannesman brothers in Morocco, England the Rothschilds in

Egypt, America its citizens in half the territories of South America.

Nationalism becomes imperialism and this means the enslavement of

lesser nations to the imperialistic power. In its worst temper, its

eternal character was described by Thucydides in that passage where he

relates the tragic end of Melos, a passage it would be mere insolence

either to summarize or to praise. Even where imperialism has resulted

in measurable benefit to the subject people, as with Great Britain in

India, or the United States in the Philippines, the resultant loss

of responsibility and character, which an imposed rule implies, is a

heavy price to pay for the efficiency of administration that has been

conferred. The noble phrase of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman that good

government is no substitute for self-government seems to me borne out

by every phase of the history of imperialism. It is the imposition

of a system of experience upon a people ignorant of the character

of that experience for ends only partially its own, and by methods

which neglect unduly the relation of consent to happiness in the

process of government. The classic case in my own experience is that

of Ireland. I cannot find ground upon which to defend the habits of

Great Britain there. But those habits seem to me the inevitable outcome

of an assumption that Great Britain was entitled to decide alone the

character of her own destiny.

Nationality, in a word, must, if it is to be consistent with the

needs of civilization, be set in the context that matters of common

interest to more than one nation-state cannot be decided by the fiat

of one member of the international community. Modern science and

modern economic organization has reduced this world to the unity of

interdependence: the inference from this condition is, as I think, the

supremacy of cosmopolitan need over the national claim. A nation, that

is, is not entitled to be the sole judge of its conduct where that

conduct, by its subject-matter, implicates others. It must consult with

them, compromise with them, find the means of resolving the problem

in terms of peace. Everyone of us can think of functions that, in the

modern world, entail international consequences by their inherent

character. We have passed the stage where we can allow a state to

fix its own boundaries as it thinks best, without consultation with

other states. The same is true of matters like the treatment of racial

minorities, of the scale of armaments, of the making of war and peace.

Everyone can see that matters like the control of the traffic in

noxious drugs, or of women and children, of epidemics like cholera and

typhus, cannot be settled save as states co-operate upon agreed methods

of action. Most people can see, at least in principle, that the same

thing applies to labour conditions, to legal questions like the law of

bills and notes, or the rights of aliens before a municipal court, or

the incorporation of public companies. An historian who surveyed the

history of international investment would, I think, not illegitimately

conclude that there are principles applicable to its control which can

justly regard with indifference the question of the nationality of the

investor or the state-power to which, save in cases of default, he

is certain to appeal. The importance of the supply of raw materials

to international economic life forces us to consider the deliberate

rationing of that supply, and the maintenance of a stable world

price level which thinks first of cosmopolitan need, and, only after

a long interval, of national profit. A sane man would, I suggest,

conclude that if bodies like the International Rail Syndicate, or the

Continental Commercial Union in the glass industry, find it sensible to

transcend national competition by international agreement, _a fortiori_

the principle applies to matters of world-concern.

I am, of course, only illustrating the problem.[51] The principle

which seems to me to emerge is the necessity for world-control where

the decision is of world-concern. The inference from that principle

is that the rights of the state are always subject to, and limited

by, the necessarily superior rights of the international community.

State-sovereignty, that is, in the sense in which the nineteenth

century used that term, is obsolete and dangerous in a world like our

world. It gives an authority to the nation-state which, in the light

of the facts, is incompatible with the well-being of the world. It

invokes the factor of prestige in realms where it has no legitimate

application. It means that problems of which a wise solution is

possible only in terms of reason have to find a solution amid

circumstances of passion and power which obviate any possibility of

justice.

For in the external, as in the internal, sphere of the state, the

choice is between the use of reason and conflict. The use of reason is

the law of liberty; conflict means the erosion of liberty. If states

are to conduct their operations always with the knowledge in the

background that the price of disagreement is war, the consequences are

obvious. The atmosphere of international affairs will be poisoned by

fear, and fear will bring with it the system of armaments and alliances

which, in 1914, issued naturally and logically in the Great War. That

was the price properly paid for a scheme of things which assumed that

the legal right of the state was unlimited, and harnessed to the

support of that legality every primitive and barbarous passion by which

nationalism can degrade humanity. We need not be afraid to assert

that, in the international sphere, the sovereignty of the state simply

means the right of any powerful nation to make its own conception

of self-interest applicable to its weaker opponents. It is the old

doctrine of self-help clothed in legal form; the doctrine against which

law itself came as a protest in the name of order and common sense.

And exactly as we cannot admit the right of a man to make his own law

in the internal life of the community, so we cannot allow the single

nation-state to make its own law in the wider life of the international

community. Because that is what the sovereignty of the state ultimately

means, the sovereignty of the state is a conception which outrages the

patent needs of international well-being.

