But the Society of Friends has for the most part consisted of sensible
persons who have accepted the common Christian interpretation of the
Sermon on the Mount, and so have been pacificists of an unusually
moderate type--by no means unconditional non-resisters. Just as they do
not give indiscriminately, or lend (especially such of them as are
prosperous bankers) expecting no return, or refrain from judging, or
going to law, or laying up treasure on earth, or taking thought for the
morrow, so they do not interpret literally the command "resist not
evil." They accept the constitution of the country, the government of
which is based on force; they pay taxes for the maintenance of the army
and the navy, and admit their necessity; they support the police, and
call it in if their persons or property are threatened; many of them, to
their infinite credit, actually join the fighting forces when they feel
that great moral issues are at stake. George Fox himself, the founder of
the Society, was an extremely belligerent and even truculent individual.
He supported the militant Cromwellian regime, and it was only after the
collapse of the Puritan Commonwealth, which was based on the force of
the New Model army, that he abjured all weapons of offence, except his
tongue. Isaac Pennington, his contemporary and friend, was actually a
chaplain in the New Model (which contained many Quakers), and to the
very end he was engaged in stirring it up to repeat its early exploits
against "Babylon." His writings contain the passage: "I speak not
against any magistrates or peoples defending themselves against foreign
invasions, or making use of the sword to suppress the violent and
evil-doers within their borders; for this the present state of things
may and doth require."[47] A sounder and saner statement of good
Christian teaching on the matter of police and military service one
could not desire. With this admission in one's mind, one can view with
unqualified admiration the efforts of the Friends to eliminate war, and
to perfect the methods of peace in the intercourse of men. More than
most Christian people have they laboured effectively to hasten the
advent of the Kingdom of God. It is true that their attempts in
Pennsylvania and elsewhere to establish a pacificist regime have
failed--it was inevitable that they should fail--but this does not in
any way lessen the debt which the world owes to them for their powerful
and far-reaching influence in favour of love and gentleness and peace.
FOOTNOTE:
[47] I quote from J. W. Graham, _War from a Quaker Point of View_, p.
71. See also my review of this book in _Hibbert Journal_, No. 55.
VII. CONCLUSION
The sum of the matter seems to be this. Government is necessary in this
present evil world. Only by means of sovereign political authority,
based upon physical as well as moral force, can there be effective
"punishment of wickedness and vice" or "maintenance of true religion
and virtue." This is clearly recognized in the Bible, which proclaims
that "the powers that be are ordained of God," which enjoins obedience
to kings and governors as a religious duty, and which sees in the sword
of justice carried by the secular ruler a weapon directed against the
same enemies as oppose the establishment of the Kingdom of God. It is
essential for the well-being and even for the existence of society, that
crime should be suppressed. Hence, in addition to moralists and
ministers who seek to educate and convert, there must be police and
soldiers--in short, the full organized force of the community--ready to
stamp out incorrigible villainy, if need be with blood and iron.
Similarly, it is essential for the well-being and even for the existence
of the polity of peoples--the growing society of nations--that
aggression should be prevented, that treacherous intrigues should be
frustrated, that treaty engagements should be enforced, that the reign
of law should be confirmed. But, in order to realize this end, there is
need not only of pacific missions and cosmopolitan congresses, but also
of an armed might sufficient to prevent or to punish with irresistible
certainty breaches of international conventions and violations of the
World's peace. Hence, whether we have regard to internal good
government, or the maintenance of international justice, the need of
military force is imperative. Not only does there exist what the
Russians quaintly call a "Christ-serving and worthy militancy," there
are occasions, of which the present is one, when military service
becomes the highest form of Christian duty. To hold aloof is not to
display a superior form of Christianity; it is to be an apostate. As
Solovyof has impressively shown in his notable conversations on _War and
Christianity_, pacificism under present conditions is that very sort of
religious imposture with which is associated the abominable name of
Antichrist.
VI
THE STATE AND ITS RIVALS
I. THE IDEA OF THE STATE IN ENGLAND
Most of our recent political troubles are attributable to what Fortescue
in the fifteenth century called "lack of governance." We are all of us
painfully aware of the fact; but we are not all of us equally conscious
that the feebleness and inefficiency of our supreme administration are
to no small extent due to the absence among our people as a whole of any
adequate idea of the position and function of the State. For if it is
true generally that every nation has the sort of government that it
deserves, it is specially true of a nation with democratic institutions.
Weaknesses of intellect, infirmities of will, and faults of character in
the sovereign representative assembly are but reproductions on a
magnified scale of the same defects in the electorate. It is the failure
of our people as a whole to realize the idea of the State that has
resulted in the filling of the House of Commons with men who stand, not
for the Nation in its unity and the Empire in its integrity, but for all
sorts of limited and conflicting sectional interests--parties, leagues,
fellowships, unions, cliques, schools, churches, orders, classes,
trusts, syndicates, and so on. No wonder that in times of national and
imperial crisis such representatives prove totally unequal to the duty
of strong, corporate, and patriotic administration.
