wherever modifications may be found desirable in practice, but let us
see that kind of knowledge made familiar throughout the great
industries of the country. The men want to know for their own sakes
just these points: something about costs, where the goods they make
have to be sold, and in competition with whom they have to be sold,
and the conditions under which those goods are produced, where they
are produced in competition, and the wages paid. They should also
have some knowledge of the amount a business should set aside to meet
its repairs and its reserves, and when they have that knowledge they
will then know when is the time that they may hope to improve their
own condition, they will know then what the imponderables (as they
have been called) are, and they can realise, in a way they cannot
now, whether or not those who were arguing against them are basing
their claims upon facts and are speaking in truth. In other words,
it will tend to dissipate that horrible suspicion which causes an
atmosphere in which no healthy plant can flourish, and give light and
publicity by which alone men can tell whether they are getting a
square deal.
Everyone of us here, we hope and believe, by throwing our influence
into political life, may do something to better the conditions of our
own country. We want to help to better the conditions for our own
people. We want to see our people raised, not into a society of
State ownership, but into a society in which, increasingly, the
individual may become an owner. There is a very famous sentence of
Sir Henry Maine's, in which he said that the progress of our
civilisation had been of recent centuries a progress on the part of
mankind from status to contract. Socialism would bring him back from
contract to status.
It is an immense encouragement to me to see a gathering like
this--the generosity, the enthusiasm--if we had it through all
classes of our party we should be in office for life. You are
showing in your youth that you mean to take up the burden, and I say
"Good luck to you," for it is the only burden worth taking up. You
realise that the State is no cold entity. It is just the sum of all
the men and women of our country. If we look at it in that
individual way, that it is the men and women of the country we are
out to help and to serve, it will lend us enthusiasm. Nothing can
help the men and women who compose the State to make the State worthy
of this country--nothing can help them more than the kind of service
which you are prepared to give--service that will relieve the burden,
and service that will make straight the path, never losing in that
the sense of the importance of the individual, and the responsibility
of each one of us and of all of us to one another and to our Maker.
DISARMAMENT
FROM A SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
23_rd July_, 1923
Very little, if anything, has been said to-day about one of the
greatest difficulties which we find facing us in dealing with this
question, and that is that fighting instinct which is part of human
nature. I propose to say a few words about that first, with a view
to explaining how, in my view, we have to attempt to eradicate it,
or, at least, to combat it, so as to produce that will to peace
without which all efforts by legislation, arbitration, rule or
otherwise, must be vain. That fighting instinct in man is the
instinct of the tiger. It dates from his creation, and was probably
given to him to enable him to fight for the survival of his species,
for the provision of space in which to bring up his race, and to
provide food for it; and we find through the ages that that instinct,
whether in democracy or empire, or among individuals, has had full
play. We find it even among men whose political views can be classed
as pacifist, and that is the reason why we have often found in
history that men of pacifist views were advocating policies which
must end, if carried to their logical conclusion, in war.
I need only remind Hon. Members that there was a considerable
agitation some little time ago, with which I personally had great
sympathy, and which was conducted very largely by those who, in all
other respects, were of a peculiarly pacific turn of mind, and that
was that this country--if there is any work to be done in this world,
it is always our country, and I am thankful for that--that this
country should in some way or other rescue Armenia. The only means
by which Armenia could have been rescued was at the point of the
sword. I may remind Hon. Members that for the thirty years preceding
one of the longest and bloodiest struggles in history, the Civil War
in America, the anti-slavery agitation in the North-Eastern States
was very largely, if not entirely, in the hands of professional
pacifists and anti-militarists, and when the agitation had brought
matters to the point that it meant either surrendering the principle
of anti-slavery or going to war the pacifists, quite rightly in my
view, said: "It shall be war," realising, as was said during the late
War, that there are times when moral issues may even triumph over
peace.
