POLITICS IN A DISSOLVING VIEW
Often when warring for he wist not what,
An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak,
Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek,
And cooled the lips so black and clammed and hot;
Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgot
The deed of grace amid the roar and reek;
Yet larger vision than the tongue can speak
He there has reached, although he has known it not
For natural mindsight, triumphing in the act
Over the throes of artificial rage,
Has thuswise muffled victory's peal of pride,
Rended to ribands policy's specious page
That deals but with evasion, code, and pact,
And war's apology wholly stultified.
1915. THOMAS HARDY: "_Often When Warring._"
I
In the life of the English generation which found its climax and
catastrophe in the war, the last chapter opened on armistice day
and closed with the signature of the German peace treaty on July
19th, 1919. As with the armistice terms, so with the treaty: no one
doubted that it would be signed, but, until it had been signed, all
efforts at reconstruction, all attempts to resume a normal life
of peace were tentative and provisional. The House of Commons in
effect declared a legislative moratorium and, in the absence of
the prime minister, marked time to the command of Mr. Bonar Law
with the disciplined noise and the calculated absence of progress
inseparable from that part of infantry drill.
As the general election of the previous December had been won on
the cry that a coalition was necessary to the conclusion of a
lasting peace, it might have been expected that the supporters
of the coalition would have influenced the course of the peace
negotiations. Beyond an occasional question, however, which
seldom brought enlightenment to the questioner, and an occasional
telegram of protest which can never have brought satisfaction to
the protester, coalition members gave the government a free hand.
In part, there were comparatively few with any parliamentary
experience; in part, there was none who could draft a desirable
alternative ministry, if his dissatisfaction with the present
prime minister stimulated him to effective revolt; and, in part,
there has probably never, since 1832, been a House of Commons so
bankrupt in public spirit, courage, independence or conscience.
Since the end of 1918 the government has triumphantly carried its
supporters against their inclinations through a dozen crises of
which any single one would have seen any other ministry disowned
and broken by a less servile house: the peace treaty with Germany,
as mischievous as it was dishonourable, was flung at parliament
with an air of "Take it--or leave it and take the consequences";
the treaty with Turkey established the Ottoman government in
Constantinople with licence to misgovern and to massacre as freely
as in the past; the Russian policy began with invective and threats
of war against the bloody-handed soviet and ended with the cordial
grip of a hand which had only become more bloody in the interval;
Ireland drifted through pats of conciliation and dabs of coercion
to a state of anarchy which ministers hoped to end by means of a
new home rule bill abhorred by every section of Irishmen; and,
while financiers protested that the country had reached its taxable
capacity, the government continued to live beyond its means and the
chancellor of the exchequer complained that it was not in his power
to retrench effectively.
For a similar display of cynical incompetence and reckless disorder
the historian must go back to the days of a great autocracy in
dissolution. The government of Louis XVI or of the last Roman
emperor, would perhaps shew an equal record of vacillations,
lethargy and light-hearted misrule; but in both instances anarchy
ended in downfall; and, if history be past politics, present
politics are future history. It is hardly straining the parallel
to suggest that such misgovernment is always attributable to one
cause, the lack of an efficient opposition; a composite government
unchecked by fear of overthrow and uninspired by any loftier ideal
than a groping instinct of self-preservation, is no less tyrannical
and prone to abuse than a single ruler.
"These various Cæsars and their successors and their women-kind,"
says H. G. Wells, "were probably no worse essentially than most
weak and passionate human beings, but they had no real religion,
being themselves gods; they had no wide knowledge on which
to build high ambitions, their women were fierce and almost
illiterate, and they were under no restraints of law or custom.
They were surrounded by creatures ready to stimulate their
slightest wishes and to translate their vaguest impulses into
action. What are mere passing black thoughts and angry impulses
with most of us became therefore deeds with them. Before a man
condemns Nero as a different species of being from himself, he
should examine his own secret thoughts very carefully."
It is less profitable to condemn the present government than to
enquire why there has been no effective opposition to hold it in
check. The political revolution which placed Mr. Lloyd George
in power was described by Mr. Asquith as a "conspiracy"; it was
generally regarded as a discreditable piece of trickery, and even
the stalwarts of the new order were for the most part reduced to
mumbling that the end must justify the means and that, without a
change, the war would have dragged on for ever. It is possible
to see now that a psychological crisis was reached in December
1916 and that after more than two years of unending and unended
fighting the herd-instinct demanded that someone should be made
responsible. To the bulk of the liberal party who stood by Mr.
