The straits of Dover, which one may sometimes see across, have sufficed
so to isolate England that it has never moved quite in step with the
rest of Europe in politics, morals, or art. No wonder that the Atlantic
Ocean, although it has favoured a mixed emigration and cheap
intercourse, should have cut off America so effectually that all the
people there, even those of Latin origin, have become curiously
different from any kind of European. In vain are they reputed to have
the same religions or to speak the same languages as their cousins in
the old world; everything has changed its accent, spirit, and value.
Flora and fauna have been intoxicated by that untouched soil and fresh
tonic air, and by those vast spaces; in spite of their hereditary
differences of species they have all acquired the same crude savour and
defiant aspect. In comparison with their European prototypes they seem
tough, meagre, bold, and ugly. In the United States, apart from the fact
that most of the early colonists belonged to an exceptional type of
Englishman, the scale and speed of life have made everything strangely
un‐English. There is cheeriness instead of doggedness, confidence
instead of circumspection; there is a desire to quizz and to dazzle
rather than a fear of being mistaken or of being shocked; there is a
pervasive cordiality, exaggeration, and farcical humour; and in the
presence of the Englishman, when by chance he turns up or is thought of,
there is an invincible impatience and irritation that his point of view
should be so fixed, his mind so literal, and the freight he carries so
excessive (when you are sailing in ballast yourself), and that he should
seem to take so little notice of changes in the wind to which you are
nervously sensitive.
Nevertheless there is one gift or habit, native to England, that has not
only been preserved in America unchanged, but has found there a more
favourable atmosphere in which to manifest its true nature—I mean the
spirit of free co‐operation. The root of it is free individuality, which
is deeply seated in the English inner man; there is an indomitable
instinct or mind in him which he perpetually consults and reveres, slow
and embarrassed as his expression of it may be. But this free
individuality in the Englishman is crossed and biased by a large residue
of social servitude. The church and the aristocracy, entanglement in
custom and privilege, mistrust and bitterness about particular
grievances, warp the inner man and enlist him against his interests in
alien causes; the straits of Dover were too narrow, the shadow of a
hostile continent was too oppressive, the English sod was soaked with
too many dews and cut by too many hedges, for each individual, being
quite master of himself, to confront every other individual without fear
or prejudice, and to unite with him in the free pursuit of whatever aims
they might find that they had in common. Yet this slow co‐operation of
free men, this liberty in democracy—the only sort that America possesses
or believes in—is wholly English in its personal basis, its reserve, its
tenacity, its empiricism, its public spirit, and its assurance of its
own rightness; and it deserves to be called English always, to whatever
countries it may spread.
The omnipresence in America of this spirit of co‐operation,
responsibility, and growth is very remarkable. Far from being
neutralised by American dash and bravura, or lost in the opposite
instincts of so many alien races, it seems to be adopted at once in the
most mixed circles and in the most novel predicaments. In America social
servitude is reduced to a minimum; in fact we may almost say that it is
reduced to subjecting children to their mothers and to a common public
education, agencies that are absolutely indispensable to produce the
individual and enable him to exercise his personal initiative
effectually; for after all, whatever metaphysical egotism may say, one
cannot vote to be created. But once created, weaned, and taught to read
and write, the young American can easily shoulder his knapsack and
choose his own way in the world. He is as yet very little trammelled by
want of opportunity, and he has no roots to speak of in place, class, or
religion. Where individuality is so free, co‐operation, when it is
justified, can be all the more quick and hearty. Everywhere co‐operation
is taken for granted, as something that no one would be so mean or so
short‐sighted as to refuse. Together with the will to work and to
prosper, it is of the essence of Americanism, and is accepted as such by
all the unkempt polyglot peoples that turn to the new world with the
pathetic but manly purpose of beginning life on a new principle. Every
political body, every public meeting, every club, or college, or
athletic team, is full of it. Out it comes whenever there is an accident
in the street or a division in a church, or a great unexpected emergency
like the late war. The general instinct is to run and help, to assume
direction, to pull through somehow by mutual adaptation, and by seizing
on the readiest practical measures and working compromises. Each man
joins in and gives a helping hand, without a preconceived plan or a
prior motive. Even the leader, when he is a natural leader and not a
professional, has nothing up his sleeve to force on the rest, in their
obvious good‐will and mental blankness. All meet in a genuine spirit of
consultation, eager to persuade but ready to be persuaded, with a cheery
confidence in their average ability, when a point comes up and is
clearly put before them, to decide it for the time being, and to move
on. It is implicitly agreed, in every case, that disputed questions
shall be put to a vote, and that the minority will loyally acquiesce in
the decision of the majority and build henceforth upon it, without a
thought of ever retracting it.
