the Middle Ages failed', says the Master of Balliol, continuing a
passage already quoted, 'was in attempting ... to make politics the
handmaid of religion, to give the Church the organization and form of a
political State, that is, to turn religion from an indwelling spirit
into an ecclesiastical machinery.' In other words, the mediaeval attempt
broke down through neglecting the special conditions and problems of the
political department of life, through declining, as it were, to
specialize. While men were discussing the Theory of the Two Swords,
whether the Emperor derived his power directly from God or indirectly
through the Pope, or whether the sword should be used at all, the actual
work of government in laying the foundations of the good life was
neglected. Not only Liberty but Justice and Order were largely in
abeyance and the range of State action which we to-day describe as
'social legislation' was not even dreamed of. Absorbed in theory or
wrapped in ignorance, men forget the practical meaning of Statehood and
its responsibilities. Central Europe languished for centuries, under a
sham Empire, in the unprogressive anarchy of feudalism. 'The feudal
system', it has been said,[65] 'was nothing more nor less than the
attempt of a society which had failed to organize itself as a State, to
make contract do the work of patriotism.' It is the bitter experience
which Germany went through under the anarchy of feudalism and petty
governments, lasting to well within living memory, which by a natural
reaction has led the German people, under Prussian tutelage, to cling to
the conception of the State as Power and nothing more.
The study of politics had to become secular before it could once more
become practical, and, by being practical, ministering to practical
ideals and enlisting practical devotion, become, as it were, sacred
once more. Where the well-being of our fellow men is concerned it is not
enough to be well-meaning. Government is an art, not an aspiration: and
those who are concerned with it, whether as rulers or voters, should
have studied its problems, reflected on its possibilities and
limitations, and fitted themselves to profit by its accumulated
experience.
Since the close of the Middle Ages, when politics became secular, the
art of government has advanced by giant strides. Invention has followed
invention, and experiment experiment, till to-day skilled specialists in
the Old World and the New are at hand to watch and to record the latest
devices for dealing with a hundred difficult special problems--whether
it be the administration of justice or patronage, the organization of
political parties, the fixing of Cabinet responsibility, the
possibilities and limits of federalism, the prevention of war. There
has, indeed, been as great an advance in the political art in the last
four centuries and particularly in the last century, as in the very
kindred art of medicine. The wonderful concentration of energy which the
various belligerent powers have been able to throw into the present war
is at once the best and the most tragic illustration of this truth.
Man's common life in the State is more real, more charged with meaning
and responsibility, more potent for good or for ill than it has ever
been before--than our predecessors even in the time of Napoleon could
have dreamed of.
The greatest inventors and most skilful practitioners of the political
art in the modern world have been the English, for it is the English
who, of all nations, have held closest to the ideal of freedom in its
many and various manifestations. Superficially regarded, the English are
a stupid people, and so their continental neighbours have often
regarded them. But their racial heritage and their island situation seem
to have given them just that combination of experience and natural
endowment necessary to success in the task of government. Taken as a
whole, the English are not brilliant, but they are clear-headed: they
are not far-sighted, but they can see the fact before their eyes: they
are ill equipped with theoretical knowledge, but they understand the
working of institutions and have a good eye for judging character: they
have little constructive imagination of the more grandiose sort, but
they have an instinct for the 'next step' which has often set them on
paths which have led them far further than they dreamed; above all, they
have a relatively high standard of individual character and public duty,
without which no organization involving the free co-operation of man and
man can hope to be effective. It is this unique endowment of moral
qualities and practical gifts, coupled with unrivalled opportunities,
which has made the English the pioneers in modern times in the art of
human association. Englishmen, accustomed to what eighteenth-century
writers used to call 'the peculiar felicity of British freedom', do not
always remember how far their own experience has carried them on the
road of political progress. They do not realize how many problems they
have solved and abolished, as the art of medicine has abolished
diseases. When they hear speak of the eternal conflict between
Nationality and Nationality, they often forget that a war between
England and Scotland has long since become unthinkable and that the
platitudes of St. Andrew's Day are still paradoxes in Central and
Eastern Europe. When they are told of States where the spontaneous
manifestations of group-life, non-conforming sects, workmen's
associations, and ordinary social clubs, are driven underground and
classed as dangerous secret societies, they should realize how precious