Asquith, forgiving his high-handed behaviour in resigning without
an adverse vote and without consultation of his supporters, the
December crisis seemed a trial of strength between two men; it was
believed first that no alternative ministry could be formed and
then that it could not endure; the opposition liberals would have
been more than human if they had cherished no hope of revenge; and
they could claim disinterestedly and honestly that the new prime
minister was at least not superior to the old in scruple and was
certainly inferior in ability.
However great their resentment, however, the new management had
to be given a trial; any show of factiousness would have been
doubtful patriotism and disastrous tactics; and the chief subject
of discussion among the wire-pullers was how long the trial should
continue. Much noise and dust accompanied Mr. Lloyd George's
triumphal progress to No. 10 Downing Street; at last a "business
government" had taken office, and Whitehall became filled with the
unfamiliar forms of shipping-men and railway-men, newspaper-men and
mining-men, all disciplined by practical experience at the head of
great commercial enterprises, though unschooled to the teamwork
of administration in which the pace and independence of each are
regulated by his fellows. For a moment the political crisis seemed
a successful _bourgeois_ protest against the spirit and methods of
Balliol: neither Mr. Lloyd George nor Lord Beaverbrook, neither
Lord Northcliffe nor Lord Rothermere, neither Sir Eric Geddes nor
Sir Joseph Maclay, neither Lord Rhondda nor Mr. Neville Chamberlain
was a Balliol man; and in his strength and in his weakness, in
his mechanical efficiency and blank want of imagination, in his
intellectual aloofness and touching belief that others too observed
an Oxford standard of honour, Mr. Asquith was a typical product of
Balliol.[56]
Nevertheless, when the dust and noise of removal had abated, there
were found to be at least as many defects of administration as
before; the wizard's wand failed to charm food from air or to
conjure up men from the vasty deep in place of those who were being
sent to rot in Salonica; the German front remained impregnable
in the west; the new war-cabinet, for all its dash and fire,
was "too late" to prevent the Russian revolution; and German
submarine-commanders, perhaps in ignorance of the change that had
taken place, continued to sink allied and neutral shipping. No
improvement was observable until the United States entered the
war; and the warmest panegyrist of the new government has never
suggested that the credit for this decision should be given to
the new prime minister. Those who look for a single principle or
detail in which the second coalition varied the policy of the
first are rewarded with an encomium on the blessings of a unified
command; but official rhetoric did not conceal that the French
were being given, with much advertising display, what was waiting
for them whenever they chose to ask for it; and, if this be Mr.
Lloyd George's sole innovation, the assertion that he won the war
stands in need of revision, the more so since the publication of
the memorandum in which Lord Milner, who was sent to "report," is
shewn to have carried out the unification of command on his own
responsibility and without reference to the prime minister.[57]
Liberals of the rank and file, growing weary of phrases about
"instant daily decisions" and the advantage of "doing it now,"
over "waiting and seeing," found so little improvement abroad and
so much calamitous disorder at home that within six months the new
management seemed to have had a long enough trial: in that time
cabinet rule had been abolished, nothing had been put in its place
and the empire was at the mercy of half-a-dozen men who were alike
only in the distrust which they aroused. From time to time the more
ardent liberal skirmishers criticised the government; but their
enthusiasm was damped by consistent failure to "make the red-hats
go over the top"; it was finally destroyed by the faint-hearted
attack of their leaders when at last they called ministers to
account in 1918.
The "Maurice Debate" is of party importance in registering the
death of the liberal party; it had indeed breathed its last
eighteen months before, but the certificate was only written when
Mr. Asquith was defeated on a division which challenged the honour
of the prime minister and certain of his colleagues. Since the
party meeting at the Reform Club on December 8th 1916 some of the
more enterprising had snatched at office, others awaited their
turn; of those who still sat on the opposition benches several
were transferring their energies to commerce; and the division
lists shewed that all but a faithful ninety-nine voted with the
government or abstained from voting. For the next and last six
months of the parliament's life, Mr. Lloyd George had nothing to
fear in the House of Commons from the man whom he had supplanted.
