Turning to the political field, I shall occupy but little of your time
with the special questions of the year. We are as a body entirely
dissevered from party politics. We seek to color political activity
with certain moral general principles, but we have no interest in party
politics as such. The idea that Positivists are, as a body, Radicals
or Revolutionaries is an idle invention; and I am the more entitled
to repudiate it, in that I have myself formally declined to enter on
a Parliamentary career, on the express ground that I prefer to judge
political questions without the trammels of any party obligation.
On the one hand we are Republicans on principle, in that we demand
a government in the interest of all and of no favored order, by the
highest available capacity, without reference to birth, or wealth, or
class. On the other hand, we are not Democrats, in that we acknowledge
no abstract right to govern in a numerical majority. Whatever is best
administered is best. We desire to see efficiency for the common
welfare, responsible power intrusted to the most capable hand, with
continuous responsibility to a real public opinion.
I am far from pretending that general principles of this kind entitle
us to pass a judgment on the complex questions of current politics,
or that all Positivists who recognize these principles are bound
to judge current politics in precisely the same way. There is in
Positivism a deep vein of true Conservatism; as there is also an
unquenchable yearning for a social revolution of a just and peaceful
kind. But no one of these tendencies impel us, I think, to march under
the banner either of Mr. Gladstone or Lord Salisbury. As Republicans
on principle, we desire the end of all hereditary institutions. As
believers in public opinion, we desire to see opinion represented
in the most complete way, and without class distinctions. As men
who favor efficiency and concentration in government, we support
whatever may promise to relieve us of the scandalous deadlock to which
Parliamentary government has long been reduced. It may be permitted to
those who are wholly detached from party interests to express a lively
satisfaction that the long electoral struggle is happily got out of
the way, and that a great stride has been taken towards a government
at once energetic and popular, without regarding the hobbies about the
representation of women and the representation of inorganic minorities.
It is on a far wider field that our great political interests are
absorbed. There is everywhere a revival of the spirit of national
aggrandisement and imperial ambition. Under the now avowed lead of
the great German dictator, the nations of Europe are running a race
to extend their borders by conquest and annexation amongst the weak
and uncivilised. There is to-day a scramble for Africa, as there
was formerly a scramble for Asia; and the scramble in Asia, or in
Polynesia, is only less urgent for the moment, in that the rivalry is
just now keenest in Africa. But in Asia, in Africa, in Polynesia, the
strong nations of Europe are struggling to found Empires by violence,
fraud, or aggression. Three distinct wars are being waged in the East;
and in Africa alone our soldiers and our Government are asserting the
rule of the sword in the North, on the East, in the centre, on the
South, and on the West at the same time. Five years ago, we were told
that for England at least there was to be some lull in this career of
blood and ambition. It was only, we see, a party cry, a device to upset
a government. There has been no lull, no pause in the scramble for
empire. The empire swells year by year; year by year fresh wars break
out; year by year the burden of empire increases whether Disraeli or
Gladstone, Liberal or Conservative, are the actual wielders of power.
The agents of the aggression, the critics, have changed sides; the
Jingoes of yesterday are the grumblers of to-day; and the peaceful
patriots of yesterday are the Jingoes of to-day. The empire and its
appendages are even vaster in 1885 than in 1880; its responsibilities
are greater; its risks and perplexities deeper; its enemies stronger
and more threatening. And in the midst of this crisis, those who
condemn this policy are fewer; their protests come few and faint. The
Christian sects can see nothing unrighteous in Mr. Gladstone; the
Liberal caucuses stifle any murmur of discontent, and force those who
spoke out against Zulu, Afghan, and Trans-Vaal wars to justify, by the
tyrant’s plea of necessity, the massacre of Egyptian fellahs and the
extermination of Arab patriots. They who mouthed most loudly about
Jingoism are now the foremost in their appeals to national vanity. And
the parasites of the parasites of our great Liberal statesman can make
such hubbub, in his utter absence of a policy, that they drive him by
sheer clamor from one adventure into another. For nearly four years now
we have continuously protested against the policy pursued in Egypt.