The weakness of the idea of the State among the peoples of the British
Isles is explicable on geographical and historical grounds. For the idea
of the State--that is to say, the idea of society politically organized
as an indivisible unit under a sovereign government--although it has
other and deeper sources of vitality, is specially fostered by a sense
of national danger, but tends to languish when complete immunity from
external peril can be postulated. Never has the realization of "the
commonwealth of this realm of England" been so strong as it was in the
days when Spanish invasion threatened. The splendid patriotism of that
great age is portrayed for all time in the immortal glory of
Shakespeare's historical plays. Not far short, however, rose the
patriotic realization of national unity during the crisis of the
Napoleonic struggle. Wordsworth's magnificent _Sonnets dedicated_ to
Liberty remain as the enduring memorial of the heights which British
State-consciousness then attained:
In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spoke; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.
But, except at rare intervals, Britain's insular position has given her
people so soothing a sense of security that they have allowed the
conception of the commonwealth to droop, and have tended to regard the
State as, under normal conditions, a nuisance which should as far as
possible be abated, as an intruder into the sphere of private enterprise
which should be extruded, as an enemy to liberty which should be
suppressed. It may readily be admitted that in days before the State had
been democratized this hostile attitude was not without justification.
In the early seventeenth century, for instance, the State meant the
Stuart monarch--_L'État c'est Moi_--and the interests of the Stuart
monarch were by no means those of any of the nations that he governed.
In the early eighteenth century the State meant the Whig oligarchy, and
its members only too easily came to regard the welfare of the Empire as
identical with their own prosperity. In the early nineteenth century the
State meant the landed and moneyed magnates of the Tory aristocracy, and
they had an extremely inadequate apprehension of the needs and
aspirations of the rapidly increasing millions over whom they exercised
authority. Hence one can understand that opposition to the policy of
Stuart king, or Whig nobility, or Tory plutocracy, readily took the form
of antagonism to the State as such. Thus the political theory of Milton
and the Puritans not only justified resistance to Charles I, it also
proclaimed a doctrine of the natural rights of the individual fatal to
all types of government. Similarly the political theory of Adam Smith
and the _laissez-faire_ economists, together with that of their
contemporaries, Bentham and the utilitarian philosophers, not only
attacked the restrictive regulations of the Whig oligarchy, but showed
on general principles the strongest dislike of what it called "State
interference" in all circumstances. So, too, Herbert Spencer and the
nineteenth century school of scientific individualists not only
demonstrated (as they did with extraordinary pungency and success) the
extreme folly and incompetence of the main government departments of
their own day; they also sought to establish the eternal and inevitable
antagonism of Man versus the State, and to limit universally the
functions of government to the irreducible minimum.
This attitude of hostility, however, ceased to have its old
justification with the advent of democracy. The Reform Acts of 1832,
1867, and 1884 have so enlarged the electorate as to convert government
into something approaching self-government, and the State has become the
organized form of democracy itself. Hence the individualism of Milton,
Adam Smith, Bentham, and Spencer is an anachronism. It is not
remarkable, then, that, following Parliamentary Reform, the idea of the
State revived in Britain with new force and in a new form--no longer
stimulated by the pressure of extreme peril, but excited by the new
possibilities of corporate democratic activity. The young lions of the
Fabian Society in their optimistic infancy were filled with the idea of
the State, and advocated State action in wide spheres of industrial
organization, municipal enterprise, and social reform. The Imperial
Federation League gloried anew in the name of Britain, and strove to
bring the four quarters of the earth within the circle of a
self-conscious Empire. Later on, the Tariff Reform League demanded
State-control and regulation of our world-wide commerce.
But the revival of the idea of the State, under the stimulus of
Socialists, Imperialists, Protectionists, and others, was short lived.
All these enthusiasts became disappointed and disgusted with democracy
and with the State which it controls. Democracy did not move fast enough
for them, nor always in the direction that they desired. Hence--and most
markedly since the dawn of the twentieth century--a reaction against the
State has set in. There has been, as we have already seen, an epidemic
of passive resistance. Individualists of all sorts, together with Trade
Unionists, Syndicalists, Clericals, Suffragists, No-Conscriptionists,
Ulstermen, Nationalists, and other bodies, giving up the attempt to
convert democracy and to secure their ends through the sovereign agency
of the democratic State, are taking direct action, are proclaiming rival
authorities to the State, and are threatening the very existence of the
body politic. The outlook is ominous, and it needs to be steadily faced.