Following up his advantage, he took care in December that he should
have nothing to fear from Mr. Asquith in the country. He that was
not with the prime minister was against the man who had won the
war and who aspired now to win the peace; there was no room for
independence or qualification; a candidate went to victory with a
"coupon" or to defeat without it. At such a time there was no lead
or guidance from "old gang" headquarters; no alternative programme
was offered; and the bemused elector was left to imagine that the
liberals who refused the "coupon" without putting forward a policy
of their own were plotting an assassin's war against a man whom
they dared not fight openly. The coalition swept the country;
the old liberal ministers were hurled from seats which some had
occupied for a generation; and, as empty benches have their value
in a division, the ministerial majority was strengthened by every
vacant place once filled, before the Sinn Fein landslide, by a
nationalist. So complete was the rout that, when Sir Donald Maclean
and his scarred following of "Asquithian liberals" took their
seats, the labour party challenged his right to be considered the
leader of the opposition.
II
Since the general election a few seats have been won by "old
gang" candidates; the liberal associations in the country have
denounced Mr. Lloyd George, his followers and all their works;
and Mr. Asquith has returned to the House as member for Paisley.
The liberal party, however, is more deeply divided than ever; and
an autocratic ministry has established itself so firmly that,
while no one can defend its misgovernment, no one can shake it
from its seat. The coalition liberals who parted from their old
leader in despair or disgust cannot be detached; the party which
was so wantonly shattered cannot be reconstructed; and, while the
opposition remains numerically small and impotent in all but voice,
the strange bed-fellows of the coalition cling comfortably to what
they have lest a worse fate overtake them. Efforts have been made
to "fuse" liberals and conservatives into one permanent union;
and, though the organizations outside the House refuse to blend,
the ministers within have contrived to discard the old shibboleths
which in other days set men and parties in antagonism.
The personnel of the ministry demands a moment's scrutiny. It was
composed of liberals and conservatives, of the older statesmen and
the young, in roughly equal numbers; it included one or two men,
such as Mr. Fisher and Sir Robert Horne, who were new to political
life and who were first-rate administrators rather than first-rate
party men: while a coalition is fortunate in being able to draw
upon two sources of political talent, it is less fortunate in
having to recognise two party debts instead of one, and Mr. Lloyd
George's second ministry contained probably more men of third-rate
ability than any in modern history; the experiment of giving office
to "business men" was not an unqualified success, and before long
only Sir Eric Geddes remained in an embryonic department where
he was spared the perhaps inevitable friction that occurs when a
business man is brought in contact with civil servants. Labour
has withdrawn from the coalition; the Irish members, with the
exception of Sir Edward Carson, never entered it. When the first
cabinet was formed in 1916, two of the appointments most strongly
criticised were those of Lord Curzon and Lord Milner, who were
felt to have failed in India and South Africa respectively and to
be antagonistic to those ideals of democracy and nationalism for
which, in theory, the war was being fought; it was added that Lord
Milner was of German extraction. No one criticises them now, for
nationalism and democracy have lost in public interest; but the
cynic, with a recollection of former party divisions, may smile at
the spectacle of Lord Curzon of Kedleston holding office under Mr.
Lloyd George of Criccieth.
The government has proved itself more varied than strong; but pure
conservatism, pure liberalism and pure labour have been unable to
organise an alternative. The attempt to perpetuate the coalition
by fusing liberals and conservatives into a "centre party" was
perhaps given new vigour by the fear that the liberal party
would coalesce with labour. There is an engaging belief among
statisticians and poets that they are the born leaders of nascent
democracy, and few popular movements are long secure from their
help and guidance: at the time of the 1918 general election Mr.
Sidney Webb and Sir Leo Chiozza-Money staked out their claim. They
were followed by an eager rush of itinerant intellectuals who were
eager to sign on before a monopoly could be established. Soon a new
formula was constructed for political grouping: the labour party
was to be the party of "earned incomes," and the vast liberal and
conservative middle-class of men and women engaged in commercial
and "professional" work was at liberty to enter it.
