To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters,
liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism
wants them together. Liberals believe that free inquiry, free
invention, free association, and free trade are sure to produce
prosperity. I have no doubt they are right in this; the nineteenth
century, that golden age of liberalism, certainly saw a great increase
in wealth, in science, and in comforts. What the ancients had before
them was a different side of the question; they had no experience of
liberalism; they expected to be state-ridden in their religion, their
customs, and their military service; even in their personal and family
morals they did not begrudge the strictest discipline; their states
needed to be intensely unified, being small and in constant danger of
total destruction. Under these circumstances it seemed clear to them
that prosperity, however it might have been produced, was dangerous to
liberty. Prosperity brought power; and when a people exercises control
over other peoples its government becomes ponderous even at home;
its elaborate machinery cannot be stopped, and can hardly be mended;
the imperial people becomes the slave of its commitments. Moreover,
prosperity requires inequalities of function and creates inequalities
of fortune; and both too much work and too much wealth kill liberty
in the individual. They involve subjection to _things_; and this is
contrary to what the ancients, who had the pride of noble animals,
called freedom. Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means
possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and
slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time
that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of
his thoughts.
I often wonder, looking at my rich friends, how far their possessions
are facilities and how far they are impediments. The telephone, for
instance, is a facility if you wish to be in many places at once and
to attend to anything that may turn up; it is an impediment if you are
happy where you are and in what you are doing. Public motor-vehicles,
public libraries, and public attendants (such as waiters in hotels,
when they wait) are a convenience, which even the impecunious may
enjoy; but private automobiles, private collections of books or
pictures, and private servants are, to my thinking, an encumbrance: but
then I am an old fogy and almost an ancient philosopher, and I don't
count. I prize civilization, being bred in towns and liking to hear and
to see what new things people are up to. I like to walk about amidst
the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should
decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take
away my liberty.
Perhaps what liberalism aspires to marry with liberty is not so much
prosperity as progress. Progress means continued change for the better;
and it is obvious that liberty will conduce to progress in all those
things, such as writing poetry, which a man can pursue without aid
or interference from others: where aid is requisite and interference
probable, as in politics, liberty conduces to progress only in so far
as people are unanimous, and spontaneously wish to move in the same
direction. Now what is the direction of change which seems progress to
liberals? A pure liberal might reply, The direction of liberty itself:
the ideal is that every man should move in whatever direction he
likes, with the aid of such as agree with him, and without interfering
with those who disagree. Liberty so conceived would be identical with
happiness, with spontaneous life, blamelessly and safely lived; and the
impulse of liberalism, to give everybody what he wants, in so far as
that is possible, would be identical with simple kindness. Benevolence
was one of the chief motives in liberalism in the beginning, and
many a liberal is still full of kindness in his private capacity;
but politically, as a liberal, he is something more than kind. The
direction in which many, or even most, people would like to move
fills him with disgust and indignation; he does not at all wish them
to be happy, unless they can be happy on his own diet; and being a
reformer and a philanthropist, he exerts himself to turn all men into
the sort of men he likes, so as to be able to like them. It would be
selfish, he thinks, to let people alone. They must be helped, and not
merely helped to what they desire--that might really be very bad for
them--but helped onwards, upwards, in the _right_ direction. Progress
could not be rightly placed in a smaller population, a simpler economy,
more moral diversity between nations, and stricter moral discipline
in each of them. That would be progress backwards, and if it made
people happier, it would not make the liberal so. Progress, if it is
to please him, must continue in the direction in which the nineteenth
century progressed, towards vast numbers, material complexity, moral
uniformity, and economic interdependence. The best little boy, for
instance, according to the liberal ideal, desires to be washed, to go
to school, to do Swedish exercises, and to learn everything out of
books. But perhaps the individual little boy (and according to the
liberal philosophy his individuality is sacred, and the only judge
of what is good or true for him is his own consciousness) desires to
go dirty, to make mud-pies in the street, and to learn everything
by experience or by report from older boys. When the philanthropist
runs up to the rescue, this little ingrate snivels at him the very
principle of liberal liberty, "Let me alone." To inform such an urchin
that he does not know what is good for him, that he is a slave to bad
habits and devilish instincts, that true freedom for him can only
come of correcting himself, until he has learned to find happiness in
virtue--plainly that would be to abandon liberalism, and to preach
the classical doctrine that the good is not liberty but wisdom.
