CHAPTER XI

LIBERALISM SINCE 1906

The policy of the Liberal Government which came into power in 1906 was the

policy of those who had followed the old course during the Imperialist

reaction. The general principles laid down by the new Prime Minister did

not differ substantially from those of Gladstone, though the problems with

which he had to deal were not precisely the same. His argument against

Tariff Reform was inspired by the same zeal for personal freedom as those

which he used against Chinese Labour, the Education Act, and aggression in

South Africa. It was a conflict between habits of mind, and not a

difference of opinion. Protection placed the common people at the mercy of

capitalists and landlords, and increased the political power of plutocracy.

Chinese labour established an industrial system, which had for its primary

object, not the well-being of all its members, but the increase of the

profits of capital. The Education Act subjected large numbers of

Nonconformists to the domination of the Established Church in the

instruction of their children. The Boer War was a brutal interference with

the national concerns of a foreign race. The Liberal attack on the

Imperialist position was thus general and not particular. Liberals in this

matter were not fighting a single proposal, but a whole spirit and tone of

policy and administration and legislation. "These fiscal proposals were

saturated, as the whole of the present Government had been found to be,

with restriction against freedom, with inequality between trade and trade

with injustice towards the community of consumers, with {325} privilege and

monopoly, with jealousy and unfriendliness towards other nations. They were

essentially part of a retrograde and anti-democratic system."[347] It was

this clear sight of the real issues of the moment which extinguished Lord

Rosebery, and brought back the Liberals who had supposed they could at once

support the Boer War and retain Liberal habits of mind in domestic affairs.

The great social currents which had run strong until Home Rule produced a

temporary diversion had once more gathered head, and those who suggested

that the Liberal party could take a clean slate, and ignore the writings of

its predecessors, were sharply reminded by the result of the election that

it was their duty to take up the tale where it had been interrupted twenty

years before. When the flood of war had subsided, the social stream was

found running in the channel which it had followed since the French

Revolution. The bad memories of Ireland were not effaced. The problems of

industry were more urgent than ever. The pent-up hopes of women broke free.

Nonconformity once more demanded relief from sectarian domination. Only

those could deal with the new situation who had not tried to forget how

they had been accustomed to deal with the old. Lord Rosebery, punting about

for a new course, grounded on the shallows, and was left behind.

Campbell-Bannerman, holding on the old course through the storm, found

himself afloat, and set for a prosperous journey.

Much of the Liberal work done since 1905 has consisted in the undoing of

the work of reactionary Toryism. For the first time since the close of the

French War, Liberalism has found itself engaged in maintaining

establishments, and in leading the people to reoccupy positions which they

have evacuated. Free Trade is a purely negative policy, and means nothing

but keeping the ground clear for economic reconstruction. The unsuccessful

attempts at Education and Licensing Reform would at best have done no more

than restore the social values which had been established in the previous

century. The extension of {326} self-government to the Transvaal and the

Orange River Colony undid, so far as it could be undone, the war, and

restored freedom.[348] The abolition of Chinese Labour was a complete

reversal of a policy only a few years old. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906

put Trade Unions in the legal position which they had occupied without

question for twenty years after 1874.[349] All this work of restoration

hampered the Government in its positive work, and when it ought to have

been free to deal with the peculiar problems of its own day, it was forced

to wait while it resettled those of a previous generation. The most

original work of the new Liberalism has been economic. What most

distinguishes the Governments which have held office since 1906 is the

degree to which they have interfered with the economic structure of society

in order to give greater freedom to the poorer classes. This work was begun

under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and since Mr. Lloyd George has relieved

Mr. Asquith of the duty of inspiring his followers with new ideas, has been

controlled and directed by the present Chancellor of the Exchequer. The

Budget of 1909, the Old Age Pensions Act, the Workmen's Compensation Act,

the Wages Boards Act, the Labour Exchanges Act, the Education (Provision of

Meals) Act, and the Insurance Act have all one feature in common, the use

of State machinery for the active assistance of the economically weak. The

principle of the Factory Acts has been extended into projects for Social

Reform, the number and variety of which may be almost indefinitely

increased. Burke's test of convenience is applied even to the {327} right

of property. "Private property is no longer regarded as one of the natural

rights of man; its incidents are considered and settled by the common

modern criterion of all these matters--to wit, the balance of social

advantage."[350]

This growth of the importance attached to economic problems has appeared

sudden only to those who have been at once deaf to the warnings of history

and without experience of personal hardship. The dangers once expected from

extensions of the franchise had receded from the view of a plutocracy and a

middle class, which had contemplated for twenty years a common people

dazzled by visions of national greatness.[351] The clamour with which these

disposing classes greeted the new democracy in 1906 expressed the natural

dismay of those who had thought that they could always manage the people as

they pleased, and now realized, in the presence of forty working men

elected to the House of Commons, that the people were going to manage

themselves. Gladstone's concentration upon Ireland had delayed this advent.

But for his adoption of Home Rule, the new policy, already suggested by Mr.

Chamberlain, would have been incorporated in practical Liberalism at least

fifteen years earlier. It was not made less ominous by the postponement.

Economic discontent was both more bitter and more articulate in 1906 than

it would have been in 1891. The Trade Unions had been roused by hostile

judicial decisions. The political organizations of workmen were perfected,

and the Trade Unions and the Independent Labour Party worked in harmony.

The workmen formed a distinct party of their own, and several of their

{328} representatives were of definitely Socialist opinions. Outside the

working classes the public mind had been directed more and more to the

study of industrial problems. The Fabian Society had been active for twenty

years, and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb were only the most industrious of the

many investigators who were establishing a historical and scientific case

for reform. All this improvement of machinery marched with an increase in

actual distress. The war added not only to the temporary, but also to the

permanent burdens of the poor, and not merely by accumulating debt, but by

increasing the expenditure on armaments which an immoral policy required

for its defence. The dislocation of industry, which always follows a war,

had brought insecurity to many and destitution to not a few. Casual labour

was more general, and sweating not less than at any previous period. In

every direction distress and discontent had increased, and the political

machinery was now adapted to the direct and articulate expression of the

feelings of the common people. The Parliament of 1906 represented the

desire of the masses to fit their conditions of life to their own capacity

for growth.

Liberals were bound to apply themselves to the new conditions in a new way,

and it savours of pedantry to accuse Liberal economists of 1906 of having

departed from the principles of Liberal economists of 1846. Paradoxical as

it may appear to say that a positive policy of constant interference is the

same as a negative policy of constant abstention, it is true that the

mental habit at the back of the one is identical with that at the back of

the other. Both aim at emancipating the individual from the things which

prevent him from developing his natural capacities. The Manchester School

saw only the fetters which directly impeded him. The modern Liberal sees

also the want of the positive aids without which he is only half free. "Of

all the obstacles which obstruct men's advance towards good living, and of

all the evils with which politics can help to deal, there is no obstacle

more formidable and no evil more grave than poverty.... Our first principle

leads clearly and directly to a policy of social {329} reform. Whoever

admits that the duty of the State is to secure, so far as it is able, the

fullest opportunities to lead the best life, cannot refuse to accept the

further proposition, that to lessen the causes of poverty and to lighten

its effects are essential parts of a right policy of State action."[352]

Poverty cripples the individual in many ways. It deprives him of mobility,

so that he cannot travel freely in search of employment. It prevents him

from accumulating reserves for times of emergency, so that a depression in

trade or an illness of a month's duration may drive an honest and

industrious man with his wife and family to the workhouse, and make it

impossible for him ever again to resume his place in the ranks of

independent labour. It disables him from saving enough to keep himself in

his old age, and thus makes him either an additional burden on his children

or a charge upon the ratepayers. If bad enough, it permanently reduces his

bodily, mental, and moral efficiency, stunts his faculties, prevents the

full development of his children, and creates disease, vice, and crime in

himself and his descendants. The diseases, the temporary losses of

employment, and the fluctuations in income which, to a man of substantial

means, may never be, and cannot immediately be disastrous, often involve in

the case of the ordinary wage-earner, the complete destruction of

everything which makes life worth living. No one who seriously believes

that it is the duty of society to secure freedom of growth to every one of

its members can doubt that it is its duty to mitigate, so far as it is

able, those consequences of poverty which no degree of thrift, enterprise,

or fortitude can avert.

To this end the economic reforms of the new Liberalism have been directed.

The Labour Exchanges Act did not furnish work for all. It provided

facilities for obtaining work for all who sought for it. The workman is no

longer left to scramble about for fresh employment. He goes to a public

office, where he learns what posts are vacant, and is put in touch with

those who may be willing to employ him. No man can now complain that

because he cannot afford to travel in search of work, or to delay {330} for

more than a day or two before he finds it, he has suffered a permanent

deterioration in health or character. If this Act can eliminate the evils

of casual and irregular labour, it will have enormously increased

individual liberty for growth.[353] The Old Age Pensions Act removed from

the shoulders of working-class families what was to many an intolerable

burden. Before the Act came into force some thousands of men and women,

from no cause but the lapse of time, became incapable of supporting

themselves. The alternatives were the workhouse and the generosity of their

children. The first meant a loss of independence for themselves, the second

a fetter upon the freedom of their relations. In the absence of sickness

requiring hospital treatment, the pension of five shillings a week is

generally sufficient to maintain the dignity of the pensioner and the

efficiency of the children. The Workmen's Compensation Act, extending Mr.