In the same way some of those to-day who are loudest in their
protestations of international pacifism are loudest in their
protestations that nothing but a class war can save society. No
truer word was ever said by a philosopher than was said by Kant, a
century ago or more, that we are civilised to the point of
wearisomeness, but before we can be moralised we have a long way to
go. It is to moralise the world that we all desire, and I have
merely mentioned these innate characteristics of human nature to make
us realise, as I think we sometimes fail to do, what difficulties
there are before us in carrying out a policy with which everyone in
this House is in sympathy. We have to remember one more thing
besides that, that since the War we must not make the mistake of
thinking that what may be war weariness is necessarily an excess of
innate good will; and we cannot help noting that there has arisen in
Europe, in the few years since the peace, a strong local feeling in
different places of an extreme nationalism which, unless corrected,
may bear in what is not of itself an evil thing the seeds of much
future peril for the peace and harmony of Europe.
But, taking into full consideration these points, on which I have
touched somewhat summarily, I think there are compensations, and I
think before I have finished I shall be able to show that the human
race is progressing, though slowly, and is full of a conscious,
though hardly as yet articulate, desire for further progress in the
same direction.
I have often thought, with reference to the late War, that one of the
most terrible effects of it--possibly a double effect--has been that
it has shown the whole world how thin is the crust of civilisation on
which this generation is walking. The realisation of that must have
come with an appalling shock to most of us here. But more than that.
There is not a man in this House who does not remember the first air
raids and the first use of poisoned gas, and the cry that went up
from this country. We know how, before the War ended, we were all
using both those means of imposing our will upon our enemy. We
realise that when men have their backs to the wall they will adopt
any means for self-preservation. But there was left behind an
uncomfortable feeling in the hearts of millions of men throughout
Europe that, whatever had been the result of the War, we had all of
us slipped down in our views of what constituted civilisation. We
could not help feeling that future wars might provide, with further
discoveries in science, a more rapid descent for the human race.
There came a feeling, which I know is felt in all quarters of this
House, that if our civilisation is to be saved, even at its present
level, it behoves all people in all nations to do what they can by
joining hands to save what we have, that we may use it as the vantage
ground for further progress, rather than run the risk of all of us
sliding in the abyss together.
The conscience of the world is not stilled yet, but on the Government
side of the House there rests a responsibility which cannot, in the
nature of things, be felt by those who sit in opposition. We have to
remember that a great deal of what has been said to-day, and if I may
use the phrase in all good faith, some of the dreams which have been
mentioned to-day are no new thing. We have to remember that in the
French wars of Queen Anne's reign there was just the same longing
for, and the same dream of, universal peace that so many of us feel
to-day. One hundred years ago that same feeling, in different forms,
animated many different breasts. Napoleon at St. Helena had dreams
too late for him, but dreams of a united Europe with a united
congress on the American model, of which he would be the chief and
the dictator. At Vienna such dreams were heard of. The Tsar
Alexander, a prototype of the late Tsar, whose dreams of peace were
shattered only too cruelly, propounded a scheme of Holy Alliance
which at that time came to nothing, because he spoke to a world that
was not yet ready for it.
We believe that any attempt at this moment to convene an
international conference would not only not lead to success, but
would lead to the indefinite postponement of any possibility of
achieving the ends which we all desire. In my view the moment cannot
arise to approach this problem, with any chance of success, until the
conditions of Europe with regard to Reparations and the security of
frontiers is settled, and I feel that it would be hopeless to expect
a definitely favourable answer--to give only two instances; and I do
not wish on this occasion to be more explicit--from France, for
instance, before she had obtained a settlement of Reparation and
security, or from Poland until she could feel that her frontiers were
secure against that gigantic and powerful neighbour along her eastern
borders.
