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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of
+To-day, by Alfred Farthing Robbins
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of To-day
+
+Author: Alfred Farthing Robbins
+
+Release Date: April 17, 2011 [EBook #35894]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRACTICAL POLITICS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PRACTICAL POLITICS
+
+or the
+
+LIBERALISM OF TO-DAY
+
+
+BY
+
+ALFRED F. ROBBINS
+
+AUTHOR OF
+
+_"Five Years of Tory Rule;" "William Edward Forster, the Man and
+his Policy;" "The Marquis of Salisbury, a Personal and
+Political Sketch," &c._
+
+_REPRINTED FROM THE "HALFPENNY WEEKLY"_
+
+
+London
+T. FISHER UNWIN
+26 PATERNOSTER SQUARE
+1888
+
+
+TO
+My Father,
+WHOSE DEVOTION TO LIBERAL PRINCIPLES
+HAS FOR SIXTY YEARS
+NEVER WAVERED,
+THIS WORK,
+THE OUTCOME OF HIS EXCELLENT TEACHING AND
+CONSISTENT EXAMPLE,
+IS
+AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+The Articles here republished are from the columns of the _Halfpenny
+Weekly_, to the Proprietors of which the Author is indebted for much
+courtesy and consideration. They were written originally in the form of
+letters to a friend, but, though they stand substantially as first
+printed, various alterations have been made consequent upon the
+necessities of a permanent rather than a serial form. The Author does
+not profess to have exhaustively discussed every political question
+which is of practical importance to-day--for that, within the limits
+assigned, would have been impossible; but he has attempted to furnish a
+body of information regarding the principles and aims of present-day
+Liberalism, not easily accessible elsewhere, which may be useful to
+those whose ideas upon public affairs are yet unformed, and helpful to
+the political cause he holds dear.
+
+_May, 1888._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+      I. WHAT IS THE USE OF A VOTE?                                  11
+
+     II. IS THERE ANYTHING PRACTICAL IN POLITICS?                    16
+
+    III. WHY NOT LET THINGS ALONE?                                   21
+
+     IV. OUGHT ONE TO BE A PARTISAN?                                 25
+
+      V. WHY NOT HAVE A "NATIONAL" PARTY?                            31
+
+     VI. IS ONE PARTY BETTER THAN THE OTHER?                         35
+
+    VII. WHAT ARE LIBERAL PRINCIPLES?                                41
+
+   VIII. ARE LIBERALS AND RADICALS AGREED?                           47
+
+     IX. WHAT ARE THE LIBERALS DOING?                                52
+
+      X. SHOULD HOME RULE BE GRANTED TO IRELAND?                     58
+
+     XI. WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH THE LORDS?                         66
+
+    XII. IS THE HOUSE OF COMMONS PERFECT?                            71
+
+   XIII. IS OUR ELECTORAL SYSTEM COMPLETE?                           77
+
+    XIV. SHOULD THE CHURCH REMAIN ESTABLISHED?                       83
+
+     XV. WOULD DISENDOWMENT BE JUST?                                 89
+
+    XVI. OUGHT EDUCATION TO BE FREE?                                 97
+
+   XVII. DO THE LAND LAWS NEED REFORM?                              102
+
+  XVIII. SHOULD WASTE LANDS BE TILLED AND THE GAME LAWS ABOLISHED?  107
+
+    XIX. OUGHT LEASEHOLDS TO BE ENFRANCHISED?                       112
+
+     XX. WHOSE SHOULD BE THE UNEARNED INCREMENT?                    117
+
+    XXI. HOW SHOULD LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT BE EXTENDED?              122
+
+   XXII. HOW IS LOCAL OPTION TO BE EFFECTED?                        127
+
+  XXIII. WHY AND HOW ARE WE TAXED?                                  132
+
+   XXIV. HOW OUGHT WE TO BE TAXED?                                  137
+
+    XXV. HOW IS TAXATION TO BE REDUCED?                             144
+
+   XXVI. IS FREE TRADE TO BE PERMANENT?                             149
+
+  XXVII. IS FOREIGN LABOUR TO BE EXCLUDED?                          155
+
+ XXVIII. HOW SHOULD WE GUIDE OUR FOREIGN POLICY?                    160
+
+   XXIX. IS A PEACE POLICY PRACTICABLE?                             165
+
+    XXX. HOW SHOULD WE DEAL WITH THE COLONIES?                      171
+
+   XXXI. SHOULD THE STATE SOLVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS?                    177
+
+  XXXII. HOW FAR SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE?                        182
+
+ XXXIII. SHOULD THE STATE REGULATE LABOUR OR WAGES?                 188
+
+  XXXIV. SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE WITH PROPERTY?                  194
+
+   XXXV. OUGHT THE STATE TO FIND FOOD AND WORK FOR ALL?             197
+
+  XXXVI. HOW OUGHT WE TO DEAL WITH SOCIALISM?                       200
+
+ XXXVII. WHAT SHOULD BE THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME?                      205
+
+XXXVIII. HOW IS THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME TO BE ATTAINED?               211
+
+  XXXIX. IS PERFECTION IN POLITICS POSSIBLE?                        216
+
+     XL. WHERE SHALL WE STOP?                                       220
+
+
+
+
+PRACTICAL POLITICS.