Though the invitation has not as yet been widely accepted, there
have been some recruits to labour, and more will no doubt come in;
to the historian the interest of this projected fusion lies in the
change which it marks in political idealism. The old liberal creed
would seem to be forfeiting the sympathy of its last supporters;
politics are losing their soul; and material self-interest is being
made the touchstone of government. It was perhaps inevitable that
there should be a move in this direction at the end of a war which
disturbed the financial equilibrium of every one in the country;
inevitable, too, that more altruistic counsels should have to
wait for a hearing until each man had done the best for himself
in the licenced scramble which economists call the "distribution
of wealth" and the "apportionment of taxation." The problems of
the future, it is urged, are economic; in England at least there
is now as much personal and religious liberty as any one cares to
enjoy; foreign politics only become interesting as they precipitate
or avert war; and war is over for the present. In their existing
state of physical and nervous exhaustion the inarticulate millions
are concerned only to attain the highest possible level of
personal comfort and to bask there with the greatest possible
degree of security. They are profoundly interested in wages and
prices, but here their political interest stops short. Until it
is seen whether this narrowing of political outlook is likely to
be permanent, liberals will occupy themselves more profitably in
studying it intelligently than in deploring it self-righteously.
They must recognise that for the present at least the electors are
considering every issue in terms of money; to nationalisation of
industry they are applying the test: will it make living cheaper
or dearer? So with a crusade against soviet government. So with
the imperial mission of Great Britain in Mesopotamia. So with Free
Trade. So with the resumption of commercial relations with Russia.
It is only at Westminster that the nervous party organisers wonder
whether the middle classes will "vote labour," whether the "old
gang" can retain its hold on the liberal machine in the country,
whether Mr. Lloyd George can form a new party and collect funds.
The electors will vote at the prompting of their pockets. If they
have not broken down the familiar lines of party division, it is
because they are not deceived by any talk of a party which is to
contain all the "earned incomes" and realise that there is no true
distinction between incomes earned or unearned; taxation falls
on the people with money, however acquired. They are as little
deceived by warnings about "Bolshevism" and suspect that it is all
a dodge to make their flesh creep. England, they feel, does not
love revolutions and has a blind, stupid instinct for avoiding
them; preeminently by never allowing too large a proportion of the
population to become too hungry at the same time; prices indeed are
high, but wages have risen to meet them; when trade has recovered
after the war, prices will fall, but wages will tend to remain
constant; the poorer classes will find themselves richer, the
rich poorer; an immense economic revolution will have taken place
without a single soviet. Every one is concerned to safeguard his
own position.
Though political interest in England has sunk to low-water mark in
one direction, it has risen alarmingly in another. The national
tradition of describing parliament as a "talking-shop" and of
demanding machines or men who will "_do_ something" may indicate
some little confusion of thought among those who would make a
deliberative assembly executive, but it prepares the way for a
great constitutional change when men discover more certain and less
dilatory methods of "doing something" than by parliamentary means;
interest has shifted from the House of Commons to Fleet Street, to
Unity House, to the periodical conferences of labour and, indeed,
to any mass-meeting convened for any purpose by men or women
who are in earnest about anything. Representative government is
breaking down; direct government threatens to take its place; and
the gravest problem of domestic statesmanship is to restore faith
in parliamentary institutions.
III
This temporary dislocation is no new phenomenon. The reform bill
of 1867 became a serious part of the ministerial programme when a
London mob pulled up the railings of Hyde Park: that was direct
pressure from below. Direct pressure from above came when Mr.
Gladstone appealed, over the head of some four hundred critical,
angular supporters, to vast mass-meetings throughout the country;
their verdict and sanction overrode the authority of the discreet
representatives who had been returned to interpret the will of
the people; representative government yielded place, on occasion,
to a direct mandate, to an informal referendum: in a word, to
direct democracy. And, as democracy became articulate through the
press and through public meetings, the doctrine was born that
every political change must be inaugurated by a press and popular
campaign.
In the last six years every political revolution has been forced on
the House of Commons from outside. The constitutional passage of
home rule was checked in 1914 by a threat of military rebellion and
popular violence; the suffrage was extended to women as the reward
of their extra-parliamentary agitation and in the teeth of press
and popular opinion; war with Bolshevist Russia was stopped by the
labour party, outside the House; and Ireland, despairing of help
or leadership from England, has set up a Sinn Fein government. In
one form or another this is "direct action"; and "direct action" is
the _ultima ratio_ of the governed against their governors when the
elected representatives slip beyond the control of their electors.