The first step to be taken is the step that we are taking now. That
is, to attempt a settlement of these existing problems of Reparation,
and in taking that step I am animated by as ardent a desire that it
may lead ultimately, and at no distant date, to the consideration of
these questions which we have been discussing to-day, as I am
desirous of it leading to a discussion and settlement of those
questions which have kept the countries of Europe apart during all
the years which have succeeded the Great War. Let us never forget
that sometimes in the darkest day the beginnings of better things are
not only attempted but successfully achieved. It was in the darkest
days of the struggle of the Thirty Years' War that Grotius worked on
international law and led to the foundation of that science which,
though it has not brought peace to the world, has yet brought into
being a code which has helped the world in its peaceful development,
and will continue to do so.
It has been during those dark days of the last three or four years
that the Washington Conference was held, which has led to a
limitation of naval armaments that, until that Conference was held, I
am convinced the statesmen of all countries would have considered to
have been impossible, impossible even to have been debated, and
impossible in its fulfilment. This year, some of the most valuable
exploratory work has been done, and is being done, by the League of
Nations. The League of Nations has been occupied in considering this
very question of disarmament, and the possibility of linking it up
with guarantees of security, universal in their application as such
guarantees must be: and such a universality is, indeed, a first and
absolute essential to make any prospect hopeful of limitation of
armaments.
Now, those efforts of the League of Nations are on the point of
taking concrete form in the shape of proposed Treaties, which will be
submitted to the Governments of Europe for their consideration,
probably after the meeting in September of the General Assembly of
the League of Nations. I can promise, at least for this Government,
and I am certain that the same will be true of all the leading
Governments of Europe, that the work that the League of Nations has
done, the form in which their work will be presented, will be
examined, not only with the sympathy and the interest that such work
deserves, but with an earnest desire, at the first moment when it
appears to be practicable, that the aims of the League, if not in the
exact form in which they have suggested they should be brought about,
shall be brought into effect in Europe.
As was well said by the Hon. Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw), in the
course of his speech, there is one great instrument of peace in this
world, and that is the British Empire. It is a great instrument, not
only in its size, and its population, and its wealth, but more than
ever a great instrument in this, that it is not only an Empire, but
it is a large assembly of free nations, not all of the same kin or
the same tongue, but animated largely by a common purpose, and all
alike equally desirous of seeing extended in every corner of that
Empire or Commonwealth those ideas of liberty, and justice, and
freedom which we believe are in our hearts, and which we hope to see
spread throughout our Empire and throughout the world. In that
collection of nations, which now spreads throughout the world, there
is something of hope for the human race, because though it may seem a
dream, it may yet some day be possible for peoples in so distracted a
Continent as Europe to feel there may be something for them to learn
from the development, from the union, and from the ideals of our
great Empire, and we may possibly be able to show them a better way,
which in years to come they may tread, and find the solution that
to-day seems so difficult.
As I have tried to explain to the House we cannot see our way to
accept this Motion and take immediate steps, believing as we do that
such steps would be rather a bar to future progress than a help. Yet
I do say this, that when we are sufficiently fortunate, as I pray we
may be, to have seen brought about, with our aid, such a settlement
in European conditions as I indicated earlier on, then the time will
be ripe and we shall be ready to take our part, in so far as we can,
whether through such schemes as have been proposed already or through
others, in bringing about that limitation of armaments which we
believe to be essential for the future progress of civilised mankind.
It is an easy thing to say, as many men say to-day, that this country
should cut herself adrift from Europe, but we must remember that our
island story is told, and that with the advent of the aeroplane we
ceased to be an island. Whether we like it or not, we are
indissolubly bound to Europe, and we shall have to use, and continue
to use, our best endeavours to bring to that Continent that peace in
which we and millions of men up and down Europe have an equal belief
and an equal faith.