+
+
+
+
+I.--WHAT IS THE USE OF A VOTE?
+
+
+There are many persons, who, though possessing the suffrage, often put
+the question, "What is the use of a vote?" Giving small heed to
+political affairs, the issue of elections has as little interest for
+them as the debates in Parliament; and they imagine that the process of
+governing the country is mainly a self-acting one, upon which their
+individual effort could have the least possible effect.
+
+This idea is wrong at the root, and the cause of much mischief in
+politics. We are governed by majorities, and every vote counts. Even the
+heaviest polls are sometimes decided by a majority of a single figure.
+In the history of English elections, many instances could be found
+wherein a member was returned by the narrowest majority of all--the
+majority of one; and when a member so elected has been taunted with its
+slenderness, he has had a right to reply, as some have replied, in
+well-known words: "'Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church
+door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve." And not only in the
+constituencies, but in Parliament itself, decisions have been arrived at
+by a solitary vote. The great principle animating the first Reform Bill
+was thus adopted by the House of Commons; and the measure shortly
+afterwards was taken to the country with the advantage thus given it.
+As, therefore, everything of importance in England is decided first in
+the constituencies, and then in Parliament, by single votes, it is
+obvious that in each possessor of the franchise is vested a power which,
+however apparently small when compared with the enormous number of
+similar possessors elsewhere, may have a direct bearing in turning an
+election, the result of which may affect the fate of some important
+bill.
+
+So far most will doubtless agree without demur; but, in their
+indifference to political questions, may think that it is only those
+interested in them who have any real concern with elections. This is
+another mistake, for political questions are so intimately bound up with
+the comfort, the fortune, and even the fate of every citizen of a free
+country, that, although he may shut his eyes to them, they press upon
+him at every turn. It would be a very good world if each could do as he
+liked and none be the worse; but the world is not so constituted, and it
+is politics that lessen the consequent friction. For the whole system of
+government is covered by the term; and there is not an hour of the day
+in which one is free from the influence of government.
+
+It is not necessary for one to be conscious of this in order to be
+certain that it is so. When he is in perfect health he is not conscious
+that every part of his body is in active exercise, but, if he stumble
+over a chair, he is made painfully aware of the possession of shins. And
+so with the actions of government. As long as things work smoothly the
+majority of people give them little heed, but, if an additional tax be
+levied, they are immediately interested in politics. And although taxes
+are not the least unpleasant evidence that there is such a thing as a
+government, it is far from the most unpleasant that could be afforded.
+The issues of peace and war lie in the hands of Parliament, although
+nominally resting with the Executive, for Parliament can speedily end a
+war by stopping the supplies; and it is not necessary to show how the
+progress and result of an armed struggle might affect each one of us.
+The State has a right to call upon every citizen for help in time of
+need, and that time of need might come very quickly at the heels of a
+disastrous campaign. It is easy enough in times of peace to imagine that
+such a call upon every grown man will never be made; but it is a
+possible call, and one to be taken into account when the value of a vote
+is considered.
+
+Those who are sent to Parliament have thus the power of embarking in
+enterprises which may diminish one's revenue by increased taxation and
+imperil his life by enforced service. And in matters of less importance,
+but of considerable effect upon both pocket and comfort, they wield
+extensive powers. They can extend or they can lessen our liberties; they
+can interfere largely with our social concerns; their powers are nowhere
+strictly defined, and are so wide as to be almost illimitable. And for
+the manner in which they exercise those powers, each man who possesses a
+vote is in his degree responsible.