Such a way of proceeding seems in America a matter of course, because it
is bred in the bone, or imposed by that permeating social contagion
which is so irresistible in a natural democracy. But if we consider
human nature at large and the practice of most nations, we shall see
that it is a very rare, wonderful, and unstable convention. It implies a
rather unimaginative optimistic assumption that at bottom all men’s
interests are similar and compatible, and a rather heroic public
spirit—such that no special interest, in so far as it has to be
overruled, shall rebel and try to maintain itself absolutely. In America
hitherto these conditions happen to have been actually fulfilled in an
unusual measure. Interests have been very similar—to exploit business
opportunities and organise public services useful to all; and these
similar interests have been also compatible and harmonious. A neighbour,
even a competitor, where the field is so large and so little pre‐empted,
has more often proved a resource than a danger. The rich have helped the
public more than they have fleeced it, and they have been emulated more
than hated or served by the enterprising poor. To abolish millionaires
would have been to dash one’s own hopes. The most opposite systems of
religion and education could look smilingly upon one another’s
prosperity, because the country could afford these superficial luxuries,
having a constitutional religion and education of its own, which
everybody drank in unconsciously and which assured the moral cohesion of
the people. Impulses of reason and kindness, which are potential in all
men, under such circumstances can become effective; people can help one
another with no great sacrifice to themselves, and minorities can
dismiss their special plans without sorrow, and cheerfully follow the
crowd down another road. It was because life in America was naturally
more co‐operative and more plastic than in England that the spirit of
English liberty, which demands co‐operation and plasticity, could appear
there more boldly and universally than it ever did at home.
English liberty is a method, not a goal. It is related to the value of
human life very much as the police are related to public morals or
commerce to wealth; and it is no accident that the Anglo‐Saxon race
excels in commerce and in the commercial as distinguished from the
artistic side of industry, and that having policed itself successfully
it is beginning to police the world at large. It is all an eminence in
temper, good‐will, reliability, accommodation. Probably some other
races, such as the Jews and Arabs, make individually better merchants,
more shrewd, patient, and loving of their art. Englishmen and Americans
often seem to miss or force opportunities, to play for quick returns, or
to settle down into ponderous corporations; for successful men they are
not particularly observant, constant, or economical. But the superiority
of the Oriental is confined to his private craft; he has not the spirit
of partnership. In English civilisation the individual is neutralised;
it does not matter so much even in high places if he is rather stupid or
rather cheap; public spirit sustains him, and he becomes its instrument
all the more readily, perhaps, for not being very distinguished or
clear‐headed in himself. The community prospers; comfort and science,
good manners and generous feelings are diffused among the people,
without the aid of that foresight and cunning direction which sometimes
give a temporary advantage to a rival system like the German. In the
end, adaptation to the world at large, where so much is hidden and
unintelligible, is only possible piecemeal, by groping with a genuine
indetermination in one’s aims. Its very looseness gives the English
method its lien on the future. To dominate the world co‐operation is
better than policy, and empiricism safer than inspiration. Anglo‐Saxon
imperialism is unintended; military conquests are incidental to it and
often not maintained: it subsists by a mechanical equilibrium of habits
and interests, in which every colony, province, or protectorate has a
different status. It has a commercial and missionary quality, and is
essentially an invitation to pull together—an invitation which many
nations may be incapable of accepting or even of understanding, or which
they may deeply scorn, because it involves a surrender of absolute
liberty on their part; but whether accepted or rejected, it is an offer
of co‐operation, a project for a limited partnership, not a complete
plan of life to be imposed on anybody.
It is a wise instinct, in dealing with foreigners or with material
things (which are foreigners to the mind), to limit oneself in this way
to establishing external relations, partial mutual adjustments, with a
great residuum of independence and reserve; if you attempt more you will
achieve less; your interpretations will become chimerical and your
regimen odious. So deep‐seated is this prudent instinct in the English
nature that it appears even at home; most of the concrete things which
English genius has produced are expedients. Its spiritual treasures are
hardly possessions, except as character is a possession; they are rather
a standard of life, a promise, an insurance. English poetry and fiction
form an exception; the very incoherence and artlessness which they share
with so much else that is English lend them an absolute value as an
expression. They are the mirror and prattle of the inner man—a boyish
spirit astray in the green earth it loves, rich in wonder, perplexity,
valour, and faith, given to opinionated little prejudices, but withal
sensitive and candid, and often laden, as in _Hamlet_, with exquisite
music, tender humour, and tragic self‐knowledge. But apart from the
literature that simply utters the inner man, no one considering the
English language, the English church, or English philosophy, or
considering the common law and parliamentary government, would take them
for perfect realisations of art or truth or an ideal polity.
