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* * * * *
A SHORT HISTORY OF
ENGLISH LIBERALISM
BY
W. LYON BLEASE
_No rational man ever did govern himself by abstractions and
universals.... A statesman differs from a professor in an university;
the latter has only the general view of society.... A statesman, never
losing sight of principles, is to be guided by circumstances; and,
judging contrary to the exigencies of the moment, he may ruin his
country for ever._
BURKE, "On the Petition of the Unitarians."
T. FISHER UNWIN
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20
* * * * *
TO
"THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN"
_First Published in 1913_
(_All rights reserved._)
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. LIBERALISM AND TORYISM 7
II. POLITICAL CONDITIONS IN THE REIGN OF GEORGE III 42
III. THE FIRST MOVEMENT TOWARDS LIBERALISM 69
IV. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ENGLISH OPINION 100
V. THE DECLINE OF TORYISM 142
VI. THE MIDDLE-CLASS SUPREMACY 168
VII. THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL AND PALMERSTON 190
VIII. THE BEGINNING OF THE GLADSTONE PERIOD 230
IX. GLADSTONE VERSUS DISRAELI 265
X. THE IMPERIALIST REACTION 294
XI. LIBERALISM SINCE 1906 324
* * * * *
{7}
A Short History of English Liberalism
CHAPTER I
LIBERALISM AND TORYISM
This book attempts to trace the varying but persistent course of Liberalism
in British politics during the last hundred and fifty years. It is not so
much a history of events as a reading of them in the light of a particular
political philosophy. In the strict sense a history of Liberalism should
cover much more than politics. The same habit of mind is to be discovered
everywhere else in the history of thought, most conspicuously in religious
history, but not less certainly in the history of science and of art. The
general victory in these innumerable conflicts of opinion has been to
Liberalism, and the movement of the race, during the period with which the
writer is concerned, is precisely measured by the degree in which the
Liberal spirit has succeeded in modifying the establishments of the
preceding age. The object of this book is to investigate the course of that
process of modification in politics.
By Liberalism I mean, not a policy, but a habit of mind. It is the
disposition of the man who looks upon each of his fellows as of equal worth
with himself. He does not assume that all men and women are of equal
capacity, or equally entitled to offices and privileges. But he is always
inclined to leave and to give them equal opportunity with himself for
self-expression and for self-development. He assumes, as the basis of his
activity, that he has no right to interfere with any other person's
attempts {8} to employ his natural powers in what he conceives to be the
best way. He is unwilling to impose his judgment upon that of others, or to
force them to live their lives according to his ideas rather than their
own. They are never to be used by him for his own ends, but for theirs.
Each is to be left to himself, to work out his own salvation. The Liberal
habit of mind has its positive as well as its negative side. Just as it
leads its possessor to refrain from interfering with the development of
others, so it leads him to take active steps to remove the artificial
barriers which impede that development. Natural obstacles will remain,
though even these may be diminished. But the artificial conditions, which
prevent or hinder growth, are perpetually obnoxious to the Liberal. Upon
class distinctions in society, privileges of sex, rank, wealth, and creed,
he wages unceasing war. They are, in his eye, weights and impediments. To
one of two individuals, not distinguishable in natural capacity, they give
an advantage which is denied to the other. It is the object of the Liberal,
not to deprive any individual of such opportunities as are required for the
exercise of his natural powers, but to prevent the excessive appropriation
of such opportunities by members of the privileged class. The differences
between the practical aims and methods of Liberals at different times are
very wide. But the mental habit has always been the same. "The passion for
improving mankind, in its ultimate object, does not vary. But the immediate
object of reformers and the forms of persuasion by which they seek to
advance them, vary much in different generations. To a hasty observer they
might even seem contradictory, and to justify the notion that nothing
better than a desire for change, selfish or perverse, is at the bottom of
all reforming movements. Only those who will think a little longer about it
can discern the same old cause of social good against class interests, for
which, under altered names, Liberals are fighting now as they were fifty
years ago."[1] The constitutional Liberalism of Fox, the economical
Liberalism of Cobden, and the new collectivist Liberalism of Mr. Lloyd {9}
George exhibit great differences in comparison. But the three men are alike
in their desire to set free the individual from existing social bonds, and
to procure him liberty of growth.
The justification for this individual freedom is not that the man is left
to his own selfish motives, to develop himself for his own advantage. It is
that it is only in this way that he can realize that his own best advantage
is only secured by consulting that of his fellows. "The foundation of
liberty is the idea of growth ... it is of course possible to reduce a man
to order and prevent him from being a nuisance to his neighbours by
arbitrary control and harsh punishment.... It is also possible, though it
takes a much higher skill, to teach the same man to discipline himself, and
this is to foster the development of will, of personality, of self-control,
or whatever we please to call that central harmonizing power which makes us
capable of directing our own lives. Liberalism is the belief that society
can safely be founded on this self-directing power of personality."[2] This
Liberalism has nothing to do with anarchy. Coercion may be consistently
applied wherever individual liberty is employed for the public injury, and
the imprisonment of burglars and the regulation of factories by law are
only two aspects of the same thing. But Liberalism restricts freedom only
to extend freedom. Where the individual uses his own liberty to restrict
that of others he may be coerced. But in spite of the modifications to
which all such political principles must be subject, the general rule holds
good. The ideal Liberal State is that in which every individual is equally
free to work out his own life.
The practical difficulty of working out the relations between the
individual and the society in which he is placed is of course very great,
and it will probably always be impossible to maintain a perfect
equilibrium. No doubt we shall always suffer from one or other of the two
unsatisfying conditions--the sacrifice of the individual to what the
majority thinks to be the right of the whole society, and the sacrifice of
the {10} society to the undue emancipation of the individual. But the
necessary imperfection of the result is no argument against this or any
other political system of thought. Politics are no more than a means of
getting things done, and when we have found a society of perfect human
beings, we can fairly complain that their affairs are not perfectly
managed. So far as he can, the Liberal aims at securing this balance of
social and individual good, remembering that the good of society can only
be measured by the good of all its members, and not by the good only of
some dominant rank, creed, or class. "Rights are relative to the well-being
of society, but the converse proposition is equally true, that the
well-being of society may be measured by the degree in which their moral
rights are secured to its component members.... The moral right of an
individual is simply a condition of the full development of his personality
as a moral being. Equally, the moral right of any community is the
condition of the maintenance of its common life, and since that society is
best, happiest, and most progressive which enables its members to make the
utmost of themselves, there is no necessary conflict between them. The
maintenance of rights is the condition of human progress.... To reconcile
the rule of right with the principle of the public welfare is the supreme
end of social theory."[3]
In practical politics the work of modern Liberalism has been to alter the
conditions of society so that this freedom of growth may be secured for
each member of it. The old conception of society was a conception of
classes. Human beings were graded and standardized. Certain privileges were
reserved for certain groups. Society looked, for its estimate of a man, not
to his natural powers, not to what he might make of himself, but to his
brand or mark. If within a certain degree, he had a free choice of his mode
of life; if without it, he found his condition prescribed, sometimes so
rigorously that he could hardly ever improve it. Liberalism has endeavoured
to go deeper into the man, to get beneath the outward complexion, {11} to
find out his intrinsic worth, and to give him that place in the social
estimate which his natural powers deserve. Arbitrary distinctions are
abhorrent to it. It is incapable of thinking in terms of class. Every class
is, in its eyes, only an aggregate of individuals, and to exalt one class
above another is to appreciate some individuals at the expense of others,
to place marks of comparative social worth upon the members of different
groups which do not correspond to the relative values of their natural
qualities. Against a privileged race, rank, creed, or sex Liberalism must
fight continually. By the artificial elevation of one above another, it is
made to count for more in society, its members are aggrandized and those of
its rivals are depreciated; and while the first are encouraged to abuse,
the second are hampered and fettered in their growth. The Liberal asserts
that no man, because he happens to be of a particular sect, or to be born
of a particular family, or to possess a particular form of property, or to
hold particular opinions, shall be invested by Society with privileges
which give him an advantage in social intercourse over his fellows. He does
not assert that all human beings are equal in capacity, but he demands that
their natural inequalities shall not be aggravated by artificial
conditions. For what he is worth, each shall be free to realize his highest
capacity.