+
+There are persons who affect, from the height of a serene indifference,
+to look down upon all political struggles as the mere diversions of a
+lower mental order. That kind of being, or any approach to its attitude
+of mind, should be avoided by all who wish well to the government of the
+country. To sit on the fence, and rail at the ploughman, because his
+boots are muddy and his hands unwashed, is at once useless and
+impertinent; and to stand outside the political field, and endeavour to
+hinder those who are doing their best within, deserves the same
+epithets. When it is said that hypocrites, and humbugs, and self-seekers
+abound in politics, and that there is no place there for honest men,
+does not the indictment appear too sweeping? Has not the same argument
+been used against religion; and is it not one of the poorest in the
+whole armoury of controversy? If there are hypocrites, and humbugs, and
+self-seekers in politics--and no candid person would deny it, any more
+than that there are such in religion, in business, in science, and in
+art--is it not the more necessary that every honest man should try and
+root them out? If every honest man abstained from politics, with what
+right could he complain that all politicians were rogues? But no sober
+person believes that all politicians are rogues, and those superior
+beings who talk as if they are deserve condemnation for doing nothing to
+purify the political atmosphere.
+
+Some who would not go so far as those who are thus condemned, still
+labour under the idea that politics are more or less a game, to the
+issue of which they can afford to be indifferent. This, it may be
+feared, is the notion of many, and it is one to be earnestly combatted.
+Every man owes the duty to the State to assist, as far as he can, those
+whom he considers the best and wisest of its would-be governors. There
+is nobility in the idea that every elector can do something for the
+national welfare by thoughtfully and straightforwardly exercising the
+franchise, and aiding the cause he deems best. Young men especially
+should entertain this feeling, for youth is the time for burning
+thoughts, and it is not until a man is old that he can afford to
+smoulder. The future is in the hands of the young of to-day; and if
+these are indifferent to the great issues of State, and are prepared to
+let things drift, a rude awakening awaits them.
+
+The details of political work need not here be entered upon. All that is
+now wanted is to show that that work is of very real importance to every
+one; and that, unless taken in hand by the honest and capable, it will
+fall to the dishonest and incapable for accomplishment. And as the vote
+is a right to which every free Englishman is entitled, and a trust each
+possessor of which should be called upon to exercise, there ought not to
+remain men on the registers who persistently decline to use it. Absentee
+landlords have been the curse of Ireland, and they will have to be got
+rid of. Abstentionist voters might, in easily conceivable circumstances,
+be the curse of England, and they would have to be got rid of likewise.
+
+The value of a vote may be judged from the fact that it saves the
+country from a periodical necessity for revolution. Everything in our
+Constitution that wants altering can be altered at the ballot-box; and
+whereas the vote-less man has no direct influence upon those affairs of
+State which affect him as they affect every other citizen, the possessor
+of the franchise can make his power directly felt. We are within sight
+of manhood, it may be of adult, suffrage; and if the vote were of no
+value it would be folly--almost criminal folly--to extend its use. Those
+who deem it folly are of a practically extinct school in English
+politics. For better or worse, the few are now governed by the many,
+and the many will never again be governed by the few.
+
+Those who are of the many may be tempted to urge that that very fact
+lessens the worth of the vote in that every elector has the same value
+at the polling booth, and that, however intelligent may be the interest
+he takes in politics, his ignorant neighbour's vote counts the same as
+his own. But that is to forget what every one who mixes with his
+fellow-men must soon learn--that the intelligent have a weight of
+legitimate influence upon their less-informed fellows which is
+exceedingly great. Our vote counts for no more than that of the man who
+has sold his suffrage for beer; but our influence may have brought
+twenty waverers to the poll, while that of our beer-drinking
+acquaintance has brought none.
+
+A cynic has observed that "politics are a salad, in which office is the
+oil, opposition the vinegar, and the people the thing to be devoured."
+But to approach public affairs from that point, and to judge them solely
+on that principle, is as reasonable as to use green spectacles and
+complain of the colour of the sky. Politics should be looked at without
+prejudice, but with the recollection that in them are concerned many of
+our best and wisest men. If that be done, and the mind kept open for the
+reception of facts, there is little doubt of the admission that there is
+a deep reality in politics, and a reality in which every one is
+concerned.
+
+
+
+
+II.--IS THERE ANYTHING PRACTICAL IN POLITICS?