Institutions so jumbled and limping could never have been planned; they
can never be transferred to another setting, or adopted bodily; but
special circumstances and contrary currents have given them birth, and
they are accepted and prized, where they are native, for keeping the
door open to a great volume and variety of goods, at a moderate cost of
danger and absurdity.
Of course no product of mind is _merely_ an expedient; all are
concomitantly expressions of temperament; there is something in their
manner of being practical which is poetical and catches the rhythm of
the heart. In this way anything foreign—and almost all the elements of
civilisation in England and America are foreign—when it is adopted and
acclimatised, takes on a native accent, especially on English lips; like
the Latin words in the language, it becomes thoroughly English in
texture. The English Bible, again, with its archaic homeliness and
majesty, sets the mind brooding, not less than the old ballad most
redolent of the native past and the native imagination; it fills the
memory with solemn and pungent phrases; and this incidental spirit of
poetry in which it comes to be clothed is a self‐revelation perhaps more
pertinent and welcome to the people than the alien revelations it
professes to transmit. English law and parliaments, too, would be very
unjustly judged if judged as practical contrivances only; they satisfy
at the same time the moral interest people have in uttering and
enforcing their feelings. These institutions are ceremonious, almost
sacramental; they are instinct with a dramatic spirit deeper and more
vital than their utility. Englishmen and Americans love debate; they
love sitting round a table as if in consultation, even when the chairman
has pulled the wires and settled everything beforehand, and when each of
the participants listens only to his own remarks and votes according to
his party. They love committees and commissions; they love public
dinners with after‐dinner speeches, those stammering compounds of
facetiousness, platitude, and business. How distressing such speeches
usually are, and how helplessly prolonged, does not escape anybody; yet
every one demands them notwithstanding, because in pumping them up or
sitting through them he feels he is leading the political life. A public
man must show himself in public, even if not to advantage. The moral
expressiveness of such institutions also helps to redeem their clumsy
procedure; they would not be useful, nor work at all as they should, if
people did not smack their lips over them and feel a profound pleasure
in carrying them out. Without the English spirit, without the faculty of
making themselves believe in public what they never feel in private,
without the habit of clubbing together and facing facts, and feeling
duty in a cautious, consultative, experimental way, English liberties
forfeit their practical value; as we see when they are extended to a
volatile histrionic people like the Irish, or when a jury in France,
instead of pronouncing simply on matters of fact and the credibility of
witnesses, rushes in the heat of its patriotism to carry out, by its
verdict, some political policy.
The practice of English liberty presupposes two things: that all
concerned are fundamentally unanimous, and that each has a plastic
nature, which he is willing to modify. If fundamental unanimity is
lacking and all are not making in the same general direction, there can
be no honest co‐operation, no satisfying compromise. Every concession,
under such circumstances, would be a temporary one, to be retracted at
the first favourable moment; it would amount to a mutilation of one’s
essential nature, a partial surrender of life, liberty, and happiness,
tolerable for a time, perhaps, as the lesser of two evils, but involving
a perpetual sullen opposition and hatred. To put things to a vote, and
to accept unreservedly the decision of the majority, are points
essential to the English system; but they would be absurd if fundamental
agreement were not presupposed. Every decision that the majority could
conceivably arrive at must leave it still possible for the minority to
live and prosper, even if not exactly in the way they wished. Were this
not the case, a decision by vote would be as alien a fatality to any
minority as the decree of a foreign tyrant, and at every election the
right of rebellion would come into play. In a hearty and sound democracy
all questions at issue must be minor matters; fundamentals must have
been silently agreed upon and taken for granted when the democracy
arose. To leave a decision to the majority is like leaving it to
chance—a fatal procedure unless one is willing to have it either way.
You must be able to risk losing the toss; and if you do you will
acquiesce all the more readily in the result, because, unless the
winners cheated at the game, they had no more influence on it than
yourself—namely none, or very little. You acquiesce in democracy on the
same conditions and for the same reasons, and perhaps a little more
cheerfully, because there is an infinitesimally better chance of winning
on the average; but even then the enormity of the risk involved would be
intolerable if anything of vital importance was at stake. It is
therefore actually required that juries, whose decisions may really be
of moment, should be unanimous; and parliaments and elections are never
more satisfactory than when a wave of national feeling runs through them
and there is no longer any minority nor any need of voting.
Free government works well in proportion as government is superfluous.