Year after year we have told Mr. Gladstone that it was blackening his
whole career and covering our country with shame. There is a monotony
about our protests. But, when there is a monotony in evil-doing, there
must alike be monotony in remonstrance. We complain that the blood and
treasure of this nation should be used in order to flay the peasantry
of the Nile, in the interests of usurers and speculators. We complain
that we practically annex a people whom we will not govern and cannot
benefit. We are boldly for what in the slang of the day is called
“scuttling” out of Egypt. We think the robber and the oppressor should
scuttle as quickly as possible, that he is certain to scuttle some
day. We complain of massacring an innocent people merely to give our
traders and money-dealers larger or safer markets. We complain of all
the campaigns and battles as wanton, useless, and unjust massacres. We
especially condemn the war in the Soudan as wanton and unjust even in
the avowal of the very ministers who are urging it. The defender of
Khartoum is a man of heroic qualities and beautiful nature; but the
cause of civilisation is not served by launching amongst savages a
sort of Pentateuch knight errant. And we seriously complain that the
policy of a great country in a great issue of right and wrong should
be determined by schoolboy shouting over the feats of our English
Garibaldi.
It is true that our Ministers, especially Mr. Gladstone, Lord
Granville, and Lord Derby, are the public men who are now most
conspicuously resisting the forward policy, and that the outcry of the
hour is against them on that ground. But ambition should be made of
sterner stuff. Those who aspire to guide nations should meet the folly
of the day with more vigorous assertion of principle. And the men who
are waging a wanton, bloody, and costly war in the sands of Africa have
no principle left to assert.
It may well be that Mr. Gladstone, and most of those who follow him in
office, are of all our public men those who have least liking for these
wars, annexations, and oppressive dealings with the weak. They may
have less liking for them it may be, but they are the men who do these
things. They are responsible. The blood lies on their doorstep. The
guilt hangs on their fame. The corruption of the national conscience
is their doing. The page of history will write their names and their
deeds in letters of gore and of flame. It is mockery, even in the
most servile parliamentary drudge, to repeat to us that the wrong
lies at the door of the Opposition, foreign intriguers, international
engagements, untoward circumstances. Keep these threadbare pretexts to
defend the next official blunder amidst the cheers of a party mob. The
English people will have none of such stale equivocation. The ministers
who massacred thousands at Tel-el-Kebir, at Alexandria, at Teb, at
Tamasi, who are sinking millions of our people’s hard-won savings in
the sands of Africa, in order to slaughter a brave race whom they
themselves declare to be heroes and patriots fighting for freedom; and
who after three years of this bloodshed, ruin, and waste, have nothing
to show for it—nothing, except the utter chaos of a fine country, the
extreme misery of an innocent people, and all Europe glowering at us
in menace and hate—the men who have done this are responsible. When
they fail to annex some trumpery bit of coast, the failure is naturally
set down to blundering, not to conscience. History, their country,
their own conscience will make them answer for it. The headlong plunge
of our State, already over-burdened with the needs and dangers of a
heterogeneous empire, the consuming rage for national extension, which
the passion for money, markets, careers, breeds in a people where
moral and religious principles are loosened and conflicting, this is
the great evil of our time. It is to stem this that statesmen should
address themselves. It is to fan this, or to do its bidding, that our
actual statesmen contend. Mr. Gladstone in his heart may loathe the
task to which he is set and the uses to which he lends his splendid
powers. But there are some situations where weakness before powerful
clamor works national ruin more readily even than ambition itself. How
petty to our descendants will our squabbles in the parliamentary game
appear, when history shall tell them that Gladstone waged far more
wars than Disraeli; that he slaughtered more hecatombs of innocent
people; that he oppressed more nations, embroiled us worse with foreign
nations; left the empire of a far more unwieldy size, more exposed and
on more rotten foundations; and that Mr. Gladstone did all this not
because it seemed to him wise or just, but for the same reason (in
truth) that his great rival acted, viz., that it gave him unquestioned
ascendency in his party and with those whose opinion he sought.