The present moment, moreover, is peculiarly favourable for its
consideration. For the sudden and unexpected return of extreme national
danger has once again quickened in our midst the idea of the State, has
revived the spirit of patriotism, has restored the national unity, and
has reenforced the principle of civic service. We can see under the
revealing searchlight of the war the anarchy towards which we have been
drifting during the past ten or more years.
II. THE RIVALS OF THE STATE
The first rival of the State that calls for consideration is the
Individual. His rights as against the government are still loudly
proclaimed. "The chief message of 1915," says one of our leading
individualists, Rev. Dr. Clifford, in a New Year's oration to his
flock,[48] "is a clarion call to guard our personal and democratic
liberties against the attacks of State absolutism." The idea of guarding
"democratic liberties" against democracy itself is, of course, mere
nonsense--one of those point-blank contradictions in terms which, though
full of sound and fury, signify nothing. It is, however, unfortunately,
typical of much of the loose thinking and vague talking indulged in by
the leaders of those pestilent anti-patriotic unions and fellowships
which infest and harass the country at the present moment. The idea of
guarding "personal liberties" against democracy is not so palpably
absurd; it does not involve a contradiction in terms. Moreover, it
appears to have some relation to the admitted fact that the rule of a
democracy may press very heavily upon some or all of its constituent
members. Nevertheless, it is equally fallacious. It rests upon a false
antithesis between the individual and the community to which he belongs.
No such antithesis exists. "The individual," rightly says Mr. W. S.
McKechnie, "apart from all relations to the community is a
negation."[49] In similar strain, Mr. E. Barker contends that "a full
and just conception of the individual abolishes the supposed opposition
between the Man and the State."[50] Long ago Hegel exclaimed: "Our life
is hid with our fellows in the common life of our people," and his true
and fruitful conception forms the basis of the political philosophy of
T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet. It is, also, the
foundation of all that is good and enduring in present-day Socialism.
The individual apart from society is a mere abstraction, like the
"economic man" of the old economists.
What, then, are these so-called "personal liberties" which the
individual is supposed to possess in virtue of his humanity and
independently of any authority external to himself? If it is said that
they are freedom of thought, freedom of emotion, and freedom of will,
the criticism is that these are not "liberties" at all, but merely
movements of the mind which no power whatsoever external to the
individual can possibly control, and with which no political authority
in the country would ever dream of attempting to interfere. If, however,
it is said that they include further such things as freedom of speech,
freedom of writing, freedom of public meeting, freedom to act generally
as conscience dictates, the criticism is that such liberties as these
are not "personal" merely, or even primarily: they are liberties that
profoundly affect the community. Regarded from the communal point of
view, in fact, they are not "personal liberties" at all, if by that term
is meant individual rights. They are rights derived from the community;
they are concessions to be granted or withheld according to the
requirements of public policy; they are matters of regulation by the
common will. Society does not, and cannot, recognize the existence,
independent of its own consent, of any such so-called "personal
liberties." It does not, and cannot, admit the possession by individuals
of any rights, inherent and indefeasible, to do as they like in matters
that concern the interests of the community generally. Still less can
the State be expected to protect individuals in the exercise of
activities which it regards as detrimental, or in the neglect of duties
which it regards as essential, to the general well-being. It cannot
restrain anyone's conscience; but it must control everyone's conduct.
All this, of course, is the commonplace of political theory, and it is
curious that at this late day one should have to repeat Burke's
destructive criticism of metaphysic liberties, or Bentham's damning
exposure of the "anarchic fallacy" of the Rights of Man, or Mr. D. L.
Ritchie's quite recent dissipation of the errors underlying the idea of
Natural Rights. But it is still more curious that many of the men who
revive against the modern democratic State this long-laid ghost of
eighteenth-century individualism call themselves Socialists, and invoke
the State (when it suits them to do so) to embark on all manner of
anti-individualistic enterprises. This anomaly, however, is merely one
among many flagrant instances of that ignorance of precedent which
revives long-buried heresies, that incapacity for thought which seems
unaware of inconsistencies, or that shameless perversity which seeks out
and proclaims any sort of general principle which happens to suit the
exigencies of the moment.
A second rival to the State is Political Party. At the present juncture
there are four important political parties in existence in the British
Isles, viz., Liberal, Conservative, Nationalist, Labour, beside various
incipient ones. The two old parties, Liberal and Conservative, stand for
more or less clearly defined and sharply opposed general principles.