Liberalism was a protest against just such assumptions of authority. It
emphatically refused to pursue an eventual stoical freedom, absurdly
so called, which was to come when we had given up everything we really
wanted--the mock freedom of service. In the presence of the little boy
liberal philosophy takes a middle course. It is convinced--though it
would not do to tell him so prematurely--that he must be allowed to
go dirty for a time, until sufficient experience of filth teaches him
how much more comfortable it is to be clean; also that he will go to
school of his own accord if the books have pictures enough in them, and
if the teacher begins by showing him how to make superior mud-pies.
As to morals and religion, the boy and his companions will evolve the
appropriate ones in time out of their own experience, and no others
would be genuine.
Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British
in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now
believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by
all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single
spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher
than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately
desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle
of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher
snobs. If you refuse to move in the prescribed direction, you are not
simply different, you are arrested and perverse. The savage must not
remain a savage, nor the nun a nun, and China must not keep its wall.
If the animals remain animals it is somehow through a failure of the
will in them, and very sad. Classic liberty, though only a name for
stubborn independence, and obedience to one's own nature, was too
free, in one way, for the modern liberal. It accepted all sorts of
perfections, animal, human, and divine, as final after their kind, each
the seat of a sufficient virtue and happiness. It was polytheistic.
Between master and slave, between man and woman, it admitted no moral
advance or development; they were, or might be, equally perfect.
Inequality was honourable; amongst the humblest there could be dignity
and sweetness; the higher snobbery would have been absurd, because if
you were not content to be what you were now, how could you ever be
content with anything? But the transcendental principle of progress
is pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease in its own
house; no one can be really free or happy but all must be tossed, like
herded emigrants, on the same compulsory voyage, to the same unhomely
destination. The world came from a nebula, and to a nebula it returns.
In the interval, happiness is not to be found in being a fixed star, as
bright and pure as possible, even if only for a season; happiness is to
flow and dissolve in sympathy with one's higher destiny.
The motion of progress is thus merged with that of universal evolution,
dropping the element of liberty and even of improvement. Nevertheless,
in the political expression of liberalism, liberty took the first
innings. Protestants began by asserting the right of private Judgement
in interpreting scripture; transcendentalists ended by asserting the
divine right of the individual to impose his own spirit on everything
he touched. His duty to himself, which was also his deepest instinct,
was to suck in from the widest possible field all that was congenial to
him, and to reject, down to his very centre, whatever might thwart or
offend. Sometimes he carried his consistency in egotism to the length
of denying that anything he could not digest could possibly exist, or
that the material world and foreign nations were more than ideal pawns
in the game he played with himself for his self-development. Even when
not initiated into these transcendental mysteries, he was filled with
practical self-trust, the desire to give himself freedom, and the
belief that he deserved it. There was no need of exploring anything
he was not tempted to explore; he had an equal right to his opinion,
whatever the limits of his knowledge; and he should be coerced as
little as possible in his action. In specific matters, for the sake of
expediency, he might be willing to yield to the majority; but only when
his vote had been counted, and as a sort of insurance against being
disturbed in his residual liberty.
There was a general conviction behind all these maxims, that tradition
corrupts experience. All sensation--which is the test of matters of
fact--is somebody's sensation; all reasoning is somebody's reasoning,
and vitally persuasive as it first comes; but when transmitted the
evidence loses its edge, words drop their full meaning, and inert
conventions falsify the insights of those who had instituted them.
Therefore, reform, revision, restatement are perpetually required: any
individual, according to this view, who honestly corrected tradition
was sure to improve upon it. Whatsoever was not the fresh handiwork
of the soul and true to its present demand was bad for that soul. A
man without traditions, if he could only be materially well equipped,
would be purer, more rational, more virtuous than if he had been an
heir to anything. _Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist_! Blessed are the
orphans for they shall deserve to have children; blessed the American!