a thing is that freedom of association which is one of the dearest
attributes of English liberty. So too when they read of monarchical and
military supremacy in a country like Germany, which is still politically
speaking in the stage of England under the Tudors, or of Russian
autocracy, or of the struggle over the King's prerogative which has been
taking place in Greece. If we believe, as we must, in the cause of
liberty, let us not be too modest to say that nations which have not yet
achieved responsible self-government, whether within or without the
British Commonwealth, are politically backward, and let us recall the
long stages of political invention by which our own self-government has
been achieved. Representation, trial by jury, an independent judiciary,
equality before the law, habeas corpus, a limited monarchy, the practice
of ministerial responsibility, religious toleration, the freedom of
printing and association, colonial autonomy--all these are distinctly
English inventions, but time has shown that most of them are definite
additions to the universal art of government. We can survey the Balkans,
for instance, and say with confidence that one thing, amongst others,
that those nations are in need of is toleration, both in the sphere of
nationality and of religion: or declare of the United States that their
industrial future will be menaced till they have freed Trade Unionism
from the threat of the so-called law of Conspiracy: or ask of our own
so-called self-governing Dominions whether they are content with a
system that concedes them no responsible control over the issues of
peace and war. This is not to say that our own governmental machinery is
perfect. Far from it. It was never in greater need of overhauling. It is
only to reaffirm the belief, which no temporary disillusionment can
shake, that it is founded on enduring principles which are not political
but moral. To compare a system which aims at freedom and seeks to
attain that aim through the working of responsible self-government with
systems, however logically perfect or temporarily effective, which set
no value on either, is, as it were, to compare black with white. It is
to go back on the lessons of centuries of experience and to deny the
cause, not of liberty alone, but of that progress of the spirit of man
which it is the highest object of liberty to promote.
We have no time here to discuss in detail the various English inventions
in the art of politics, but we must pause to consider two of the most
important, because they are typical of British methods. The first is the
invention called the Principle of Representation. Representation is a
device by which, and by which alone, the area of effective government
can be extended without the sacrifice of liberty. It is a device by
which the scattered many can make their will prevail over the few at the
centre. Under any non-representative system, whether in a State or a
Church or a Trade Union or any other association, men always find
themselves set before the inexorable dilemma between freedom and
weakness on the one hand and strength and tyranny on the other. Either
the State or the association has to be kept small, so that the members
themselves can meet and keep in touch with all that goes on. Or it is
allowed to expand and grow strong, in which case power becomes
concentrated at the centre and the great body of members loses all
effective control. The ancient world saw no way out of this dilemma. The
great Oriental monarchies never contemplated even the pretence of
popular control. The city-states of Greece, where democracy originated,
set such store in consequence by the personal liberty of the individual
citizen, that they preferred to remain small, and suffered the
inevitable penalty of their weakness. Rome, growing till she
overshadowed the world, sacrificed liberty in the process. Nor was the
Christian Church, when it became a large-scale organization, able to
overcome the dilemma. It was not till thirteenth-century England that a
way out was found. Edward I in summoning two burgesses from each borough
and two knights from each shire to his model Parliament in 1295, hit on
a method of doing business which was destined to revolutionize the art
of government. He stipulated that the men chosen by their fellows to
confer with him must come, to quote the exact words of the summons,
armed with 'full and sufficient power for themselves and for the
community of the aforesaid county, and the said citizens and burgesses
for themselves and the communities of the aforesaid cities and boroughs
separately, there and then, for doing what shall then be ordained
according to the Common Council in the premises, so that the aforesaid
business shall not remain unfinished in any way for defect of this
power'. In other words, the members were to come to confer with the king
not as individuals speaking for themselves alone, but as
representatives. Their words and acts were to bind those on whose behalf
they came, and those who chose them were to do so in the full knowledge
that they would be so bound. In choosing them the electors deliberately
surrendered their own share of initiative and sovereignty and combined
to bestow it on a fellow citizen whom they trusted. In this way, and in
this way alone, the people of Cornwall and of Northumberland could bring
their wishes to bear and play their part, together with the people at
the centre, in the government of a country many times the size of a
city-state of ancient Greece. There had been assemblies before in all
ages of history: but this was something different. It was a Parliament.