_MISCELLANEOUS_
SCOTLAND
ST. ANDREW'S DAY FESTIVAL OF THE ROYAL SCOTTISH
CORPORATION
30_th November_, 1925
It is a great honour for one who is not hundred per cent. a Scot to
preside over the anniversary of the Corporation. The Charity goes
back even further than 261 years. It goes back to the time when the
throne was transferred from Edinburgh to London, and in the wake of
that throne began the migration southwards which, in after years,
attained such great proportions. It being a Scottish army, the
casualties by the way were few, but it is a great tribute to the race
that from the beginning they made preparations to deal with those
casualties. Attempts were made to succour the fallen, attempts which
have gained in force from generation to generation as the need
becomes greater, so that, as the years go by, there is hardly a
family which has attained prosperity in London whose name may not be
found in the annals of the Corporation as having helped to make
provision for their less fortunate brothers and sisters. In the face
of a patriotism so insistent and so persistent it is not necessary
for me this night to beg for this great organisation. You have
responded to its call already with your traditional and your national
generosity.
Now, I would like, as an Englishman, not without connection with a
certain part of Scotland, to offer a few observations on the virtues
of the Scot and on the impression that the Scot has made in England;
and I think perhaps, speaking as an Englishman, that there is one
thing above all others which we owe to you, and one thing in which
the Scot has set an example, which we would do well to imitate.
There is nothing that fills me with more admiration than the way in
which your people for generations have held up that standard of plain
living and high thinking--a lesson which to-day a world that would,
if it could, be a world of high living and plain thinking, needs more
than ever before. Nothing has made Scotland what she is more than
the magnificent system of parochial education, which she had years
before any other part of the British Isles. The picture of the
Scottish student with his sack of oatmeal, leaving his work for part
of the year, living and drawing on the frugality and self-sacrifice
of father and mother, brother and sister, in the pursuit and
attainment of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, is an example to
the whole world, and what your Scots have to be mindful of is that in
this age, when education is tending to become spoon-fed, you do not
allow yourselves to lose sight of the ideals of the past generations.
When I think of all the lessons you have to give us, I am always
struck by the fact that of Scotsmen, I think, perhaps alone, the
English people are in no way either jealous or envious. Whatever be
the reason, the English have always taken the Scots to their hearts
as blood brothers. I do not think it is difficult to give the
reason, and I think the reason may be traced to one man of genius.
For a long time after the Union it would seem that the Union itself
afforded no stimulus--whatever else it may have done--to Scottish
literature. One of your own most famous writers in the last century
said that at that time you had "theologic ink and Jacobite blood,
with gall enough in both cases to have blotted out the intellect of
the country"--and when David Hume and Adam Smith came they were still
drawing from France rather than from their own soil. But a few years
later, by the grace of God, you threw up two men of genius, Walter
Scott and Robert Burns. You had, as no other nation ever has had, a
man of yourselves to interpret you to the neighbouring kingdom--that
was Walter Scott; for however ardent an admirer of Burns you may be,
no one could call Burns an interpreter to Englishmen. Scott did a
great deal for your country. There was, of course, patriotism before
Scott appeared, but he deepened, enriched and ennobled it in a
thousand ways for the Scots themselves. All that honours the
ancestry of the Scot and the kindred of the Scot, the virtues and the
noble deeds of your ancestors, the heroism of the common people--all
that he gave you, and through that many in his generation, and in the
generation that came after, have felt more than they had ever felt
before that they had a country to live for, an ancestry to live up
to. It was a tremendous stimulus.
But the greatest service he rendered was the interpretation of
Scotland to England. Take myself as a typical Englishman. By the
time I was ten I had read the _Tales of a Grandfather_, and had read
all his poems and half his novels. Since then, I suppose, not a year
goes by that I do not read some of them again, and whenever I go to
Edinburgh I go down to Castle Street and look at the bay window where
he stood and the door where he welcomed Pet Marjorie. He said when
he first wrote that he wished to do for Scotland what Maria Edgeworth
did for Ireland; but how many people of to-day outside those who love
books--which is not the same thing as borrowing from Mudie's--ever
read Maria Edgeworth? Had there been a Walter Scott for Ireland
there would have been no Boundary Commission sitting to-day, and I
should have been able to have devoted my week-end, as I had intended,
to preparing a speech worthy of this occasion.
