Government I gladly accepted, for it is a subject on which I have
reflected a good deal. But when I came to think over what I should say,
I saw that you had asked me for the impossible. For what is Government?
I do not know whether there are any here for whom Government means no
more than a policeman, or a ballot-box, or a list of office-holders. The
days of such shallow views are surely over. Government is the work of
ordering the external affairs and relationships of men. It covers all
the activities of men as members of a community--social, industrial, and
religious as well as political in the narrower sense. It is concerned,
as the ancients had it, with 'that which is public or common', what the
Greeks called [Greek: to koinon] and the Romans _res publica_. The Old
English translation of these classical terms is 'The Commonwealth' or
Common Weal; and I do not see that we can do better than adopt that
word, with its richness of traditional meaning and its happy association
of the two conceptions, too often separated in modern minds, of Wealth
and Welfare.
Our subject then is the Progress of the Commonwealth or, in other words,
the record of the course of the common life of mankind in the world. It
is a theme which really underlies all the other subjects of discussion
at this week's meetings: for it is only the existence of the
Commonwealth and its organized efforts to preserve and sustain the life
of the individuals composing it, which have made possible the
achievements of mankind in the various separate fields of effort which
are claiming your attention. Lord Acton spent a lifetime collecting
material for a History of Liberty. He never wrote it: but, if he had, it
would have been a History of Mankind. A History of Government or of the
Commonwealth would be nothing less. Such is the nature of the invitation
so kindly given to me and so cheerfully accepted. If you could wait a
lifetime for the proper treatment of the subject I would gladly give the
time; for, in truth, it is worth it.
What is the nature of this common life of mankind and with what is it
concerned? The subjects of its concern are as wide as human nature
itself. We cannot define them in a formula: for human nature overleaps
all formulas. Whenever men have tried to rule regions of human activity
and aspiration out of the common life of mankind, and to hedge them
round as private or separate or sacred or by any other kind of taboo,
human nature has always ended by breaking through the hedges and
invading the retreat. Man is a social animal. If he retires to a
monastery he finds he has carried problems of organization with him, as
the promoters of this gathering would confess you have brought with you
here. If he shuts himself up in his home as a castle, or in a workshop
or factory as the domain of his own private power, social problems go
with him thither, and the long arm of the law will follow after. If he
crosses the seas like the Pilgrim Fathers, to worship God unmolested in
a new country, or, like the merchant-venturers, to fetch home treasure
from the Indies, he will find himself unwittingly the pioneer of
civilization and the founder of an Empire or a Republic. In the life of
our fellows, in the Common Weal, we live and move and have our being.
Let us recall some wise words on this subject from the Master of
Balliol's book on the Middle Ages. 'The words "Church" and "State"', he
writes,
represent what ought to be an alliance, but is, in modern
times, at best a dualism and often an open warfare.... The
opposition of Church and State expresses an opposition
between two sides of human nature which we must not too
easily label as good and evil, the heavenly and the earthly,
the sacred and the profane. For the State, too, is divine as
well as the Church, and may have its own ideals and
sacramental duties and its own prophets, even its own
martyrs. The opposition of Church and State is to be
regarded rather as the pursuit of one great aim, pursued by
contrasted means. The ultimate aim of all true human
activity must be in the noble words of Francis Bacon 'the
glory of God and the relief of man's estate'.[53]
Bacon's words form a fitting starting-point for our reflections: for
they bring vividly before us both the idealism which should inspire all
who labour at the task of government and the vastness and variety of the
field with which they are concerned. Looked at in this broad light, the
history of man's common life in the world will, I think, show two great
streams of progress--the progress of man over Nature, or, as we say
to-day, in the control of his environment, and the progress of man in
what is essentially a moral task--the art of living together with his
fellows. These two aspects of human activity and effort are in constant
contact and interaction. Studied together, they reveal an advance which,
in spite of man's ever-present moral weakness, may be described as an
advance from Chaos to Cosmos in the organization of the world's common
life; yet they are so distinct in method and spirit that they can best
be described separately.
Let us first, then, consider the history of Government, as a record of
the progress of man's power over Nature.
Human history, in this sphere, is the story of man making himself at
home in the world. When human history begins we find men helpless,
superstitious, ignorant, the plaything of blind powers in the natural
and animal world. Superstitious because he was helpless, helpless
because he was ignorant, he eked out a bare existence rather by avoiding
than controlling the forces in the little world by which he found
himself surrounded. Human life in its earliest stages is, as Hobbes
described it, nasty, brutish, and short. Man was the slave of his
environment. He has risen to become its master. The world, as the
prophetic eye of Francis Bacon foretold, has become 'The Kingdom of
Man'.
