the plea that every people must be left free to manage its
own affairs, and that intervention is wicked, is to repeat
the tragic mistake of the Manchester School in the economic
world which protested against any interference by the State
to protect workmen ... from the oppression and rapacity of
employers, on the ground that it was an unwarranted
interference with the liberty of the subject and the freedom
of trade and competition. To prevent adventurers from
entering the territory is impossible, unless there is some
civilized authority within it to stop them through its
police. To shut off a backward people from all contact with
the outside world by a kind of blockade is not only
unpracticable, but is artificially to deny them the chances
of education and progress. The establishment of a genuine
government by a people strong enough and liberal enough to
ensure freedom under the law and justice for all is the only
solution.... They must undertake this duty, not from any
pride of dominion, or because they wish to exploit their
resources, but in order to protect them alike from
oppression and corruption, by strict laws and strict
administration, which shall bind the foreigner as well as
the native, and then they must gradually develop, by
education and example, the capacity in the natives to manage
their own affairs.
Thus we see that the progress in knowledge and in the control of their
environment made by the civilized peoples has, in fact and inevitably,
led to their leadership in government also, and given them the
predominant voice in laying down the lines along which the common life
of mankind is to develop. If we are to look for the mainspring of the
world's activities, for the place where its new ideas are thought out,
its policies framed, its aspirations cast into practical shape, we must
not seek it in the forests of Africa or in the interior of China, but in
those busy regions of the earth's surface where the knowledge, the
industries, and all the various organizations of government and control
find their home. Because organization is embodied knowledge, and because
knowledge is power, it is the Great Powers, as we truly name them,[58]
who are predominantly responsible for the government of the world and
for the future of the common life of mankind.
In the exercise of this control the world has already, in many respects,
become a single organism. The conquest of distance in the fifteenth
century was the beginning of a process which led, slowly but inevitably,
to the widening of the boundaries of government. Two discoveries made
about the same time accentuated the same tendency. By the invention of
gunpowder the people of Europe were given an overwhelming military
superiority over the dwellers in other continents. By the invention of
printing, knowledge was internationalized for all who had the training
to use it. Books are the tools of the brain-worker all the world over;
but, unlike the file and the chisel, the needle and the hammer, books
not only create, but suggest. A new idea is like an electric current set
running throughout the world, and no man can say into what channels of
activity it may not be directed.
But neither travel nor conquest nor books and the spread of ideas caused
so immense a transformation in the common life of mankind as the process
beginning at the end of the eighteenth century which is known to
historians as the Industrial Revolution. As we have spoken of the
conquest of distance perhaps a better name for the Industrial
Revolution would be the Conquest of Organization. For it was not the
discovery of the steam-engine or the spinning-jenny which constituted
the revolution: it was the fact that men were now in a position to apply
these discoveries to the organization of industry. The ancient Greeks
played with the idea of the steam-engine: it was reserved for
eighteenth-century England to produce a generation of pioneers endowed
with the knowledge, the power, the foresight, and the imagination to
make use of the world-transforming potentialities of the idea. The
Industrial Revolution, with its railways and steamships, telegraphs and
telephones, and now its airships and submarines and wireless
communication, completed the conquest of distance. Production became
increasingly organized on international lines. Men became familiar with
the idea of an international market. Prices and prospects, booms and
depressions, banking and borrowing, became international phenomena. The
organization of production led to an immensely rapid increase of wealth
in Western Europe. The application of that wealth to the development of
the world's resources in and outside Europe led to a correspondingly
huge advance in trade and intercourse. The breakfast-table in an
ordinary English home to-day is a monument to the achievements of the
Industrial Revolution and to the solid reality of the economic
internationalism which resulted from it. There is still poverty in
Western Europe, but it is preventable poverty. Before the Industrial
Revolution, judged by a modern standard, there was nothing but poverty.
The satisfying physical and economic condition which we describe by the
name of comfort did not exist. The Italian historian Ferrero, in one of
his essays, recommends those who have romantic yearnings after the good
old times to spend one night on what our forefathers called a bed. Mr.
Coulton, in his books on the Middle Ages, has used some very plain
language on the same text. And Professor Smart, in his recently
published posthumous work, pointing a gentle finger of rebuke at certain
common Socialist fantasies, remarks:
There never was a golden age of equality of wealth: there
was rather a leaden one of inequality of poverty.... We
should speak more guardedly of the riches of the old world.