Chamberlain's Acts of 1896 and 1900, insures the working people against

accident as the Old Age Pensions Act insures them against age, and the

Insurance Act against sickness and unemployment due to causes beyond their

control. So the Act providing for the feeding of necessitous children in

public schools aims at preventing the permanent deterioration of body and

character which is produced by inadequate nourishment in the early years of

life. So the Wage Boards Act and the Miners' Minimum Wage Act established

machinery for fixing a wage in certain employments which, having regard to

the circumstances of each trade, would insure that the wage-earner should

enjoy a reasonable standard of health and comfort. All these measures are

based upon the same principle, that absolute liberty of the individual

meant the degradation, if not the destruction, of many individuals who were

poor. There can be no equal chance of growth so long as accidents which

cannot be averted, by any effort of the individual, may permanently impair

his natural capacity. Social reform is {331} justified as a national army

is justified. It is a system of common organization for the purpose of

common protection. What Mr. Churchill said of insurance may be said of all

these economic projects: "I think it is our duty to use the strength and

the resources of the State to arrest the ghastly waste, not merely of human

happiness, but of national health and strength, which follows when a

working man's home, which has taken him years to get together, is broken up

and scattered through a long spell of unemployment, or when, through the

death, the sickness, or the invalidity of the bread-winner, the frail boat

in which the fortunes of the family are embarked founders, and the women

and children are left to struggle helplessly on the dark waters of a

friendless world."[354] The conception of society is no longer that of an

extended procession, the strongest pushing on to the full limit of their

powers, while the country to the rear is strewn with the sick and injured.

It is that of a compact army, every man of which has to be brought in, with

a sufficient organization of waggons and ambulances to pick up all the

stragglers.

This elaboration of the system of protection is not inconsistent with such

competition as is necessary for the development of character, and for the

production of the wealth which is so distributed among the members of

society. It is not Socialism. It is not a system of doles. It removes only

some of the risks of failure, and only those which are beyond individual

control. No man is made less thrifty because at the age of seventy he will

receive five shillings a week. No man works the better for knowing that if

he is ever ill for a month he and his family will never be free again, or

will work the worse for knowing that his home will be kept together until

he is able once more to support it by his own exertions. No woman gets any

virtue out of working fifteen hours a day for seven days a week, with the

knowledge that even then she will not earn enough to keep herself in food

and clothing without recourse to charity or prostitution, and her character

will not be deteriorated when a {332} level is fixed below which her wages

cannot fall. The benefit of competition remains. The disasters inevitably

attendant on it are averted. The poorer people no longer wrestle on the

brink of an unfenced precipice. "I do not want to see impaired the vigour

of competition, but we can do much to mitigate the consequences of failure.

We want to draw a line below which we will not allow persons to live and

labour, yet above which they may compete with all the strength of their

manhood. We want to have free competition upwards; we decline to allow free

competition to run downwards. We do not want to pull down the structures of

science and civilization, but to spread a net over the abyss."[355] "It is

clear that the unlimited and uncontrolled struggle of wages spells anarchy

almost as painful in its effects as the unlimited and uncontrolled

competition of physical force in our streets and highways. What is to be

the remedy? What, using the expression in its broadest sense, appears to be

the solution--whether through Parliament, local boards, or an independent

Commission--to which we are heading? A Plimsoll line for labour as well as

for ships; a line above which the ship is not to sink with its burden when

it puts out to sea; a line to limit with human lives on land as with those

'who go down to the sea in great ships,' the extent of peril and suffering

to which the worker is to be liable. Not to abolish competition any more

than competition has been abolished in ships. Competition will always be

powerful enough. But to limit the strife--to fix a ring round the

prize-fight--to protect the vital parts from the blows of the

combatants."[356] These statements reconcile the old individualism with the

new. Individual growth can only take place in competition. But it is not

necessary that failure in competition should be mortal. The struggle of

competition is to go on. But it is not to go on to the death. Economic

society is to be converted into a gigantic Trade Union,[357] based upon the

{333} belief that the highest good of the individual can only be secured in

co-operation with his fellows, and limiting his freedom only in so far as

it is necessary to secure freedom to his associates.

It is obvious that this new economic Liberalism has borrowed largely from

Socialism, and it has one character in common with Protection. Once we

admit that it is right for the State to interfere with economic freedom, we

have advanced one step on the road which leads towards the nationalization

of industry and towards the regulation of production by tariffs. The

difference between Social Reform and Tariff Reform is nevertheless clear.

Social Reform operates directly, only where it is needed, and without

substantially interfering with any individual's enjoyment of life. Tariff

Reform, if it can destroy poverty at all, can only destroy it indirectly by

giving higher profits to the employer, who may or may not share his

increased gains with his workpeople. Its operation is also entirely

capricious, it can only apply to industries which suffer from foreign

competition, and cannot touch those many underpaid forms of employment in

which such competition cannot or does not in fact exist. Finally, as it can

only operate by raising prices, it can only give benefits to one class of

labour by imposing burdens upon another. It has only one certainty, the

increase of prices, with the consequent increase of profits and rents. The

benefits to be obtained from it by the poor are vague, must be confined to

one section only, and cannot be got by that except at the cost of those

which are differently situated.

The resemblance between Social Reform and Socialism is much more real. The

sympathies and the objects of the two are not dissimilar, though their

practical proposals are essentially different. Socialism, so far as it is

ever expressed in definite terms, makes a logical application of a general

formula. Private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and

exchange means a combination of the owners of capital against the

wage-earners to the injury of the class which is economically the weaker of

the two. Therefore society as a whole must take possession of industrial

capital, production for use must be substituted for {334} production for

profit, work at a good wage must be guaranteed to every one who asks for

it, and the fair distribution of wealth among the workers must be regarded

as of more primary importance than the quantity which is produced.

Socialists differ widely about methods and the rapidity with which the

economic change is to be effected. Generally, the modern Socialist of the

Fabian type prefers a gradual evolution to the cruder appropriations of

early thinkers, he is prepared to exempt certain industries from his

scheme, and the equal distribution of rewards has gone the way of the class

war and community of goods. But all agree that, sooner or later, society,

as politically organized in the form of the State, shall produce and

distribute or control the production and distribution of wealth according

to ethical principles. The Liberal is less universal in his proposals. He

does not object to the municipalization, or even nationalization, of

mechanical monopolies, of industries which in fact do not admit of

competition. Such industries as the supply of water, gas and electricity,

tramways and railways, are not in fact competitive, and efficiency is

probably as well maintained by aggrieved payers of rates and taxes as by

shareholders disappointed of their profits. But the Liberal is not disposed

to admit that similar conditions would produce similar results in

industries of a more speculative or hazardous character. Nor can he admit

that private ownership of capital necessarily involves the exploitation of

labour. In certain industries, notably the cotton industry of Lancashire,

he sees examples of the successful combination of individual enterprise in

management with minimum standards of life and wages fixed either by the

Factory Acts or by powerful Trade Unions, and he is not satisfied that the

enterprise would be as brilliant or the minimum standards as high if the

capital engaged were owned by the State.

In particular, the Liberal distrusts the bureaucratic system of management

which Socialism involves. The London School of Economics seems to him a

very good servant. He has no doubt that it would be a bad master. Even with

its disadvantages, the system which makes private gain at once the {335}

incentive to efficiency and its only possible test may be much superior to

that which leaves the determination of industrial policy to a sort of lay

hierarchy. An active and persecuting aristocracy will at least keep its

subjects alive. The dull and unimaginative methods of bureaucracy stifle

even when they are inspired by benevolence. Officialism is generally fatal

to new ideas, and apart from the reduction of wealth which would probably

follow the abolition of private profit, the officialization of mind which

would be diffused throughout society is a sufficiently deadly argument

against Socialism. It might even destroy individual life as completely as

did some of the religions of the East. This argument against Socialism is

to some extent an argument against Social Reform. Social Reform requires

the appointment of many officials. But the functions of such as have

already been appointed are confined to inspection, to advice, and to the

collection of money or information. We have had no experience of officials

engaged in the manufacture of goods for export, or in the conduct of the

shipping trade. Such experience as we have had of municipal enterprise has

only satisfied us of the capacity of officials who are controlled and

criticized by unofficial ratepayers, who have a personal and pecuniary

interest in the efficiency of the official. No Liberal Government has yet

proposed to extend official management to those many fields where success

depends upon the judicious calculation of risks. Until that proposal is

made there will always be a gulf between Liberals and Socialists, and a

distinction between the policy which limits the destructiveness of

competition for private gain and that which abolishes such competition

altogether.

A second objection which is urged against Social Reform is its cost; and

the charges on the public, required by Old Age Pensions, Insurance, and

Labour Exchanges, have afforded a good opportunity for contrasting the

greatly increased expenditure of Liberal Government with the demand of

Liberal Opposition for "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform." As the terms are

now understood, Retrenchment and Reform cannot go together. The new

Liberalism has been compelled to recognize that {336} economy and parsimony

are not synonymous expressions, and that the mere refusal to spend money

may in the end prove more costly than a judicious outlay in the present.

What is too generally ignored by the critics of this new policy is that, in

one way or another, all the service which is now being rendered by the

State has already been rendered by society. Since the reign of Elizabeth we

have admitted our duty to provide for the destitute, and the burden which

has not fallen upon the poor rates has been borne by private charity, by

public hospitals, and by the police. In public or private poor relief, in

the curing of disease, and in the punishment of crime we have long been

accustomed to pay for the consequences of poverty. The new Social Reforms

merely transfer these various duties to the national Exchequer. It is

impossible to compare figures of expenditure. But it is most probable that

ultimately the total weight of poverty will be considerably less than under

the old system. Prevention is better than cure. Relief used to be delayed

until some permanent degradation of body or character had taken place. It

is now applied while there is still a chance of restoring the unfortunate

to their old efficiency. The Old Age Pension directly relieves the rates by

keeping the pensioner out of the workhouse, or gives his family the

opportunity of a fuller life by releasing the money hitherto required for

his support. The Insurance Act should eventually abolish all that very

large proportion of pauperism which is produced by casual sickness, prevent

the deterioration which so often follows the temporary loss of work, and

maintain the average level of industrial efficiency at a higher level than

before. The Minimum Wage Acts impose a direct charge upon industry. It is

possible that some trades may be extinguished because they cannot bear the

charge. If that should be the event, it can only be because the trades in

question are at present parasitic: they do not support themselves, but suck

nourishment from society by way of outdoor relief, charity, petty larceny,

or prostitution. The cost to the community will here be made definite

instead of remaining unknown. But in most of the underpaid trades the Acts

will have the same effect as a powerful {337} Trade Union. So long as

Parliament abstains from fixing wages, and confines itself to the erection

of machinery for fixing them in accordance with the conditions of the

trade, Minimum Wage Acts merely create by law what Trade Unionism creates

by voluntary effort. The higher wages established under the Acts will do

what higher wages established under Trade Unionism have done. They will

mean increased efficiency, increased production of wealth, and increased

purchasing power. In this case, as in those of the Workmen's Compensation

Act and the Insurance Act, not only will a burden be transferred from one

part of the community to another, but it will in time be reduced in weight.