+
+
+All will possibly admit that, in conceivable circumstances, a vote may
+be useful, but many will not be prepared to allow that politics are an
+important factor in our daily life. War, they would urge, is a remote
+contingency, and a conscription is, of all unlikely things, the most
+unlikely; our liberties have been won, and there is no chance of a
+despot sitting on the throne; and, even if taxes are high, what can any
+one member of Parliament, much less any one elector, do to bring them
+down? From which questions, and from the answers they think must be made
+to them, they would draw the conclusion that, whatever might have been
+the case formerly, there is nothing practical in the politics of to-day.
+
+It would not be hard to show that a conscription is by no means an
+impossibility; that our liberties demand constant vigilance; and that
+individual effort may greatly affect taxation. But even if the answer
+desired were given to each question, the points raised, except the last,
+are admittedly remote from daily life; and, if politics are to be
+considered practical, they must concern affairs nearer to us. This they
+do; and if they affected only the greater issues of State, they would
+not be practical in the sense they now are. It is the small troubles,
+whether public or private, which worry us most. The dust in one's eye
+may be only a speck, but, measured by misery, it is colossal.
+
+The law touches us upon every side, and the law is the outcome of
+politics in having been enacted by Parliament. From the smallest things
+to the greatest, the Legislature interferes. A man cannot go into a
+public-house after a certain hour because of one Act of Parliament; he
+cannot deal with a bank upon specified days because of another. One Act
+of Parliament orders him, if a householder, to clean his pavement;
+another prohibits him from building a house above a given height in
+streets of a certain width. And while the law takes care of one's
+neighbour by affixing a well-known penalty to murder, it is so regardful
+of oneself that it absolutely prohibits suicide. We are surrounded, in
+fact, by a network of regulations provided by Parliament. We are no
+sooner born than the law insists upon our being registered; we cannot
+marry without the interference of the same august power; and when we
+die, those who are left behind must comply with the formalities the law
+demands.
+
+It may be answered that this does not sound like politics; that there is
+nothing of Liberal or Tory in all this; but there is. Liberals, for
+instance, have been mainly identified with the demand for the better
+regulation of public-houses; it is to the Liberals that we owe a
+long-called-for reform in the burial laws; and it is due to the Liberals
+that a change in the marriage regulations, particularly affecting
+Nonconformists, is on the eve of being adopted. Social questions are not
+necessarily divorced from party concerns, and the moment Parliament
+touches them they become political. If one looks down a list of the
+measures presented to the House of Commons he will see that from the
+purity of beer to the protection of trade-marks, from the enactment of a
+close-time for hares to the provision of harbours of refuge, from a
+declaration of the size of saleable crabs to the disestablishment of a
+Church--every subject which concerns a man's external affairs,
+political, social, or religious, is dealt with by Parliament.
+
+Even if only those political matters are regarded which have a
+distinctly partisan aspect, there is more that is practical in them than
+would at first be perceived. "What," it may be asked, "is local option,
+or county councils, or 'three acres and a cow' to me? I have no
+particular liking for drink; I have not the least ambition to become a
+combination of guardian and town councillor; and I am in no way
+interested in agricultural concerns. When you require me to take an
+active part in promoting the measures here indicated, how, I want to
+know, am I concerned in any one of them?"
+
+The answer is that any and all of them should concern the questioner a
+great deal. He imagines he is not directly interested because of the
+reasons put forward. Is he certain those reasons cover the whole case?
+He has "no particular liking for drink," and, therefore, would not
+trouble himself to obtain local option. But has he not been a
+sufficiently frequent witness of the crime and misery caused by drink to
+be persuaded that it is the duty of every good citizen to do all that in
+him lies to lessen the evil effects? And as such good results have
+flowed from the stricter regulation of the sale of intoxicating liquors,
+ought it not to be his endeavour to place a further power of regulation
+in the hands of those most interested--the people themselves?
+
+Establishing county councils may not touch the individual citizen so
+nearly, though it is in that direction that a solution of the local
+option problem is being attempted to be found; and the supposed
+questioner has "not the least ambition to become a combination of
+guardian and town councillor." Perhaps not; other people have, and it is
+a legitimate ambition that does them honour. The work performed by town
+councillors, and guardians, and members of school boards is excellent
+service, not only to the locality but the State. The freedom which
+England enjoys to-day is largely owing to the habits of self-government
+fostered by local institutions, the origin of which is as old as our
+civilization, and the roots of which have sunk deeply into the soil. And
+seeing how our towns have thriven since their government was taken from
+a privileged few and given to the whole body of their inhabitants, is
+there not fair reason to hope that the county districts will similarly
+be benefitted by institutions equally representative and equally free?