A careful examination of any old book would show that the
most splendid processions of pomp and luxury in the Middle
Ages were poor things compared to the parade of a modern
circus on its opening day.[59]
Such prosperity as we enjoy to-day, such a scene as we can observe on
these smiling outskirts of Birmingham, is due to man's Conquest of
Organization and to the consequent development and linking-up, by mutual
intercourse and exchange, of the economic side of the world's life.
So far we have been watching the progress of man in his efforts to 'make
himself at home' in the world. We have seen him becoming more skilful
and more masterful century by century, till in these latter days the
whole world is, as it were, at his service. He has planted his flag at
the two poles: he has cut a pathway for his ships between Asia and
Africa, and between the twin continents of America: he has harnessed
torrents and cataracts to his service: he has conquered the air and the
depths of the sea: he has tamed the animals: he has rooted out
pestilence and laid bare its hidden causes: and he is penetrating
farther and ever farther in the discovery of the causes of physical and
mental disease. He has set his foot on the neck of Nature. But the last
and greatest conquest is yet before him. He has yet to conquer himself.
Victorious against Nature, men are still at war, nay, more than ever at
war, amongst themselves. How is it that the last century and a half,
which have witnessed so unparalleled an advance in the organization of
the common life of man on the material side, should have been an age of
wars and rumours of wars, culminating in the vastest and most
destructive conflict that this globe of ours has ever witnessed? What
explanation could we give of this to a visitor from the moon or to those
creatures of inferior species whom, as Sir E. Ray Lankester has told us,
it is our function, thanks to our natural superiority, to command and
control?
This brings us to the second great branch of our subject--the progress
of mankind in the art of living together in the world.
Government, as we have seen, covers the whole social life of man: for
the principles that regulate human association are inherent in the
nature of man. But in what follows we shall perforce confine ourselves
mainly to the sphere of what is ordinarily called politics, that is to
the recognized and authoritative form of human association called the
State, as opposed to the innumerable subordinate or voluntary bodies and
relationships, which pervade every department of man's common life.
The progress of Government in this second sphere may be defined as the
deepening and extension of man's duty towards his neighbour. It is to be
reckoned, not in terms of knowledge and organization, but of character.
The ultimate goal of human government, in the narrower sense, as of all
social activity--let us never forget it--is liberty, to set free the
life of the spirit. 'Liberty,' said Lord Acton, who could survey the
ages with a wealth of knowledge to which no other man, perhaps, ever
attained, 'Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is
itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good
public administration that it is required but for security in the
pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private
life.'[60] Government is needed in order to enable human life to become,
not efficient or well-informed or well-ordered, but simply good; and
Lord Acton believed, as the Greeks and generations of Englishmen
believed before him, that it is only in the soil of liberty that the
human spirit can grow to its full stature, and that a political system
based upon any other principle than that of responsible self-government
acts as a bar at the outset to the pursuit of what he called 'the
highest objects of civil society or of private life'. For though a
slave, or a man living under a servile political system, may develop
many fine qualities of character: yet such virtues will, in Milton's
words, be but 'fugitive and cloistered', 'unexercised and unbreathed'.
For liberty, and the responsibilities that it involves, are the school
of character and the appointed means by which men can best serve their
neighbours. A man deprived of such opportunities, cut off from the
quickening influence of responsibility, has, as Homer said long ago
'lost half his manhood'. He may be a loyal subject, a brave soldier, a
diligent and obedient workman: but he will not be a full-grown man.
Government will have starved and stunted him in that which it is the
supreme object of government to develop and set free.
It is idle, then, to talk in general terms about the extension of
government as a good thing, whether in relation to the individual
citizen or to the organization of the world into an international State.
We have always first to ask: What kind of Government? On what principles
will it be based? What ideal will it set forth? What kind of common life
will it provide or allow to its citizens? If the whole world were
organized into one single State, and that State, supreme in its control
over Nature, were armed with all the knowledge and organization that
the ablest and most farseeing brains in the world could supply, yet
mankind might be worse off under its sway, in the real essentials of
human life, than if they were painted savages. 'Though I have the gift
of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge: and though I
have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity,
I am nothing.' Government may be the organization of goodness, or the
organization of evil. It may provide the conditions by which the common
life of society can develop along the lines of man's spiritual nature:
or it may take away the very possibility of such a development. Till we
know what a Government stands for, do not let us judge it by its
imposing externals of organization. The Persian Empire was more imposing
than the Republics of Greece: Assyria and Babylon than the little tribal
divisions of Palestine: the Spanish Empire than the cities of the
Netherlands. There is some danger that, in our new-found sense of the
value of knowledge in promoting happiness, we should forget what a
tyrant knowledge, like wealth, can become. No doubt, just as we saw that
moral qualities, patience and the like, are needed for the advancement
of knowledge, so knowledge is needed, and greatly needed, in the task of
extending and deepening the moral and spiritual life of mankind. But we
cannot measure that progress in terms of knowledge or organization or
efficiency or culture. We need some other standard by which to judge
between Greece and Persia, between Israel and Babylon, between Spain and
the Netherlands, between Napoleon and his adversaries, and between
contending powers in the modern world. What shall that standard be?