Representation seems to us such an obvious device that we often forget
how comparatively modern it is and what a degree of responsibility and
self-control it demands both in the representative and in those whom he
represents. It is very unpleasant to hear of things done or acquiesced
in by our representatives of which we disapprove, and to have to
remember that it is our own fault for not sending a wiser or braver man
to Westminster in his place. It is still more unpleasant for a
representative to feel, as he often must, that his own honest opinion
and conscience draw him one way on a matter of business and the opinions
of most of his constituents another. But these are difficulties inherent
in the system, and for which there is no remedy but sincerity and
patience. It is part of the bargain that a constituency should not be
able to disavow a representative: and that a representative should feel
bound to use his own best judgement on the issues put before him. To
turn the representative, as there is a tendency to do in some quarters,
into a mere mouthpiece with a mandate, is to ignore the very problem
which made representation necessary, and to presume that a local
mass-meeting can be as well informed or take as wide a view as those who
have all the facts before them at the centre. The ancient Greeks, who
had a strong sense of individuality, were loth to believe that any one
human being could make a decision on behalf of another. In the deepest
sense of course they were right. But government, as has been said, is at
best a rough business. Representation is no more than a practical
compromise: but it is a compromise which has been found to work. It has
made possible the extension of free government to areas undreamed of. It
has enabled the general sense of the inhabitants of the United States,
an area nearly as large as Europe, to be concentrated at Washington, and
it may yet make it possible to collect the sense of self-governing
Dominions in four continents in a Parliament at London. All this lay
implicit in the practical instructions sent by the English king to his
sheriffs; but its development would only have been possible in a
community where the general level of character was a high one and where
men were, therefore, in the habit of placing implicit trust in one
another. The relationship of confidence between a member of Parliament
and his constituents, or a Trade Union leader and his rank and file, is
a thing of which public men are rightly proud: for it reflects honour on
both parties and testifies to an underlying community of purpose which
no passing disagreement on details can break down.
Representation paved the way for the modern development of responsible
self-government. But it is important to recognize that the two are not
the same thing. Responsible self-government, in its modern form, is a
separate and more complex English invention in the art of government. A
community may be decked out with a complete apparatus of representative
institutions and yet remain little better than an autocracy. Modern
Germany is a case in point. The parliamentary suffrage for the German
Reichstag is more representative than that for the British House of
Commons. The German workman is better represented in his Parliament than
the British workman is in ours. But the German workman has far less
power to make his will effective in matters of policy than the British,
because the German constitution does not embody the principle of
responsible self-government. Sovereignty still rests with the Kaiser as
it rested in the thirteenth century with Edward I. The Imperial
Chancellor is not responsible to the Reichstag but to the Kaiser, by
whom he is appointed and whose personal servant he remains. The
Reichstag can discuss the actions of the Chancellor: it can advise him,
or protest to him, or even pass votes of censure against him; but it
cannot make its will effective. We can observe the working of similar
representative institutions in different parts of the British
Commonwealth. The provinces of India and many British Colonies have
variously composed representative assemblies, but in all cases without
the power to control their executives. The self-governing Dominions, on
the other hand, do enjoy responsible self-government, but in an
incomplete form, because the most vital of all issues of policy are
outside their control. On questions of foreign policy, and the issues of
war and peace, the Parliaments of the Dominions, and the citizens they
represent, are, constitutionally speaking, as helpless as the most
ignorant native in the humblest dependency. Representative institutions
in themselves thus no more ensure real self-government than the setting
up of a works committee of employees in a factory would ensure that the
workmen ran the factory. The distinction between representation and
effective responsibility is so simple that it seems a platitude to
mention it. Yet it is constantly ignored, both in this country by those
who speak of Colonial self-government as though the Dominions really
enjoyed the same self-government as the people of these islands, and by
the parties in Germany whose programme it is, not to make Germany a
truly constitutional country, but to assimilate the retrograde Prussian
franchise to the broader representation of the Reichstag.