I have not hesitated to speak out my mind of the policy condemned,
not in personal hostility or irritation, however much I respect the
great qualities of Mr. Gladstone himself, however little I desire
to see him displaced by his rivals. No one will venture to believe
that I speak in the interest of party, or have any quarrel with my
own countrymen. All that I have said in condemnation of the African
policy of England I would say in condemnation of the Chinese policy in
France. I would say it all the more because, for the reasons on which
I will not now enlarge, our brethren in France have said so little,
and that little with so broken a voice. It is a weakness to our common
cause that so little has been said in France. But I rejoice to see
that in the new number of our Review, our director, M. Laffitte, has
spoken emphatically against all disturbance of the _status quo_, and
the policy of founding colonial empires. It behooves us all the more
to speak out plainly here. There is the same situation in France as
in England. A ministry whom the majority trust, and whom the military
and trading class can bend to do their will; a thirst in the rich to
extend the empire; a thirst in the adventurers for careers to be won; a
thirst in the journalists for material wherewith to pamper the national
vanity. There, too, are in the East backward peoples to be trampled
on, a confused tangle of pretexts and opportunities, a Parliamentary
majority to be secured, and a crowd of interests to be bribed. In
the case of M. Ferry, we can see all the weakness, all the helpless
vacillations, all the danger of his game; its cynical injustice, its
laughable pretexts and excuses, its deliberate violation of the real
interests of the nation, the formidable risks that he is preparing for
his country, and the ruin which is as certain to follow it. In Mr.
Gladstone’s case there are national and party slaves for the conscience
of the boldest critic.
The year, too, has witnessed a new form of the spread-eagle tendency in
the revival of one of our periodical scares about the strength of the
navy. About once in every ten or twenty years a knot of shipbuilders,
journalists, seamen, and gunners, contrive to stir up a panic, and to
force the nation into a great increase of its military expenditure.
I am not going to discuss the truth about the Navy, or whether it be
equal or not to the requirements of the Service. I look at this in
a new way: I take up very different ground. I say that the service,
to which we are now called on to make the navy equal, is a service
that we ought not to undertake. The requirements demanded are wholly
incompatible with the true interests of our nation. They are opposed
to the real conditions of civilisation. They will be in a very few
years, even if they are not now, beyond the power of this people to
meet. The claim to a maritime supremacy, in the sense that this country
is permanently to remain undisputed mistress of all seas, always able
and ready to overwhelm any possible combination of any foreign Powers,
this claim in itself is a ridiculous anachronism. Whether the British
fleet is now able to overpower the combined fleets of Europe, or even
of several Powers in Europe, I do not know. Even if it be now able,
such is the progress of events, the ambition of our neighbors, and
the actual conditions of modern war, that it is physically impossible
that such a supremacy can be permanently maintained. To maintain it,
even for another generation, would involve the subjection of England
to a military tyranny such as exists for the moment in Germany, to a
crushing taxation and conscription, of which we have had no experience.
We should have to spend, not twenty-five, but fifty millions a year on
our army and navy if we intend to be really masters in every sea, and
to make the entire British empire one continuous Malta and Gibraltar.
And even that, or a hundred millions a year, would not suffice in the
future for the inevitable growth of foreign powers and the constant
growth of our own empire. To guarantee the permanent supremacy of the
seas, we shall need some Bismarck to crush our free people into the
vice of his military autocracy and universal conscription.
“Rule Britannia,” or England’s exclusive dominion of the seas, is a
temporary (in my opinion, an unfortunate) episode in our history.
To brag about it and fight for it is the part of a bad citizen; to
maintain it would be a crime against the human race. To have founded,
not an empire, but a scattered congeries of possessions in all parts of
the world by conquest, intrigue, or arbitrary seizure, is a blot upon
our history; to perpetuate it is a burdensome inheritance to bequeath
to our children. To ask that this inorganic heap of possessions shall
be perpetually extended, made absolutely secure against all comers,
and guarded by a fleet which is always ready to meet the world in
arms—this is a programme which it is the duty of every good citizen to
stamp out. Whilst this savage policy is in vogue, the very conditions
of national morality, of peace, of true industrial civilisation are
wanting. The first condition of healthy national progress is to have
broken for ever with this national buccaneering. The commerce, the
property of Englishmen on the seas must protect itself, like that of
other nations, by just, prudent, and civilised bearing, and not by an
exclusive dominion which other great nations do very well without. The
commerce and the honor of Americans are safe all over the world, though
their navy is not one-tenth of ours. And Germany can speak with us face
to face on every ocean, though she can hardly put a first-rate ship in
array of battle. To talk big about refusing to trust the greatness of
England to the sufferance of her neighbors is mere clap-trap. It is
the phrase of Mexican or Californian desperadoes when they fill their
pockets with revolvers and bowie-knives. All but two or three of the
greatest nations are obliged, at all times, to trust their existence to
the sufferance of their stronger neighbors. And they are just as safe,
and quite as proud, and more civilised than their great neighbors in
consequence. Human society, whether national or international, only
begins when social morality has taken the place of individual violence.
