which the Labour Government has displayed itself as obtuse and blind as
any Government could have been. Mr. Smillie, the other day, rejecting
“all understandings with Liberals,” declares that the Labour Party is
“out to deal with root causes.” But this Labour Government has never
dared to be caught looking at a “root cause” yet. Take the question of
birth-control. England is over-populated; it has a million unemployed;
it cannot house its population decently, and it cannot educate its
numerous progeny above a miserably low standard. But the Roman Catholic
vote is organised against birth-control, and the Labour politicians
dare not offend the Roman Catholic vote. Yet the housing problem, the
unemployment problem, the organisation of education, the relations
of the British Empire with other countries, the question of the
necessity of war, all become absolutely different according to whether
the population of the country is considered as being stationary or
expansive. But this present Labour Government does not know whether
it is for birth-control or against it. It does not know anything of
that sort about itself. It does not know whether it is shaping the
future for a restrained or overflowing population. The Intelligenzia,
in the enthusiasm of its plunge into politics, thought that the Labour
Party--as distinguished from all other parties--did. And generally they
are coming to realise how greatly they overrated the creative power and
the creative will of Labour.
As the exhilaration consequent upon being allowed _carte blanche_ to
write promises for the Labour Party evaporates, the Intelligenzia
will revert to its normal and proper aloofness from politicians. The
Intelligenzia are the rain and the wind and sunshine of the political
field, but not the field-workers of politics. To have the Intelligenzia
in a party is like an elemental being married to a mortal. Elementals
have magic gifts, but they are not always comfortable to live with.
The Labour politicians will feel more and more masters in their own
house--at least until the next election--as the critical, exacting
Intelligenzia evaporate from the party.
XXXVII
CONSTRUCTIVE IDEAS AND THEIR RELATION TO CURRENT POLITICS
17.5.24
Mr. Smillie, a little while ago, was talking of the peculiar mental
virtues of the Labour Party. It was “out to deal with root causes”
and so forth. There was to be no parleying with Liberals. This was
immediately before Mr. Snowden produced the greatest Liberal Budget
in history; something off something for everybody and no Socialist
confiscation. I was moved at the time of Mr. Smillie’s speech to point
out that the Labour Government had not been caught looking at the root
cause of anything whatever since it came into office. It had put on its
Court livery like little gentlemen, and done as it was told. That “root
cause” delusion was created in the mind of Mr. Smillie by reading the
election addresses of his associates.
For a time, until it got into office, the Labour Party was a
magnificent hoarding for the constructive Radical. At bottom it is a
party of feelings rather than ideas. It became boldly, out-spokenly
Socialist. It was declared to stand for a broad collective handling
of our common interests, for scientific method. It wasn’t afraid of
bankers or landowners or Protection-seeking trade monopolists. It stood
for the free, high constructive future against the injustice and mean
limitations of the present. It was the New Age struggling to be. But
really it wasn’t for all those things because it was so at heart, but
because it had to say something different from all other parties, and
the creative Intelligenzia prompted it. So long as it was out of office
active constructive minds could do its public thinking for it. But now
that the Labour Party has taken office it has come of age and become
an adult political party; it has lost the wild freshness and promise
of youth, and begun to act for itself. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, with his
piety and his political dexterity, is extremely like a Scotch, instead
of a Welsh, Lloyd George, and the array of his colleagues is revealed
as the very twin brothers of the Tory and Liberal knights, local
councillors, provincial mayors, and so forth we have always known. The
Labour Party brought down from the cloudland of promise to performance
is seen to be little more than another of the numerous Liberal parties
that have appeared in the vast inchoate world of British Liberalism. It
has appeared and struggled to office because Mr. Lloyd George and Mr.
Asquith were tiresome, obstinate egotists without an up-to-date idea
between them, and because the complexity of self-conscious interests in
Great Britain is too great any longer for the magnificent simplicity
and “loyalties” of the old two-party system.