It must be a similar standard--let us boldly say it--to that by which we
judge between individuals. It must be a standard based on our sense of
right and wrong. But right and wrong in themselves will not carry us
very far, any more than they will carry the magistrate on the bench or
the merchant in his counting-house. Politics, like business, is not the
whole of life--though some party politicians and some business men think
otherwise--but a department of life: both are means, not ends; and as
such they have developed special rules and codes of their own, based on
experience in their own special department. In so far as they are framed
in accordance with man's spiritual nature and ideals these rules may be
considered to hold good and to mark the stage of progress at which
Politics and Business have respectively arrived in promoting the common
weal in their own special sphere. With the rules of business, or what is
called Political Economy, we have at the moment no concern. It is the
rules of politics, or the working experience of rulers, crystallized in
what is called Political Science or Political Philosophy, to which we
must devote a few moments' attention.
We are all of us, of course, political philosophers. Whether we have
votes or not, whether we are aware of it or not, we all have views on
political philosophy and we are all constantly making free use of its
own peculiar principles and conceptions. Law, the State, Liberty,
Justice, Democracy are words that are constantly on our lips. Let us try
to form a clear idea of the place which these great historic ideals
occupy in the progress of mankind.
The great political thinkers of the world have always been clear in
their own minds as to the ultimate goal of their own particular study.
Political thought may be said to have originated with the Jewish
prophets, who were the first to rebuke kings to their faces and to set
forth the spiritual aims of politics--to preach Righteousness and Mercy
as against Power and Ambition and Self-interest. Their soaring
imagination, less systematic than the Greek intellect, was wider in its
sweep and more farseeing in its predictions. 'As the earth bringeth
forth her bud and as the garden causeth the things sown in it to spring
forth', says Isaiah, in magnificent anticipation of the doctrine of
Natural Law, 'so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to
spring forth before all the nations.' 'Peace, peace, to him that is far
off, and to him that is near, saith the Lord, and I will heal him: but
the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters
cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, for the wicked.'
'Out of Zion shall go forth the Law and the word of the Lord from
Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations and shall reprove many
peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their
spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war any more.'[61]
It was, however, Plato and Aristotle who first made politics a branch of
separate study: and, unlike many of their modern successors, they
pursued it throughout in close connexion with the kindred studies of
ethics and psychology. Their scope was, of course, confined to the field
of their own experience, the small self-contained City-States of Greece,
and it did not fall within their province to foreshadow, like the Jewish
Prophets, the end of warfare, or to speculate on the ultimate unity of
mankind. Their task was to interpret the work of their own
fellow-countrymen on the narrow stage of Greek life. Their lasting
achievement is to have laid down for mankind what a State is, as
compared with other forms of human association, and to have proclaimed,
once and for all, in set terms, that its object is to promote the 'good
life' of its members. 'Every State', says Aristotle in the opening
words of his _Politics_, 'is a community of some kind.' That is to say,
States belong to the same _genus_, as it were, as political parties,
trade unions, cricket clubs, business houses, or such gatherings as
ours. What, then, is the difference between a State and a political
party? 'If all communities', he goes on, 'aim at some good, the State or
political community, which is the highest of all and which embraces all
the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest
good.'