The Liberal conception of equality as between individuals is extended to
the case of Churches, of nations, and of sexes. These classes are indeed
not regarded by the Liberal as classes, but simply as associations, for
limited purposes, of individuals, who are, in all essential respects,
separate and distinct. To confer a privilege upon one Church or nation or
sex is simply to confer a privilege upon the individuals who compose it,
and whether the privilege is the monopoly of political power or the sole
right to take part in a public ceremony, it does in greater or less degree
affect the relative social values of the members of the two groups, and
places the members of the inferior at the disposition of those of the
superior. To give the Established Church the sole right to take part in the
coronation of the King is a violation {12} of Liberal principle of the same
kind, though not of the same degree, as to exclude Dissenters or Catholics
from Parliament, and if men were content to exclude women only from the
legal profession, they would be arrogating to themselves a superior value
no less clearly than when they refuse to them the right to control their
own government.
The same general habit of mind is applied to foreign policy. The
acknowledgment of the equal worth of individuals within the nation becomes
the acknowledgment of the equal worth of nations among themselves.
"Nationalism has stood for liberty, not only in the sense that it has
resisted tyrannous encroachment, but also in the sense that it has
maintained the right of a community to work out its own salvation in its
own way. A nation has an individuality, and the doctrine that individuality
is an element in well-being is rightly applied to it. The world advances by
the free, vigorous growth of divergent types, and is stunted when all the
fresh bursting shoots are planed off close to the heavy, solid stem."[4]
The interference of one with another, attempts to prescribe the limits or
the cause of development, are as obnoxious in international as in
intra-national relations. It was in fact in connection with this idea of
nationality that the words "Liberal" and "Liberalism" came into use. The
first English Liberals were those statesmen who followed Canning in his
championship of Greece and the South American Republics, and some of them
were very far from being Liberals within the borders of their own State.[5]
This extension of Liberalism from individuals to nations is easy as a
mental process, but very far from easy as a matter of practical politics.
Nationality is not difficult to define in general terms. It is sometimes
infinitely difficult to decide in a particular case whether the general
definition applies. John Stuart Mill has perhaps given as much precision to
the Liberal conception of nationality as it can bear. "A portion of mankind
may be said {13} to constitute a nation if they are united among themselves
by common sympathies which do not exist between them and others. This
feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes
it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language and
community of religion greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one
of the causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political
antecedents, the possession of a national history and consequent community
of recollections, collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret,
connected with the same incidents in the past."[6] Nationality is not a
thing of sharp outline, any more than any other political conception, and
community of interest, the management of common concerns over a long period
of time, has triumphed over differences so potent as those of race and
creed. Such has been the fortune of Switzerland, of Canada, and of white
South Africa, and it is the hope of Liberalism that such will also be the
fortune of Ireland. Without attempting to draw hard lines between
communities, the Liberal sees in them distinctions of worth and capacity
such as he sees in individuals, and he would give the same freedom of
self-development to a nation as to a human being.
The idea that nations are to be bound by moral rules as much as individuals
is only another application of the general rule that one man is to be
treated as equally entitled with every other to the development of his own
faculties. The same rule is extended to nations as to single persons. No
one people has the right to interfere with the free development of another,
until it is clearly and unmistakably proved that that free development will
be generally injurious. Once this principle is accepted, it becomes
impossible, as in the case of single persons, for one nation to decline to
recognize moral rules in its dealings with others. Morality is nothing but
the subjection of individual wills to the common will, as expressed in
defined rules. Immorality is only the arrogance of the individual will,
refusing to submit itself to general rules, while it endeavours to enforce
general rules upon {14} others. The Liberal State is that which recognizes
the universal application of its own principles of conduct, declines to
thrust its own ideas upon unwilling associates, and works in harmony with
other races instead of in opposition to them.
It is not suggested here that it is any part of the Liberal doctrine to
seek peace at any price, or to turn the other cheek to the smiter. A vital
condition of the existence of morality is that moral persons shall be ready
at all times to defend it. To suffer wanton aggression is as fatal to a
nation as to an individual. It is a mere encouragement to the general
infringement of rights which means the dissolution of international
morality. Liberal patriotism exists, though it is of a different kind from
that patriotism which is so conspicuous a feature of our modern
Imperialism. Imperialist patriotism is often a vulgar assertion of selfish
power. Liberal patriotism is a means of diminishing national selfishness.
Just as the Liberal believes that the best life within the nation is
produced by the growth of free individuality, so he believes that the best
life in the race at large is produced by the growth of free nationality.
"If there is one condition precedent to effective internationalism or to
the establishment of any reliable relations between States, it is the
existence of strong, secure, well-developed, and responsible nations.
Internationalism can never be subserved by the suppression or forcible
absorption of nations; for these practices react disastrously upon the
springs of internationalism, on the one hand setting nations on their armed
defence and stifling the amicable approaches between them, on the other
debilitating the larger nations through excessive corpulence and
indigestion. The hope of a coming internationalism enjoins above all else
the maintenance and natural growth of independent nationalities, for
without such there could be no gradual evolution of internationalism, but
only a series of unsuccessful attempts at a chaotic and unstable
cosmopolitanism. As individualism is essential to any sane form of national
socialism, so nationalism is essential to internationalism."[7]
{15}
By far the most difficult of all the tasks which Liberalism has to perform
is in its conduct of foreign policy. Even in domestic affairs it is often
not easy to calculate the effects of particular proposals, how far they can
be pressed towards the ideal, in what temper they will be received by the
people, with what smoothness they will operate when they have been
expressed in an Act of Parliament. It is a matter of accommodating
ourselves to somewhat intractable material, and of managing, persuading,
and guiding human beings whose motives we cannot directly control. But the
facts are at least fairly within reach. The Liberal statesman has as much
opportunity as anybody can have of knowing the mental habit and disposition
of those whom his legislation will affect. He is acquainted with their
history. He is guided by previous successes or failures. In the last
resort, he knows that the great bulk of the people concerned will respect
the law even if they dislike it, and will express their dissent no more
dangerously than by turning him out of office. In foreign affairs his
difficulties are infinitely greater, and the consequences of failure may be
disastrous. He is dealing, not with subjects, but with independent persons,
who, except in a few points settled by agreement, observe no common law
with himself. Their objects are obscure, and may only temporarily coincide
with his own. They may have private arrangements among themselves of which
he knows little or nothing, and if they cheat him in their own interest he
has no remedy except one which is so violent as to be worse almost than any
disease. Finally, even if his knowledge of the facts were more accurate,
and his confidence in his associates more complete, he would still be
baffled by the hostility to Liberal ideas which animates some, if not all,
of the foreign diplomatists.