All this is perfectly natural and necessary. All political parties must
represent the present, existing interests, existing social fears and
jealousies, current delusions. No political party can represent the
future, as Mr. Smillie would have us believe the Labour Party does.
But it was the delusion of Karl Marx that the expropriated masses
of mankind, living at a disadvantage, would necessarily realise the
desirability of a more highly organised Socialist State and evolve
a collective will to bring it about. This idea, through the devoted
repetition of the Marxists, has infected the greater part of Socialist
thought. It had manifestly infected Mr. Smillie. In so far as modern
social inequalities and injustices, illuminated by modern educational
influences, have brought out a steadily increasing hostility between
the masses and the classes with an advantage, Marx was right, but in
so far as that has involved the development of any capacity whatever
to achieve a new and better order, he was wrong. The uncomfortable
masses seek uncritically for some expression of their antagonism to
the lucky, the dexterous, the unscrupulous, and the far-sighted who
enjoy the advantages of the existing social and economic tangle, and
their suffrages and passion will go to support the particular lucky,
dexterous, unscrupulous, or far-sighted politicians who seem most
in harmony with the hates and hopes of the stinted, hampered, and
oppressed multitude. But the antagonisms and discords of the present
system are as much a part of the present as its order and its success.
The Labour Party as a Labour Party is no more inherently reconstructive
than the Banking Interest or the Shipping Interest. Like them, it
merely wants an excessive and inconsiderate share of present power and
satisfactions.
I suppose if we could set aside the entangling influences of social
position and traditions we should find that men and women fell into a
series between two extremes of temperamental type; the Conservatives
at one end, who like things to go on very much as they are going, only
to be just a little richer and sounder and sunnier, and at the other
end the disturbers who like fresh things to happen and who make fresh
things happen. And of the disturbers there seem to be two main types:
the personal adventurers who want a series of vivid events centring
upon themselves, and do not care very much how much disorder is caused
by their careers, and the innovators with an instinct or a mental habit
of creative service--the scientific worker, the educationist, the
innovating artist, the men with a passion for industrial and financial
and social organisation, who will ultimately remake the world. These
types mingle in most of us, we are all something of each, but in such
prominent British figures as Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Winston Churchill,
or Lord Beaverbrook we seem to have almost pure adventurers, and in
Mr. Sidney Webb or Mr. C. P. Trevelyan almost pure creative service
innovators. But the great financial adventurers are not in politics.
They are behind politics. The un-co-ordinated, inexplicit world of
to-day is all for the bold acquisitive egoist; he causes wars and
prevents peace, the industrialist is in his financial net, he does
things to the exchange and the money in our pockets becomes worthless
counters, he controls the news in our newspapers, and buys the house
over our heads and the ground under our feet. He turns up in all
parties as they suit him, and his eternal antagonist, the creative
service innovator, must use all parties as he can against him.
No party has a monopoly of creative ideals; the Labour Party little
more than the Conservative. For consider what the great constructive
ideas before the world at the present time are. There is the rescue
of civilisation from the destructive pressure of unregulated births
through the extension of the necessary knowledge for efficient
birth-control. There is the reorganisation of educational method
throughout the world to develop the habits of service and co-operation
upon the lines so admirably demonstrated by Sanderson and the
re-orientation of educational aims and material by making universal
history the basis of the conception of a universal citizenship. There
is the rescue of democracy from its hopeless suffocation under the
party system, by the reduction in the size of representative bodies to
efficient proportions, and the adoption of the method of proportional
representation in large constituencies. Only in that way can the
ordinary citizen be released from his slavery to party managers and
brought into a direct personal relationship to the member his vote
elects. There is the liberation of the economic life of the world from
restrictive and destructive financial manipulations by the creation
of a world authority for a regulated currency and the clearing of
the world debt jungle. There is the lifting of the waste and weight
of private profiteering and nationalist sabotage, from shipping and
world transport and the staple productions of the world, through the
creation of a group of world authorities for these ends. Everybody
of intelligence knows that these are just possible achievements for
mankind, and that the outlook for mankind is dangerous and on the whole
dingy until they are attained and secured. But there is no political
party in the world that dare do more in office than fumble and
prevaricate about any of them.