+And, as the improvement of a part has good effect upon the whole, even
+those who may never have a direct connection with the suggested county
+councils, will profit by their establishment.
+
+With equal certainty it may be asserted that the condition of the
+labourer is of practical importance to every citizen. "I am in no way
+interested in agricultural concerns," it is said; and if by that is
+simply meant that the objector does not work upon a farm, has no direct
+dealings with agricultural produce, and no money invested in land, he,
+of course, would be right. But even these conditions do not exhaust the
+possibilities of connection with agriculture, which is the greatest
+single commercial interest this country possesses; and, so
+inter-dependent are the various interests, if the largest of all is not
+in a satisfactory state the others are bound to suffer. It is those
+others in which most of us may be specially concerned, but we are
+generally concerned in agriculture; and as the latter cannot be at its
+best as long as the labourers are in their present condition, is it not
+obvious that all are interested in every honest endeavour to get that
+condition improved? This is not the moment to argue the details of any
+plan; but the principle is plain--the condition of the agricultural
+labourer has passed into the region of practical politics.
+
+There is a school among us, and perhaps a growing one, which, affecting
+to despise such matters as these, wishes to make the State a huge
+wage-settling and food-providing machine. If one talks to its members of
+public affairs, they reply that the only practical politics is to give
+bread-and-cheese to the working classes. But fact is wanted instead of
+theory, demonstration rather than declamation, and, in place of a
+platitude, a plan. For it is easy to talk of a State, in which there
+shall be no misery, no poverty, and no crime; but the practical
+politician will want to know how this is to be secured; and while
+waiting for a plain answer, will decline to be drawn from the questions
+of the immediate present.
+
+No one need sigh for other political worlds to conquer while even such
+problems as have just been noted ask for settlement; and there are
+further departments of public affairs which demand attention, and which
+are pressing to the front. Most would admit that a vote may be useful
+sometimes. I say it is useful always. All would own that the greater
+matters of law and liberty may fairly be called practical politics. I
+add that the lesser matters with which Parliament has to deal, and which
+affect us daily, are equally worthy the name. Let one look around and
+say if "everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."
+If he cannot, he ought to strive for the reform of that which is not for
+the best. And as long as he has to strive for that reform, so long will
+there be something practical in politics.
+
+
+
+
+III.--WHY NOT LET THINGS ALONE?
+
+
+"Why can't you let things alone?" is a question which has often been put
+by those who either care little for politics or who wish to stave off
+reform. It was the favourite exclamation of a Whig Prime Minister, Lord
+Melbourne, and it is still used by many worthy persons as if it were
+really applicable to matters of government. "Things"--that is public
+affairs--can no more be let alone than one can let himself alone, or his
+machinery alone, or his business alone. The secret of perpetual motion
+has not been discovered in the State any more than in science. If one is
+a workman and leaves things alone, he will be dismissed; if a tradesman
+or manufacturer, he will become bankrupt; if a property-owner, ruin will
+equally follow. A man would not leave his face alone because it had been
+washed yesterday; he would not argue that as a face it was a very good
+face, and that one thorough cleansing should last it a lifetime. And the
+Constitution needs as careful looking after as one's business or his
+body.
+
+A sound Radical of a couple of centuries ago--and though the name
+Radical had not then been invented, the man Radical was frequently to
+the fore--put this point in plain words. "All governments and societies
+of men," said Andrew Marvell, "do, in process of time, gather an
+irregularity and wear away. And, therefore, the true wisdom of all ages
+hath been to review at fit periods those errors, defects, or excesses
+that have crept into the public administration; to brush the dust off
+the wheels and oil them again, or, if it be found necessary, to choose a
+set of new ones." And if Marvell be objected to as an authority, one can
+be given which should satisfy even the staunchest Conservative. "There
+was never anything by the wit of man so well devised or so sure
+established which in the continuance of time hath not been corrupted."
+That expression of opinion is not taken from any Whig, Liberal, or
+Radical source, but from the preface to the Book of Common Prayer.
