“They'll never help us, I feel,” said Margaret.
“Us?”
“The Liberals.”
“Oh, damn the Liberals!” I said. “They'll never even help themselves.”
“I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people,” said
Margaret, after a pause.
She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel, perplexed
by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I did not look up,
and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed me and went rustling
softly to her room.
I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts crystallising
out....
It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that
opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and the
mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social affairs.
The ideas go on--and no person or party succeeds in embodying them. The
reality of human progress never comes to the surface, it is a power
in the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in silence while men think, in
studies where they write self-forgetfully, in laboratories under the
urgency of an impersonal curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest
talk, in moments of emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not
in everyday affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday
affair, are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,
interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation, personal
feeling, are their substance. No man can abolish his immediate self and
specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he simply turns himself
into something a little less than the common man. He may have an immense
hinterland, but that does not absolve him from a frontage. That is the
essential error of the specialist philosopher, the specialist teacher,
the specialist publicist. They repudiate frontage; claim to be pure
hinterland. That is what bothered me about Codger, about those various
schoolmasters who had prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their
dream of an official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher
in the first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the
first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like gifts
to the pretence--a quack. These are attempts to live deep-side
shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To understand
Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to join a
Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not even
tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for which it
stands....
I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had taken me
some years to realise the true relation of the great constructive ideas
that swayed me not only to political parties, but to myself. I had
been disposed to identify the formulae of some one party with social
construction, and to regard the other as necessarily anti-constructive,
just as I had been inclined to follow the Baileys in the
self-righteousness of supposing myself to be wholly constructive. But I
saw now that every man of intellectual freedom and vigour is necessarily
constructive-minded nowadays, and that no man is disinterestedly so.
Each one of us repeats in himself the conflict of the race between the
splendour of its possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be
shaping immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong,
and have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man
counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but
for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are held
together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the stabler bond
of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for progress in general, and
nearly everybody is opposed to any change, except in so far as gross
increments are change, in his particular method of living and behaviour.
Every party stands essentially for the interests and mental usages of
some definite class or group of classes in the exciting community, and
every party has its scientific-minded and constructive leading section,
with well-defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a
public-spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing
its meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish
itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct
itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited
socialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression upon
other classes lies the essential driving force of modern affairs. The
instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway and struggle.
The ideas and understandings march on and achieve themselves for all--in
spite of every one....
The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of two
great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends in the
event of a small Government majority. These two main parties are more or
less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has certain necessary
characteristics. The Conservative Party has always stood quite
definitely for the established propertied interests. The land-owner,
the big lawyer, the Established Church, and latterly the huge private
monopoly of the liquor trade which has been created by temperance
legislation, are the essential Conservatives. Interwoven now with the
native wealthy are the families of the great international usurers, and
a vast miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise. Outside the range of
resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has always
shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any other party.
The great landowners have been as well-disposed towards the endowment
of higher education, and as willing to co-operate with the Church in
protective and mildly educational legislation for children and the
working class, as any political section. The financiers, too, are
adventurous-spirited and eager for mechanical progress and technical
efficiency. They are prepared to spend public money upon research,
upon ports and harbours and public communications, upon sanitation and
hygienic organisation. A certain rude benevolence of public intention is
equally characteristic of the liquor trade. Provided his comfort leads
to no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see
the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar. All
sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably inclined
to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised population
in uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners and old-fashioned
country clergy, full of localised self-importance, jealous even of the
cottager who can read, but they have neither the power nor the ability
to retard the constructive forces in the party as a whole. On the other
hand, when matters point to any definitely confiscatory proposal, to the
public ownership and collective control of land, for example, or
state mining and manufactures, or the nationalisation of the so-called
public-house or extended municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of
the taxation of property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly
adamantine bar. It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement
in these affairs.
Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose immediate
interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor, increase employment,
and make better terms for the working-man tenant and working-man
purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt constructive minded, but the mass
of the following is naturally suspicious of education and discipline,
hostile to the higher education, and--except for an obvious antagonism
to employers and property owners--almost destitute of ideas. What
else can it be? It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole
situation and difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative
and organising power. It favours the nationalisation of land and capital
with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process; but, on the
other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of individuals which
is implied by military service is steadily and quite naturally and quite
illogically opposed by it. It is only in recent years that Labour has
emerged as a separate party from the huge hospitable caravanserai of
Liberalism, and there is still a very marked tendency to step back again
into that multitudinous assemblage.
For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.
Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified
crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these
other parties. It is the party against the predominating interests. It
is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the party
of decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and planless
association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so constructive
on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to hinder the inevitable
constructions of the civilised state. Essentially it is the party
of criticism, the “Anti” party. It is a system of hostilities and
objections that somehow achieves at times an elusive common soul. It is
a gathering together of all the smaller interests which find themselves
at a disadvantage against the big established classes, the leasehold
tenant as against the landowner, the retail tradesman as against
the merchant and the moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the
Churchman, the small employer as against the demoralising hospitable
publican, the man without introductions and broad connections against
the man who has these things. It is the party of the many small men
against the fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for
loving the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer
is doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but
it resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages
common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the king.
The Liberal Party is the party against “class privilege” because it
represents no class advantages, but it is also the party that is on
the whole most set against Collective control because it represents
no established responsibility. It is constructive only so far as its
antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than its jealousy of the
state. It organises only because organisation is forced upon it by the
organisation of its adversaries. It lapses in and out of alliance with
Labour as it sways between hostility to wealth and hostility to public
expenditure....
Every modern European state will have in some form or other these three
parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and unsympathetic
party of establishment and success, the rich party; the confused,
sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small, struggling,
various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a third party
sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes reuniting with
it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses, the proletarians,
Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to Republican and Democrat, for
example, and you have the conditions in the United States. The Crown or
a dethroned dynasty, the Established Church or a dispossessed church,
nationalist secessions, the personalities of party leaders, may break
up, complicate, and confuse the self-expression of these three necessary
divisions in the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out
none the less for that....
And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;--the ideas go
on--as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in
some great brain beyond our understanding....
So it was I sat and thought my problem out.... I still remember my
satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like clouds
dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course, couldn't hold
a party together alone, “interests and habits, not ideas,” I had that
now, and so the great constructive scheme of Socialism, invading and
inspiring all parties, was necessarily claimed only by this collection
of odds and ends, this residuum of disconnected and exceptional people.
This was true not only of the Socialist idea, but of the scientific
idea, the idea of veracity--of human confidence in humanity--of all that
mattered in human life outside the life of individuals.... The only real
party that would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that
in the entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive
attack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and
claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted
anything in the world.
Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it
before?... I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.