These are obstacles to direct action which it would be folly not to take
into consideration, and in the case of the present Foreign Secretary they
seem to have proved insuperable. But in some directions it is obvious that
the Liberal statesman can pursue his course without fear. Where no powerful
opponent or associate is concerned, he is as free as within his own
country, and he is bound to act on purely Liberal principles. He must act
always {16} according to moral rules, even in dealing with weak peoples. He
is bound to do nothing which would help to maintain a vicious system or
government. He is bound not to interfere in the domestic affairs of another
nation, save where the fundamental liberties of his own countrymen are in
danger. It is equally his duty to refrain from arrogance towards distracted
China and towards united Germany. It is not his business to lecture the
Russian Government for its vile domestic policy or the Spanish Government
for the atrocious murder of Ferrer. But it is no more his business to
strengthen these Governments, either by his alliance or otherwise, in thus
acting towards their subjects. It is no doubt the duty of Liberals who are
private persons to protest against cruelty and oppression, wherever it may
be found. Public opinion counts for something, even in a foreign country,
and if we cannot prevent evil abroad, we can at least keep alive the hatred
of it in our own country. The Englishman who is indifferent to the
sufferings of Finland is in danger of becoming insensitive to his own. But
whatever may be the duty of private persons, official representations to a
foreign State are always useless, and often exaggerate the evils to which
they refer. In the face of foreign dictation, domestic tyranny becomes a
patriotic duty. Whatever a Liberal Foreign Secretary may think, he must not
dictate to any established Government. But his duty on the other side is
equally clear, and he must do nothing to strengthen such a Government
against its subjects. Palmerston's expressed approval of Napoleon III's
_coup d'etat_ and Sir Edward Grey's more indirect support of the present
Russian tyranny are equally illiberal. If a Government which violates every
Liberal principle in its domestic policy is not to be treated as an enemy,
it is no more to be treated as a friend. It is entitled to the honourable
observance of all agreements for the joint management of joint concerns,
and to perfect freedom in its own domestic administration. It is not
entitled to anything which will enhance its power. To assist it directly or
indirectly is to participate in its wrongdoing, and no Liberal can safely
do that without impairing his own character. {17}
These are elementary rules which the Liberal must observe in all cases
where his conduct is to be determined by nothing out of his own control. In
other cases he can often do very little, and is compelled to acquiesce in
conduct of which he would never himself be guilty. Here it is his duty to
do as much as he can, to avoid the offensive imposition of his own ideas
upon his fellows, to avoid arrangements which dispose of the fortunes of
weak peoples irrespective of their wishes, to work in concert, not with one
Power or group of Powers, but with all who are interested, and, in case of
difficulty, to throw his weight into the scale with those whose aims most
resemble his own. Generally, it is his duty to substitute the expression of
moral rules by arbitration for the brutal assertion of national egoism in
war. But there is no general presumption against war. It is always an evil.
But it may be the least of possible evils. War for the independence of his
own nation requires no justification. War for the independence of another
nation or for the defence of some rule of international morality is to be
judged by its expediency. "It seems to be impossible to state the principle
of non-intervention in rational and statesmanlike terms, if it is under all
circumstances, and without qualification or limit, to preclude an armed
protest against intervention by other foreign Powers. There may happen to
be good reasons why we should on a given occasion passively watch a foreign
Government interfering by violence in the affairs of another country. Our
own Government may have its hands full; or it may have no military means of
intervening to good purpose; or its intervention might in the long run do
more harm than good to the object of its solicitude. But there can be no
general prohibitory rule. When a military despot interferes to crush the
men of another country while struggling for their national rights, no
principle can make it wrong for a free nation to interfere by force against
him. It can only be a question of expediency and prudence."[8] In other
words, the importance of the moral rule involved must be weighed with the
chances {18} of success, the cost of war, the waste of life and wealth, and
the sufferings of the poorer classes, which are the inevitable consequences
of war. In the face of a universal enemy like Napoleon a war on behalf of
Spain and Portugal was just. The Crimean War and the Boer Wars were unjust.
Wars on behalf of Poles or Finns against Russia or Hungarians against
Austrians would have been just, but not expedient, because no maritime
power could have waged them with any chance of permanent success. It is a
matter of calculation, and there are few wars, other than wars for the
independence of their own country, which Liberals would not hold to cost
more in blood and treasure than the principle for which they were
undertaken.
It is obvious that this reasoning is entirely inconsistent with the theory
of the balance of power. That theory, unhappily revived in recent years,
requires not merely the subordination of morality to expediency in
particular cases, but the complete abandonment of morality as a condition
of international politics. Its essence is not international agreement and
the rule of right, but international hostility and the rule of force. It
sets the States into two groups, one of which must always act against the
other. England's policy is no longer decided by herself, but by herself in
consultation with allies, whose character and objects may be purely
selfish. If one of her associates is guilty of immoral aggression against
one of the opposing group, or asserts some right which ought only to be
conferred upon her by international agreement, she is dragged into a
quarrel in defence of wrong against right, and not only violates moral
rules in the particular case, but weakens her own ability to observe them
in every other. Her honour and her interest alike are placed in the hands
of others. She accepts a bill in blank, which the holder may fill in with
any amount he pleases. In cases of extreme necessity this may be
inevitable. When all are threatened by an enemy of the type of Napoleon,
England cannot dissociate herself from the rest on account of their want of
scruple. But as a settled and habitual policy the maintenance of the
balance of power must be abhorrent to every {19} man who is not ready to
put his conscience into the keeping of others.
An examination of the opposing mode of thought will make clearer the
essential nature of Liberalism. This opposite may fairly be called Toryism,
if that term is used, like the other, to describe a persisting habit of
mind and not a policy, which varies from generation to generation.
Conservatism and Unionism are not satisfactory equivalents. The latter,
especially, expresses only opposition to a particular project of
Liberalism, and is itself, like its object, of a temporary nature.