+
+There is an older authority still, and that is the proverb which says "A
+stitch in time saves nine." One can scarcely read a page of English
+constitutional history without seeing the advances made in the comfort,
+prosperity, and liberty of the people by timely reform; and no man would
+seriously urge our going back to the old standpoints. Yet every reform,
+though we may now all agree that it was for the greatest good of the
+greatest number, was opposed by hosts of people, who talked about "the
+wisdom of our ancestors," and asked, "Why can't you let things alone?"
+It may be said that the grievances under which men labour to-day are
+nothing like as great as those against which our fathers fought.
+Happily--and thanks to the enthusiasts of old--that is so; but if they
+are grievances, whether small or large, they ought to be removed. There
+are some who think that a man with a grievance is a man to be
+pitied--and put on one side. But, even if those so afflicted are apt to
+prove bores, such complaints as are well founded should be attended to.
+
+It is a fact beyond question that there is no finality in politics, and,
+to take two examples from the present century--the Reform Act of 1832,
+which was thought by its authors to be a "final" measure, and at the Act
+of Union with Ireland, which the first Salisbury Administration
+described in their Queen's Speech as "a fundamental law"--it will be
+seen that the dream of finality in each case has been and is being
+roughly dispelled. What man has done, man can do--and can undo.
+
+The instances mentioned deserve a closer examination, because they so
+perfectly show the impossibility of standing still in political affairs.
+If ever there was a measure which statesmen of both parties held to be
+final, the Reform Act was that one. During the discussions upon it, the
+word "finality" was more than once used; Sir Robert Peel two years later
+declared that he considered it "a final and irrevocable settlement of a
+great constitutional question;" and in 1837, as in 1832, its author,
+Lord John Russell, spoke of it as "a final measure." Final it was in the
+sense that England would never go back to the days of borough-mongering,
+but there the finality ended. As early as the year after it passed, a
+Liberal member declared in his place in the House that "he for one had
+never conceded the monstrous principle that any legislative measure was
+to be final; still less had he ever conceded the yet more monstrous
+principle that the members of that House were entitled by any sort of
+compromise to barter away the rights and privileges of the people." The
+views thus plainly laid down have been put in practice by men of both
+parties; the ten-pound franchise of 1832 gave place in 1867 to household
+suffrage for the boroughs, and this in 1884 was extended to the
+counties. So much for the "finality" of the one great Act of this
+century to which the word has been applied.
+
+The so-called "fundamental law" of the Union with Ireland is threatened
+with alteration and amendment in the same fashion as the "final" Reform
+Act. Already, by the disestablishment of the Irish Church, a large hole
+has been made in it; and a larger will be made when Home Rule is gained.
+There is in England no law of so "fundamental" a nature that it cannot
+be mended or ended just as the people wish. No generation has power to
+bind its successors; and if the Parliament of 1800 was able to make the
+Legislative Union, the Parliament of to-day is able to unmake it. Upon
+this point--and it affects not only the general question now being
+argued, but a particular question yet to be discussed--one of the most
+distinguished "Liberal Unionists" may be quoted. Mr. Bright, speaking at
+Liverpool in the summer of 1868, observed--"I have never said that
+Irishmen are not at liberty to ask for and, if they could accomplish it,
+to obtain the repeal of the Union. I say that we have no right whatever
+to insist upon a union between Ireland and Great Britain upon our terms
+only.... I am one of those who admit--as every sensible man must
+admit--that an Act which the Parliament of the United Kingdom has
+passed, the Parliament of the United Kingdom can repeal. And further, I
+am willing to admit what everybody in England allows with regard to
+every foreign country, that any nation, believing it to be its
+interest, has a right both to ask for and to strive for national
+independence." If, then, even a "fundamental law" can be got rid of, if
+occasion demands and the people wish, what hope can the most lukewarm
+have that things will be let alone?
+
+Politics, in fact, may fairly be called a sort of see-saw: we are
+constantly going up and down, and can never be still. As long as a
+public grievance remains unremedied, so long will there be a call for
+reform; and one may be sure that, though he may come to a ripe old age,
+he will not live enough years to see every wrong made right. Some may
+hide behind the question put and answered eighteen centuries ago; may
+ask, as was then asked, "Who is my neighbour?" and may seek to avoid
+doing as they would be done by. But, as citizens of a free State, they
+have no right to shirk their duty to those around them. No man who looks
+at society with open eyes can doubt that much can be done by the
+Legislature to better the conditions of daily life. We do wrong if we
+allow others to suffer when efforts of ours can remove at least some of
+their pain.