So the Act for feeding necessitous school-children, by preventing the

reduction of physical, mental, and moral strength in the present, will

prevent future expenditure in poor relief, hospitals, and police. The

survey which includes nothing but the legislative reforms themselves is

partial and deceptive. It is only when we realize that poverty is already

being relieved in a tardy, disorganized, and unscientific way that we can

see how the cost of the new reforms will be in fact a most wise economy of

national resources, and that by spending on prevention instead of on

restoration we will actually be saving money.

The philosophical argument against Social Reform which has most weight is

neither the argument from bureaucracy nor the argument from expense. It is

the argument which is more justly directed against Socialism, that by

helping individuals the State deprives them, in whole or in part, of the

disposition to help themselves, that they tend to rely more and more upon

the social organization and less upon their own strength. Everything in the

way of public assistance is thus regarded with suspicion. To feed

school-children is to weaken parental responsibility. To raise wages by

legislation is as demoralizing as to distribute doles. To offer a pension

of five shillings a week in old age is to discourage thrift in youth. It is

therefore better, in the end, that poverty should be allowed to run its

course than that a misdirected benevolence should demoralize {338} the

people. This argument, reproducing the logical individualism of the

Utilitarians, has been greatly strengthened by Darwinism. No less impartial

a man than Herbert Spencer has thus applied the theory of evolution to

political affairs. "The well-being of existing humanity, and the unfolding

of it into ... ultimate perfection, are both secured by the same

beneficent, though severe discipline to which the animate creation at large

is subject; a felicity-pursuing law which never swerves for the avoidance

of partial and temporary suffering. The poverty of the incapable, the

distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and

those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many in

shallows and in miseries, are the decree of a large, far-seeing

benevolence."[358] The conception, which makes of foreign politics an

immoral conflict between nations, is to make of domestic politics an

equally immoral conflict between individuals, in which justice and humanity

are to be set aside as inconsistent with the progress of the race. At first

sight it would appear that the whole of that progress up to the time of

Darwin had been along a wrong line. If there is one thing which most

distinguishes modern from ancient society, and society of any kind from the

disorganized existence of primitive man, it is the prevalence of the idea

that we are, in some measure, responsible for the condition of our

neighbours. The emotions and the reasoning faculties which have produced

moral inhibitions on our own desires, laws for the protection of the weak

against the strong, the machinery of private charity, and the public relief

of the poor, all these have been evolved with the other characteristics of

humanity as we know it. If the course of past development is any guide we

may be certain that unless we take steps to alter our conditions, we shall

certainly continue in the same course in the future. It would be at least

surprising that the salvation of the race should now be found to lie in

deliberate reaction, against the movement of countless ages towards the

stage of undisciplined human egoism which followed that of the anthropoid

apes. A doctrine so repugnant to what we {339} have been accustomed to

regard as our better feelings requires little examination to discover its

fallacies.

The evolutionary argument against Social Reform falls to the ground when it

is once admitted that the individuals in contemplation are individuals

organized in a society, and that it is only so long as they are so

organized that development, as we understand it, can take place. If mankind

were left to scramble for such good things as it could get without

co-operation, the race would no doubt, in course of time, develop such

characteristics as that competition would allow to survive. But if we erect

higher standards, and require, even from selfish motives, the moral,

intellectual, and physical benefits which only organization, culture, and

the communication of ideas will produce, the comparison between human

beings and the rest of the animate creation is useless for our purpose.

Some limitation of the struggle for existence is obviously needed, if we

are not to fall back to the level where only the brute qualities of

strength, swiftness, and cunning are of value. Once we admit the need of a

social organization, which involves a very considerable check on mechanical

evolution by the survival of the fittest, the only controversy is about the

extent and character of the limits on competition, and not about their

existence. The beasts, birds, and fishes which are unfit for their

environment, and have not those qualities which make for survival, perish

by disease or are destroyed by their enemies. The man generally remains a

drag on the community. What is the community to do with him? The lethal

chamber being regarded as impossible, it must keep him in hospital, in

prison, in the workhouse, or in a charitable institution, and if he is not

thus maintained he will maintain himself by crime or beggary. Throughout

his life he remains a parasite upon his fellows. It is always therefore the

most economical course, if it be possible, to alter his environment, so

that he may have the chance of supporting himself.

But the argument for Social Reform is not based only on the possibility of

altering environment so that individuals who are unfit for it may maintain

themselves so long as they live. Spencer was reasoning away from the facts.

It is not only the incapable {340} who are poor. It is not only the

imprudent who are overcome by distresses. It is not only the idle who

starve. Bad conditions of life destroy not only the inefficient, but the

efficient, and many of those whom they do not kill they maim. He is a very

dull and stupid observer who supposes that all the slovenly, debauched, and

criminal men and women whom he sees around him are what they are because of

their innate qualities, or that all those who die of their own dirt,

debauchery, and criminality are any worse. They were not all born criminals

whom our great-grandfathers hung or transported for petty larceny, nor are

they all born inefficients whom some modern eugenists would segregate or

sterilize. A bad environment does not merely destroy the inefficient, it

manufactures them; and it is as reasonable to oppose social reform, because

it prevents the elimination of the unfit, as it would be to defend

excessive eating and drinking, or sitting in wet clothes. Unhealthy living

would no doubt destroy people with weak stomachs and livers, and a tendency

to chalky deposits in the joints. But for every one who perished in this

struggle with environment there would be ten who survived. Bad housing and

bad wages produce the same results as bad habits. Of all the slum children

who die of their surroundings, a large number would have lived to become

valuable citizens if they had had better conditions of life in their early

years. An ill-fed girl becomes the mother of weakly children. Inadequate

housing produces disease, incest, and prostitution, besides killing a few

undesirable infants. Casual labour kills only after it has given birth to

an incalculable amount of laziness, vice, and mental disorder. Everywhere

the good is kept back, even if some of the bad is prevented from

development. The slum creates what the slum destroys, and it discharges

upon the community much that it does not destroy. The elimination of the

unfit is uncertain and capricious. The deterioration of the fit is certain

and remorseless. Social Reform, if it is nothing else, is thus the only

possible means of discovering which individuals are fit in the human sense.

It is only when all have a chance of survival that we can distinguish the

naturally inefficient from the accidentally inefficient. The {341} reformer

need have no fear that his generous impulses are signs of an anti-social

sentimentalism. He is in fact only Evolution conscious of itself. He marks

a point in the great course of life, at which the cultivation of

individuals ceases to be careless and wasteful, and becomes deliberate and

economical, adapting its own environment to the achievement of its ideals.

When the necessity for Social Reform is admitted, the provision for its

cost affords another opportunity for the conflict of Liberalism and

Toryism. The Budget of 1909, which tempted a plutocratic House of Lords

into a rashness which an aristocratic House of Lords had never ventured to

display, was a clear expression of the new Liberal principles. Part of that

Budget was merely an extension of the Finance Act of 1894. Another part was

entirely new. It carried the principle of graduation to a further point,

both in income tax and in death duties, and it imposed for the first time a

tax upon the natural monopoly of land. To those who understand the meaning

of Social Reform, the necessity of the Budget is clear. Money must be found

for the purpose of relieving poverty. To raise it by a general taxation of

rich and poor would be to lay a new burden upon the poor in order to remove

an old burden, to increase by one act the poverty which the other was

intended to diminish. Social Reform financed by Protection is an economic

contradiction. The money required to improve the condition of the poor must

be taken from the rich, if it is to be of any practical use. The heaviest

of the new taxes were therefore placed, according to a graduated scale,

upon the payers of income tax, the inheritors of large estates, and the

recipients of unearned increments from land. These taxes had one principle

in common. They were based, not upon the enjoyment of property, but the

method of its acquisition. Those who drew incomes from permanent

investments were taxed more heavily than those whose prosperity depended

upon their personal exertions, and the owners of property, which was a

natural monopoly and grew in value without any effort of their own, were

compelled to pay charges, from which the owners of property of other kinds

were exempted. Other taxes were imposed upon {342} the luxuries of the

working classes. These would in any case be paid by those who could afford

them, and would not deprive a poor man of anything which was a real

necessity of life.