XXXVIII
THE WEMBLEY EMPIRE: AN EXHIBITION OF LOST OPPORTUNITIES
24.5.24
The preparation of a great exhibition of the glories of the British
Empire at Wembley profoundly deranged the order of nature. The skies
wept copiously; the English spring showed every sign of distress.
The builders struck at the eleventh hour, and were only allayed by a
patriotic speech by Mr. Thomas. The show opened in a state of entirely
British unpreparedness, and the ceremony went chiefly to demonstrate
that the development of building in concrete was a much more imposing
fact in human life than the continued existence of the British Empire.
Under the circumstances it was unfortunate that the King should have
reminded the assembled company of the Great Exhibition of 1851. That
was opened in sunshine, and in a sunshine of hope and great ideas. It
was international in design and spirit; the first of a great series
of such displays. Its guiding spirit was the Prince Consort, one of
the most intelligent and creative princes who have ever stood near
the British throne. Heaven alone knows how deep Britain would not be
wallowing in ignorance and vain delusions if it had not been for his
initiatives. He stirred the self-satisfied lethargy of Oxford and
Cambridge, so that they have never really slept in peace since, and to
this day the Commissioners of his Exhibition administer great funds for
scientific and artistic education. The most stimulating things in that
Exhibition were the displays of foreign products. They woke up England
to the fact that she was falling behind technically and artistically;
they caused heart-searchings and effort. But this show is a show of
Empire products, “just among ourselves.” We no longer want to know what
the world is thinking and doing outside the ring fence of Empire. If
the foreigner is being cleverer than we are in any department we do not
propose to hear of it.
The King said that the aim of the Exhibition was more “modest” than
that of the great show of seventy-three years ago. Was “modest” the
word to use? Or “base”? Is this flat bragging that follows really
modesty? It is the tune to which the whole thing goes. The London show
of 1851 was Tennysonian, and Tennyson sang of the confederation of the
world; Wembley in 1924 is Kiplingesque or nothing, and this is Mr.
Kipling’s “modest” cry to the Dominions. To set the rhyme going, and
without any particular geographical reference, he informs the Dominions
“the pathways are broad”:
“In thy house and my house is half the world’s hoard;
In thy house and my house hangs all the world’s fate;
On thy house and my house lies half the world’s hate.”
What a combination of the spirit of grab and the spirit of panic is
here! Not thus did the Hyde Park crystal palace reflect God’s sunlight.
Is it true of the British Empire, is it just to the British Empire,
that the rhyming of this hysterical boy scout should be accepted as
the expression of its deepest realities? It is at Wembley. At Wembley
the British people do seem to be represented to the world in perfect
good faith as the scared favourites of good fortune, keenly aware of
a richly merited unpopularity, but reluctant to disgorge. So they are
all g-g-going to h-hold together and not be afraid. The Exhibition,
apart from a large area devoted to Coney Island amusements, where
the Imperial citizen can for a time forget his imperial anxieties in
vehement motion and noise, is a display of scenery and merchandise.
There are, of course, one or two unclassifiable exhibits--the Queen’s
delightful Dolls’ House, for example--but these are in the nature of
irrelevances, and a small extra admission fee emphasises the fact.
The core, the reality of Wembley, is a show of natural resources and
manufactured goods, for which preferential consideration is demanded on
the score of a common jealousy, fear and hatred of foreign peoples.
A small pavilion does remind us, it is true, of the League of Nations
to which the Empire as a whole and also in pieces belongs, but the
League of Nations is far less pervasive than Australian wool or New
Zealand mutton. It peeps like a little man in the back row at a
football match; the salesman’s shoutings drown its voice.