+
+Therefore, things cannot be let alone in politics any more than in daily
+life; and even if they could, it would not be right to let them. It does
+not need that one should give all his leisure moments to politics, and
+all the energies he can spare from business to public life. But it does
+need that he should pay some heed to that which concerns his fellow-man
+and the society in which he lives; and all should be politicians in
+their degree, not for love of place, or power, or excitement, but
+because politics really mean much to the happiness and welfare of the
+State.
+
+
+
+
+IV.--OUGHT ONE TO BE A PARTISAN?
+
+
+When we come from "first principles" to the more immediate topics of the
+day, party considerations at once enter in; and to the question, "Ought
+one to be a partisan?" I answer "Certainly." On the political barometer
+a man ought distinctly to indicate the side he takes--not stand in the
+middle and point to "change."
+
+There is a great deal talked of the beauty of non-partisanship, of the
+necessity for looking at public matters in a clear white light, and of
+the exceeding glory of those who put country before party. Such of this
+as is not commonplace is cant, and in politics Johnson's advice to
+"clear your mind of cant" is especially to be taken. When a public man
+talks of putting his country before his party, he surely implies that he
+has been in the habit of putting his party before his country, and that
+man's record should be carefully scanned. For it will very often be
+found that those who boast of placing country before party place
+themselves before either.
+
+"Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours
+the national interest upon some particular in which they are all
+agreed." That is Burke's definition, and it holds good to-day. Superfine
+folk speak as if there were something derogatory in the fact of
+belonging to a party, some lessening of liberty of judgment, some
+forfeiting of conscience. That need not be. There must be give-and-take
+among members of the same party, just as there must be among those of
+the same household, of the same religious connection, and often of the
+same business concern. The necessity to bear and to forbear is as
+obvious in politics as in other matters of daily life, which is only
+saying in a different fashion that in politics, as in everything, a
+man's angles have to be rubbed off if he is to work in company with
+anybody else. But he gives up a portion of his opinions only to retain
+or strengthen those he considers essential. A Churchman is still a
+Churchman whether he is labelled High, Low, or Broad; he may believe
+with Canon Knox-Little, with Bishop Ryle, or with Archdeacon Farrar, and
+continue a member of the Established Church; and it is only when
+conscience compels him to differ from them all upon some essential point
+of doctrine or practice that he becomes a Protestant Dissenter, a
+Unitarian, a Roman Catholic, or, it may be, an Atheist.
+
+As with religion, so with politics. A Conservative is still a
+Conservative, whether he be called a Constitutionalist, a Tory Democrat,
+a Tory, or, as Mr. William Henry Smith was accustomed to describe
+himself, an Independent-Liberal-Conservative. He may be of the school of
+the late Mr. Newdegate, of Lord Salisbury, or of Lord Randolph
+Churchill, and the party bond is elastic enough to embrace him. And when
+it is remembered that the name "Liberal" covers all sorts and conditions
+of friends of progress, from Lord Hartington to Mr. Labouchere, it will
+be seen that a man must be querulous indeed who cannot find rest for the
+sole of his foot in one or other of the great parties of the State.
+
+No doubt it is easy to quote opinions from some eminent persons in
+condemnation of the party system. There is a saying of Dr. Arnold that a
+Liberal is "one who gets up every morning in the full belief that
+everything is an open question;" and with this may be coupled a chance
+expression of Carlyle, that "an English Whig politician means generally
+a man of altogether mechanical intellect, looking to Elegance,
+Excitement, and a certain refined Utility as the Highest; a man halting
+between two Opinions, and calling it Tolerance;" while there may be
+added the quotation, better known than either, "Conservatism discards
+Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected
+all respect for Antiquity, it offers no redress for the Present, and
+makes no preparation for the Future." It was the author of these last
+words who uttered also the caustic remark, "It seems to me a barren
+thing, this Conservatism, an unhappy cross-breed; the mule of politics,
+that engenders nothing." And that author was Benjamin Disraeli,
+afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield.
+
+Of course, this merely shows that hard things have been and can be said
+of all parties, but if they have been as bad as thus represented, is it
+not strange that England has done so well under their rule? It may be
+replied that, whatever has been the case, the fact now is that the old
+parties are dead, and the idea may be echoed of those who wish to keep
+the Tories in power, that only "Unionists" and "Separatists" are left;
+but, setting aside the circumstance that the Liberals emphatically
+disclaim the latter title, the facts are against the original
+assumption.