Wherein does the transition from representation to full responsibility
consist? It came about in England when Parliament, instead of merely
being consulted by the sovereign, felt itself strong enough to give
orders to the sovereign. The sovereign naturally resisted, as the Kaiser
and the Tsar will resist in their turn; but in this country the battle
was fought and won in the seventeenth century. Since that time, with a
few vacillations, Parliament has been the sovereign power. But once this
transfer of sovereignty has taken place, a new problem arises. A
Parliament of several hundred members, even though it meets regularly,
is not competent to transact the multitudinous and complex and highly
specialized business of a modern State. The original function of
Parliament was to advise, to discuss, and to criticize. It is not an
instrument fit for the work of execution and administration. Having
become sovereign, its first business must be to create out of its own
members an instrument which should carry out its own policy and be
responsible to itself for its actions. Hence arose the Cabinet. The
Cabinet is, as it were, a distillation of Parliament, just as Parliament
itself is a distillation of the country. It consists of members of
Parliament and it is in constant touch with Parliament; but its methods
are not the methods of Parliament but of the older, more direct, organs
of government which Parliament superseded. It meets in secret: it holds
all the strings of policy: it has almost complete control of political
and legislative initiative: it decides what is to be done and when and
how: it has its own staff of agents and confidential advisers in the
Departments and elsewhere whose acts are largely withdrawn from the
knowledge and criticism of Parliament. A modern Cabinet in fact is open
to the charge of being autocracy in a new guise. Such a charge would, of
course, be a gross overstatement. But there is no doubt that the
increasing complexity in the tasks of government has led to a
corresponding growth of power and organization at the centre which has
strengthened the Cabinet immeasurably of recent years at the expense of
the direct representatives of the people. There are, however, powerful
influences at work in the opposite direction, towards decentralization
and new forms of representation, which there is no space to touch on
here. Suffice it to say that here, as elsewhere, the price of liberty is
eternal vigilance.
England, then, and all who enjoy the full privileges of British
citizenship have been placed by the progress of events in a position of
peculiar responsibility. The twentieth century finds us the centre of
the widest experiment of self-government which the world has ever seen;
for the principles of liberty, first tested in this island, have
approved themselves on the soil of North America, Australasia, and South
Africa. It finds us also responsible for the government and for the
training in responsibility of some 350,000,000 members of the more
politically inexperienced and backward races of mankind, or about
one-fifth of the human race. The growth of the British Commonwealth,
about which so astonishingly little is known either by ourselves or by
other peoples, is not a mere happy or unhappy accident. It is one of the
inevitable and decisive developments in the history of mankind. It is
the direct result of that widening of intercourse, that
internationalizing of the world, to which reference has already been
made. It represents the control of law and organized government over the
blind and selfish forces of exploitation. In the exercise of this
control we have often ourselves been blind and sometimes selfish. But
'the situation of man', as Burke finely said of our Indian Empire, 'is
the preceptor of his duty'. The perseverance of the British character,
its habit of concentration on the work that lies to hand, and the
influence of our traditional social and political ideals, have slowly
brought us to a deeper insight, till to-day the Commonwealth is becoming
alive to the real nature of its task--the extension and consolidation of
liberty. If it has thus taken up, in part, the work of the mediaeval
Empire and has had a measure of success where the other failed, it is
because of the character of its individual citizens, because despite