Philosophy should be transcendental, history romantic and focussed in
one's own country, politics democratic, and art individual and above
convention. Variety in religious dogma would only prove the truth--that
is, the inwardness--of inspiration.
Yet if this transcendental freedom had been the whole of liberalism,
would not the animals, such of them at least as are not gregarious,
have been the most perfect liberals? Are they not ruled wholly from
within? Do they not enjoy complete freedom of conscience and of
expression? Does Mrs. Grundy interfere with their spontaneous actions?
Are they ever compelled to fight except by their own impulse and in
their private interest? Yet it was not the ideal of liberalism to
return to nature; far from it. It admonished the dogs not to bark and
bite, even if, in the words of the sacred poet, "it is their nature
to." Dogs, according to transcendental philosophy, ought to improve
their nature, and to behave better. A chief part of the liberal
inspiration was the love of peace, safety, comfort, and general
information; it aimed at stable wealth, it insisted on education,
it venerated culture. It was wholly out of sympathy with the wilder
instincts of man, with the love of foraging, of hunting, of fighting,
of plotting, of carousing, or of doing penance. It had an acute, a
sickening horror of suffering; to be cruel was devilish and to be
hardened to pain was brutal. I am afraid liberalism was hopelessly
pre-Nietzschean; it was Victorian; it was tame. In inviting every man
to be free and autonomous it assumed that, once free, he would wish to
be rich, to be educated, and to be demure. How could he possibly fail
to covet a way of life which, in the eyes of liberals, was so obviously
the best? It must have been a painful surprise to them, and most
inexplicable, that hardly anybody who has had a taste of the liberal
system has ever liked it.
What about liberty in love? If there is one ingenuous and winged
creature among the immortals, it is Eros; the freer and more innocent
love is, the more it will flutter, the farther it will range, and the
higher it will soar. But at the touch of matter, of conditions, of
consequences, how all its freedom shrivels, or turns into tragedy!
What prohibitions, what hypocrisies, what responsibilities, what
sorrows! The progress of civilization compels love to respect the
limits set to it by earlier vows, by age, sex, class, race, religion,
blood relationship, and even fictitious relationship; bounds of which
the impertinent Eros himself knows nothing. Society smothers the imp
altogether in the long christening-clothes of domestic affection
and religious duty. What was once a sensuous intoxication, a mystic
rapture, an enchanted friendship, becomes all a question of money, of
habit, of children. British liberalism has been particularly cruel
to love; in the Victorian era all its amiable impulses were reputed
indecent, until a marriage certificate suddenly rendered them godly,
though still unmentionable. And what liberty does even the latest
radicalism offer to the heart? Liberty to be divorced; divorced at
great expense, with shabby perjuries and public scandal, probably in
order to be at once married again, until the next divorce. Was it not
franker and nobler to leave love, as in Spain, to the poets; to let
the stripling play the guitar as much as he liked in the moonlight,
exchange passionate glances, whisper daily at the lattice, and then,
dressing the bride in black, to dismiss free fancy at the church door,
saying: Henceforth let thy names be charity and fidelity and obedience?
It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that
must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy; but liberalism may
bring large opportunities for achievement in a man's outward life.
It intensifies--because it renders attainable--the lure of public
distinction, of luxury, of love surrounded by refined pleasures.
The liberal state stimulates the imagination of an ambitious man to
the highest degree. Those who have a good start in the universal
competition, or sharp wits, or audacity, will find plenty of prizes
awaiting them. With the pride of wealth, when it is great, there comes
the pride of munificence; in the suburbs of wealth there is culture,
and in its service there is science. When science can minister to
wealth and intelligence to dominion, both can be carried on the
shoulders of the plutocracy which dominates the liberal state; and they
can fill it with innumerable comforts and marvellous inventions. At the
same time, nothing will hinder the weaker members of rich families from
becoming clergymen or even scholars or artists; or they may range over
the five continents, hunt whatever wild beasts remain in the jungle,
and write books about savages.