Conservatism on the other hand, though a permanent force, is not
essentially opposed to Liberalism. It is indeed often allied with Toryism,
and so long as Liberalism continues to do positive and reconstructive work
the strength of Toryism must generally lie in this negative and preserving
instinct. When the two opponents exchange their usual parts, the
Conservative mass swings over to the Liberal side. It is to Conservatism,
as well as to Liberalism, that Free Trade owes its present security. In the
face of active retrogression, the true Conservative, without becoming a
Liberal, ranges himself with Liberals. But this sort of temporary alliance
is rare. Until very recent years Liberalism has been the active and
changing force, and has accordingly always found Conservatism its enemy.
A very good illustration of this working agreement between the positive
dislike of individual emancipation and the negative reluctance to modify an
institution which prevents it was furnished a short time ago by the Dean of
Canterbury. The Convocation of the Diocese was considering whether the
wife's pledge to obey her husband should be struck out of the marriage
service. To the Liberal, this pledge, purporting to invest the subjection
of the female sex to the male with a divine sanction, is one of the most
obnoxious of all the fetters upon the freedom of women. Regarding the woman
as of equal worth with the man, he has no doubt that this institution must
be modified in her interest. On the occasion in question, the proposal for
her {20} relief was successfully opposed by the Dean. He said that when
they were asked to say that the views of the Apostles regarding the
position of the two sexes were wrong, that was a somewhat alarming and
distressing principle to introduce into their deliberations. They were
bound, not only by the ancient traditions of their Church, but by their
vows, to submit their judgment absolutely to the statements of the Apostles
on matters of that kind.[9] This is a clear case of Conservatism defending
Toryism. The subjection of the wife enjoined by the marriage service dates
from a period long preceding even that of apostolic barbarism, when women
were regarded as absolutely at the disposition of their male associates. In
origin it was a crude assertion of the male ego at the expense of the
female. The modern Church makes no such naked requisition, and defends the
selfish establishment, not because it is selfish, but because it is an
establishment.
This is the usual method of Conservatism. The position was fixed by the
remote ancestors of the present garrison, and they are content to defend it
even though they would never have themselves taken it up. But pure Toryism
lives to-day, and reproduces the thoughts, the arguments, and often the
very words, of the Toryism of a century ago. Opponents of Disestablishment
repeat the language of the supporters of the Test Act. Opponents of Woman
Suffrage, even those who call themselves Liberals, argue as Eldon and Peel
argued against Parliamentary Reform. Ulster preserves the atmosphere of the
struggle for Catholic Emancipation. Mr. Lloyd George, like Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain thirty years ago, excites the same fury as was produced by Tom
Paine's _Rights of Man_. The same principles contend on different stages,
and through the mouths of different actors. Though the cries of the
unending warfare change, the parties are always the same. Liberty is like
the books of the Roman Sybil. As each instalment is wrested from the grasp
of the monopolists, the remainder becomes at once as precious as was
previously the whole: loss of one privilege never prepares them for the
surrender of another. The admission of Dissenters {21} to public office
involved no adoption of the general principle that all sects should be
treated equally by the State. The abandonment of rotten boroughs was no
acknowledgment that every individual subject to government had the right to
control government. The innumerable concessions made by Toryism to Irish
nationality have involved no general recognition. The old arguments have
been shattered and dissipated in more than one contest. But when the forces
of Liberalism advance against the next line of defence, the ancient
retainers of monopoly are dragged from the hospitals and galvanized into
new activity, to be routed again after a struggle almost as bitter and as
long as the first. Toryism is beaten. It is never converted.
This Toryism is the habit of mind which refuses to concede to others that
right of free expression which it requires for itself. It is the egoistic
mind which regards all others as at its disposition. Its opinions are of
superior worth, and others must give way. As the Liberal temper is
extended, so is the Tory. The ego includes the Church, the occupation, the
nation, and the sex of the individual. It thinks of human beings in
classes, as distinguished from itself. They are Dissenters, or "people who
do not agree with my religious opinions"; tenants, or "people who pay money
to me or my class for the privilege of working or living on our land";
foreigners, or "people who happen to be born in countries other than my
own"; wives, widows, and spinsters, or "persons who are, or have been, or
will be connected with my sex." The Tory habitually thinks of his
fellow-creatures not according to their individuality, but according to
their class, the face value which, regardless of their intrinsic worth,
either entitles or disentitles them to his favour. They either belong to
his own class or they do not. The real worth of each is not the standard by
which he forms his judgment of them. Every act and utterance, every request
and protest of another person is referred to the artificial connection, or
distinction, instead of being judged for itself. The prime condition is
that the other should keep in his place. By the Liberal the other is
considered as an isolated object, an end in {22} himself, to be treated
without regard to any artificial association between them. The accidental
is distinguished from the essential, and the creed, nationality,
occupation, or sex is not allowed to interrupt the clear view of the human
being who is enclosed in it. The Tory deals with his object as invested
with a status. The Liberal deals with the man in himself.
These different points of view determine the different attitudes of the two
parties to political problems as they arise. The pure Tory is of course as
rare as the pure Liberal, and neither of the two groups, which are at any
particular time described as Liberal and Tory, corresponds exactly with the
habit of mind associated with its name.[10] Self-styled Tories are
occasionally strongly Liberal in particular cases. Windham, who thought
that the abolition of bull-baiting was a dangerous revolution, voted
against the Slave Trade. Peel, the greatest man whom the old Tory party
ever produced, was Liberal in finance, in legislation about crime and
factories, and in foreign policy. In the same way, men who are Liberal in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred show {23} themselves to be Tory in the
last. Robert Lowe, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the great Liberal
Ministry of 1868, had as fierce a contempt for the working classes as Lord
Salisbury himself. The question of Woman Suffrage, appearing unexpectedly
on the surface of politics in 1906, has divided both parties, though in
different proportions. The true Liberal supports the demand for
enfranchisement. The true Tory opposes it. But the agitation has discovered
some of the most bitter of sexual egoists on the Radical benches of the
House of Commons, and champions of the individual's right to control her
own government even among the Cecils.[11] The division between the members
of the schools is thus not sharply defined. But the schools always exist,
and it is in the perpetual conflict between them that the progress of the
nation takes place.
Every political problem involves a conflict between an existing institution
and the interest of individuals. The two parties thus approach it from
different sides. The Tory looks down from the institution to the man, the
Liberal up from the man to the institution. To the Liberal, the State and
all other institutions within it are things of flesh and blood, they are so
many expressions of human society, associations of human beings for their
own human purposes. To the Tory, the institution is a machine, its
efficient working is everything, and it is the duty of the individual to
subordinate himself to that object whether his own interest is served by it
or not. The Liberal says, "The State is made for man, and not man for the
State." The Tory reverses the dogma, and even when he pursues the good of
individuals, he pursues it rather in order to make them better soldiers or
workers, that is to say, better servants of the State, than to make them
better in themselves. Democratic government to the Liberal is an essential
condition of the free growth of the individual soul. To the Tory, if he
believes in it at all, it is a piece of efficient political machinery.
"What use can the State make of this man?" asks the Tory. "What {24} use
can this man make of himself?" asks the Liberal. The Tory theory is
expressed in terms of duties, the Liberal in terms of rights. The disposing
mind is at the back of the one, the encouraging mind at the back of the
other. The Tory finds the good of the individual in the strength of the
State. The Liberal finds the strength of the State in the good of the
individual. Where the one seeks to maintain and use, the other seeks to
ease, to alter, and to readjust, binding himself to no particular scheme of
political or economic construction, but ready to apply to each case of
individual hardship, as it arises, such devices as he can invent.