constant and heart-breaking failures in knowledge and imagination, we
are a people who, in the words of a stern, if friendly, critic, 'with
great self-assertion and a bull-dog kind of courage, have yet a
singular amount of gentleness and tenderness'.[66]
* * * * *
We have come to the end of our long survey. Some of you may feel that I
have fetched too wide a compass and given too wide an extension to the
meaning of government. But if I have sinned I have sinned of set
purpose. I refuse to confine government within the limits of what is
ordinarily called politics, or to discuss the association called the
State in isolation from other sides of man's community life. To do so, I
feel, is to lay oneself open to one of two opposite errors: the error of
those for whom the State is the Almighty, and who invest it with a
superhuman morality and authority of its own; and the error of those who
draw in their skirts in horror from the touch of what Nietzsche called
this 'cold monster' and take refuge in monastic detachment from the
political responsibilities of their time. We must be able to see
politics as a part of life before we can see it steadily and see it
whole. We must be able to see it in relation to the general ordering of
the world and to connect it once more, as in the Middle Ages, with
religion and morality. No thinking man can live through such a time as
this and preserve his faith unless he is sustained by the belief that
the clash of States which is darkening our generation is not a mere
blind collision of forces, but has spiritual bearings which affect each
individual living soul born or to be born in the world. It is not for us
to anticipate the verdict of history. But what we can do is to bear
ourselves worthily, in thought and speech, like our soldiers in action,
of the times in which we live--to testify, as it were, in our own lives,
to that for which so many of our friends have laid down theirs. We are
met at a culminating moment of human fate--when, so far as human
judgement can discern, the political destinies of this planet are being
settled for many generations to come--perhaps for good. If the task of
leadership in the arts of government remains with us, let us face the
responsibility conscious of the vast spiritual issues which it involves,
and let us so plan and act that history, looking back on these years of
blood, may date from them a new birth of freedom and progress, not for
ourselves in this country alone but throughout that kingdom of Man which
must one day, as we believe, become in very truth the kingdom of God.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
1. _Man's Control over Nature_:
Ray Lankester, _The Kingdom of Man_, and other essays. 1912.
Demolins, _Comment la route cree le type social_.
Curtis (ed. by), _The Commonwealth of Nations_. Vol. i, 1916.
Murphy, _The Basis of Ascendancy_. 1909.
_Introduction to the Study of International Relations_ (Greenwood
and others). 1916.
2. _Political Ideals_:
_The Jews_: Todd, _Politics and Religion in Ancient Israel_. 1904.
_Greece_: _Aristotle's Politics_, translated by B. Jowett. 1908.
Dickinson, _The Greek View of Life_. 1909.
Barker, _The Political thought of Plato and Aristotle_. 1908.
_Rome_: H. Stuart Jones, _The Roman Empire_. (Story of the
Nations.) 1908. Warde Fowler, _Rome_ (Home University
Series).
_The Middle Ages_: A. L. Smith, _Church and State in the Middle
Ages_. 1911.
Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_ (introduction by
Maitland). 1900.
_Miscellaneous_: Wallas, _Human Nature in Politics_. 1908.
Acton, _The History of Freedom_, and other essays. 1909.
Lowell, _The Government of England_.
Buelow, _Imperial Germany_. 1916.
FOOTNOTES:
[53] A. L. Smith, _Church and State in the Middle Ages_, pp. 207-8.
[54] Lankester, _Nature and Man_, Romanes Lecture, 1905, pp. 27-9.
[55] _The Commonwealth of Nations_, edited by L. Curtis, Part I, p. 130.
[56] Ibid., p. 166.
[57] P. H. Kerr in _An Introduction to the Study of International
Relations_, 1915, p. 149.
[58] A still better name would be the Great Responsibilities.
[59] _Second Thoughts of an Economist_, 1916, pp. 17-18, 22.
[60] _Freedom and other Essays_, p. 22.
[61] Isaiah lxvi. 2; lvii. 19, 21; ii. 3, 4.
[62] _Ecclesiastical Polity_, Book I, ch. xvi. 5.
[63] End of Book I of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_.