That most parliamentary measures should be trivial or technical, and
really devised and debated only in government offices, and that
government in America should so long have been carried on in the shade,
by persons of no name or dignity, is no anomaly. On the contrary, like
the good fortune of those who never hear of the police, it is all a sign
that co‐operative liberty is working well and rendering overt government
unnecessary. Sometimes kinship and opportunity carry a whole nation
before the wind; but this happy unison belongs rather to the dawn of
national life, when similar tasks absorb all individual energies. If it
is to be maintained after lines of moral cleavage appear, and is to be
compatible with variety and distinction of character, all further
developments must be democratically controlled and must remain, as it
were, in a state of fusion. Variety and distinction must not become
arbitrary and irresponsible. They must take directions that will not mar
the general harmony, and no interest must be carried so far as to lose
sight of the rest. Science and art, in such a vital democracy, should
remain popular, helpful, bracing; religion should be broadly national
and in the spirit of the times. The variety and distinction allowed must
be only variety and distinction of service. If they ever became a real
distinction and variety of life, if they arrogated to themselves an
absolute liberty, they would shatter the unity of the democratic spirit
and destroy its moral authority.
The levelling tendency of English liberty (inevitable if plastic natures
are to co‐operate and to make permanent concessions to one another’s
instincts) comes out more clearly in America than in England itself. In
England there are still castles and rural retreats, there are still
social islands within the Island, where special classes may nurse
particular allegiances. America is all one prairie, swept by a universal
tornado. Although it has always thought itself in an eminent sense the
land of freedom, even when it was covered with slaves, there is no
country in which people live under more overpowering compulsions. The
prohibitions, although important and growing, are not yet, perhaps, so
many or so blatant as in some other countries; but prohibitions are less
galling than compulsions. What can be forbidden specifically—bigamy, for
instance, or heresy—may be avoided by a prudent man without renouncing
the whole movement of life and mind which, if carried beyond a certain
point, would end in those trespasses against convention. He can indulge
in hypothesis or gallantry without falling foul of the positive law,
which indeed may even stimulate his interest and ingenuity by suggesting
some indirect means of satisfaction. On the other hand, what is exacted
cuts deeper; it creates habits which overlay nature, and every faculty
is atrophied that does not conform with them. If, for instance, I am
compelled to be in an office (and up to business, too) from early
morning to late afternoon, with long journeys in thundering and
sweltering trains before and after and a flying shot at a quick lunch
between, I am caught and held both in soul and body; and except for the
freedom to work and to rise by that work—which may be very interesting
in itself—I am not suffered to exist morally at all. My evenings will be
drowsy, my Sundays tedious, and after a few days’ holiday I shall be
wishing to get back to business. Here is as narrow a path left open to
freedom as is left open in a monastic establishment, where bell and book
keep your attention fixed at all hours upon the hard work of
salvation—an infinite vista, certainly, if your soul was not made to
look another way. Those, too, who may escape this crushing routine—the
invalids, the ladies, the fops—are none the less prevented by it from
doing anything else with success or with a good conscience; the bubbles
also must swim with the stream. Even what is best in American life is
compulsory—the idealism, the zeal, the beautiful happy unison of its
great moments. You must wave, you must cheer, you must push with the
irresistible crowd; otherwise you will feel like a traitor, a soulless
outcast, a deserted ship high and dry on the shore. In America there is
but one way of being saved, though it is not peculiar to any of the
official religions, which themselves must silently conform to the
national orthodoxy, or else become impotent and merely ornamental. This
national faith and morality are vague in idea, but inexorable in spirit;
they are the gospel of work and the belief in progress. By them, in a
country where all men are free, every man finds that what most matters
has been settled for him beforehand.
Nevertheless, American life _is_ free as a whole, because it is mobile,
because every atom that swims in it has a momentum of its own which is
felt and respected throughout the mass, like the weight of an atom in
the solar system, even if the deflection it may cause is infinitesimal.