Practical Toryism, the theory as it has been expressed in actual politics,
has been until recent years the Toryism of a governing class. But no class
has a monopoly of it. The same habit of mind exists everywhere. There is
nothing so universal as the aristocratic temper, which disposes of the
fortunes of others according to its own sense of what is fitting. The Tory
statesman of a hundred and fifty years ago was a landowner, a Churchman,
and a man of wealth. But his view of life would have been much the same if
he had been a tinker, an atheist, and in daily expectation of the
workhouse. He might, in pursuit of his own class interest, have rebelled
against the Toryism of the governing class, without abating any of his own.
To such persons as came within his disposition he would display the same
zeal for the assertion of his own ego at the expense of theirs, as that
which he resented in his own superiors. Even the poorest man has generally
a wife, and even the meanest of Englishmen can always speak contemptuously
of foreigners. Toryism is a habit of mind, which is often modified by
circumstances, but can and does exist in men and women of all classes,
irrespective of wealth, creed, or occupation.
It is true that this Tory doctrine is not always crudely stated. The
formula is more often that of identification than that of disposition. If
the inferior class is so placed that the superior class may dispose of it,
it suffers no hardship, because the interest of both is the same. The
people are identified with the State, {25} the workmen are identified with
the employer, the wife is identified with the husband. Make the State
strong, and you make the people happy. Give the employer higher profits,
and the workmen get higher wages out of those profits. Give the husband
security and freedom, and the wife will partake of them both. But whatever
the form of argument may be, the result is the same. There is an inevitable
tendency in human nature to deteriorate in the enjoyment of absolute power.
Some governing classes may use the strength of the State to make the people
happy. Some employers may cheerfully share their increased gains with their
workpeople. Some husbands may concede to their wives that complete freedom
of occupation, expression of opinion, and control of property which they
themselves possess. But history and contemporary experience alike afford
innumerable examples of governing classes oppressing or keeping down their
subjects, of employers giving higher wages only in response to strong or
even violent pressure from their workmen, and of husbands depriving their
wives of independence of thought and action, and even of the control of
their own bodies. There is no security for the individual in the generosity
of superiors. It is only when all are recognized by the State as having
equal worth in their relations with each other that individual liberty can
be enjoyed by all.
The essential differences between Liberalism and Toryism are revealed in
their disputes about the larger political topics. The franchise never fails
to draw clear expressions of character from both sides. To the Liberal, the
right of a man to control his own government is only one of the many rights
which go to make up his right to control his own life. His freedom of life
cannot be complete if, without his consent, his earnings may be diminished
by taxation, his business ruined by a commercial treaty, the education of
his children prescribed by legislation, and his whole fortune impaired by a
declaration of war. There can be no real freedom of growth without control
of government. But the argument for enfranchisement is based on more than
the {26} direct consequences of it. That the man who is taxed against his
will enjoys only an imperfect freedom is obvious. What is not so readily
perceived is that he is indirectly affected in a much more serious way. It
is axiomatic that a governing class will, sooner or later, abuse its
absolute power. Landowners use the tariff to increase their rents, and so
impose burdens upon the poor. The middle class prohibits the combination of
workmen in trade disputes, or resists the regulation of factories by law.
Working-men exclude working-women from trades which they wish to preserve
for their own sex. Men erect a system of marriage law which places the wife
in the power of the husband. All this is written in history, and cannot be
disputed. But the unseen consequences of disfranchisement are not so often
realized. There is constant action and reaction between political
institutions and social estimates. If disfranchisement springs from
depreciation, it also encourages it. To confine the control of government
to one class is to appreciate that class at the expense of others, and to
encourage its members to abuse their disfranchised associates whenever they
are brought into contact with them. So long as the big business of politics
is reserved for them, so long are they compelled to believe that the
monopoly is the reward of their superior worth. Their ego is exalted, and
that of their subjects is depressed. Private insolence is the inevitable
consequence of public privilege. Government by landlords means interference
with the political and religious opinions of tenants. Government by
Protestants means the exclusion of Catholics from offices of dignity and
profit. Government by masters means bad conditions of labour and fettered
powers of combination among workmen. Government by men means the exclusion
of women from professions and the maintenance of a double standard of
morality. It is not suggested here that disfranchisement does more than
affect tendencies. The political thinker who values his reputation will
always write in terms of tendencies rather than in terms of states. But
disfranchisement at least tends to produce, if it does not actually
produce, the consequences of social depreciation. In some countries, or in
{27} some states of society, these may be less dangerous than the
consequences of general enfranchisement. But they always exist.
An admirable statement of this part of the case for enfranchisement has
been recently made by an opponent of Woman Suffrage. "If you enfranchise
women," he said, "you cannot deprive them of the powers and privileges
which accompany it. If they are to share men's political duties they must
enjoy his rights, they must be eligible for the Bar, the Bench, for the
Civil Service, and for election to Parliament. Once in Parliament you
cannot brand them as a class or sex apart, to be deprived of any of the
high offices open to men. If they are not to attain these offices, it
cannot be by the avowal of sex, but by an admission of incapacity."[12]
This is absolute Toryism. Disfranchisement is a convenient means of
depreciating women in private life, and the main bulwark of the male ego.
It disables every woman in advance, and deprives her of private rights
without the trouble of testing her capacity. Her political disability marks
her with a brand wherever she goes, and the person who disposes of her
politics, disposes also, in proportion to his own selfishness, of her
occupation, of her marital rights, and of her honour. Mr. Harcourt is
content to exclude her from Parliament and the legal profession. Baser men
display the same male egoism in depriving her of education, in enfeebling
her body and mind by excessive child-bearing, and in taking advantage of
her poverty to use her as a prostitute for the gratification of their
vilest passions. This confession by an opponent of Woman Suffrage
illustrates the temper of Toryism in all controversies about the franchise.
Acknowledge the right to control government, and you acknowledge the right
to control life. So long as it lies in the power of one class to impose
taxes, to regulate the hours of labour, to admit and to exclude from
occupations, and generally to control the political organization of
society, so long will its members be tempted to dispose of the members of
the subject class in every part of life. When the equality of both classes
in the State is admitted, the admission of their equal worth in all their
private {28} relations inevitably follows. There is no essential difference
between public and private rights.