The arguments against the Budget were characteristic of their plutocratic

origin. The class which had used Imperialist sentiment in the interest of

its foreign investments, and had proposed at once to finance its military

exploits and to increase its wealth by taxation of the common people,

naturally resented this increase of its own fiscal burdens. The super-tax

on incomes of more than L5,000 a year was described as a penalty upon

thrift and enterprise, and it was urged with most patriotic zeal that these

appropriations of surplus wealth would produce unemployment. The answer to

the first argument is that incomes and accumulations of a size to be

affected by the new taxes are not produced by thrift, in any real sense of

the word, nor will the enterprise which produces them be checked by such

trifling deductions. Enterprise was as vigorous and successful fifty years

ago, when L10,000 a year was a very large income, as it is now, when

incomes of L50,000 and L100,000, are almost as common. A certain definite

inducement is required to stimulate a man to the utmost use of his capacity

for producing wealth. Beyond that limit all that he earns is sheer waste,

and uneconomic remuneration which evokes no further effort. Upon that

surplus, and upon that only, do the new taxes operate. The argument from

unemployment is more specious. It is that, deprived of the money required

for income tax and death duties, the more prosperous citizens will be

compelled to dismiss some of their servants. During the discussion of the

Budget, the general public learnt, for the first time, that those wealthy

persons who spent money on horses and dogs, motor-cars, jewellery, and

china, shooting-boxes, racing stables, and rock-gardens were animated by no

selfish love of their own ease and comfort, but by a disinterested passion

for providing remunerative labour for the common people. The argument was

partial. It dealt only with the taxes of the Budget, and ignored the

alternative taxes of Tariff Reform. The problem was to raise money.

Whatever form the taxation took, it must {343} deprive the taxpayer of his

power of spending money and employing labour. If L1,000 was paid by a man

with L20,000 a year, his power to employ motormen and gardeners, jockeys,

gamekeepers, and dealers in pictures and jewellery was reduced by precisely

that amount. But if the same sum is paid by a thousand cotton operatives,

their power to employ butchers, bakers, tailors, and bootmakers is equally

reduced. The reduction of employment is precisely the same in each case,

whether the L1,000 is taxed out of one rich man or out of a thousand poor

men. But there is an infinite difference in the other consequences of the

two systems of taxation. The rich man paying the L1,000 is not deprived of

anything which contributes to his present efficiency, to his future

security, or to his reasonable enjoyment of life.[359] The poor men paying

the same sum may suffer in any one of the three ways. A charge of sixpence

a week upon an artisan who earns twenty-five shillings a week may be the

difference between sufficiency and insufficiency. A charge of L1,000 a year

upon the head of a family who earns, or receives without earning, L20,000 a

year leaves him with everything which could be required for the fullest

development of all his natural capacities. Taxation of poverty cripples

life. Taxation of wealth does not. The new Liberalism, seeking to extend

life, must draw upon abundance and superfluity.

In their economic proposals the Liberal Governments since 1906 have thus

advanced along the old line towards the more complete emancipation of the

individual. If they have interfered with liberty, they have interfered with

liberty on one side only to enlarge it on another, and the money required

for reform has been so provided as to reduce by as little as possible

individual capacity for growth. Whatever the particular defects of these

{344} social reforms may be, their general character has been as Liberal as

that of the reforms of 1832 and 1868. In other matters they have met with

varied success. Their repayment of debt and their refusal to continue the

wasteful policy of borrowing for the construction of works have followed

the best traditions of Peel and Gladstone, though Mr. Lloyd George's

treatment of the surplus of 1912 affords a vicious precedent for less

economical successors. The Irish University Act, the Home Rule Bill, and

the Welsh Disestablishment Bill are partly recognitions of the principle of

nationality, concessions to the demand that matters of local concern shall

be regulated by local opinion. They also express the other Liberal

principle, that sects shall be equal in the State. Recent demonstrations in

Ulster, the persecution of Catholic and Liberal workmen in the shipyards of

Belfast, and speeches which reveal a ferocity of religious bigotry equal to

that of the seventeenth century, have confirmed rather than weakened

Liberal belief in Home Rule. So long as one section of Irish society looks

to England as the successor of an ancient enemy, and the other looks to her

as a protector against the descendants of those whom their fathers kept

beneath their heel, so long will incompatibility of temper exist. As soon

as possible Liberals intend to put the inhabitants of Ireland in such a

position that, ceasing to batten upon the exhumed remains of mediaeval

controversies, they may discover, in the course of managing their joint

affairs, that they are only Irishmen after all. The various Education Bills

seem to have only partially expressed Liberal principles. It is impossible,

in a country where sharply divided sects exist side by side, to establish a

system which shall completely satisfy any party. Denominationalists and

undenominationalists must agree upon mutual concessions. No practical

hardship is done where denominational schools, with teachers subjected to

denominational tests, are confined to the instruction of children whose

parents approve of such a system. The demand of some Nonconformists, that

they should not be compelled to pay for denominational teaching, cannot be

recognized unless the demand of some Churchmen and all Catholics, {345}

that they should not be compelled to pay for undenominational teaching, is

also recognized. Whatever logical answer there may be to the second, a

Liberal State, accepting the equality of all sects as its first principle,

must give them precisely the same liberty as the first. If a Churchman is

not to count for more than a Dissenter, a Dissenter is not to count for

more than a Churchman. Where the denominationalist case passes from a

reasonable request for justice to the assertion of an insolent and

intolerable claim to control the opinions of others is when it requires

that any school, which was founded for denominational purposes, shall be

maintained by public money as a denominational school, with denominational

teachers, for the instruction of Nonconformist children. No Liberal can

have regard to this claim, not to teach their own opinions to their own

children, but to teach their own opinions to other people's children.

Nothing can justify this part of the denominationalist case, which would

not also justify a grant from the national Exchequer to the Church of

England for a mission to convert Dissenters. So far as the recent proposals

tend to overthrow this denominational control of schools to which the

children of Nonconformist parents are compelled by circumstances to go,

they are as purely Liberal as the repeal of the Test Act or the abolition

of the Church monopoly of the Universities.

In two matters of vital importance the Liberal Governments have

conspicuously failed to express Liberal principles. The right of the

individual to control his own government was recognized, with equal courage

and wisdom, when the conquered Dutch Republics, in the face of Tory

opposition, received the grant of responsible government under the Crown.

The contest with the House of Lords in 1910 re-established the control of

government elected by representatives, and the subordination of the

hereditary and irresponsible House to that which the people could choose

for themselves. The payment of Members has somewhat enlarged the field of

choice, though the expense of an election is still an almost impassable

obstacle to a {346} poor man. The Plural Voting Bill, passed through the

Commons and rejected by the Lords, was an attempt of the same sort to give

equal political rights to individuals, irrespective of the amount of their

property, and the Franchise Bill of 1912 proposed to abolish the property

qualification, or limitation, altogether. The extension of political

freedom in South Africa and the defeat of the House of Lords in its attempt

to prevent the application of the new economic principles of Liberalism

represented real conflicts in matters of vital importance. The other

measures were comparatively trifling, and the proposal to enfranchise all

adult men has less popular enthusiasm behind it than any previous Reform

Bill which was introduced by a Government. The only existing problem which

involves the struggle between essential Liberalism and essential Toryism is

that of Woman Suffrage. It is here, more than in any other field of

domestic policy, that the Government have failed to discover and to pursue

the Liberal course.

It is not the purpose of the writer to describe in detail a course of

events which has been so interesting to the student of reforming

fanaticism, unimaginative administration, and political chicanery. The

levity with which Members of Parliament have given pledges which they never

meant to perform, and have prepared to break pledges given openly, in the

face of all circumstances, existing, probable, and possible, may seem

ludicrous or contemptible according to the disposition of those who watch

the working of the political machine.[360] The writer has little to say

about this subject in this place. He is now only concerned to place the

demand for the enfranchisement of women in relation {347} with other

expressions of the Liberal habit of mind. The arguments which support Woman

Suffrage are those which have supported every proposal for the

enfranchisement of men. Women claim now to be treated in political society

as Dissenters claimed to be treated in 1828, and Catholics in 1829, and the

middle class in 1832. They decline to remain any longer at the disposition

of governors over whom they have no control. They desire to enforce their

opinions, not merely as a sex, for the removal of such political

disabilities as are imposed upon them on account of their sex, but as

separate and distinct individuals, each of whom has the same interest in

questions of general politics as a man. Women have peculiar grievances in

marriage laws, in the law dealing with sexual vice and crime, in the

payment of women in the Civil Service, and in threatened legislation for

excluding married women from work in factories. But their peculiar

grievances are no more to them than those which they share with men. They

pay taxes, their conditions of labour are regulated by the State, their

wages may be affected, favourably or adversely, by legislation, questions

of peace and war are decided to their benefit or detriment, in almost every

action of Government the individual woman is involved to precisely the same

extent as the individual man. It is not to them a question of men imposing

oppressive taxes upon women, it is a question of a legislature imposing

taxes upon individuals. The human being who controls his own fortunes and

takes all the chance of life in society is to them no different from any

other human being in the same situation. To confer political control upon

one class of such human beings and to deny it to the other is to establish

one of those artificial distinctions in social value which are of the

essence of Toryism, and produce the private egoism in the superior and the

incomplete development of the inferior which have been already described.

The arguments against Woman Suffrage are the usual arguments of Toryism.

The franchise is not a right, but a privilege, to be conferred by a

disposing class upon such persons as it selects. Women are, from physical

causes, periodically incapable of taking a rational interest in public

affairs. To enfranchise women will {348} distract them from their proper

duties of maternity and the management of the home. It will produce

dissension between husband and wife. It will lead to the admission of women

to the professions, to Parliament, and to public offices. To those who have

followed the course of Liberalism, as described in these pages, the

arguments will appear familiar. The first is the general Tory assumption,

inconsistent with every Liberal proposal of every kind, that the individual

has no rights, except such as the State, or rather the governing class,

chooses to bestow upon him. The second, third, and fourth are the egoistic

arguments, which express the mind of a person who sees another always in

relation with himself. They assume that the other is completely defined in

terms of that relationship, and has outside its limits no character. All

the actions of the other are explained by abstract reasoning from that

assumption. Women are thus supposed to be involved entirely in their sex,

and while no man suggests that the demand of transport workers for higher

wages or the violence incident to a transport strike is an expression of

maleness, the demand of women for the franchise and the violence of

militant Suffragists are assumed to be the actions of spinsters

disappointed of maternity and of females impelled by perverted sexual

instincts.[361] The argument from maternity is one of those which imply

that the governed class must be confined, so far as artificial methods

permit, to those occupations which it can only perform in association with

the governors. Women's political fortunes must be regulated upon the

assumption that they ought to become mothers. Women are not to be free to

choose maternity out of all possible occupations, they must be driven to it

by the want of opportunity to do anything else. It is not a question of

what women think that they ought to do, but of what men think that they

ought to do. The individual is not to have the right to plan out her life

as she pleases. Maternity is her business, and men will so contrive the

State as to {349} discourage her from engaging in any other. In the same

way eighteenth-century fathers warned their daughters not to develop their

minds, lest the revelation of intellectual power should discourage suitors.