In temper America is docile and not at all tyrannical; it has not
predetermined its career, and its merciless momentum is a passive
resultant. Like some Mississippi or Niagara, it rolls its myriad drops
gently onward, being but the suction and pressure which they exercise on
one another. Any tremulous thought or playful experiment anywhere may be
a first symptom of great changes, and may seem to precipitate the
cataract in a new direction. Any snowflake in a boy’s sky may become the
centre for his _boule de neige_, his prodigious fortune; but the monster
will melt as easily as it grew, and leaves nobody poorer for having
existed. In America there is duty everywhere, but everywhere also there
is light. I do not mean superior understanding or even moderately wide
knowledge, but openness to light, an evident joy in seeing things
clearly and doing them briskly, which would amount to a veritable
triumph of art and reason if the affairs in which it came into play were
central and important. The American may give an exorbitant value to
subsidiary things, but his error comes of haste in praising what he
possesses, and trusting the first praises he hears. He can detect sharp
practices, because he is capable of them, but vanity or wickedness in
the ultimate aims of a man, including himself, he cannot detect, because
he is ingenuous in that sphere. He thinks life splendid and blameless,
without stopping to consider how far folly and malice may be inherent in
it. He feels that he himself has nothing to dread, nothing to hide or
apologise for; and if he is arrogant in his ignorance, there is often a
twinkle in his eye when he is most boastful. Perhaps he suspects that he
is making a fool of himself, and he challenges the world to prove it;
and his innocence is quickly gone when he is once convinced that it
exists. Accordingly the American orthodoxy, though imperious, is not
unyielding. It has a keener sense for destiny than for policy. It is
confident of a happy and triumphant future, which it would be shameful
in any man to refuse to work for and to share; but it cannot prefigure
what that bright future is to be. While it works feverishly in outward
matters, inwardly it only watches and waits; and it feels tenderly
towards the unexpressed impulses in its bosom, like a mother towards her
unborn young.
There is a mystical conviction, expressed in Anglo‐Saxon life and
philosophy, that our labours, even when they end in failure, contribute
to some ulterior achievement in which it is well they should be
submerged. This Anglo‐Saxon piety, in the form of trust and
adaptability, reaches somewhat the same insight that more speculative
religions have reached through asceticism, the insight that we must
renounce our wills and deny ourselves. But to have a will remains
essential to animals, and having a will we must kick against the pricks,
even if philosophy thinks it foolish of us. The spirit in which parties
and nations beyond the pale of English liberty confront one another is
not motherly nor brotherly nor Christian. Their valorousness and
morality consist in their indomitable egotism. The liberty they want is
absolute liberty, a desire which is quite primitive. It may be
identified with the love of life which animates all creation, or with
the pursuit of happiness which all men would be engaged in if they were
rational. Indeed, it might even be identified with the first law of
motion, that all bodies, if left free, persevere in that state of rest,
or of motion in a straight line, in which they happen to find
themselves. The enemies of this primitive freedom are all such external
forces as make it deviate from the course it is in the habit of taking
or is inclined to take; and when people begin to reflect upon their
condition, they protest against this alien tyranny, and contrast in
fancy what they would do if they were free with what under duress they
are actually doing. All human struggles are inspired by what, in this
sense, is the love of freedom. Even craving for power and possessions
may be regarded as the love of a free life on a larger scale, for which
more instruments and resources are needed. The apologists of absolute
will are not slow, for instance, to tell us that Germany in her
laborious ambitions has been pursuing the highest form of freedom, which
can be attained only by organising all the resources of the world, and
the souls of all subsidiary nations, around one luminous centre of
direction and self‐consciousness, such as the Prussian government was
eminently fitted to furnish. Freedom to exercise absolute will
methodically seems to them much better than English liberty, because it
knows what it wants, pursues it intelligently, and does not rely for
success on some measure of goodness in mankind at large. English liberty
is so trustful! It moves by a series of checks, mutual concessions, and
limited satisfactions; it counts on chivalry, sportsmanship, brotherly
love, and on that rarest and least lucrative of virtues,
fair‐mindedness: it is a broad‐based, stupid, blind adventure, groping
towards an unknown goal. Who but an Englishman would think of such a
thing! A fanatic, a poet, a doctrinaire, a dilettante—any one who has a
fixed aim and clear passions—will not relish English liberty. It will
seem bitter irony to him to give the name of liberty to something so
muffled, exacting, and oppressive. In fact English liberty is a positive
infringement and surrender of the freedom most fought for and most
praised in the past. It makes impossible the sort of liberty for which
the Spartans died at Thermopylæ, or the Christian martyrs in the arena,
or the Protestant reformers at the stake; for these people all died
because they would not co‐operate, because they were not plastic and
would never consent to lead the life dear or at least customary to other
men. They insisted on being utterly different and independent and
inflexible in their chosen systems, and aspired either to destroy the
society round them or at least to insulate themselves in the midst of
it, and live a jealous, private, unstained life of their own within
their city walls or mystical conclaves. Any one who passionately loves
his particular country or passionately believes in his particular
religion cannot be content with less liberty or more democracy than
that; he must be free to live absolutely according to his ideal, and no
hostile votes, no alien interests, must call on him to deviate from it
by one iota. Such was the claim to religious liberty which has played so
large a part in the revolutions and divisions of the western world.