I conclude, therefore, that if the nation is entitled to

self-government, it is to a self-government limited and defined by

the demands of a wider interest. I conclude that its recognition as a

state, if sovereignty be involved in that recognition, is incompatible

with a just system of international relations. It is, further,

incompatible with the notion of an international law regarded as

binding upon the member-states of the international community. I need

not dwell upon the impossible difficulties in which the defenders of

this doctrine have found themselves.[52] In their extreme form they

have even led a great jurist to write of war as the supreme expression

of the national will.[53] I am unable to share such a view. Where war

begins, freedom ends. Where war begins, the opportunity of making just

solutions of any problem in dispute is indefinitely postponed. And I

ask you to remember that, although, under modern conditions, a whole

nation is implicated in war after its beginning, that is not the case

either with its preparation or its declaration. That is an affair of

the agents of the state whose interest in the action they take may be

totally at variance with the interest of the people for whom they are

taken as acting. They may be serving private ambition, a particular

party; they may be acting on false information or wrong conceptions. My

point is that they dispose of the whole power of the state, and that

there is no means of checking their activity save the very unlikely

means of revolution. The full implications of national sovereignty are

a license to wreck civilization. I cannot recognize those implications

as necessary to a proper view of national freedom.

I deny, therefore, that there is any qualitative difference between

the interests or the rights of states, and the interests or rights of

other associations or individuals. Their purposes are ordinary, human

purposes like any other: they are a means to the happiness of their

members. They have, it seems to me, to be judged by exactly the same

principles as those by which we judge the conduct of a trade union, or

a church, or a scientific society. They do not constitute a corporate

person living on a plane different from, and having standards other

than, those of the individuals of whom they are composed. I fully agree

that no decision ought to be taken about them, in the making of which

they do not amply share. I fully agree, also, that limitations imposed

upon their activities must pay scrupulous regard to the psychological

facts out of which they are built. I do not, for instance, deny that

the Partition of Poland was a crime against Poland, or that its

inevitable result was to persuade millions of human beings that a war

for their resuscitation was a morally justified adventure. But I see

no difference between the Partition of Poland and, let us say, the

suppression in the community of a Communist Party. Each seems to me an

attack upon a corporate experience which is wrong because it does not

persuade those who share that experience to abandon its implications.

I do not advocate the supremacy of international authority over the

national state in order to destroy the national state. I advocate that

supremacy as the sole way with which I am acquainted to set the great

fact of nationalism in its proper perspective.

My point is, then, that the fact of a nation’s existence does not

entitle it to the full panoply of a sovereign state. Scotland and Wales

are both of them nations; neither possesses that panoply; neither, I

think, suffers in moral or psychological stature by reason of its

absence. Neither, let me add, do the Scandinavian peoples--perhaps the

happiest of modern communities--who are only sovereign states upon the

essential condition that they do not exercise their sovereignty. But

there is no more humiliation in that position than in the position any

government occupies in the context of its own subjects. Power is, by

its very nature, an exercise in the conditional mood. Those who exert

it can only have their way by making its objects commend themselves,

as, also, its methods of pursuing those objects, to those over whom it

is exerted. The sovereign king in Parliament could legally disfranchise

the working-classes in England; practically we know that it dare not

do so. Everyone in England is aware of the grim, practical limitations

under which parliamentary sovereignty operates; no one, I believe,

finds humiliation in limits such as we know.

What is happening to the world is something of the same sort. The

Covenant of the League of Nations is a method of limiting the

unfettered exercise of national sovereign power. It is a painful and

delicate operation; how painful and how delicate the timidity that has

been characteristic of the League’s history makes hideously manifest.

At any point in which the history of the League is examined, elections

to the Council, operations of the Mandate system, application of a

plebiscite, resolution of an international dispute, the statesmen of

Geneva have hesitated to act upon the logic of the world’s facts. They

have seen great nations confronting them, and they have feared that

those nations might, if angered, flout the League and go their own

way. So the League has fumbled and compromised and evaded. The big

states have controlled it, and over almost all of its history there has

fallen, darkening it, the shadow of the war.

Yet experience of the League gives us hope rather than despair. It

took three centuries to build up the sovereign national state to that

amplitude which proclaimed its own disastrous character in 1914; it

would be remarkable indeed if a decade full of memories and hates

so passionate as those of the last ten years sufficed to overthrow

its authority. We can at least say out of the experience of those ten

years that remarkable incursions into that authority have occurred.

We have discovered a great range of social questions the solution

of which is not relevant to the national state or to the problems

of power that state first of all considers. We have been able, that

is, to devise subjects of government in which national control is

not the obvious technique of operation. We have found, further, that

a platform can be constructed at Geneva the nature of which throws

any possible aggressor upon the defensive, and suggests the possible

organization against it of the rest of the civilized world. We are

finding ways of reaching the opinion of citizens in different states

over the heads of their governments; of making those citizens demand

attention to League recommendations in a way that a generation ago

would have been unthinkable. We have shown, and this, in some ways, is

the vital discovery of our time, that men of different nationalities

can co-operate together in the task of international government in

such a way as to sink the pettiness of a narrow outlook before the

greatness of the common task. I know that Sir Arthur Salter is a great

Englishman; but I believe his quality as an Englishman has been made

complete because he is above all a great citizen of the world.