Whether these prizes offered by liberal society are worth winning, I
cannot say from experience, never having desired them; but the aspects
of modern life which any one may observe, and the analytic picture
of it which the novelists supply, are not very attractive. Wealth is
always, even when most secure, full of itch and fear; worry about
health, children, religion, marriage, servants; and the awful question
of where to live, when one may live anywhere, and yet all seems to
depend on the choice. For the politician, politics are less important
than his private affairs, and less interesting than bridge; and he has
always a party, or a wicked opposition, on which to throw the blame if
his careless measures turn out badly. No one in office can be a true
statesman, because a true statesman is consistent, and public opinion
will never long support any consistent course. What the successful man
in modern society really most cares about is love; love for him is a
curious mixture of sensuality, vanity, and friendship; it lights up
all the world of his thought and action with its secret and unsteady
flame. Even when mutual and legal, it seems to be three-quarters
anxiety and sorrow; for if nothing worse happens to lovers, they grow
old. I hear no laughter among the rich which is not forced and nervous.
I find no sense of moral security amongst them, no happy freedom, no
mastery over anything. Yet this is the very cream of liberal life, the
brilliant success for the sake of which Christendom was overturned,
and the dull peasantry elevated into factory-hands, shopkeepers, and
chauffeurs. When the lists are open to all, and the one aim of life is
to live as much as possible like the rich, the majority must needs be
discouraged. The same task is proposed to unequal strengths, and the
competition emphasizes the inequality. There was more encouragement
for mediocre people when happiness was set before them in mediocrity,
or in excellence in some special craft. Now the mass, hopelessly out
of the running in the race for wealth, falls out and drifts into
squalor. Since there is liberty, the listless man will work as little
and drink as much as he can; he will crawl into whatever tenement he
can get cheapest, seek the society in which least effort is demanded
and least shame is felt, have as many children as improvidence sends
him, let himself out, at a pinch, for whatever service and whatever
wages he can obtain, drift into some syndicated servitude or some great
migration, or sink in solitude into the deepest misery. He then becomes
a denizen of those slimy quarters, under the shadow of railway bridges,
breweries, and gas-works, where the blear lights of a public-house peer
through the rain at every corner, and offer him the one joy remaining
in life; for joy is not to be mentioned in the same breath as the
female prowling by the door, hardly less befuddled and bedraggled
than the lurching idlers whom she endeavours to entice; but perhaps
God does not see all this, because a pall hangs over it perpetually
of impenetrable smoke. The liberal system, which sought to raise the
individual, has degraded the masses; and this on so vast a scale
and to so pitiable a degree, that the other element in liberalism,
philanthropic zeal, has come again to the fore. Liberty go hang, say
the new radicals; let us save the people. Liberal legislation, which
was to have reduced government to the minimum of police control, now
has undertaken public education, social reform, and even the management
of industry.
This happy people can read. It supports a press conforming to the
tastes of the common man, or rather to such tastes as common men can
have in common; for the best in each is not diffused enough to be
catered for in public. Moreover, this press is audaciously managed
by some adventitious power, which guides it for its own purposes,
commercial or sectarian. Superstitions old and new thrive in
this infected atmosphere; they are now all treated with a curious
respect, as if nobody could have anything to object to them. It is
all a scramble of prejudices and rumours; whatever first catches the
ear becomes a nucleus for all further presumptions and sympathies.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to
make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of
all propagandas--those insults to human nature--is carried on by the
most expert psychological methods, which the art of advertising has
discovered; for instance, by always repeating a lie, when it has been
exposed, instead of retracting it. The world at large is deafened; but
each propaganda makes its little knot of proselytes, and inspires them
with a new readiness to persecute and to suffer in the sacred cause.
The only question is, which propaganda can first materially reach the
greatest number of persons, and can most efficaciously quench all
the others. At present, it looks as if the German, the Catholic, and
the communist propaganda had the best chances; but these three are
divergent essentially (though against a common enemy they may work
for a while together, as they did during this war), and they appeal
to different weaknesses of human nature; they are alike, however,
in being equally illiberal, equally "_rücksichtlos_" and "_böse_"?
equally regardless of the harm they may do, and accounting it all an
added glory, like baiting the devil. By giving a free rein to such
propagandas, and by disgusting the people with too much optimism,
toleration, and neutrality, liberalism has introduced a new reign of
unqualified ill-will. Hatred and wilfulness are everywhere; nations
and classes are called to life on purpose to embody them; they are
summoned by their leaders to shake off the lethargy of contentment and
to become conscious of their existence and of their terrible wrongs.