Now I know I am not supposed to be a very perfect patriot, but I
protest that this meretricious shop-window at Wembley does no justice
to the real greatness of the British people in the world’s affairs. The
New Zealand pavilion, for example--I quote an advertisement--“displays
in the most picturesque and attractive way the wonderful charms and
remarkable industrial development of this important Dominion. New
Zealand is the greatest supplier to Great Britain of Dairy Produce,
Mutton and Lamb, and Cross-Bred Wool--industries which have impressive
representation. Her export and import trade is the greatest per capita
in the world. New Zealand has the finest Mountain, Forest, Lake, and
River scenery, and deer-stalking, trout and salmon fishing equal to
the best in the world,” and so on. But New Zealand does not exhibit
Professor Gilbert Murray nor Mr. Harold Williams nor a score of other
brilliant sons and daughters she has given back to the world’s affairs.
There is a great display of the rich and picturesque side of Indian
life again, but no satisfactory representation of the very considerable
work of education that must have been done in India. The British have
founded Universities at Khartoum and in Mesopotamia; one looks in vain
for models or schemes of them here. You may go about the Exhibition,
and find butter and tallow and hides at every turn, but you will find
no reproductions of the fine new public schoolhouses these rich young
Dominions _must_ possess, the colleges and research institutions they
_must_ have set going, and their magnificent arrangements for the
interchange of students and ideas with India and the Homeland and the
world generally.
We British cannot be such fools as to have neglected these things. But
I cannot find the exhibits. Nor is there any display of the scientific
and intellectual irrigation of the Press, nor of the machinery of
book-publication and distribution that sustains the mental unity of the
Dominions....
But I find my mind slipping away from the Wembley that is, to the dream
of the Wembley that might have been. I drift off into a vision of the
exhibits of work and achievement from the eighteen or twenty great
Universities we have surely set up in India; the studies and reports
of the two thousand students we send annually to that great land; the
display of intellectual interchanges between the four or five splendid
Australian Universities and Japan and China, Burmah and Siam; the
achievements of the great schools of Polynesian ethnology at Sidney
and Adelaide and Brisbane; the splendid educational work of Canada in
China, rivalling the American effort: the joint exhibit of the United
States and Canada of the scientific exploration of the Arctic and
the Pacific; the vast pavilion giving a comparative treatment of the
efforts of South Africa, Jamaica, and the United States to deal with
the civilisation and assimilation of “colour”; the Capetown to Cairo
school of African history, ethnology and economic geography. Surely
these things have been seen to! We are so rich.
“_In thy house and my house is half the world’s hoard._”
But what are we doing with it? Are we just hoarding it? I thought the
White Man’s Burthen was a magnificent task, not a bundle of loot that
he stood upon to brag about. I must have taken the wrong turning when I
went to Wembley. I must go there again. I must go right on and find the
turning _beyond_ the ones that lead to these magnificent displays of
machinery and metal and wool and grease.
XXXIX
THE EXTINCTION OF PARTY GOVERNMENT
31.5.24
The politicians of Great Britain, under the pressure of various
accidental and some fundamental necessities, are being forced towards
an honest democracy and efficient government. But they resist with
great activity and ingenuity.
A Bill for what is called Proportional Representation, but which is
really sane voting, has recently been rejected by the House of Commons
by a majority of 238 to 144. It had the official support of the Liberal
Party. Previously the Liberal hacks were all against it, but they
have been chastened by the last two elections. The Bill went very far
towards honest representative government, but in one respect it went
no distance at all towards a great revolution in political method.
When the time comes for its re-introduction it will be necessary to
extend it or supplement it by another reducing the numbers of the
representative assembly.