Society, for men or nations, cannot be based on the revolver and
bowie-knife principle.
We repudiate, then, with our whole souls the code of buccaneer
patriotism. True statesmen are bound to check, not to promote, the
expansion of England; to provide for the peaceful disintegration of
the heterogeneous empire, the permanence of which is as incapable of
being justified in policy as of being materially defended in arms.
These aggressions and annexations and protectorates, these wanton
wars amongst savages are at once blunders and crimes, pouring out by
millions what good government and thrift at home save by thousands,
degrading the present generation and deeply wronging the next. We want
no fleet greater than that of our greatest neighbors, and the claim to
absolute dominion at sea must be put away like the claim to the kingdom
of France or exclusive right to the British Channel. We can afford
to smile at the charge that we are degenerate Britons or wanting in
patriotism. Patriotism to us is a deep and working desire for the good
name of England, for the justice and goodness of her policy, for the
real enlightenment and well-being of her sons, and for her front place
in humanity and civilisation. We smile at the vaporing of men to whom
patriotism means a good cry, and several extra editions.
It may seem for the moment that doctrines such as ours are out of
credit, and that there is little hope of their ever obtaining the
mastery. We are told that to-day not a voice is raised to oppose the
doctrines of spoliation. It is true that, owing to the hubbub of party
politics, to the servility of the Christian Churches, and the low
morality of the press, these national acts of rapacity have passed as
yet with but small challenge. But at any rate here our voice has never
wavered, nor have considerations of men, parties, or majorities led us
to temporise with our principles. We speak out plainly—not more plainly
than Mr. Gladstone and his followers on platform and in press spoke
out once—and we shall go on to speak out plainly, whether we are many
or whether we are few, whether the opinion of the hour is with us or
not. But I am not despondent. Nor do I doubt the speedy triumph of our
stronger morality. I see with what weather cock rapidity the noisiest
of the Anti-Jingoes can change their tone. The tribe of Cleon, and the
Sausage-seller are the same in every age. I will not believe that the
policy of a great nation can be long dictated by firms of advertising
touts, who will puff the new soap, a comic singer, and an imperial war
in the same page; who are equally at home in the partition of Africa or
a penny dreadful. Nations are not seriously led by the arts which make
village bumpkins crowd to the show of the fat girl and the woolly pig.
In the rapid degradation of the press to the lower American standard
we may see an escape from its mischief. The age is one of democracy.
We have just taken a great stride towards universal suffrage and the
government of the people. In really republican societies, where power
rests on universal suffrage, as in France, and in America, the power
of the press is reduced to a very low ebb. The power of journalism is
essentially one of town life and small balanced parties. Its influence
evaporates where power is held by the millions, and government appeals
directly to vast masses of voters spread over immense areas. Cleon
and the Sausage-seller can do little when republican institutions are
firmly rooted over the length and breadth of a great country.
The destinies of this nation have now been finally committed to the
people, and to the people we will appeal with confidence. The laborer
and the workman have no interest in these wanton wars. In this imperial
expansion, in this rivalry of traders and brag of arms; no taste for it
and no respect for it. They find that they are dragged off to die in
wars of which they know nothing; that their wages are taxed to support
adventures which they loathe. The people are by instinct opponents of
these crimes, and to them we will appeal. The people have a natural
sense of justice and a natural leaning to public morality. Ambition,
lucre, restlessness, and vainglory do not corrupt their minds to
approve a financial adventure. They need peace, productive industry,
humanity. Every step towards the true republic is a step towards
morality. To the new voters, to the masses of the people, we will
confidently appeal.