Every new heresy professed to be orthodoxy itself, purified and
restored; and woe to all backsliders from the reformed faith! Even the
popes, without thinking to be ironical, have often raised a wail for
liberty. Such too was the aspiration of those mediæval cities and barons
who fought for their liberties and rights. Such was the aspiration even
of the American declaration of independence and the American
constitution: cast‐iron documents, if only the spirit of co‐operative
English liberty had not been there to expand, embosom, soften, or
transform them. So the French revolution and the Russian one of to‐day
have aimed at establishing society once for all on some eternally just
principle, and at abolishing all traditions, interests, faiths, and even
words that did not belong to their system. Liberty, for all these
pensive or rabid apostles of liberty, meant liberty for themselves to be
just so, and to remain just so for ever, together with the most vehement
defiance of anybody who might ask them, for the sake of harmony, to be a
little different. They summoned every man to become free in exactly
their own fashion, or have his head cut off.
Of course, to many an individual, life even in any such free city or
free church, fiercely jealous of its political independence and moral
purity, would prove to be a grievous servitude; and there has always
been a sprinkling of rebels and martyrs and scornful philosophers
protesting and fuming against their ultra‐independent and
nothing‐if‐not‐protesting sects. To co‐operate with anybody seems to
these _esprits forts_ contamination, so sensitive are they to any
deviation from the true north which their compass might suffer through
the neighbourhood of any human magnet. If it is a weakness to be subject
to influence, it is an imprudence to expose oneself to it; and to be
subject to influence seems ignominious to any one whose inward monitor
is perfectly articulate and determined. A certain vagueness of soul,
together with a great gregariousness and tendency to be moulded by
example and by prevalent opinion, is requisite for feeling free under
English liberty. You must find the majority right enough to live with;
you must give up lost causes; you must be willing to put your favourite
notions to sleep in the family cradle of convention. Enthusiasts for
democracy, peace, and a league of nations should not deceive themselves;
they are not everybody’s friends; they are the enemies of what is
deepest and most primitive in everybody. They inspire undying hatred in
every untamable people and every absolute soul.
It is in the nature of wild animal life to be ferocious or patient, and
in either case heroic and uncompromising. It is inevitable, in the
beginning, that each person or faction should come into the lists to
serve some express interest, which in itself may be perfectly noble and
generous. But these interests are posited alone and in all their
ultimate consequences. The parties meet, however diplomatic their
procedure, as buyers and sellers bargain in primitive markets. Each has
a fixed programme or, as he perhaps calls it, an ideal; and when he has
got as much as he can get to‐day, he will return to the charge
to‐morrow, with absolutely unchanged purpose. All opposed parties he
regards as sheer enemies to be beaten down, driven off, and ultimately
converted or destroyed. Meantime he practises political craft, of which
the climax is war; a craft not confined to priests, though they are good
at it, but common to every missionary, agitator, and philosophical
politician who operates in view of some vested interest or inflexible
plan, in the very un‐English spirit of intrigue, cajolery, eloquence,
and dissimulation. His art is to worm his way forward, using people’s
passions to further his own ends, carrying them off their feet in a wave
of enthusiasm, when that is feasible, and when it is not, recommending
his cause by insidious half‐measures, flattery of private interests,
confidence‐tricks, and amiable suggestions, until he has put his
entangled victims in his pocket; or when he feels strong enough,
brow‐beating and intimidating them into silence. Such is the inevitable
practice of every prophet who heralds an absolute system, political or
religious, and who pursues the unqualified domination of principles
which he thinks right in themselves and of a will which is
self‐justified and irresponsible.
Why, we may ask, are people so ready to set up absolute claims, when
their resources are obviously so limited that permanent success is
impossible, and their will itself, in reality, is so fragile that it
abandons each of its dreams even before it learns that it cannot be
realised? The reason is that the feebler, more ignorant, and more
childlike an impulse is, the less it can restrain itself or surrender a
part of its desire in order the better to attain the rest. In most
nations and most philosophies the intellect is rushed; it is swept
forward and enamoured by the first glimpses it gets of anything good.
The dogmas thus precipitated seem to relieve the will of all risks and
to guarantee its enterprises; whereas in fact they are rendering every
peril tragic by blinding us to it, and every vain hope incorrigible. A
happy shyness in the English mind, a certain torpor and lateness in its
utterance, have largely saved it from this calamity, and just because it
is not brilliant it is safe. Being reticent, it remains fertile; being
vague in its destination, it can turn at each corner down the most
inviting road. In this race the intellect has chosen the part of
prudence, leaving courage to the will, where courage is indispensable.
How much more becoming and fortunate is this balance of faculties for an
earthly being than an intellect that scales the heavens, refuting and
proving everything, while the will dares to attempt and to reform
nothing, but fritters itself away in sloth, petty malice, and irony! In
the English character modesty and boldness appear in the right places
and in a just measure. Manliness ventures to act without pretending to
be sure of the issue; it does not cry that all is sure, in order to
cover up the mortal perils of finitude; and manliness has its reward in
the joys of exploration and comradeship.