Literary education was withheld in the reign of George III for the same

reason that political education is withheld to-day, because it involves the

independent activity of the individual. The fourth argument is even more

crudely selfish than the third. Stated in plain terms, it means that if

women have votes they will tend to form political opinions of their own,

that these may differ from those of their husbands, and that as such a

discordance could not be tolerated, the home will be broken up. The husband

might be wrong. But the argument has nothing to do with the soundness of

his opinions. He is entitled to think for himself, and in order to maintain

his unquestioned despotism of political judgment the wife is to be deprived

of the encouragement to thinking for herself. Another argument, that the

natives of India will refuse to submit to government by a race which has

enfranchised its women, is a characteristic example of the reaction of

Imperialism upon domestic liberty. The constitution of the United Kingdom

is to be determined, not by the needs of its inhabitants, but by the wishes

of a race whom they have conquered. The development of the individual is

subordinated to the use which the disposing class wishes to make of her.

Even if it were true that the Indian peoples would object to the

enfranchisement of English women, an assertion which has never been

supported by any evidence, the success of the argument would be the most

astonishing example of Toryism in English history. No Englishman would

suggest, after the loss of the American Colonies, that one self-governing

community of white men within the Empire should dictate to another how its

government should be constituted. But it carries the opposite doctrine of

interference in local affairs to a frantic extremity, to say that a

conquered race shall be allowed to dictate the constitution of the

government of the conquerors. If this argument prevails, and the ill temper

of the Indian peoples is allowed to decide the form of our political {350}

system, our eighteenth-century exploitation of them will be amply avenged.

The last argument, that enfranchisement will only be a step towards other

measures of emancipation, is another characteristic expression of Toryism.

Private depreciation will cease, as soon as political depreciation is

abolished. How can a Liberal man dictate to a woman how she shall exert

herself in society? There is no motive, other than that of selfish

interest, the desire to retain the most honourable and profitable

occupations for the dominant sex, which can impel a man to the use of this

argument. It is precisely that which most roused Burke to the support of

the Catholics. It was used forty years ago against the women who wished to

practise medicine, and Sophia Jex-Blake was covered with insult, and even

pelted with mud, for no other reason than that she tried to obtain

admission to the medical schools of Edinburgh. It is now admitted that if a

woman has the natural capacities which enable her to practise medicine mere

artificial restrictions shall not stand in her way. When the medical

profession is opened, how can any other logically be kept closed? When the

individual can satisfy the tests which are imposed at the entrance, whether

they are tests by examination or tests by election, why should she be

excluded because she possesses the quality of sex, which has nothing to do

with those tests? This is simply to brand women, who vary infinitely among

themselves, with a class mark, and to decide the fortunes of each

individual by some general assumption which may be true in other cases and

false in hers. No one can use this argument, who is not steeped in those

ideas of domination and disposition, which once operated in the same way to

prevent the free development of Catholics and Dissenters. The case against

Woman Suffrage varies little from the case against every other Liberal

movement, and some of the arguments are literally the same as the arguments

against the Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1884. Fundamentally the case is

pure Toryism.[362]

{351}

In 1906 the movement in favour of Woman Suffrage, neglected during the

Imperialist reaction, became once more prominent. Various causes

contributed to produce this revival. Like all the other movements for

enlarging the opportunities of women, it partook of the fortunes of the

general movement of Liberalism. In the history of English women the periods

of emancipation have always been those of Liberal ascendancy, and the

geographical and social divisions between Liberalism and Toryism have

always been substantially the same as those between Feminism and

Anti-Feminism.[363] The manufacturing districts of the North are Liberal

and Feminist. The agricultural districts of the South are Tory and

Anti-Feminist. The Feminist movement is strong among the better sort of

artisans and those of the middle class who depend upon their own exertions.

It is weak among the country gentry and those whom accumulated wealth

enables to live a parasitic or partly parasitic existence. The so-called

Liberal who opposes the emancipation of women finds himself allied with his

hereditary political enemies. Liberalism must be universal. The immediate

causes of the new agitation for Woman Suffrage were three. The first was

the {352} economic condition of working women, upon whom the low wages,

long hours, and unhealthy surroundings, which are described by the general

term of "sweating," pressed with far greater force than upon men. The

second was the general improvement in feminine education, not only by the

improvement of schools and colleges for women of the middle class and the

public education of women of the working class, but by the development of

women's organizations. Bodies like the Women's Liberal Federation, a purely

political association, the National Union of Women Workers, an association

of middle-class women for the study and improvement of women's labour of

all sorts, the Women's Co-operative Guild, an association of working women,

the various Women's Trade Unions, associations of women for the protection

of their industrial interests, all these bodies, founded in the twenty-five

years preceding the Liberal victory, had broadened and deepened the minds

of women, extended their knowledge of affairs, increased their practical

capacity, and given them that interest in association for the management of

common concerns which is the basis of all political movements. In

particular, their attention had been directed to foreign countries like the

United States, Australia, and Norway, where women had recently been

enfranchised, and more than one international association linked up the

English movement with the rest of the universal progress of women. But the

most influential of all the causes of the new strength of the agitation was

the increased knowledge of physical facts and the consequences of sexual

vice. The development of sick nursing since Florence Nightingale, the

experience of work among prostitutes since Josephine Butler, and the study

of medicine since Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake, had

revealed to an increasing number of women the dreadful consequences of a

moral standard which indulged men and degraded women. Prostitution appears

to the Suffragist to be a direct consequence of the political supremacy of

one sex over the other, to be the result of that encouragement of egoism

which always follows the disposition of the political affairs of one class

by another. There are in the United Kingdom at the {353} present day not

less than one hundred thousand women who are kept, through no desire of

their own, for no other purpose than that of the destruction of their

bodies and souls for the gratification of their political superiors. In

1899 Englishmen went to war, as they supposed, to rescue some of their

countrymen from oppressive taxation and the abuse of the machinery of

justice. The Suffragists since 1906 have been conducting a political

agitation of a milder sort, as they suppose, to rescue some of their

fellow-creatures from an infinitely more dreadful fate. Those who require

an explanation of their earnestness, or an excuse for their extravagance,

will find it in their belief that social degradation is the inevitable

consequence of political inferiority. The White Slave Traffic Act of 1913,

flung by Parliament as a sop to womanhood in revolt, merely touches the

surface of the problem. The whole system of sexual ethics is put in issue

by the Woman Suffrage movement.[364]

The failure of the Government and their followers to deal liberally with

this question has been an interesting revelation of the incompleteness of

self-styled Liberalism, and of the power of the party machine to subdue

independent thinking to the convenience of Ministers with stereotyped

minds. The majority of members of the Liberal party, in the Cabinet and

elsewhere, have acknowledged the justice of the demand, even though its

sudden violence has taken them by surprise. A minority, which unhappily

includes Mr. Asquith, have displayed a Toryism, in matters of sex, as

complete as that of Castlereagh. It has been particularly unfortunate for

the credit of the Liberal party that its leader at such a critical moment

should be a man of little imagination. It is the large imagination, ever

ranging beyond the bounds of the practicable and the expedient, and

detecting in the obscurity of apparent chaos the currents of new social

forces, which distinguishes the greatest statesmen from those who are

merely {354} great. Peel had it, though in him it was often blind and

groping. Disraeli had it, though spoilt by his mean and tawdry ideals.

Gladstone had it, in full measure, and so, with less practical gifts, had

Campbell-Bannerman. The mantle of leadership descended in 1908 upon the

shoulders of a man who had all the qualities of a great leader except the

greatest of all; and Mr. Asquith's inability to see the rightness of the

women's movement has brought his party into great difficulty and greater

discredit. In spite of his own public promise to adopt the opinion of the

House of Commons, even if it be contrary to his own, a perverted sense of

loyalty has caused many of his followers to find in his feelings a reason

for the violation of their own express and public pledges. This dullness of

vision in Ministers has been severely blamed. But it is not for the want of

imagination which disables them from understanding the problem that they

are to be condemned. The historian who wastes his indignation on such

natural incapacities will have little to spare for the graver political

vices. The blameworthiness of the Liberal party and the Government lies in

their mismanagement of the disorder which was produced by their refusal to

redress grievances. The writer has nothing to say in defence of the recent

actions of the militant Suffragists. The earliest breaches of the law

produced no substantial injury to anybody but the women themselves. Those

of the last twelve months have in some cases been as wicked as they have in

all cases been foolish. But however arrogant, reckless, and unscrupulous

the militant movement may now have become, it was in origin as

disinterested and as remorseless in its self-sacrifice as any political

movement in history, and its corruption is due no more to the native

ill-disposition of the women than to the folly of the Government and its

supporters.[365]