But the reaction of political status upon the individual has another aspect
no less important than this. Participation in the organized life of the
community is a necessary part of that education which modern opinion
requires for every human being. There are now living very few of those
frantic Tories who believe that it is harmful to develop the minds of the
poor, and every civilized State regards public education as one of its
ordinary duties. But once the right of individuals to a good education is
admitted, the extent of the right can hardly be limited to the provision of
elementary or secondary schools. There is no education to be compared with
the experience of organized life. Trade Unionism and Co-operation,
political associations outside Parliament, the management of charities, all
these are valuable not only for their immediate results, but for the way in
which they train the people concerned. Incomparably the best school of the
kind is politics. Nothing so broadens the mind and so disciplines the
temper as being engaged, even in a humble capacity, in the management of
political affairs. But the connection between the individual and the State
must be direct, if it is to produce its full benefit. The vague and
irresponsible interest of the disfranchised is a poor substitute for the
definite obligation to apply one's own strength to the machine itself,
which is the privilege of the enfranchised. The extension of the suffrage
to all individuals in the State is thus an essential part of the Liberal
faith, not only because it prevents direct and indirect abuse, but because
it is a means of education without which few individuals can ever develop
their natural powers to the full. "We, who were reformers from the
beginning, always said that the enfranchisement of the people was an end in
itself. We said, and we were much derided for saying so, that citizenship
only gives that self-respect which is the true basis of respect of others,
and without which there is no lasting social order or real morality."[13]
"If the individual is {29} to have a higher feeling of public duty, he must
take part in the work of the State.... That active interest in the service
of the State, which makes patriotism in the better sense, can hardly arise
while the individual's relation to the State is that of a passive recipient
of protection in the exercise of his rights of person and property."[14] It
is this conception of the exercise of the franchise which leads to the
apparent paradox that the people are never fit for the suffrage until they
possess it. In practice these logical difficulties have little weight. It
is true that the only real test of political capacity is politics. But it
is no hard task to detect in a person's management of other affairs how he
is likely to conduct himself as a voter. Plain good sense is the only
essential quality. It is got by living, not by learning, and where
conditions of life are reasonably good, political capacity will not be
wanting. The franchise completes, it does not make, education. It may thus
be fairly extended to all ordinary persons as part of the Liberal method of
equipping the individual for the fullest life of which he is capable.
Influenced by these considerations, the Liberal asserts that the franchise
is a right which exists in the individual subject. To the Tory, accustomed
to the idea of disposition, the subject is under and not above the State.
Where the Liberal emphasizes the responsibility of the State to the
subject, and requires that every act of its ministers shall be done in the
interest of the subject, the Tory emphasizes the duty of the subject to
submit to the State, and by a process of argument which is as illogical as
it is politically vicious, leaves it to the State to decide even to what
persons it shall be responsible. Thus Sir Robert Inglis, opposing in 1853 a
Bill for permitting Jews to sit in Parliament, contended "that power was a
trust which the State might delegate to those whom it thought fit to
exercise it--the exercise of the suffrage, for example--but it was the
inherent right of no man. If it were, then indeed had they destroyed the
value of the principle by all the restrictions imposed with respect to
property, {30} to age, and to sex."[15] The allusion to sex was prophetic.
More than half a century later, Professor Dicey uses precisely the same
argument against the enfranchisement of women. "The rights of an individual
with regard to matters which primarily concern the State are public or
political rights, or, in other words, duties or functions to be exercised
by the possessor not in accordance with his own wish or interest, but
primarily at least with a view to the interest of the State, and therefore
may be limited or extended in any way which conduces to the welfare of the
community."[16]
The confusion of thought in both these passages is the same. What is the
State? Who are the community? How is the State to know what conduces to the
welfare of the community? Both these Tory thinkers reason as if the State
were some concrete thing, some piece of machinery, existing out of and
independent of the society of human beings, managing their affairs,
allotting them their rights, and associating with itself in their
government such of them as it was pleased to select. Their argument is
based upon this fundamental absurdity. The State has in fact no existence
apart from human beings; it is not external to society, but a growth out of
it, and its own form and constitution are determined in all cases by the
creatures whom the Tory theorists treat as subjected to its absolute
discretion. The Liberal declares that human beings exist before the State,
and control it, that their opinion determines in what way the State, like
the Church, the industrial system, and the home, shall be constructed, that
opinion varies in different countries and in different ages, and will at
one time and in one place acquiesce in despotism and at another time and in
another place require adult suffrage, but that always, first and last, the
subjects are masters of the State.
What is actually at the back of the Tory mind, when it reasons in this
fashion, is that the State, as conceived by them, is not external to all
society, but only to a part of it. In other words, {31} when it says "the
State," it means "the governing class for the time being." It is always
thinking of a privileged class disposing of the fortunes of another class.
To Sir Robert Inglis "the State" meant "men of twenty-one years of age, who
are landowners and Christians." To Windham, fifty years before, it meant
"men of twenty-one years of age, who are landowners and Churchmen." To
Professor Dicey, fifty years later, it meant "men of twenty-one years of
age." The class varies, and its boundaries extend. But it is always of a
class of some dimensions that the Tory thinks when he speaks of "the
State." In effect he argues that the general body of men and women have no
right to control their own government, except when the class into whose
hands government has fallen sees fit to give it them. By the same process
of reasoning the most bloody despot who ever usurped a throne could exclude
aristocracy itself, and keep the control of government in the hands of the
meanest of his parasites. This conflict between the individual right of the
subject and the absolute discretion of the governing class has been
repeated at every proposal to extend the franchise in Great Britain. The
work of Liberalism has been, and is still, to extend the limits of the
governing class, and to make State and subjects, government and governed,
co-extensive.
The same characteristic difference between the desire to adapt an
institution to the encouragement of individual growth and the desire to
compel individual growth to the efficient working of an institution peeps
out, even where the practical proposals of the two parties appear to be
identical. A Liberal supports State education because it puts the poor man
into fuller possession of himself. A Tory supports it because an ignorant
poor man is likely to be turbulent and to make attacks upon the institution
of property. A Liberal supports a Mental Deficiency Bill because it
protects feeble-minded persons against their neighbours and against
themselves. A Tory supports it because it discourages the breeding of types
which he regards as useless to the State. While the general attitude of
Toryism to the economic reforms of modern Liberalism has been hostile, a
small {32} section of the Tory party has shown itself ready enough to
support, and even to originate schemes which interfere with economic
freedom and the rights of property. But the motives of the Liberal and the
Tory social reformers are not the same. The one aims at private happiness,
the other at public utility. "We would endeavour," said Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, "to secure to every man the best conditions of living,
and so far as can be done by laws and customs, to secure him also an equal
chance with others of a useful and happy life."[17] "The essence of our
policy," says Lord Willoughby de Broke, "is to give each individual the
elements that will afford him an opportunity of at least living a free and
a decorous existence, and the opportunity to raise himself or herself to
the highest point of moral and material efficiency."[18] The emphasis on
happiness in the one passage and on efficiency in the other shows precisely
the difference in the objects of the two men. The first is personal, the
second instrumental. The Liberal conception of the State makes the
development of the individual an end in itself. The Tory conception makes
it a means of public advantage, of obtaining workers for national
industries and soldiers for national armies, and it is accompanied by
proposals for conscription, protection, and the maintenance of popular
education at a low level, which are redolent of restriction and
subordination. A Tory journalist puts the matter more precisely: "If
Unionism is to recover the confidence of the masses it must recognize their
claim to a fuller and a happier life. Only in this way can it serve the
great causes which it has at heart. We stand for the Empire. An Imperial
people cannot be built up in squalor and poverty, when every thought is
absorbed by the provision of the daily bread. We cannot get a hearing for
Imperial causes until we have brought happiness into the homes of the
people."[19] The Tory makes its inhabitants happy for the sake of the
Empire. The Liberal has no use for the Empire unless it makes its
inhabitants happy.