These propagandas have taken shape in the blue sky of liberalism, like
so many summer clouds; they seem airships sailing under a flag of
truce; but they are engines of war, and on the first occasion they will
hoist their true colours, and break the peace which allowed them to
cruise over us so leisurely. Each will try to establish its universal
ascendancy by force, in contempt of personal freedom, or the voice
of majorities. It will rely, against the apathy and vagueness of the
million, on concentrated zeal in its adepts. Minorities everywhere have
their way; and majorities, grown familiar with projects that at first
shocked them, decide one fine morning that there may be no harm in them
after all, and follow like sheep. Every trade, sect, private company,
and aspiring nation, finding some one to lead it, asserts itself
"ruthlessly" against every other. Incipient formations in the body
politic, cutting across and subverting its old constitution, eat one
another up, like different species of animals; and the combat can never
cease except some day, perhaps, for lack of combatants. Liberalism has
merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest
may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in
this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which
will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age
against a new crop of rebels.
For myself, even if I could live to see it, I should not be afraid
of the future domination, whatever it may be. One has to live in
some age, under some fashion; I have found, in different times and
places, the liberal, the Catholic, and the German air quite possible
to breathe; nor, I am sure, would communism be without its advantages
to a free mind, and its splendid emotions. Fanatics, as Tacitus said
of the Jews or Christians, are consumed with hatred of the human race,
which offends them; yet they are themselves human; and nature in them
takes its revenge, and something reasonable and sweet bubbles up out
of the very fountain of their madness. Once established in the world
the new dispensation forms a ruling caste, a conventional morality,
a standard of honour; safety and happiness soften the heart of the
tyrant. Aristocracy knows how to kiss the ruddy cheeks of its tenants'
children; and before mounting its thoroughbred horse at the park gates,
it pats him with a gloved hand, and gives him a lump of sugar; nor does
it forget to ask the groom, with a kindly interest, when he is setting
out for the war. Poor flunkey! The demagogues will tell him he is a
fool, to let himself be dragooned into a regiment, and marched off
to endure untold privations, death, or ghastly wounds, all for some
fantastic reason which is nothing to him. It is a hard fate; but can
this world promise anybody anything better? For the moment he will have
a smart uniform; beers and lasses will be obtainable; many comrades
will march by his side; and he may return, if he is lucky, to work
again in his master's stables, lounge at the public-house, and bounce
his children on his knee amongst the hollyhocks before his cottage.
Would the demagogues give him better prospects, or prove better
masters? Would he be happier with no masters at all? Consider the
demagogues themselves, and their history. They found themselves in the
extreme of misery; but even this is a sort of distinction, and marks
off a new species, seizing new weapons in the struggle for existence.
The scum of the earth gathers itself together, becomes a criminal or
a revolutionary society, finds some visionary or some cosmopolitan
agitator to lead it, establishes its own code of ethics, imposes the
desperate discipline of outlaws upon its members, and prepares to rend
the free society that allowed it to exist. It is astonishing with
what docility masses of Englishmen, supposed to be jealous of their
personal liberty, will obey such a revolutionary junta, that taxes and
commands them, and decrees when they shall starve and when they shall
fight. I suspect that the working-people of the towns no longer have
what was called the British character. Their forced unanimity in action
and passion is like that of the ages of faith; its inspiration, like
that of early Christianity, comes from a few apostles, perhaps foreign
Jews, men who in the beginning had visions of some millennium; and the
cohesion of the faithful is maintained afterwards by preaching, by
custom, by persecution, and by murder. Yet it is intelligible that the
most earnest liberals, who in so far as they were advocates of liberty
fostered these conspiracies, in so far as they are philanthropists
should applaud them, and feel the need of this new tyranny. They save
liberal principles by saying that they applaud it only provisionally as
a necessary means of freeing the people. But of freeing the people from
what? From the consequences of freedom.
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