It is this massive malleable character, this vigorous moral youth, that
renders co‐operation possible and progressive. When interests are fully
articulate and fixed, co‐operation is a sort of mathematical problem; up
to a certain precise limit, people can obviously help one another by
summing their efforts, like sailors pulling at a rope, or by a division
of labour; they can obviously help one another when thereby they are
helping themselves. But beyond that, there can be nothing but mutual
indifference or eternal hostility. This is the old way of the world.
Most of the lower animals, although they run through surprising
transformations during their growth, seem to reach maturity by a
predetermined method and in a predetermined form. Nature does everything
for them and experience nothing, and they live or die, as the case may
be, true to their innate character. Mankind, on the contrary, and
especially the English races, seem to reach physical maturity still
morally immature; they need to be finished by education, experience,
external influences. What so often spoils other creatures improves them.
If left to themselves and untrained, they remain all their lives stupid
and coarse, with no natural joy but drunkenness; but nurseries and
schools and churches and social conventions can turn them into the most
refined and exquisite of men, and admirably intelligent too, in a
cautious and special fashion. They may never become, for all their
pains, so agile, graceful, and sure as many an animal or _a priori_ man
is without trouble, but they acquire more representative minds and a
greater range of material knowledge. Such completion, in the open air,
of characters only half‐formed in the womb may go on in some chance
direction, or it may go on in the direction of a greater social harmony,
that is, in whatever direction is suggested to each man by the suasion
of his neighbours. Society is a second mother to these souls; and the
instincts of many animals would remain inchoate if the great instinct of
imitation did not intervene and enable them to learn by example.
Development in this case involves assimilation; characters are moulded
by contagion and educated by democracy. The sphere of unanimity tends to
grow larger, and to reduce the margin of diversity to insignificance.
The result is an ever‐increasing moral unison, which is the simplest
form of moral harmony and emotionally the most coercive.
Democracy is often mentioned in the same breath with liberty, as if they
meant the same thing; and both are sometimes identified with the sort of
elective government that prevails in Great Britain and the United
States. But just as English liberty seems servitude to some people
because it requires them to co‐operate, to submit to the majority, and
to grow like them, so English democracy seems tyranny to the wayward
masses, because it is constitutional, historical, and sacred, narrowing
down the power of any group of people at any time to voting for one of
two or three candidates for office, or to saying yes or no to some
specific proposal—both the proposals and the candidates being set before
them by an invisible agency; and fate was never more inexorable or
blinder than is the grinding of this ponderous political mill, where
routine, nepotism, pique, and swagger, with love of office and money,
turn all the wheels. And the worst of it is that the revolutionary
parties that oppose this historical machine repeat all its abuses, or
even aggravate them. It would be well if people in England and America
woke up to the fact that it is in the name of natural liberty and direct
democracy that enemies both within and without are already rising up
against their democracy and their liberty. Just as the Papacy once
threatened English liberties, because it would maintain one inflexible
international religion over all men, so now an international democracy
of the disinherited many, led by the disinherited few, threatens English
liberties again, since it would abolish those private interests which
are the factors in any co‐operation, and would reduce everybody to
forced membership and forced service in one universal flock, without
property, family, country, or religion. That life under such a system
might have its comforts, its arts, and its atomic liberties, is certain,
just as under the Catholic system it had its virtues and consolations;
but both systems presuppose the universality of a type of human nature
which is not English, and perhaps not human.
The great advantage of English liberty is that it is in harmony with the
nature of things; and when living beings have managed to adapt their
habits to the nature of things, they have entered the path of health and
wisdom. No doubt the living will is essentially absolute, both at the
top and at the bottom, in the ferocious animal and in the rapt spirit;
but it is absolute even then only in its deliverance, in what it asserts
or demands; nothing can be less absolute or more precarious than the
living will in its existence. A living will is the flexible voice of a
thousand submerged impulses, of which now one and now another comes to
the surface; it is responsive, without knowing it, to a complex
forgotten past and a changing, unexplored environment. The will is a
mass of passions; when it sets up absolute claims it is both tragic and
ridiculous. It may be ready to be a martyr, but it will have to be one.
Martyrs are heroic; but unless they have the nature of things on their
side and their cause can be victorious, their heroism is like that of
criminals and madmen, interesting dramatically but morally detestable.
Madmen and criminals, like other martyrs, appeal to the popular
imagination, because in each of us there is a little absolute will, or a
colony of little absolute wills, aching to be criminal, mad, and heroic.