{355}

However that may be, the treatment of the militant Suffrage movement since

the death of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has been in the very temper of

the Toryism of the French Revolution. Trifling disorders, springing from

political discontent, have been treated as serious crimes, and people who

offended, not out of private malice or greed, but out of a desire to

improve the conditions of society, have been subjected to harsh and

degrading punishments. It has always been the contention of Liberals in

opposition that a distinction should be drawn between criminals whose

motives are political and criminals whose motives are personal, between

those who break the law for private and anti-social ends and those who

break it for ends which they honestly believe represent the advantage of

their fellow-creatures. This distinction, obvious to the moralist, is

expressed in the legislation of almost every other civilized state, as well

as in that Act of Parliament which provides that a seditious libeller shall

be treated in prison, not as a common offender, but as a first-class

misdemeanant. The same ethical distinction impelled the Whigs to oppose

Tory methods of repression during the French War, and was the basis of all

modern Liberal attacks on Tory methods in Ireland. Liberals have always

recognized that the maintenance of order is only a condition of the redress

of grievances, and that those who are impatient for redress are to be

restrained only and not to be injured. If there is one principle of

administration more distinctively Liberal than any other, it is that

wrongful action from right motives requires delicate handling, and that

even if it must be punished, the motives which produce it must be

destroyed, not by brutality, but by removal of the abuse which has created

them. What the Government did with the militant Suffrage movement was to

violate this essentially Liberal principle, and while they refused to

remove the cause of discontent, they repressed its early and trifling

symptoms with a severity which only dangerous crime could have

deserved.[366] The {356} Government in fact did what Tory Governments have

always done. They looked, not to the people concerned, to find out what

they were, and why they acted as they did, but to the class brand which

custom had placed upon them. They thought they were dealing with women,

when in fact they were only dealing with human beings. They assumed that

the disorder was due to something peculiar to the sex, and not to a state

of mind which was common to men and women alike. Their formula was not the

general political formula, "Disorder springs from grievances," but some

hasty deduction from inaccurate assumptions about the physical constitution

of women. They thought that they were dealing, not with political

discontent, but with sexual aberration, and they sought for explanations,

not in the history of Reform, Chartism, and Fenianism, but in medical

treatises on the diseases of women.[367] They did not reflect that this

revolt of women did not differ in any essential from previous revolts of

men, or that as it sprang from similar causes it could be cured by the same

remedies. When Ministers ought to have been giving facilities to a Woman

Suffrage Bill, they were contriving means of avoiding vitriol, and based

their policy upon speculations about erotic mania when they should have

thought of nothing but common political principles. This sexuality of mind,

exactly reproducing the mental habit of eighteenth-century Toryism,

determined their fatal course of action.

Ministers could not reasonably have been required to introduce a Government

Bill for the enfranchisement of women. The Cabinet had not been formed on

that basis, and no Anti-Suffrage {357} Minister could be compelled to

submit his judgment to that of his colleagues. But there has not been, at

any time since 1906, any reason why facilities should not have been given

for the passing of a private members' Bill. So long as the Government

refused to help the women, and refused to allow private members to help

them, even while they continued to inflict degrading forms of punishment,

so long must their administration increase instead of diminish discontent.

Facilities for the private Bill were refused year after year, until the

militant women and their sympathizers had become convinced of the

insincerity of the Government, and when at last the concession was obtained

it was robbed of all value by the recollection of previous quibbling and

evasion. In the meantime punishment had failed to do anything but poison

the temper of agitation. Imprisonment in the third division among common

felons was at first imposed upon women who had been guilty only of

technical offences. When the women were roused to demand privileged

treatment in the second division, the Government advanced to granting

ordinary treatment in the second division. When the demand became a demand

for imprisonment in the first division, the Government consented to

privileged treatment in the second division. When the women refused to

submit to any imprisonment at all, and prepared to starve rather than

remain in jail, the Government made a partial surrender, and offered the

leaders the first division, while it kept their followers, the tools and

instruments of their conspiracy, in the second. Each stage of the disease

has been conscientiously treated with those remedies which would have cured

it at the preceding stage, and always without any result, except to

increase the contempt with which the offenders regarded the Government.

Concessions, which should have been made boldly and generously, have been

made grudgingly and parsimoniously, and where prompt and spontaneous action

would have been effective, this tardy and reluctant yielding to pressure

has produced no good at all.

The folly of the Government has not been confined to their neglect. In two

matters they have been guilty of positive action, {358} for which they

cannot escape heavy censure. The first was the adoption of the policy of

feeding by force those women who starved rather than submit to degrading

conditions of imprisonment. The second was Mr. Churchill's refusal to

inquire into the charges which were brought against the police in

connection with one of the women's deputations. The writer will not attempt

to argue the abstract merits of the operation of forcible feeding. He has

read most of the public and private proofs that among criminals, lunatics,

and dyspeptics it is a harmless process. They appear to him to have nothing

to do with the Government's adoption of it in the case of people who were

neither of bad character nor of unsound mind, and who were not only

unwilling patients, but were already inspired by a profound resentment

against their political superiors. It is not the business of a statesman to

consider how his actions would affect other persons in other conditions. It

is his business to consider only what is their effect upon the particular

individuals with whom he has to deal at the particular moment. Tried by

this test, the Government's forcible feeding was of almost incredible

stupidity. It is clear that in the case of the militant women it produced

grave physical and mental injuries, in many cases of a permanent kind.[368]

Of its political consequences the writer can speak from personal knowledge.

It exasperated the temper of the agitation to an infinitely greater degree,

and brought us, in 1909, from the breaking of a few panes of glass to the

brink of assassination. The concession of privileged treatment which was

wrested from Mr. Churchill in 1910 at once allayed this dangerous spirit,

but it was at once revived in 1912, when Mr. McKenna, defying all

experience, resumed the stupid and brutal policy of his predecessor. It is

of course argued that the Government cannot enforce the law unless it

adopts this course. Are we to release dangerous criminals because they

refuse food? The {359} answer to this is simply that if the Government had

been wise in the past they would have had no such difficulty to encounter

in the present. When forcible feeding was first employed, hardly a single

assault, even of the most trivial character, had been committed, and there

had only been a few isolated cases of the breaking of windows. If

concessions had been freely granted then, crime would not have become so

frequent or so dangerous now. The Government, having adopted harsh methods

at the beginning, are impelled to use harsher methods now. They have been

occupied with great diligence in turning enthusiasts into fanatics, and

fanatics into criminals, and they are now faced with dangers and

difficulties which could once have been prevented by the use of tact and

discretion. Five years ago they might have disarmed their rebellious

subjects by giving a week of Parliamentary time for the study of their

grievance. To-day, they can only subdue them by starvation or hanging. They

will get little credit from posterity either for humanity or for wisdom.

The episode of Parliament Square was as ugly an affair as Mitchelstown or

Peterloo. On the 18th November, 1910, the militant organization known as

the Social and Political Union sent a numerous body of women to present a

memorial to the Prime Minister. Mr. Asquith, whose views had been

repeatedly published, declined to receive the deputation, it was turned

back by the police, and many women were arrested. Women, under similar

circumstances, had been more than once maltreated by the mob. On this

occasion it was alleged that brutality was displayed by the police as well

as by the populace. In more than twenty cases specific charges of indecent

assault were made. Many of the women concerned are known to the writer,

personally or by reputation, and however strongly he may disagree with

their general policy, he has no doubt that they are incapable of

fabricating accusations of this sort. The police, against whom the charges

were made, were not those who had had to deal with previous deputations,

but had been brought in from rougher districts like Whitechapel. The case

against them was not {360} brought by the militant women, but by the

committee of Members of Parliament of all parties, which had been formed to

press forward the cause of Woman Suffrage in the House of Commons, and it

was with great reluctance that the women consented to give the committee

the information for which it asked. Mr. Ellis Griffith, a Liberal, and Lord

Robert Cecil, a Conservative, both lawyers of experience and reputation,

personally examined some of the women, and read the written statements of

the rest, and came to the conclusion that the complaints were made honestly

and deserved inquiry. In the face of this request Mr. Churchill behaved

precisely as Lord Grenville behaved in 1819, and Mr. Balfour in 1887. He

made no attempt to examine any witnesses against the police, and he

declared that the charges should be brought against individuals in a court

of law.[369] But while he refused to pronounce judgment on the constables,

he was eager to pronounce judgment on the women. He acted, not as an

impartial representative of the public in a dispute between officials and

private citizens, but as a champion of the officials. He threw all his

influence against the women, described their story as a fabrication, and

the Social and Political Union as "a copious fountain of mendacity." Mr.

Churchill's party followers will no doubt be content to accept his

judgment. Posterity cannot act so lightly. It is not to accept accusations

{361} against individual policemen to say that charges put forward under

such circumstances, and supported by such responsible and independent

authorities, must have had some foundation in fact. No impartial observer

can acquit either the police of misconduct, or the Home Secretary of a

gross and partisan abuse of the powers of his office. Lord Gladstone, who

began the maladministration of the law, could urge that he was taken by

surprise, and that he knew neither the character of the individual women,

nor the force of the movement which was behind them. Mr. McKenna, who

succeeded Mr. Churchill, and has developed the policy of harshness with a

caprice and a partiality which has enormously increased its ill effects,

may plead his natural incompetence in explanation of all his blunders. Mr.