{33}
Modern Toryism is identified with Imperialism, and, except for the relics
of old controversies between sects, most of the antagonism of Liberal and
Tory centres to-day about the Empire. The most definite opposition is to be
observed in original conceptions. To the Tory, the Empire seems to be
something in itself; he is impressed with its size, its wealth, its
population; the mere existence of such a huge fabric, efficiently
maintained, under the national flag, satisfies him. The Liberal is more
concerned with what the Empire represents, with its maintenance of
individual liberty, with its development of the subject peoples which it
contains, with its encouragement to exploitation, with its implied
antagonism to foreign peoples, with its increase of the cost of armaments,
and with its effect upon the temper of domestic government. He is not, as a
practical statesman, concerned to evacuate any part of this vast
inheritance. "The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty." But he
looks with suspicion upon any attempt to increase it, he encourages every
transfer of control to local authorities, he insists that where races of an
inferior civilization are incorporated their affairs shall be managed in
their interest and not in that of the conquering race, and he views with
constant apprehension the inclusion of such races because he knows that
their despotic government must threaten the existence of his own free
institutions. If the Empire is justified at all, it is justified by the
ideals which it expresses, and by nothing else.
The better Imperial idea was thus described a few years ago by Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain: "We, in our Colonial policy, as fast as we acquire new
territory and develop it, develop it as trustees of civilization for the
commerce of the world. We offer in all these markets over which our flag
floats the same opportunities, the same open field, to foreigners that we
offer to our own subjects, and upon the same terms. In that policy we stand
alone, because all other nations, as fast as they acquire new
territory--acting, as I believe, most mistakenly in their own interests,
and, above all, in the interests of the countries that they administer--all
other nations seek at once to secure the {34} monopoly for their own
products by preferential and other methods."[20] These are noble and
generous words. The conception of a rich and powerful race extending the
blessings of order, good government, and industrial enterprise into the
backward parts of the earth for the universal benefit of all mankind is a
magnificent conception. But if it ever was Imperialism it is not the
Imperialism of to-day. In less than ten years the speaker denied himself.
The trustees of civilization became national egoists, subordinating all
others to their own ascendancy. The free and open market was made a
national monopoly, and British subjects arrogated to themselves all the
exclusive privileges which had been "most mistakenly" reserved to
themselves by other nations. The deterioration of generosity has seldom
been so swift and so complete. In 1912 Mr. Chamberlain's successor in the
leadership of Protectionist Imperialism makes the exclusion of the
foreigner the very essence of Empire. "Co-operation in war was a vital
necessity; but there could never be real co-operation in war unless there
first had been co-operation in peace. It was for that reason that Unionists
had advocated, and intended to advocate, the policy of Imperial preference.
All the Dominions had urged the Mother Country to adopt in trade--and in
everything else--that principle which would enable one portion of the
Empire to treat all other portions of the Empire on better terms than were
given to the rest of the world." The whole basis of the Empire is thus made
to be hostility towards foreign peoples, and instead of war being a hateful
necessity, undertaken to preserve the ideals for which the Empire stands,
it becomes itself the first object of the Empire, to which all its other
possibilities must be sacrificed.
The Empire, as conceived by modern Imperialists, is in fact the negation of
Liberalism. Domestic liberty, local independence, economic freedom, the
development of inferior races, all must be sacrificed to the idea of an
isolated and mechanically efficient unity. "The Unionist policy is a policy
of union and strength. The Unionists say: As we are faced by great dangers,
{35} let us hold to the tried and proved national organization which was
devised to meet such dangers in the past. And they say also: Let us have
peace between the classes, for division in that way is even more dangerous
than the division of the United Kingdom into its separate tribes or
parishes.... We must keep united or we will be destroyed. But the Unionists
go farther, and they say: We must be united not only as a United Kingdom
but as a British Empire. Old England by herself may not have the strength
to face the enormous forces now being arrayed against her. In the same way
the Dominions by themselves have not the strength to maintain their freedom
against possible attacks. Let us therefore combine, and then we shall be
like the bundle of faggots, impossible to break. Now this policy of
Imperial union cannot be achieved by sentiment alone. Sentiment is an
excellent thing; but as part of the Empire is Dutch and part French, and as
even British colonists tend to forget the Mother Country and look upon
their own new country as the centre and the boundary of their patriotism,
we need the perpetual unifier of material interest. Where a man's treasure
is, there shall his heart be also." Therefore we must tax imported
foodstuffs in order to give a preference to the Colonies. If we do not,
"What are we to offer to Canada in the way of a material interest strong
enough to make her foreign policy identical with ours?"[21]
This is the subordination of everything to organization. Ireland is to be
governed against its will, the poorer classes are to be kept down by force
or by indulgence, the industrial and commercial freedom of the Colonies and
the Mother Country is to be fettered by artificial bonds of trade, in order
that {36} Germany may be kept in her place. The illustration of the bundle
of faggots will serve for the Liberal as well as for the Tory. What the
Liberal wants is not a bundle of dead wood, but a group of living and
growing trees about a parent stem, each planted freely in the soil and
drawing from it its own sustenance.
The Tory conception of the Empire is in fact very like the old Roman
Empire, and ominous comparisons are often drawn between the two.[22] The
Roman Empire was a similar gigantic organization, which subordinated all
other ideas to that of strength and unity against external peoples. What
will preserve the British Empire from the fate of the Roman is what the
Romans omitted, the encouragement of local independence, the sacrifice of
mere mechanical efficiency to that infinite diversity of individual
civilizations which keeps nations alive. The recent Canadian attempt to
make a treaty of reciprocity with the United States produced some excellent
examples of the viciousness of Imperialism. The Liberal Ministry allowed
the British Ambassador in the States to place his services at the disposal
of the Canadian Government. They assumed that it was not their business to
dictate to the Canadians what commercial arrangements they should or should
not make with foreign peoples, and they treated a Canadian Government which
had been in office for seventeen years as properly representative of the
Canadian people. The Tory Imperialists attacked them for assisting the
Canadian Ministry in its negotiations. Their demand, in effect, was that
the British Government should have at least tacitly disapproved of this
assertion of Canadian independence. For the moment the Canadian people have
refused to enter into the treaty. Ten years hence they may have changed
their minds, and we shall then have a direct conflict between Imperialism
and Canadian Nationalism. The Liberals would allow the Canadians to manage
their own affairs as they think best. The Tories, even though they would
refrain from force, would at least try to bribe {37} them into an
artificial union, which they would not enter of their own free will.
The deterioration of Imperialism really dates from the South African War.