How complete this conquest is, can best be realized perhaps by
considering man's relation to the lower animals. When history opens, the
animals are in their element; it is man who is the interloper. Two
thousand years ago it was not the Society of Friends but wolves and wild
boars who felt themselves at home on the site of Bournville Garden
Village. To-day we are surprised when we read that in remote East Africa
lions and giraffes venture occasionally to interfere in the murderous
warfare between man and man. Man has imposed himself on the animals, by
dint of his gradual accumulation of knowledge and his consequent power
of organization and government. He has destroyed the conditions under
which the animals prospered. He has, as we might say, destroyed their
home life, exposing them to dangers of his own making against which they
are now as powerless as he was once against them. 'It is a remarkable
thing,' writes Sir E. Ray Lankester,
which possibly may be less generally true than our present
knowledge seems to suggest--that the adjustment of organisms
to their surroundings is so severely complete in Nature
apart from Man, that diseases are unknown as constant and
normal phenomena under those conditions. It is no doubt
difficult to investigate this matter, since the presence of
Man as an observer itself implies human intervention. But it
seems to be a legitimate view that every disease to which
animals (and probably plants also) are liable, excepting as
a transient and very exceptional occurrence, is due to Man's
interference. The diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs, and
horses are not known except in domesticated herds and those
wild creatures to which Man's domesticated productions have
communicated them. The trypanosome lives in the blood of
wild game and of rats without producing mischief. The hosts
have become tolerant of the parasite. It is only when man
brings his unselected, humanly-nurtured races of cattle and
horses into contact with the parasite, that it is found to
have deadly properties. The various cattle-diseases which in
Africa have done so much harm to native cattle, and have in
some regions exterminated big game, have _per contra_ been
introduced by man through his importation of diseased
animals of his own breeding from Europe. Most, if not all,
animals in extra-human conditions, including the minuter
things such as insects, shellfish, and invisible aquatic
organisms, have been brought into a condition of
'adjustment' to their parasites as well as to the other
conditions in which they live: it is this most difficult and
efficient balance of Nature which Man everywhere upsets.[54]
And Sir E. Ray Lankester goes on to point out the moral to be drawn from
this development. He points out that
civilized man has proceeded so far in his interference with
extra-human nature, has produced for himself and the living
organisms associated with him such a special state of things
by his rebellion against natural selection and his defiance
of Nature's pre-human dispositions, that he must either go
on and acquire firmer control of the conditions, or perish
miserably by the vengeance certain to fall on the
half-hearted meddler in great affairs. We may indeed compare
civilized man to a successful rebel against Nature, who, by
every step forward, renders himself liable to greater and
greater penalties, and so cannot afford to pause or fail in
one single step. Or again we may think of him as the heir to
a vast and magnificent kingdom, who has been finally
educated so as to take possession of his property, and is at
length left alone to do his best; he has wilfully abrogated,
in many important respects, the laws of his mother Nature by
which the kingdom was hitherto governed; he has gained some
power and advantage by so doing, but is threatened on every
hand by dangers and disasters hitherto restrained: no
retreat is possible--his only hope is to control, as he
knows that he can, the sources of these dangers and
disasters.
The time will come, not too long hence, as I believe, when men have
realized, with the scientists, that the world is one kingdom not many,
and these problems of man's relation to his non-human environment will
be the first concern of statesmen and governors. In some of our tropical
colonies they have, perforce, become so already. If you live on the Gold
Coast, the war against malaria cannot help seeming more important to you
than the war against German trade: and in parts of Central Africa the
whole possibility of continued existence centres round the presence or
absence of the tsetse fly which is the carrier of sleeping sickness.
Some day, when means have been adopted for abating our fiercer
international controversies, we shall discover that in these and kindred
matters lies the real province of world-politics. When that day comes
the chosen representatives of the human race will see their
constituents, as only philosophers see them now, as the inheritors of a
great tradition of service and achievement, and as trustees for their
successors of the manifold sources of human happiness which the advance
of knowledge has laid open to us.