Why is the State the highest of all forms of association? Why should our
citizenship, for instance, take precedence of our trade unionism or our
business obligations? Aristotle replies, and in spite of recent critics
I think the reply still holds good: because, but for the existence of
the State and the reign of law maintained by it, none of these
associations could have been formed or be maintained. 'He who first
founded the State was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when
protected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and
righteousness, he is the worst of all.' Or, to put it in the resounding
Elizabethan English of Hooker: 'The public power of all societies is
above every soul contained in the same societies. And the principal use
of that power is to give laws to all that are under it; which laws, in
such case, we must obey, unless there be reason showed which may
necessarily enforce that the law of Reason or of God doth enjoin the
contrary. Because except our own private and probable resolutions be by
the law of public determinations overruled, we take away all possibility
of social life in the world.'[62] The Greeks did not deny, as the
example of Socrates shows, the right of private judgement on the
question of obedience to law, or the duty of respect for what Hooker
calls the Law of Reason or of God. Against the authentic voice of
conscience no human authority can or should prevail. But Aristotle
held, with Hooker, that obedience to law and faithful citizenship are
themselves matters normally ordained by the law of Reason or of God and
that, as against those of any other association ([Greek: koinonia]), the
claims of the State are paramount. In other words, he would deny what is
sometimes loosely called the _right_ of rebellion, whilst not closing
the door to that _duty_ of rebellion which has so often advanced the
cause of liberty. When Aristotle speaks of the State, moreover, he does
not mean a sovereign authority exercising arbitrary power, as in Persia
or Babylon: he means an authority administering Law and Justice
according to recognized standards: and he is thinking of Law and
Justice, not simply as part of the apparatus of government but as based
upon moral principles. 'Righteousness', he says, 'is the bond of men in
States and the administration of Justice, which is the determination of
what is righteous, is the principle of order in political society.' 'Of
Law', says Hooker,[63] here as elsewhere echoing the ancients, 'there
can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her
voice the harmony of the world.' The State takes precedence of the party
or the trade union because, however idealistic in their policy these
latter may be, the State covers all, not merely a section of the
community, and is able not merely to proclaim but to enforce the rule of
law and justice. Put in modern language, one might define the Greek idea
of the State as the Organization of Mutual Aid.
The Greek States did not remain true to this high ideal. Faced with the
temptations of power they descended almost to the level of the oriental
monarchies with which they were contrasted. But even had they remained
faithful to their philosophers' ideal of public service they would not
have survived. Unable to transcend the limits of their own narrow
State-boundaries and to merge their ideals with those of their
neighbours, they were helpless in the face of the invader. First
Macedonia and then Rome swept over them, and political idealism
slumbered for many centuries. Rome gave the world, what it greatly
needed, centuries of peace and order and material prosperity: it built
up an enduring fabric of law on principles of Reason and Humanity: it
did much to give men, what is next to the political sense, the social
sense. It made men members of one another from Scotland to Syria and
from Portugal to Baghdad. But it did not give them 'the good life' in
its fullness: for it did not, perhaps it could not, give them liberty.
Faced with the choice between efficiency and the diffusion of
responsibility, the rulers of the Roman Empire unhesitatingly chose
efficiency. But the atrophy of responsibility proved the canker at the
heart of the Empire. Deprived of the stimulus that freedom and the habit
of responsibility alone can give, the Roman world sank gradually into
the morass of Routine. Life lost its savour and grew stale, flat and
unprofitable, as in an old-style Government office. 'The intolerable
sadness inseparable from such a life', says Renan, 'seemed worse than
death.' And when the barbarians came and overturned the whole fabric of
bureaucracy, though it seemed to educated men at the time the end of
civilization, it was in reality the beginning of a new life.
Amid the wreckage of the Roman Empire, one governing institution alone
remained upright--the Christian Church with its organization for
ministering to the spiritual needs of its members. With the conversion
of the barbarians to Christianity the governing functions and influence
of the Church became more and more important; and it was upon the basis
of Church government that political idealism, so long in abeyance, was
reawakened. The thinkers who took up the work of Plato and Aristotle on
the larger stage of the Holy Roman Empire boldly looked forward to the
time when mankind should be united under one government and that
government should embody the highest ideals of mankind. Such an ideal
seemed indeed to many one of the legacies of the Founder of
Christianity. The familiar petition in the Lord's Prayer: _thy kingdom
come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven_ sounded, in the ears
of Dante and Thomas Aquinas and innumerable theologians and canonists,
as a prayer and a pledge for the ultimate political unity of mankind on
the basis of Christian Law. Such a belief was indeed the bedrock of
mediaeval political thought. To devout Christians, brought up in the
oecumenical traditions of the Roman Empire,
'every ordering of a human community must appear as a
component part of that ordering of the world which exists
because God exists, and every earthly group must appear as
an organic member of that _Civitas Dei_, that God-State,
which comprehends the heavens and the earth.[1] ... Thus the
Theory of Human Society must accept the divinely created
organization of the Universe as a prototype of the first
principles which govern the construction of human
communities.... Therefore, in all centuries of the Middle
Age, Christendom, which in destiny is identical with
Mankind, is set before us as a single, universal Community,
founded and governed by God Himself. Mankind is one
"mystical body"; it is one single and internally connected
"people" or "folk"; it is an all-embracing corporation,
which constitutes that Universal Realm, spiritual and
temporal, which may be called the Universal Church, or, with
equal propriety, the Commonwealth of the Human Race.
Therefore, that it may attain its one purpose, it needs One
Law and One Government.'[64]