The course of legislation and of foreign politics is now determined
by a series of political strikes. In 1920, the labour party tried
its hand on a solution of the Irish problem. Certain railway
workers refused to carry munitions for the government. The National
Union of Railway Workers was urged to support this local strike
and to declare a general strike if the government tried to run the
Irish railways with the help of engineers working under military
discipline. Here, if it had chosen to throw down the challenge,
organised labour would have met and contended with the executive of
representative government on the highest plane. Mr. J. H. Thomas
shewed the statesmanship to avert or postpone this conflict by
asking the prime minister to receive a deputation to discuss an
Irish settlement from the standpoint of labour.
At least for a time parliament has been superseded by the direct
action of men who find themselves impotent as parliamentary
electors but powerful--perhaps, in the future, all-powerful--as
the mechanicians of the communal life. This change from
constitutionalism to direct action, from representation to control
at first hand, is too grave to be ignored. As men meet primarily in
human associations for the comforts of life, they defeat the object
of their association by encouraging or condoning trials of strength
which establish nothing but the momentary triumph of the moment's
victor; what has been secured by the railway strike of 1919 beyond
the knowledge that the railwaymen can to a great extent paralyse
the activity of the country and that the rest of the community
can to a great extent improvise means and services for preventing
complete paralysis?
It is more than time alike for employers and employed to realise
that they are the servants of the public: as every strike comes to
an end at some time and on some terms, there is no reason in equity
why a strike should ever begin; if the individual submits--and
cheerfully submits--his honour, life and fortune to the arbitrament
of a judge and jury, every man or body of men who will not
submit an industrial dispute to a similar tribunal is suspected
of having discarded equity in favour of the doctrine that might,
however temporary, is right. Employers and employed will only win
public sympathy, if indeed they care to have it, when they agree
to compulsory arbitration backed by the severest penalties for
breach of agreement; the status of both is at present that of a
robber-baron. It is more than time, too, for masters and men in any
one industry to realise that they represent but a small proportion
of the organised capital and labour in the country, a yet smaller
proportion of the total life and wealth of the community.
More needful even than the divorce between militant politics and
militant economics is the reestablishment of public order.
As the policeman is a symbol, as organised society depends far less
on the executive officers of the law than on respect for the law,
nothing but chaos can be expected of any successful resistance to
law. When the law-breaker goes not only unpunished but rewarded
and honoured, can it be expected that others will not follow
in the footsteps of those who have risen by anarchy to be lord
chancellor, lord of appeal, chancellor of the exchequer and leader
of the Ulster party? The privy councillor who preaches and prepares
armed resistance to law, the suffragette who breaks a window, the
employer or the workman who breaks a contract, the conscientious
objector who repudiates any liability that the soveran government
may impose upon him is a danger, by contact and example, to the
whole state, a mad dog whose extirpation is the first duty of all
who value the stability of the state. Here, as everywhere, popular
judgement is warped by social and intellectual snobbishness: the
"passive resister," whose "nonconformist conscience" forbade his
paying rates for the support of Church of England teaching was an
object of impatient scorn; the lady of rank who declined to lick
insurance-stamps at the bidding of a little Welsh attorney was
a woman of pride and independence; the officers who threatened
mutiny and the civilians who took up arms against home rule
were regarded as heroes; but the men who preferred prisons and
obloquy to the necessity of trying to take the life of their
country's enemies were branded as traitors and cowards. There can
only be one equitable rule: so long as a man remains a member
of any community--nation, church, profession or club--he must
submit scrupulously to its rules and only seek to change them by
constitutional means.
But, inasmuch as constitutional government is the art of
understanding and coordinating to a common end human beings who
are at once above and below the mute, mechanical conscripts of an
autocracy, the governors have to make obedience easy by making
government human. In the twentieth century man is too imaginative
and too little servile to worship the inexorable soveranty of
Hobbes' _Leviathan_. Men and women will submit still to starvation,
torture and death rather than compromise with an ideal: it is
doubtful citizenship, but it is a psychological problem to be faced
and solved; it is best solved by preventing the martyr's high,
tragic sense of desperation and by facilitating the methods of
constitutional redress. Direct action is a final protest when the
ways of constitutionalism are blocked; in Russia, in Ireland, in
Egypt and India, the man with a grievance has been driven back on
the bomb remedy. England dislikes sporadic violence as much as
general revolution: bombs are unlikely to be thrown in England,
but the political strike will take their place as an alternative
to the methods of representative government unless these methods
can be made more sensitive to opinion. First the mode of election
must be so changed that a minority candidate no longer slips into
parliament over the struggling forms of his majority rivals; then
the life of parliament must be so shortened that a member can be
called to more frequent account; and lastly the constituency must
have power to demand of its member that he submit himself for
reelection when he is acting against its wishes. The representative
must, in other words, become more and more the deputy. Such a
development would have brought consternation to the heart of
Edmund Burke; but it is the only alternative, in a press-ridden,
publicity-ruled state, to direct action.