Churchill has neither one excuse nor the other. He acted in cold-blood, and

he is too wise a man to be allowed to suggest that he did not know his

duty. His was a deliberate refusal to grant to his political opponents the

opportunity of obtaining a public endorsement of their complaints, and it

will always remain a blot upon the reputation of the Government. The memory

of this affair, added to the passionate resentment provoked by forcible

feeding, now prevents all chance of reconciliation. The loss of the

Franchise Bill of 1912, which no reasonable person believes to be the

result of deliberate dishonesty on the part of the Government, has only

completed the process of satisfying the militant women that there is no

good faith to be found in Parliament. The Government should have given full

facilities to the Private Members' Bills of 1910 and 1911. When they had

the opportunity, they refused to disarm the hostile party by concession,

and when they at last had the will, the opportunity was taken away. They

will now be faced by a conspiracy, involving danger, certainly to property,

and probably to life, less extensive and less excusable, but no less

determined than Irish Fenianism. They will suppress it with the approval of

the great majority of English men and women. But no acknowledgment of the

moral corruption which has now fallen upon the women will blind those who

have followed closely the varying fortunes of the Suffrage {362} movement

to the fact that that moral corruption is largely due to the gross

administrative blunders of the Government and the levity and moral

cowardice of Members of Parliament. Such clumsy folly in the management of

discontent has not been displayed in England since 1832.[370]

While the failure of the Liberal party in one important part of domestic

policy has thus been unquestionable and complete, it appears, so far as it

is possible to get an accurate sight of events, that they have also failed

in foreign policy. In India, the Liberalism of Lord Morley triumphed over

official tradition. The admission of natives of India to a greater share in

their own government was as much an expression of Liberalism as the

reversal of Lord Curzon's partition of Bengal, a preference of the national

idea over one of those mechanically efficient devices by which despotic

Governments continually increase their own difficulties. Outside India, the

management of external affairs has been less successful. The deportation of

Cole of Nairobi was an excellent example of the protection of native

populations against the arbitrary power of white colonists. But no effort

on the part of the British Government could guarantee the political rights

of black men under the new South African Constitution, and this and the

equally complete failure to secure freedom of movement and occupation for

coloured immigrants into the new Federation are disquieting evidence of the

conflict between the two Imperial principles of self-government for white

men and full opportunities of development for black and brown. These

failures could hardly have been avoided. The general failure of foreign

policy, so far as it is possible to speak with certainty, is due largely,

if not entirely, to our own fault.

{363}

The writer has already indicated, in the first chapter of this book, how

little he is disposed to lay down hard and fast rules for the conduct of

foreign policy. It is conceivable, in his view, that facts may subsequently

be disclosed which will satisfy Liberals of another generation that Sir

Edward Grey's abandonment of most of the principles of his Liberal

predecessors has been forced upon him, and that the speeches, in which he

has appeared to repudiate them, have been the utterances of diplomacy

rather than conviction.[371] Imperialism has not been a monopoly of Great

Britain. Russia in China and Persia, Japan in China, Austria in Bosnia and

Herzegovina, Italy in Tripoli, and France in Morocco, have in turn shown

their willingness to upset the established rules of international morality

in the pursuit of their own interests. In the almost universal

demoralization of foreign policy which has followed The Hague Peace

Conference of 1899, it has perhaps been impossible for a single statesman

to tread a straight path. When Sir Edward Grey failed to persuade the

Powers to take concerted action to prevent Austria's cynical appropriations

of 1908, the fault was unquestionably not his.[372] The selfish aims of his

associates prevented him from attaining his own object. But other

circumstances suggest that he has not had the will to act liberally, even

if he has had the opportunity. Before 1908 he had shown a personal

incapacity, which had nothing to do with the machinations of competing

diplomatists. The public execution and flogging of the villagers of

Denshawi in 1906, for an offence which barely amounted to manslaughter, and

was committed under extreme provocation, was more in the Russian than in

the English temper. Here the Foreign Secretary acted {364} under the

direction of Lord Cromer, and it is not impossible that in other cases he

may have surrendered himself to the hierarchy of the Foreign Office.[373]

Whatever the cause, the desertion of Liberalism is clear. Even Lord

Lansdowne and the late Lord Salisbury, after the Boer War, gave up some of

the inheritance of Beaconsfield. They ceased to befriend Turkey, and in

1903 Lord Lansdowne failed, through no fault of his own, to revive the

policy of concerted European pressure on the Turk. He, like Lord Salisbury,

generally pursued a policy which tended towards internationalism, and away

from egoism. But his successor twisted even his internationalism into

weapons of offence. In 1904 Lord Lansdowne made an agreement with France by

which the two contracting Powers settled all their outstanding disputes.

This was intended by its author to be only the first of a series of

international agreements. It was converted by Sir Edward Grey into a weapon

of offence against Germany, the country upon which, after passing from

Russia to the United States, and from the United States to France, the

animosity of modern Toryism had definitely settled. The fortunes of Great

Britain were bound up with those of France. The theory of the Balance of

Power was revived, every diplomatic conference was made a conflict between

France and Great Britain on the one side and Germany on the other, and in

1911 the lives and the wealth of the British people were endangered, not to

maintain any moral principle or any British interest, but to promote the

material interests of French financiers in Morocco. To this diplomatic

warfare, and to the military warfare which it constantly contemplates, our

whole foreign policy is subdued. When Germany proposed at a Hague

Conference, that international agreement should abolish the system of

destroying private property at sea, Great Britain refused even to discuss

the point. When we fought Germany, our great fleet would be able to destroy

her commerce. The right to destroy her commerce was our {365} most powerful

weapon against her, and as our peace policy was determined by our war

policy, we preserved this relic of barbarism. The inevitable consequence of

our diplomacy was to give German Jingoism an irresistible argument for the

increase of the German Fleet. The increase in the German Fleet was

described in threatening language by Mr. Churchill, and was matched by an

increase in our own. The burden of armaments increased, and unremunerative

expenditure drained the resources which should have been available for the

costs of social reform. Such was the foreign policy of Great Britain until

the outbreak of the Balkan War at the end of 1912. There may have been

information in the possession of the Foreign Office which justified this

persistent hostility towards Germany. That country may have been animated

by some desire to destroy our commerce, or to appropriate our Colonies. So

far as we are allowed by our governors to learn any facts at all, there is

no more than a shadow of a foundation for such an assumption. Up to the end

of 1912 we were bound straight for a conflict, of the causes of which not

one Englishman in ten thousand knew anything definite, and not one in a

thousand knew anything at all. All the Gladstonian principles, rightly or

wrongly, had been forsaken. We made no serious attempt to establish the

comity of nations, we carefully distinguished between Germany and the rest

of the world, and we entangled ourselves in engagements with France and

Russia, which brought us no profit, and served only to increase the

suspicions of the German people. This violation of Liberal principle, which

was also a violation of the practice of the last Tory Foreign Secretary,

may have been inevitable. But its justification is not contained in

anything that has yet been said or written on behalf of Sir Edward Grey,

and those of us who held by the old rules during the Boer War can get only

a melancholy satisfaction out of a comparison of the failure of this

Imperialist Liberal in foreign affairs with the successes of his Pro-Boer

associates in South Africa, in India, and in Social Reform.[374]

{366}

The departure from principle which has most disgusted the supporters of the

Government is the alliance with Russia. This, like so many of our modern

associations, is cemented by finance, and the union of the two Governments

has been followed by a steady flow of British capital into Russian

municipal and industrial securities. It is suggested that the object of

both the diplomatic and the financial support is the same, to restore the

influence of Russia, seriously impaired by her humiliation at the hands of

Japan and by her violent internal dissensions, in the councils of Europe.

In other words, we have strengthened the Russian Government as part of our

scheme for keeping Germany in her place. This is one of those alliances

which would have been repugnant to a Liberal of the old school. Russian

Government and British Government are essentially different. The temper of

national independence, which is welcomed by English Liberals everywhere,

and even by English Tories outside the boundaries of the Empire, is to the

governing class of Russia what a heap of dirt is to a sanitary inspector.

It is a perpetual menace to what it is their business to protect, and they

devote to the extinction of some of the noblest of human aspirations the

untiring zeal with which better men apply themselves to the destruction of

evil. No Government in the world has so persistently violated the rules of

morality in its dealings with its own subjects or with the foreign peoples

who lie without its boundaries. In five years of the {367} twentieth

century it executed 3,750 persons, its courts of law sentenced 31,885

political offenders to imprisonment or exile, and its administrative orders

transported 28,173 others without trial. More than 30,000 of its Jewish

subjects have been massacred in organized riots at which it has connived.

In these affairs it has had to deal with all sorts of persons. But it has

exercised little discrimination in its treatment, and if some of its

victims have been the vilest of criminals, it has also caused thousands of

honourable men and women to be shot or bludgeoned, to be exiled, or to rot

in crowded prisons. It has even employed agents to promote the

assassination of its own associates, that it might have the better excuse

for taking violent measures to suppress peaceful agitation. It has now

crowned its career of domestic misgovernment by beginning to destroy the

liberties of the Finnish people, whose social policy has been at once the

admiration of the civilized world, and a standing rebuke to the comparative

brutality of Russia. It is not the business of Great Britain to dictate to

established Governments, or to go to war with them for the better

regulation of their internal affairs. Nor is it the business of a British

Government to refuse to make agreements with any foreign Government for the

management of matters in which they are jointly concerned. But it is the

duty of a British Government not to corrupt its own people by involving

itself intimately with a Government whose methods are not only different

but are utterly alien from its own. An alliance with France is bad only in

so far as it is turned into a combination against Germany. An alliance with

Russia is in itself unnatural and horrible.