This was the first expression of Imperial unity. But what was that unity
worth, which was employed for the shameful purpose of destroying the local
independence which it existed only to maintain? The whole justification of
the Empire was that it enabled communities of different characters to grow
freely within it, and the war destroyed what war should never have been
undertaken except to preserve. The difference of opinion about that grave
event marked the characteristic difference between Liberal and Tory. The
life of the individual parts is everything to the Liberal, and their
organization is only tolerable in so far as it protects and encourages that
life. It is not to him, as it is to the Tory, a thing in itself, a
permanent segregation of his race from the rest of humanity, a monopoly and
a preserve, to be maintained as a weight in the balance of international
power. Nor has he any doubt that the loosely knit federation, which he
prefers, will prove in the end stronger against Foreign enemies than the
drilled and disciplined union which the Tories want. The Roman Empire
collapsed because of this unnatural perfection of strength. The native
vigour and independence of its parts were sacrificed to centralization. By
enslaving the minds of her dependents to the Imperial idea, Rome threw
herself open to less organized but more individualistic enemies. By leaving
the inhabitants of her Dominions to develop themselves according to their
own ideas, and not by managing them as potential weapons against the
foreigner, Great Britain has brought herself to her present strength. A
conscript army may be maintained for an indefinite period by constantly
renewing the recruits. Nations cannot be renewed, and a conscript Empire
must inevitably perish of its own rigidity.
Imperialists often speak of the Empire as if it consisted entirely of
self-governing dominions of white men. In fact, by far the greater part of
it is governed despotically, and consists of countries where white men
cannot make permanent settlements. This {38} part of the Empire the Liberal
regards from two points of view. The less civilized or less powerful races
which inhabit them are as individual to him as are the Canadians or the
Germans, and are no more to be used by him for his own interest. "A
superior race is bound to observe the highest current morality of the time
in all its dealings with the subject race."[23] Order, justice, capital,
the development of natural resources, and education, with an honest spirit
in the Government, may help rather than retard the growth of the local
life. But with the benefits of civilization is too often introduced the
temper of exploitation. Confiscation, massacre, slavery, open or disguised,
and the abuse of native women, have been common enough in the building of
the Empire, and the conduct of men like Cole of Nairobi and Lewis of
Rhodesia shows that the same habit of mind is far from rare at this
day.[24] The modern history of South Africa contains more than one
disreputable passage of this kind, and if the development of territories
like Uganda and Batsutoland has been more disinterested, it is only because
they offered less easy prizes to the rapacity of trading companies and
financiers. The primary motive of all our appropriations of territory has
of course been our desire to increase our own wealth, and in most quarters
we have been more anxious to force the native population into labour for
our profit than to improve their condition or character. The plea that our
Empire is justified because it elevates inferior races is a piece of cant
which has been grafted on to a purely materialistic system. How little
separates us even now from the old slavery may be seen in the following
passage from a Tory newspaper: "In all essential qualities of racial
progress, in self-control, perseverance, reasoning power, and so forth, the
negro races are far behind the white.... The negro is given new racial
ambitions by the acquisition of civil and in some cases of political
rights.... The white South {39} African ... may be forced to reconsider his
whole native policy.... Education is a frightful source of mischief....
Industrial education, the painful teaching of toil in civilization, must
precede the higher development."[25] In plain English, we may have to
disfranchise the coloured voters of Cape Colony, shut up their schools and
churches, and reduce them to slavery. In just such language did the West
Indian planters reason in the days of Wilberforce, from the fact of
inferiority, through the deprivation of the means of improvement, to the
ultimate destruction of character in "industrial education." It is in
problems of this sort that the Liberal sees the evil side of Empire. It is
more important to him that the black races of Cape Colony should not be
deprived of the franchise than that South Africa should be able to assist
Great Britain in time of war. If the country can only be included in the
Empire at the cost of this deliberate degradation of the native peoples, it
is better in his eyes that it should become independent. When the Empire
ceases to encourage the growth of all peoples within it, the justification
of it has ceased to exist.[26]
The badness of this government of less efficient races lies not only in its
possible, and almost inevitable, exploitation of those races themselves,
but in its reaction upon the people of Great Britain. There are very few
men who can occupy themselves even with the honest and disinterested
management of the affairs of a subject people without suffering some
deterioration of their love of liberty. However benevolent despotism may
be, it is always despotism. The essence of such government as that of India
is to dispose of the fortunes of a people according to our own opinion of
what is best for them, and not according to theirs. When it is bad, it is
tyranny. When it is good, as it nearly always is, it is indulgence. It is
never responsibility. It never {40} seriously contemplates the time when
the subject shall control his own affairs, or shall even be associated on
equal terms with the foreign conqueror. Those who grow accustomed to this
absolute power can never work comfortably with free institutions, and the
whole of the governing race tends to become infected with the disposing
habit. The business of government becomes more than the spirit of it, the
mechanical successes of administration are applauded, while the
stultification of the general mind is overlooked. Efficiency is exaggerated
at the expense of freedom, criticism of the Ministry is treated as
insolence, and the right of every intelligent man to interest himself in
the affairs of his own country is subordinated to the convenience of
officials.[27] The official always looks up and not down for approval and
censure, and he cannot depress the eye of his mind when he returns home
from one of our foreign dependencies. The Imperialist revival of the last
thirty years has thus coincided, not only with the neglect of domestic
affairs, but with the active suppression of domestic freedom. The foremost
champions of the House of Lords in 1909 were a retired Viceroy of India and
a man who, after a successful career in Egypt, had been the mouthpiece of
British insolence in South Africa. The best name in the list of the
opponents of Woman Suffrage is that of the greatest despot that Egypt has
ever known. "Is it not just possible," asked Cobden in 1860, "that we may
become corrupted at home by the reaction of arbitrary political maxims in
the East upon our domestic politics, just as Greece and Rome were
demoralized by their contact with Asia?"[28] No Liberal who has watched the
joint progress of {41} Imperial expansion and domestic reaction, which has
taken place since Cobden's death, can answer that searching question in the
negative.
The foregoing examination will be sufficient to indicate the scope and the
method of the following chapters. They attempt to describe the political
growth of the country, from a time when power was confined to a small
disposing class, to the present day, when we have reached a well-defined
stage on our advance towards complete equality of values. They also deal
with the varying fortunes of Liberal ideas in foreign policy. The process
seems to the writer to resemble the change from the old Ptolemaic to the
new Copernican system of Astronomy. The old astronomers believed that the
Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that the planets revolved about
it. The new astronomers discovered that the Earth was not the centre, and
that the other planets, though they had certain relations with and
attractions for the earth, actually were, in the main, independent of it,
and revolved, like it, about a common centre in orbits of their own.
Similarly Toryism imagined that the unprivileged sex, classes, and creeds
existed for no other purpose than fulfilling those duties which related to
itself, and for enjoying those rights which proceeded from itself. It has
been compelled to recognize that other individuals, however united with the
dominant class for certain limited purposes, have their independent
interests, orbits, and personalities. The writer cannot pretend to be
indifferent, as between Liberalism and Toryism. But the last chapter will
be sufficient proof that he is not over-full of the spirit of mere party.
* * * * *
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