These are the mechanics of politics, the fundamentals governing
the relations of ruler and ruled in all states at all times.
Politics--in the sense of a conflict between parties organised in
obedience to common principles and in pursuit of common aims--have
lately been shelved. Now--as always--the king's government must
be carried on; now--for the first time--it must be carried on by
the king's present ministers. To secure that consummation, the
unbending partisans of other days have sunk their differences: Mr.
Lloyd George and Lord Curzon, Mr. Churchill and Lord Birkenhead,
Mr. Montagu and Mr. Balfour work side by side; though liberal and
conservative stalwarts retain enough of the old spirit to assure
their constituents that they would resign if a sacrilegious finger
were laid on their cardinal principles, by luck, contrivance or
the requirements of the moment Mr. Lloyd George has been able to
avoid such controversial legislation as might split his ministry;
and, where legislation threatened to become controversial, as in
the latest home rule bill, the greatest living conciliator found
a means of accommodating minor differences until a united cabinet
recognised the absurdity of resigning office.
Though every government falls more or less unexpectedly, there
is no reason why the present one should not continue until its
leaders judge the moment to be ripe for an election. A ministry is
upset by opposition within the House or outside; the coalition has
no organised opposition to fear beyond the "wee free" liberals,
who are numerically unimportant, and the labour party, which is
not yet ready to take control. Coalition liberals and coalition
conservatives have at least one foot firmly planted in the
promised land; before they try to plant the second foot, they
have to remember Aesop's fable of the dog that snapped at the
reflection of his own piece of meat. Outside the House there is
plenty of criticism, plenty of opposition; but, though a little of
the criticism becomes fruitful through the urgency of the press,
there is no visible alternative government, no one wants a general
election, and the public is bored with politics. The warning which
Charles II gave to his ambitious brother might be quoted by any
minister to any critic who wished to supplant him.
Something as great as the war in its comprehensive, intimate
attack on every member of the community will be required to
reawaken general interest in politics: when Great Britain is even
nearer bankruptcy and starvation, when the United States refuse
her credit, when the world shortage of food affects the stomachs
of the world and the hungry, maddened hordes of central and
eastern Europe break raveningly forth, it may be remembered that
the misrule of the present government has an exact parallel, on a
smaller scale, in the misrule of Louis XVI's ministers before the
French revolution.
IV
On the eve of the 1918 election the prime minister expressed his
political ideal in the formula that England had to be made a home
fit for heroes. How far he has realised this ideal in the years
during which he has ruled the House of Commons without opposition
is a question which the heroes themselves are best qualified to
answer; but, exalted as was his vision, some may still feel that,
since England contains men and women of most unheroic stature and
is but a part of the inhabited world, his formula was inadequate.
The young men of the generation which this book has attempted to
describe were, from the first awakening of their intelligence,
exercised over the function of government and divided over its
aim by the political philosophy which they hammered out for
themselves in reading and discussion. From different angles
and by different paths they reached agreement on the postulate
that, before all else, every man should have secured to him the
minimum of essentials. He could not claim food, air and warmth
of natural "right", for in organised society a man enjoys only
those rights which his fellow-men allow him; but the communists
accorded them as a payment on account, and the individualists as
an insurance against revolution. Those who fought shy of party
labels and regarded themselves as having been born fortuitously
and without consultation into a world from which there was no
escape but by death felt that they had every inducement to live,
by mutual consideration, on the best possible terms with their
fellows and that life would be intolerable if a neighbour rifled
their pockets as they slept or broke their heads if they snored.
Those who gloried in the name of liberals and believed that the
end of life was the attainment of beauty included in their minimum
the claim that each man should have secured to him the chance of
making his own life beautiful. With generosity not yet tarnished by
experience and with hatred of injustice not yet tempered by custom,
these young men felt that they could not be wholly comfortable
while others were uncomfortable: the cries of the suffering might
banish sleep, their desperation might threaten security; if they
obtruded it, as they were so tastelessly prone to do, their misery
might disquiet an over-active conscience. Policy joined hands with
humanity in favour of giving every one his minimum of essentials.