I do not want to exaggerate the prospects of achievement that lie

before us; one blunder in Moscow or Rome might easily destroy every

hope we may tentatively cherish. I want merely to note that the idea of

a world-state is slowly, painfully, hesitantly, taking shape before our

eyes. I want to emphasize the logic of that state in an international

community so inescapably interdependent as this. I want to draw

therefrom the inference that national sovereignty and the international

community confront one another as incompatibles. Even the states which

have most carefully stood aloof from Geneva are in a degree to which

they are themselves unconscious within the orbit of that influence

which its idea makes so compelling. There is hardly one aspect of the

League’s work in which American citizens have not borne their share;

and I should hazard the suspicion that there have been occasions

when “unofficial observers” have done considerably more than observe

unofficially. I do not believe it is exaggeration to suggest that the

underlying motive of the Kellogg Pact was compensation by America for

her abstention from the Geneva Covenant. The Pact, by itself, is an

empty declaration; but its logic, like that of the Covenant, is likely

to take it much further in the direction of international government

than its authors intended it should go. Even Russia, in some sort the

antipodes of Geneva, has appeared there at Disarmament Conferences; and

even granted the rigour of the premises upon which her life is built,

she cannot remain unrelated to the structure of a world-order.

I believe, accordingly, that we can retain all that is essential to the

freedom of national life, and yet fully admit the implications of the

international community. We can leave to England, for instance, her

full cultural independence, her characteristic internal institutions,

her special contacts with the Dominions she has begotten; to sacrifice

the predominance of her navy, her right, by its means, to dictate the

law of the sea, would still leave her England. She would still be

England even if, to push speculation to the furthest point, the Suez

Canal were internationalized and Gibraltar returned to Spain. France

would be not the less France if the gold policy of her bank were set

by an international authority, if she gave up her zeal for a conscript

army, if she built her frontiers upon the impalpable solidity of

friendship rather than the shifting waters of the Rhine. I can see

nothing in the conceivable policy of a stronger League which would take

from her the glory that has made her the Athens of the modern world.

Changes in law policy, a different colonial outlook, a willingness to

improve the physical standards of labour, an acceptance of novel and

military forces determined upon the basis of world safety instead of

national aggressiveness--it is difficult to see in any of these things

such a blow at freedom as destroys the prospect of national happiness.

I can see grounds for the view that an international authority which

forbade the teaching of French in French schools; or altered the

boundary of France so as to make Marseilles Italian; or sought the

abrogation of the French civil code with its profound impact on the

social customs of France; might reasonably be regarded as invading what

in a nation’s life that nation only can claim to decide. I can see

that a nation might feel an international authority to be oppressive

if it sought, say, by an immigration policy seriously to alter the

_mores_ of a national life; it should not impose Japanese immigration

on California any more than Great Britain seeks to impose it upon

Australia. I can even see that oppression might be felt where, in the

building of an international civil service, there was a sense that

there is discrimination against the members of any particular nation,

or that in composing the committees of its government proper attention

is not given to the claims of some particular power.

The likelihood of any of these difficulties becoming real is, surely,

exceedingly small. An international authority must presumably be

endowed with an average volume of human common sense; and it is no

more likely than any other authority to invite disaster. Indeed it is

rather likely to fail to embark upon experiments and decisions it ought

to make from an excessively delicate sense of what some particular

nation may feel. International life in this realm is much more likely

to be a régime of example and influence than one of legislative

compulsion simply because the penalties of national dissent would

strain too gravely the structure of the authority which sought an

unwise imposition of its will. Here, once more, the situation is very

like that of the internal life of a national state. There is hardly

any association the state could not overthrow if it bent its energies

to the task. But, also, most states are wise enough to realize that

victories of this kind are empty victories, that solutions imposed by

force have consequences invariably too grave to be satisfactory in

their application. Consent has its full place in the international

sphere; and it is a safeguard of national right as creative here,

as elsewhere. Indeed it may reasonably be argued that with the

disappearance of national sovereignty, the factor of consent is likely

to be far more effective, far more genuinely related to the realities

of the world; than it is at the present time. For consent between two

powers like, say, America and Nicaragua, or Great Britain and Iraq has

something in it which partakes of the ironical spirit. It is consent

always in the knowledge that refusal to agree will make no serious

difference to the result that occurs. But the surrender of national

sovereignty is the surrender of aggressive power; and the nation can

move on its way the more freely since it knows that it no longer lives

in the shadow of international injustice.