If the first and most important of these sources is the discovery of
the conditions of physical well-being, the second is the discovery of
means of communication between the widely separate portions of man's
kingdom. The record of the process of bringing the world under the
control of the organized government of man is largely the record of the
improvement of communications. Side by side with the unending struggle
of human reason against cold and hunger and disease we can watch the
contest against distance, against ocean and mountain and desert, against
storms and seasons. There can be few subjects more fascinating for a
historian to study than the record of the migrations of the tribes of
men. He might begin, if he wished, with the migrations of animals and
describe the westward progress of the many species whose course can be
traced by experts along the natural highways of Western Europe. Some of
them, so the books tell us, reached the end of their journey while
Britain was still joined to the continent. Others arrived too late and
were cut off by the straits of Dover. I like to form an imaginary
picture, which the austerity of the scientific conscience will, I know,
repudiate with horror, of the unhappy congregation, mournfully assembled
bag and baggage on the edge of the straits and gazing wistfully across
at the white cliffs of England, which they were not privileged to
reach--_tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore_, 'stretching out
their paws in longing for the further bank.'
Our historian would then go on to describe the early 'wanderings of
peoples' (_Voelkerwanderungen_) how whole tribes would move off in the
spring-time in the search for fresh hunting-grounds or pasture. He would
trace the course of that westward push which, starting from somewhere in
Asia, brought its impact to bear on the northern provinces of the Roman
Empire and eventually loosened its whole fabric. He would show how
Europe, as we know it, was welded into unity by the attacks of
migratory warriors on three flanks--the Huns and the Tartars, a host of
horsemen riding light over the steppes of Russia and Hungary: the Arabs,
bearing Islam with them on their camels as they moved westward along
North Africa and then pushing across into Spain: and the Northmen of
Scandinavia, those carvers of kingdoms and earliest conquerors of the
open sea, who left their mark on England and northern France, on Sicily
and southern Italy, on the Balkan Peninsula, on Russia, on Greenland,
and as far as North America. Then, passing to Africa and Asia, he would
describe the life of the pack-saddle and the caravan, the long and
mysterious inland routes from the Mediterranean to Nubia and Nigeria, or
from Damascus with the pilgrims to Medina, and the still longer and more
mysterious passage through the ancient oases of Turkestan, now buried in
sand, along which, as recent discoveries have shown us, Greece and
China, Christianity and Buddhism, exchanged their arts and ideas and
products. Then he would tell of the great age of maritime discovery, of
the merchant-adventurers and buccaneers, of their gradual transformation
into trading companies, in the East and in the West, from companies to
settlements, from settlements to colonies. Then perhaps he would close
by casting a glimpse at the latest human migration of all, that which
takes place or took place up to 1914, at the rate of a million a year
from the Old World into the United States. He would take the reader to
Ellis Island in New York harbour, where the immigrants emerge from the
steerage to face the ordeal of the Immigration Officer. He would show
how the same causes, hunger, fear, persecution, restlessness, ambition,
love of liberty, which set the great westward procession in motion in
the early days of tribal migration, are still alive and at work to-day
among the populations of Eastern Europe. He would look into their minds
and read the story of the generations of their nameless fore-runners;
and he would ask himself whether rulers and statesmen have done all that
they might to make the world a home for all its children, for the poor
as for the rich, for the Jew as for the Gentile, for the yellow and
dark-skinned as for the white.
Let us dwell for a moment more closely on one phase of this record of
the conquest of distance. The crucial feature in that struggle was the
conquest of the sea. The sea-surface of the world is far greater than
its land-surface, and the sea, once subdued, is a far easier and more
natural means of transport and communication. For the sea, the
uncultivable sea, as Homer calls it, is itself a road, whereas on earth,
whether it be mountain or desert or field, roads have first painfully to
be made. Man's definitive conquest of the sea dates from the middle of
the fifteenth century when, by improvements in the art of sailing and by
the extended use of the mariner's compass, it first became possible to
undertake long voyages with assurance. These discoveries are associated
with the name of Prince Henry of Portugal, whose life-long ambition it
was, to quote the words engraved on his monument at the southern
extremity of Portugal, 'to lay open the regions of West Africa across
the sea, hitherto not traversed by man, that thence a passage might be
made round Africa to the most distant parts of the East.'