Hallam has described them as the party of progress and the party of
order respectively; and he (followed by Macaulay and other writers) has
devoted a good deal of care to the elucidation of the fundamental
differences between them. These old parties are by far the most vital
and powerful political entities in the United Kingdom. They have
deep-rooted traditions, efficient organizations, large funds secretly
raised and administered, formulated programmes, and all the
paraphernalia of habitations, catchwords, and badges calculated to
excite loyalty and stimulate zeal. They secure in alternation the
control of the State, and administer in the name of the nation as a
whole the vast affairs of the British Empire. It may be at once
admitted that parties such as these are inevitable in any system of
representative government. For so long as fundamental differences of
opinion exist among electors, it is only by means of organizations based
on the primary opposing principles that any working constitution can be
framed. To attack party-government as such is vain and even absurd.
Nevertheless, party has become the rival of the State; and its rivalry
is all the more dangerous and insidious because it always professes to
act in the interests of the State and on behalf of the nation as a
whole. Its professions, however, have become false and hypocritical. In
the name of the People it seeks its own gain. It has ceased to be a
means to good democratic government, and has grown to be an end in
itself. In its rivalry to other parties, in its struggle for power, in
its scramble for the spoils of office, in its eagerness to secure votes,
it has debased political ideals, it has corrupted citizenship, it has
abandoned truth, it has proclaimed smooth lies, it has betrayed the
State, it has almost destroyed the nation. Happy indeed will it be if
this war, which is revealing to us the hideousness and deadliness of the
party-spirit, enables us to reduce the old parties to their proper place
of subordination to the State.
In addition to the two old parties, however, there are two
comparatively new ones which occupy places of importance in the world of
politics. These are the Nationalist and the Labour parties. Neither of
these professes to make the interests of the State its prime concern.
The one concentrates its energies upon a struggle to advance the cause
of a single nation from among the four that constitute the United
Kingdom; the other devotes itself to the affairs of a single social
class. The existence of these powerful sectional organizations is a
disastrous portent. They stand, not as the old parties do for divergent
views concerning the interests of the State as a whole, but for mortal
schism in the body politic. Never can there be a full return to healthy
national life until means have been found for reabsorbing these and
other incipient schismatic organizations into the unity of the Great
Society.
A third rival to the State has recently come into prominence in the
shape of a number of various non-political corporations which claim to
possess an organic existence independent of, and co-ordinate with, the
State, and thus deny the right of the State to intrude within the
spheres of their operations. The most important are the Syndicalists,
who proclaim the autonomy of the industrial union or guild, and the
Ecclesiastics, who assert the autonomy of the denationalized church.
Both agree in repudiating political control, and in abjuring the use of
political instruments. They rely upon "direct action" of their own, the
one employing the terrors of the general strike to overawe the
community, the other the horrors of hell. Now it may be freely granted
that one of the most notable advances in modern political theory has
been the recognition of the fact that men naturally organize themselves
into groups--families, clans, tribes; sects, societies, churches;
guilds, trade unions, clubs, and so on--and that the State is rather a
federation of groups than an association of isolated individuals. It may
be granted, secondly, that some of these organizations are anterior to
the State in point of time, and that they deal with matters that are not
appropriate for direct State control. Finally, it may be granted that
the State will be well advised to leave some or all of them in
possession of large powers of self-administration. Nevertheless, when
once the Great Society has come into existence, and has organized itself
as the National State, they must, if anarchy is to be avoided, all take
their places as constituent members of the community, and recognize that
they exercise such autonomous powers as they possess in virtue of the
permission of the general will. The State, however prudently it may
employ its powers, must be, and must be universally admitted to be, in
all causes, civil or ecclesiastical, throughout all its dominions, in
the last resort, supreme. In the interests of the common good it cannot
tolerate any rivals.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] Reported in _Daily Chronicle_, January 4th, 1916.
[49] McKechnie. _The State and the Individual_, p. 3.
[50] Barker. _Political Thought from Spencer to the Present-Day_, p.
108.
III. WHAT THE STATE IS AND DOES
In the purification and exaltation of the Democratic National State
rests the one hope of the salvation of Britain and the Empire. In a
federation of Democratic National States resides the best prospect of
the future peaceful and well-ordered government of the world. The
individualism of Dr. Clifford leads straight to anarchy; the unchecked
development of the party-system means the corrupt tyranny of the caucus;
the triumph of Syndicalism would involve the tragedy of class war; the
dream of the reunion of humanity in the bosom of a cosmopolitan church
is a vain revival of a mediæval illusion. The individual must be brought
to recognize that politically he has no separate existence, and must
learn to limit his operations to his proper share in the constitution
and determination of the general will; party must be remorselessly
reduced to its legitimate subordination to the interests of the
community as a whole; syndicates and trade unions must be prevented from
cutting themselves loose from the body of the nation, must be compelled
to recognize the supremacy of the law of the land, and must be deprived
of any inequitable privileges which they may have secured; ecclesiastics
of all orders must be persuaded to rest content with such autonomy as
the general will may grant them, and must strive to become, not a
separate corporation, but the indwelling and directing conscience of the
people. The State must be supreme.