The urgencies of the British situation have put Great Britain far
in advance of the United States in this matter. There is a very
respectable movement for Proportional Representation in the United
States of America, but it has still to be realised as practical
politics and a serious need by the American public. In America every
citizen is born either a little Republican or else a little Democrat;
it does not matter what the Republican or Democratic platform is or
what sort of man is put up for him in his division, he has to vote
for his party. Or else go through a crisis almost like disowning his
father and mother and vote for the other party. There is nothing else
in the world for him to do in politics, just as there was nothing else
but being “either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative” in
the great days of Gilbert and Sullivan in London. The United States is
young, prosperous, and at a great advantage to the rest of the world;
it may be able to afford its present travesty of democracy for a long
time yet. Britain cannot. The party system has always been more rigidly
organised in America than in England. In Britain on the Left side,
counting Liberal, Labour, and Communist together, there are eight or
ten distinct schools of political thought and intention; on the Right
side there are five or six. The British voter grows more and more
erratic and uncertain under the present idiotic system, and the results
of General Elections more and more silly and incalculable.
The idea of Proportional Representation is now nearly a century old.
It is due to a clear-headed man named Hare. He proposed that a number
of candidates should stand for the whole country as one constituency.
The voter would vote for the man he liked and trusted best. If that
man were so widely liked and trusted that he got more votes than were
needed to return him, he would take as large a fraction of every vote
as he needed, and if the voter had indicated a second choice on his
paper, the rest of his vote would go to the candidate next on his list.
_Whatever happened, some or all of the voter’s support would go to the
man he had chosen._ That man would be his man par excellence. There
could be no more direct relationship between voter and representative.
But if that man were a very great and desirable man, the voter could
also congratulate himself on the partial possession of a second or even
a third, more personal representative. There are people who profess to
find great difficulty in understanding Proportional Representation;
mostly this is a purely wilful and subjective befuddlement. The
filling up of the voting papers is perfectly simple and the counting
and fractionation of the votes offers no difficulty to any properly
instructed educated person.
For trivial reasons Hare’s voting method, which would give us an almost
pure representative democracy, has been modified in all the practical
proposals made by the division of the country into large constituencies
instead of leaving it one whole, and the assignation of a limited but
still large number of members to each. But its virtue of comparative
veracity in representation still to a large extent remains. Mr.
Rendall’s recent Bill proposed constituencies returning not less than
three and not more than seven members. This is much too small for a
real representation of British opinion, but it was as much as the party
wire-pullers would allow. When the question is reopened this maximum
should be increased.
Of course the systems called Proportional Representation in use in
France and Italy are scoundrelly caricatures of the idea. Under them
the voters vote not for men but for party gangs, and the whole object
of Proportional Representation is to release men from servitude to
party manipulation.
The objections to the measure made in the debate upon the rejected
Bill were mostly very trivial or based on positive misconceptions.
The question was indeed not discussed. Most of the opponents from the
Labour side contented themselves with twitting the Liberal politicians
with change of heart upon the question. They behaved just as the
Liberal Party hacks did in 1918 because they are exactly the same
sort of men. The mentality of the party hack, Liberal, Labour, or
Conservative, is very much on a level in this matter. Most of the big
men in all parties are for Proportional Representation, because they
know they are outstanding enough to survive its establishment. The
party hack knows he lives through and by his party: the voter does
not choose him but suffers him, and at the first clear opportunity
the voter will push him out of the way and choose a more interesting
non-party man. About seventy Labour men who have at one time or
another professed approval of Proportional Representation did not vote.
The struggle against Proportional Representation is really the life
struggle of the professional party politician. Under Proportional
Representation the legislative assembly, instead of being elected by
a small majority, or even a minority of the voters in the country,
will be representative of nearly the whole country. In a constituency
electing ten members, for instance, there will probably be less than
a tenth of that constituency not actually represented by members
returned. This wipes out every hope of a bilateral political system,
because it will fill the assembly with free members, responsible only
to the voters who have returned them, and practically independent of
organised party support. They will necessarily be very various in their
opinions.