That is not all that Walter Scott did. How impossible it would have
seemed to Boswell and Dr. Johnson, when they travelled in the
Hebrides, if anyone had told them that within sixty years there would
arise a genius who would bring the English King to Edinburgh and put
him in a kilt, that a genius would arise under the spell of whose
wand the Lowlander would adopt the garb of the robbers of the North.
I remember when I was in Scotland this autumn I was asked humorously
why I did not wear a kilt when in Scotland. I said the last time my
ancestors wore a kilt was at Culloden, and I leave it for the English
to wear it when they go to Scotland. If it had not been for Walter
Scott you would never have seen the kilt south of the Grampians, and
the result is that we English--a prosaic race--cannot look at
Scotland or at a Scot except through those glasses tinted with
romance and history, those glasses that Walter Scott made us wear;
and, while we are looking at you with the vision of the Wizard of the
North, wrapped in admiration, you attend strictly to business! When
Scott wrote his first novel the "Forty-five" was only sixty years
back. It seems long years away from us. The Industrial Revolution,
which Scott hardly understood, has almost submerged us.
"The successor of Monkbarns does not exchange ideas with the
successor of Edie Ochiltree. He meets his fellow lairds in a London
club. Edie Ochiltree has left the bonny burnsides for the city
slums; Mrs. Mucklebackit sells her ware to a London fishmonger; and
Captain M'Intyre hires his moor to a wealthy American; while Mr.
Blattergowl is not the unique minister of a unique parish."
And yet, though there is an element of truth in these things, there
remains in you that indestructible love of your own people and your
own soil; and, in my view at least, it is largely for this reason
that you, in spite of a certain amount of industrialising of your
country, have not yet been submerged by industrialism to the extent
that a large part of the southern portion of Great Britain has been.
So long as you keep your contact with nature, so long as the
Highlands are left, so long as your great agricultural country is
left, those roots are left in the soil which alone can propagate that
plant of tradition which means so much to you, as it does to the
countryman in England.
If you ask an Englishman what he thinks of Scotland in
contradistinction to what comes in his mind when he thinks of
England, we think of the heather and the moors, and we see your
northern country as we should see it in June, ablaze with the glory
of the broom. Those are the pictures that rise in our minds, and if
I were asked what represents the soul of Scotland I could not answer
better than by the reply which was given many years ago to a relative
of mine in New Zealand by an old Scottish farmer. My relative asked
him how long the traditions that your people bring from home last in
a new country, and the old settler replied, "The porridge and the
heather and the Psalms of David last to the third generation as a
sustenance for body and spirit." And may they abide for ever,
because--and I speak as an Englishman--were the Scot to pass, with
his history, with his tradition, with his character, there would pass
at the same time from earth a large part of the heroism and the
romance of the world, those intangible qualities which, perhaps more
than anything else, make us capable of plain living, high thinking
and great deeds.
IRELAND
ST. PATRICK'S DAY BANQUET
17_th March_, 1926
No man can stand here to-night before an audience like this,
occupying the position which I do, without asking himself what has
happened that such a gathering, that such a company, is possible in
London to-night. I feel, perhaps, it means that the secular struggle
is drawing--has drawn--to a close; it means that you recognise too
generously the little that I have been able to do with my colleagues
to help Ireland over a stile.
Having safely surmounted the stile, two facts stand out before the
statesmen of Ireland and the statesmen of England. It is not for me
in my position to speak, as Mr. MacVeagh did, with the yearning of
the Irish for an Ireland one and indivisible, but I still say this,
that the fact that by that recent settlement it was recognised in
Ireland that there was a problem in the North has, for the first
time, rendered the solution at some time possible, because as the
Minister for Justice of the Free State said, it is a problem not
perhaps soluble at the present time, but one that possibly only time
can solve. To solve any problem the first essential is the
recognition of it.