There is, too, another side to this matter. If these burdens are to be
thrust on the national purse, and (should the buccaneers have their
way) if the permanent war expenditure must be doubled, and little
wars at ten and twenty millions each are inevitable as well, then in
all fairness the classes who make these wars and profit by them must
pay for them. We have taken a great stride towards democracy, and two
of the first taxes with which the new democracy will deal are the
income-tax and the land-tax. The entire revision of taxation is growing
inevitable. It is a just and sound principle that the main burden of
taxation shall be thrown on the rich, and we have yet to see how the
new democracy will work out that just principle. A graduated income-tax
is a certain result of the movement. The steady pressure against
customs duties and the steady decline in habits of drinking must
combine to force the taxation of the future more and more on income and
on land. A rapid rise in the scale of taxing incomes, until we reach
the point where great fortunes cease to be rapidly accumulated, would
check the wasteful expenditure on war more than any consideration of
justice. Even a China merchant would hardly promote an opium war when
he found himself taxed ten or twenty per cent. on his income.
One of the first things which will occur to the new rural voters is the
ridiculous minimum to which the land-tax is reduced. Mr. Henry George
and the school of land reformers have lately been insisting that the
land-tax must be immensely increased. At present it is a farce, not
one-tenth of what is usual in the nations of Europe. I entirely agree
with them, and am perfectly prepared to see the land-tax raised till
it ultimately brings us some ten or even twenty millions, instead
of one million. If the result would be to force a great portion of
the soil to change hands, and to pass from the rent receivers to the
occupiers, all the more desirable. But one inevitable result of the new
Reform Act must be a great raising of the taxes on land, and when land
pays one-fifth of the total taxation, our wars will be fewer and our
armaments more modest.
One of the cardinal facts of our immediate generation is the sudden
revival of Socialism and Communism. It was not crushed, as we thought,
in 1848; it was not extinguished in 1871. The new Republic in France is
uneasy with it. The military autocracy of Germany is honeycombed with
it. Society is almost dissolved by it in Russia. It is rife in America,
in Italy, in Denmark, in Austria. Let no man delude himself that
Socialism has no footing here. I tell them (and I venture to say that I
know) Socialism within the last few years has made some progress here.
It will assuredly make progress still. With the aspirations and social
aims of Socialism we have much in common, little as we are Communists
and firmly as we support the institution of private property. But if
Socialism is in the ascendant, if the new democracy is exceedingly
likely to pass through a wave of Socialist tendency, are these the men,
and is this the epoch to foster a policy of imperial aggression? With
the antipathy felt by Socialists for all forms of national selfishness,
with their hatred of war, and their noble aspirations after the
brotherhood of races and nations, we as Positivists are wholly at
one. Let us join hands, then, with Socialists, with Democrats, with
Humanitarians, and reformers of every school, who repudiate a policy of
national oppression; and together let us appeal to the new democracy
from the old plutocracy to arrest our nation in its career of blood,
and to lift this guilty burden from the conscience of our children for
ever.
So let us begin the year resolved to do our duty as citizens,
fearlessly and honestly, striving to show our neighbors that social
morality is a real religion in itself, by which men can order their
lives and purify their hearts. Let us seek to be gentler as fathers,
husbands, comrades, or masters; more dutiful as sons and daughters,
learners or helpers; more diligent as workers, students, or teachers;
more loving and self-denying as men and as women everywhere. Let us
think less about calling on Humanity and more about being humane. Let
us talk less about religion, and try more fully to live religion. We
have sufficiently explained our principles in words. Let us manifest
them in act. I do not know that more is to be gained by the further
preaching of our creed—much less by external profession of our
own conviction. The world will be ours, the day that men see that
Positivism in fact enables men to live a more pure and social life,
that it fills us with a desire for all useful knowledge, stimulates
us to help one another and bear with one another, makes our homes
the brighter, our children the better, our lives the nobler by its
presence; and that on the foundation of order, and in the spirit of
love, and with progress before us as our aim, we can live for others,
live openly before all men.—_Fortnightly Review._