Yet the equilibrium by which we exist if we are sane, and which we call
reason, keeps these rebellious dreams under; if they run wild, we are
lost. Reason is a harmony; and it has been reputed by egotistical
philosophers to rule the world (in which unreason of every sort is
fundamental and rampant), because when harmony between men and nature
supervenes at any place or in any measure, the world becomes
intelligible and safe, and philosophers are able to live in it. The
passions, even in a rational society, remain the elements of life, but
under mutual control, and the life of reason, like English liberty, is a
perpetual compromise. Absolute liberty, on the contrary, is
impracticable; it is a foolish challenge thrown by a new‐born insect
buzzing against the universe; it is incompatible with more than one
pulse of life. All the declarations of independence in the world will
not render anybody really independent. You may disregard your
environment, you cannot escape it; and your disregard of it will bring
you moral empoverishment and some day unpleasant surprises. Even
Robinson Crusoe—whom offended America once tried to imitate—lived on
what he had saved from the wreck, on footprints and distant hopes.
Liberty to be left alone, not interfered with and not helped, is not
English liberty. It is the primeval desire of every wild animal or
barbarous tribe or jealous city or religion, claiming to live and to
tramp through the world in its own sweet way. These combative organisms,
however, have only such strength as the opposite principle of
co‐operation lends them inwardly; and the more liberty they assume in
foreign affairs the less liberty their members can enjoy at home. At
home they must then have organisation at all costs, like ancient Sparta
and modern Germany; and even if the restraints so imposed are not
irksome and there is spontaneous unison and enthusiasm in the people,
the basis of such a local harmony will soon prove too narrow. Nations
and religions will run up against one another, against change, against
science, against all the realities they had never reckoned with; and
more or less painfully they will dissolve. And it will not be a normal
and fruitful dissolution, like that of a man who leaves children and
heirs. It will be the end of that evolution, the choking of that ideal
in the sand.
This collapse of fierce liberty is no ordinary mutation, such as time
brings sooner or later to everything that exists, when the circumstances
that sustained it in being no longer prevail. It is a deep tragedy,
because the narrower passions and swifter harmonies are more beautiful
and perfect than the chaos or the dull broad equilibrium that may take
their place. Co‐operative life is reasonable and long‐winded; but it
always remains imperfect itself, while it somewhat smothers the impulses
that enter into it. Absolute liberty created these elements;
inspiration, free intelligence, uncompromising conviction, a particular
home and breeding‐ground, were requisite to give them birth. Nothing
good could arise for co‐operation to diffuse or to qualify unless first
there had been complete liberty for the artist and an uncontaminated
perfection in his work. Reason and the principle of English liberty have
no creative afflatus; they presuppose spontaneity and yet they half
stifle it; and they can rest in no form of perfection, because they must
remain plastic and continually invite amendments, in order to continue
broadly adjusted to an infinite moving world. Their work is accordingly
like those cathedrals at which many successive ages have laboured, each
in its own style. We may regret, sometimes, that some one design could
not have been carried out in its purity, and yet all these secular
accretions have a wonderful eloquence; a common piety and love of beauty
have inspired them; age has fused them and softened their incongruities;
and an inexpressible magic seems to hang about the composite pile, as if
God and man breathed deeply within it. It is a harmony woven out of
accidents, like every work of time and nature, and all the more profound
and fertile because no mind could ever have designed it. Some such
natural structure, formed and reformed by circumstances, is the
requisite matrix and home for every moral being.
Accordingly there seems to have been sober sense and even severe thought
behind the rant of Webster when he cried, “Liberty _and_ Union, now and
for ever, one and inseparable!” because if for the sake of liberty you
abandon union and resist a mutual adaptation of purposes which might
cripple each of them, your liberty loses its massiveness, its
plasticity, its power to survive change; it ceases to be tentative and
human in order to become animal and absolute. Nature must always produce
little irresponsible passions that will try to rule her, but she can
never crown any one of them with more than a theatrical success; the
wrecks of absolute empires, communisms, and religions are there to prove
it. But English liberty, because it is co‐operative, because it calls
only for a partial and shifting unanimity among living men, may last
indefinitely, and can enlist every reasonable man and nation in its
service. This is the best heritage of America, richer than its virgin
continents, which it draws from the temperate and manly spirit of
England. Certainly absolute freedom would be more beautiful if we were
birds or poets; but co‐operation and a loving sacrifice of a part of
ourselves—or even of the whole, save the love in us—are beautiful too,
if we are men living together. Absolute liberty and English liberty are
incompatible, and mankind must make a painful and a brave choice between
them. The necessity of rejecting and destroying some things that are
beautiful is the deepest curse of existence.
THE END
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.