The opening of the high seas which resulted from Prince Henry's
activities is one of the most momentous events in human history. Its
effect was, sooner or later, to unite the scattered families of mankind,
to make the problems of all the concern of all: to make the world one
place. Prince Henry and his sailors were, in fact, the pioneers of
internationalism, with all the many and varied problems that
internationalism brings with it. 'In 1486,' says the most recent history
of this development,
Bartholomew Dias was carried by storm beyond the sight of
land, round the southern point of Africa, and reached the
Great Fish River, north of Algoa Bay. On his return journey
he saw the promontory which divides the oceans, as the
narrow waters of the Bosphorus divide the continents, of the
East and West. As in the crowded streets of Constantinople,
so here, if anywhere, at this awful and solitary headland
the elements of two hemispheres meet and contend. As Dias
saw it, so he named it, 'The Cape of Storms'. But his
master, John II, seeing in the discovery a promise that
India, the goal of the national ambition, would be reached,
named it with happier augury 'The Cape of Good Hope'. No
fitter name could have been given to that turning-point in
the history of mankind. Europe, in truth, was on the brink
of achievements destined to breach barriers, which had
enclosed and diversified the nations since the making of the
World, and commit them to an intercourse never to be broken
again so long as the World endures. That good rather than
evil may spring therefrom is the greatest of all human
responsibilities.[55]
The contrast between Constantinople and the Cape, so finely drawn in
these lines, marks the end of the age when land-communications and
land-power were predominant over sea-power. The Roman Empire was, and
could only be, a land-power. It is no accident that the British
Commonwealth is, as the American Commonwealth is fast becoming,
predominantly a sea-power.
How was 'the greatest of all human responsibilities', arising from this
new intercourse of races, met? Knowledge, alas, is as much the devil's
heritage as the angels': it may be used for ill, as easily as for good.
The first explorers, and the traders who followed them, were not
idealists but rough adventurers. Breaking in, with the full tide of
western knowledge and adaptability, to the quiet backwaters of primitive
conservatism, they brought with them the worse rather than the better
elements of the civilization, the control of environment, of which they
were pioneers. To them Africa and the East represented storehouses of
treasure, not societies of men; and they treated the helpless natives
accordingly.
England and Holland as well as the Latin monarchies treated
the natives of Africa as chattels without rights and as
instruments for their own ends, and revived slavery in a
form and upon a scale more cruel than any practised by the
ancients. The employment of slaves on her own soil has
worked the permanent ruin of Portugal. The slave trade with
America was an important source of English wealth, and the
philosopher John Locke did not scruple to invest in it.
There is no European race which can afford to remember its
first contact with the subject peoples otherwise than with
shame, and attempts to assess their relative degrees of
guilt are as fruitless as they are invidious. The question
of real importance is how far these various states were able
to purge themselves of the poison, and rise to a higher
realization of their duty towards their races whom they were
called by the claims of their own superior civilization to
protect. The fate of that civilization itself hung upon the
issue.[56]
The process by which the Western peoples have risen to a sense of their
duty towards their weaker and more ignorant fellow citizens is indeed
one of the chief stages in that progress of the common life of mankind
with which we are concerned.
How is that duty to be exercised? The best way in which the strong can
help the weak is by making them strong enough to help themselves. The
white races are not strong because they are white, or virtuous because
they are strong. They are strong because they have acquired, through a
long course of thought and work, a mastery over Nature and hence over
their weaker fellow men. It is not virtue but knowledge to which they
owe their strength. No doubt much virtue has gone to the making of that
knowledge--virtues of patience, concentration, perseverance,
unselfishness, without which the great body of knowledge of which we are
the inheritors could never have been built up. But we late-born heirs of
the ages have it in our power to take the knowledge of our fathers and
cast away any goodness that went to its making. We have come into our
fortune: it is ours to use it as we think best. We cannot pass it on
wholesale, and at one step, to the more ignorant races, for they have
not the institutions, the traditions, the habits of mind and character,
to enable them to use it. Those too we must transmit or develop together
with the treasure of our knowledge. For the moment we stand in the
relation of trustees, teachers, guides, governors, but always in their
own interest and not ours, or rather, in the interest of the
commonwealth of which we and they, since the opening of the high seas,
form an inseparable part.
It has often been thought that the relation of the advanced and backward
races should be one purely of philanthropy and missionary enterprise
rather than of law and government. It is easy to criticize this by
pointing to the facts of the world as we know it--to the existing
colonial empires of the Great Powers and to the vast extension of the
powers of civilized governments which they represent. But it may still
be argued that the question is not Have the civilized powers annexed
large empires? but Ought they to have done so? Was such an extension of
governmental authority justifiable or inevitable? Englishmen in the
nineteenth century, like Americans in the twentieth, were slow to admit
that it was; just as the exponents of _laissez-faire_ were slow to
admit the necessity for State interference with private industry at
home. But in both cases they have been driven to accept it by the
inexorable logic of facts. What other solution of the problem, indeed,
is possible? 'Every alternative solution', as a recent writer
remarks,[57]