The Persian Agreement of 1907 appears to have been twisted into such an

alliance. Originally that Agreement, like the Moroccan Agreement with

France, provided merely for the settlement of outstanding disputes in Asia,

and as such it was welcomed by all Liberals. It has been converted into an

instrument for the destruction of the independence of Persia, which both

Powers had solemnly declared it was their intention to maintain, and more

recently into a means of enabling Russia {368} to blackmail the struggling

Chinese Republic. The successive steps of Russian aggression cannot be

described here. In effect, the Northern Sphere, marked out by the Agreement

solely for the purposes of financial and commercial development, has been

annexed politically to Russia, and occupation by her troops has been

followed by outrages of almost indescribable brutality. The attempt of the

Persian Government to restore the finances of the country, with the aid of

the American Mr. Morgan Shuster, was frustrated by Russian intervention,

and for want of money the protection of trade routes, life, and private

property has ceased in many districts. In each successive act of Russian

insolence, except the foul barbarities at Tabriz, Sir Edward Grey has

acquiesced, and he actively assisted in the removal of Mr. Shuster. He has

apparently acted Liberally in only two matters, in his protest against the

outrages which followed the Russian occupation, and in his refusal to

participate in the guilt of a formal partition. But the national

independence of Persia to which the recent revolution seemed to give a new

justification, has been practically destroyed, and the supposed limitations

on British freedom of action by war of protest are construed out of that

Agreement, which professed to be based upon its preservation. The

strangling of Persia has not been such a plain affair of right and wrong as

some critics of Sir Edward Grey suggest. Generations of misgovernment had

corrupted the native system. Mr. Shuster gave provocation by his

straightforward independence where a more supple diplomatist might have

succeeded in managing even Russia. But he was the only hope of Persia, and

if he could have been supported as Afghanistan has been supported, even

Russia might have been forced to hold her hand.[375] Here again we are

brought up against our policy of isolating Germany. At all costs Russia was

to be kept out of the orbit of German diplomacy. We acquiesced in Russian

appropriations in Persia for the same reason that we supported French

exploitations of Morocco. We were bound to make it to the {369} interest of

our allies to prefer association with us to association with our enemy.

Where we might have defended a people against Russia on moral grounds, we

sacrificed them for our diplomatic interests. Where we might have promoted

international agreements for the disposition of uncivilized races, we were

compelled to resist them in the interest of the ally, with whom we had just

arranged a private deal. All came back to our settled policy of acting in

opposition to Germany. There may be excuses, of which we have as yet no

knowledge. But it is unquestionable that the present Government had lost

the habit of expressing Liberalism in foreign policy. Liberals had

certainly reason to regret it. Posterity alone will know whether or not

they had also reason to be ashamed.

More recent events have lightened the general gloom. The Persian disgrace

remains, and the Russian penetration of Mongolia proceeds steadily. But

just as the rising tide of French Jingoism seems to have found a President

and a Premier who will float easily upon its surface, the Anglo-German feud

has begun to ebb. Apparently by no effort of our own, but simply through

the overwhelming pressure of our common interest in peace, the Balkan

crisis has united Great Britain, France, and Germany in preventing war

between Austria and Russia. We have not lacked suggestions that we should

make war on Germany because Russia wished to prevent Austria from attacking

Servia. This would have been the climax of anti-Liberalism; to engage in

war because Servia wished to impose her will upon that of the Albanians,

and because the allies with whom we were entangled decided to support

her.[376] From this disgrace, and from the destruction of European

civilization which such a war would have involved, we have been preserved.

The reality of common interests and common aims has broken the fiction of

the Balance of Power into pieces, and Sir Edward Grey, whose career had

been watched with dismay by the most Liberal of his followers, now finds

{370} himself in universal favour as he expresses once more the pure theory

of Liberalism. The Concert of Europe has been revived, with Great Britain

at the head of it, and if the Foreign Secretary can make out of our

temporary association with Germany something in the nature of a permanent

friendship he will render a greater service to his country than any of his

predecessors. The gross brutality of Denshawi in 1906 and the unexplained

provocation of Germany in 1911 will not be obliterated by a peaceful and

honourable issue out of our afflictions, and the Russian difficulty is only

now beginning. It is possible that there can be no such thing as a

permanently Liberal Foreign Policy, that the systematic application of

Liberal principles to foreign affairs can never be undertaken with any

chance of success. No Liberal as yet will be content with that desperate

assumption, and the recent improvement in the international situation

rather confirms than weakens his belief that abroad, as at home, politics

will ultimately rest upon a basis of ethics. His chief hope is not in the

chancelleries, but in the large and increasing body of international

associations of private persons. Unions for the purpose of promoting peace,

and for the discussion of the unnational interests of women and of working

men, and periodical meetings of representatives of all nations to determine

the principles of commercial law, and even the rules of war, are steadily

uniting the nations by "organic filaments." For what the present Government

has apparently done in the way of preventing rather than encouraging union,

Liberals are ready enough to find excuses. But until they are presented

with more facts than have yet been published by the Government itself, they

will continue to contemplate its foreign record with more regret than

satisfaction.

* * * * *

{371}

INDEX

Aberdeen, Lord, 217

American Rebellion, 83;

effect of, on Liberalism, 86

American Civil War, 227, 263

Army Purchase, 241

Balance of Power, 18, 139, 364

Balfour, Arthur, 280 _n._, 297, 299, 302

Ballot, 107, 241

Beaconsfield, _see_ Disraeli

Bentham, Jeremy, 155

Bowring, Sir John, 221

Bradlaugh, Charles, 283

Bright, John, and Factory Acts, 176, 203;

moral ideals of, 194;

and American Civil War, 228;

and Reform, 219, 232;

on Ireland, 248, 249;

otherwise mentioned, 193, 195, 199, 223, 283

Brougham, Lord, on the franchise, 105;

on religious disabilities, 165;

on Trade Unions, 172;

otherwise mentioned, 176, 181

Burke, Edmund, and Ireland, 57;

on Catholic disabilities, 60;

on Unitarians, 62;

on the franchise, 62, 63;

on American Rebellion, 85, 86;

and Warren Hastings, 93;

and French Revolution, 97, 109, 115

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 322, 324

Canada, affairs of, 182

Canning, George, on the franchise, 48;

and Catholic disabilities, 130;

and nationality, 140, 150

Carlyle, Thomas, and Socialism, 234

Cartwright, Major John, 79, 103, 104, 106, 108

Castlereagh, Lord, on the working class, 46;

on public meetings, 48;

on Dissenters, 52;

on women in politics, 54;

on French War, 133;

at Vienna, 139;

and Reform agitation, 145, 147

Catholics, political condition of, 50, 55;

emancipation of, 91, 127, 129, 161, 162

Chamberlain, Joseph, 33, 272, 279, 321

China, affairs of, 211, 221

Civil Service, reforms in, 241

Clarendon, Lord, 260

Cobden, Richard, on Empire, 40;

and Factory Acts, 176;

moral ideals of, 193;

on intervention, 195;

on social reform, 196;

and Palmerston, 213, 225;

on Ireland, 248;

otherwise mentioned, 199, 223

Collectivism, _see_ Social Reform.

Colonial System, the old, 55, 83;

the new, 182, 204;

and Imperialism, 33

Contagious Diseases Acts, 255

{372}

Co-operation, 231

Copenhagen, attack on, 135

Crimean War, 217

Criminal Law, 50;

reforms in, 154

Denmark, Palmerston and, 224

Disestablishment, 307

Disraeli (Beaconsfield), and the franchise, 232;

on Ireland, 248;

Turkish policy of, 266;

Afghan policy of, 270;

and Social Reform, 237;

and Imperialism, 313

Divorce Act, 220

Dorchester Labourers, 172

Durham, Lord, 166;

on Canada, 182

Education, 31;

condition of, 49, 241;

first public grant for, 179;

legislation concerning, 241, 280, 307, 322, 344

Egypt, affairs of, 290, 363

Empire, Liberal and Tory conceptions of, 32, 33

Evolution, theory of, and politics, 309;

and foreign policy, 313;

and social reform, 337

Factory Acts, 175

Fawcett, Henry, 265, 282, 285

Foreign policy, 15, 131, 187, 193, 209, 259, 266, 275, 313, 362

Fox, Charles James, Liberalism of, 66;

on Ireland, 56, 130, 131;

on Catholic disabilities, 61;

on Reform, 90, 105;

Libel Act of, 92;

on political discussion, 125;

on French War, 132;

on international morality, 134

Fox, W. J., 191, 223

Franchise, Liberalism and, 26

Francis, Sir Philip, 63

Franco-Prussian War, 260, 262

Free Trade, 197, 322

French Revolution, 95;

effect of, in England, 96, 100, 118

Friends of the People, Society of, 104

Game Laws, 45, 50, 154, 178

Gladstone, William Ewart, and Colonial system, 208;

on foreign policy, 214, 259, 275;

and paper duty, 221;

and American Civil War, 227, 228;

Liberalism of, 230;

on the franchise, 232;

and _Alabama_ claims, 263;

and Bulgarian atrocities, 267;

and Irish land, 287;

on Home Rule, 296;

otherwise mentioned, 261, 262, 283, 302

Godwin, William, 103

Granville, Lord, 216, 262, 263

Grenville, Lord, 140

Grey, Charles Earl, 97, 125;

on international morality, 136, 140;

on Peninsular War, 137

Hastings, Warren, 93

Hume, Joseph, 159, 199

Imperialism, 33, 305, 313

Industrial Revolution, 70;

political effects of, 73

International morality, 13, 134, 263, 363

Ireland, before Union, 55;

Union with, 128;

since Union, 161, 187;

land question in, 188, 250, 286, 300, 307, 323;

Church in, 249;

Home Rule question in, 294;

and Imperialism, 299;

local government in, 306, 322

Italy, affairs of, 226

Jews, emancipation of, 166 _n._, 220

{373}

Land, social estimate of property in, 43;

reforms in law affecting, 178, 220, 309

Law, Mr. Bonar, 34, 39 _n._, 305 _n._

Libel, law of, 92, 265

Liberalism, definition of, 7;

and class distinctions, 11;

and nationality, 12;

and foreign policy, 15, 260, 275, 362;

and marriage law, 19;

and the franchise, 25;

negative and positive, 8;

and theory of evolution, 311, 316;

since 1906, 324;

and taxation, 341;

and Woman Suffrage, 346

Liquor Trade, 246, 308, 322

Liverpool, Lord, on class distinctions, 44;

on Balance of Power, 139;

on Reform agitation, 148

Local Government, 178, 306, 308