It had not been given when the war put an end to dreaming. It
has not been given yet. It will not be fully given until a man
is secure from disease and premature death; from pain, hunger,
thirst and cold; from spiritual and intellectual fear; from terror
of his fellow-man; from the educational inequality that sets him
at a disadvantage with others; from the grievance that comes of
a blow struck to his racial or religious sentiment. Twenty years
ago, before they discovered the limitations of official politics,
young liberals found from the contemplation of those ideals a
vocation: they believed in equality of opportunity and swore by
better housing, better feeding, better education; they sympathised
with the aspirations of nationality half a generation before these
were discovered and forgotten by the rest of England; they were
disturbed by the thought that men were flogged to death in the
Belgian Congo or massacred in Armenia; and, maybe, they wearied the
complacent with statistics of all those who in a single year and
in the richest country in the world died of cancer and consumption
or rotted away with syphilis. The verminous, rickety child seemed
no less a blot on civilisation than the short-lived prostitute
who--they were assured--was irreclaimable, "because that sort of
thing always _has_ gone on; it's the oldest profession in the
world; and, of course, it _is_ a safety-valve...."
Twenty years of work and travel, twenty years of mingling with
average, sensual men and women, twenty years' experience of inertia
may have cured young liberals of their optimism, but it should have
strengthened their faith. By now they have probably seen much of
what, before, was made known to them only from books: they have
walked through factories and seen girls turned into machines by
the monotonous repetition of one part of one process; they have
looked, over the side of a liner, at straining, black, half-naked
men who have already been turned into the semblance of shuffling,
debased animals by the monotony of carrying coal; they are assured,
perhaps, that industrial conditions are better in England than
anywhere else, but they still wonder what life and what vision
of beauty are possible to these slaves of the work-room and of
the coal-lighter, who are not the less slaves because they enjoy
freedom to move from one master to another. Sheltered indeed must
be the life of any who have not found, in twenty years, a daily
vent for the compassion which is the living breath of liberalism.
The communist who seeks to abolish private property has more
chance of success than the impatient reformer who tries to sweep
away all the ugliness of modern life by breaking the mechanism on
which modern life with its ugliness and its beauty depends. It
is too late to make an end of industrialism; and man was harder
used and more brutalised before the advent of machinery than ever
since. His lot is improving daily; and all that the reformer can
reasonably ask is that the rate of improvement shall be accelerated
until the employer of labour no longer imposes on his work-people
conditions that he would himself refuse. In war, a British officer
does not order his men into an action which he is himself afraid
to undertake; at the end of a march, he does not think of his own
needs until he has seen that his men have their food. There is
something perilously like shirking in the attitude of an employer
who expects men and women to undertake hardships from which he
stands aloof; and, directly or indirectly, all are employers.
The mission of liberalism will not be fulfilled until it has
achieved a form of civilisation whereof no part can inspire
misgiving or shame. Every country has its dark places; the
inhabitants of every country turn a blind eye to them until the
upheaval of war, the outbreak of revolution or the spread of a new
faith throws a challenge to every social institution and demands
that it shall justify itself. When more than five million men
voluntarily risked their lives in defence of one system against
another, their decision was less a clean-cut choice than a blend
of herd-instinct, collective hypnotism and that irrational feeling
for associations which is called patriotism; the decision once
taken, they committed themselves to a struggle in which one order
of civilisation would probably maintain itself and another would
probably be overthrown. If they preserved that which was less good
and destroyed that which was more good, they sinned against the
light; if they preserved that which was more good, they were still
obliged to prove it so much the better that no sacrifice was too
great for it; and, if in their scrutiny they discovered blemishes,
they were bound to remove them for fear the enemy would say that
they had sacrificed themselves for something that was not worth
their lives. During the war, of course, every one was too busy to
hunt for blemishes and to remove them.
After the war every one is too busy; and those who once called
themselves liberals have lost interest in everything but the
cost of living, though the youngest of them can recall the days
when the present prime minister's voice throbbed with emotion in
describing the misery of the poor and in championing the outcasts
of civilisation, wherever they were to be found.
It is more than time for the young liberals of twenty years ago to
recognise that the liberal faith has lost its prophets and that the
prophets have lost their liberal faith.