+
+The history of our Constitution will show that parties bring the best
+men to the front, groups the worst--the most pushing, pertinacious, and
+impudent of those among them. And when men talk, as some are talking
+to-day, of new combinations--combinations of persons rather than of
+principles--to take the place of the old parties, they should be watched
+carefully to see whether they do not degenerate, as other men in similar
+circumstances have done, into mere hungry scramblers for place.
+
+Much of the flabby feeling which pervades some minds in antagonism to
+partisanship has been nourished by the cry of "measures, not men." "To
+attack vices in the abstract, without touching persons, may be safe
+fighting indeed, but it is fighting with shadows." These words of Pope
+were taken by Junius to enforce his opinion that "'measures and not men'
+is the common cant of affected moderation--a base counterfeit language,
+fabricated by knaves and made current among fools." "What does it
+avail," he asked, "to expose the absurd contrivance or pernicious
+tendency of measures if the man who advises or executes shall be
+suffered not only to escape with impunity, but even to preserve his
+power?" If this opinion be put aside as being only that of a clever but
+venomous pamphleteer, an equally strong condemnation of the old
+cuckoo-cry can be quoted from the greatest philosopher who ever
+practically dealt with English politics. "It is an advantage," said
+Burke, "to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals, that their maxims have a
+plausible air, and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles.
+They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin, and
+about as valuable. They serve equally the first capacities and the
+lowest; and they are at least as useful to the worst men as the best. Of
+this stamp is the cant of 'not men, but measures'; a sort of charm by
+which many people get loose from every honourable engagement." And, if
+we go to the gaiety of Goldsmith from the gravity of Burke, it is
+significant that the author of "The Good-Natured Man" puts in the mouth
+of a bragging political liar and cheat the expression, "Measures, not
+men, have always been my mark."
+
+But, it is sometimes said, the very fact of not being a partisan argues
+freedom from prejudice. Does it not equally argue freedom from
+principle? If a man holds a principle strongly, he can hardly avoid
+being what the unthinking call prejudiced. It is surely better to be
+fast anchored to a principle, even at the risk of being called
+prejudiced, than to be swayed hither and thither by every passing
+breeze, like the "independent" politician--defined by the late Lord
+Derby as "a politician not to be depended upon"--with the liability of
+being wrecked by some more than usually stirring gust.
+
+We have only to look at the political history of the past half-century
+to find that it is the "prejudiced" men who have done good work, and the
+"independent" politicians who have made shipwreck of their public lives.
+The former held their principles firmly; they lost no opportunity of
+pushing them to the front; and success attended their efforts. As for
+the politicians who were too proud, or too unstable, or too quarrelsome
+to work in harness with their fellows, the shores of our public life
+have been strewn with their wrecks. The glorious opportunities for good
+that were missed by Lord Brougham, the wasted career of the once popular
+Roebuck are matters of history. And in our own day we can point to Earl
+Grey and Mr. Cowen--and the narrow escape from a similar fate of Mr.
+Goschen--as striking instances of the fact that no good thing in
+politics can be done by men who cannot or will not join with a great
+party to secure the ends for which they strive. The independent
+politician, in fact, must of necessity appear an incomplete sort of
+man--always leading up to something and never getting it; everlastingly
+striking the quarters, but never quite reaching the finished hour.
+
+It is not only, however, the crotchety man, or the quarrelsome man, or
+the tactless man, who, because he cannot work with anybody else, poses
+as "independent." There are also "men of no decided character, without
+judgment to choose, and without courage to profess any principle
+whatever--such men can serve no cause for this plain reason, they have
+no cause at heart." Burke here clearly describes a large section of
+"armchair politicians," who turn many an election without a distinct
+idea of what will be the ultimate result of their action. They are of
+the kind even more forcibly characterized by Dryden a century before--
+
+
+     Damn'd neuters, in their middle way of steering,
+     Are neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring;
+     Nor Whigs, nor Tories they; nor this, nor that;
+     Nor birds, nor beasts; but just a kind of bat;
+     A twilight animal; true to neither cause,
+     With Tory wings, but Whiggish teeth and claws.
+
+
+Trimmers of this type live and flourish to-day as they lived and
+flourished in the age of Dryden and of Burke, and the airs they give
+themselves of superiority over the ordinary run of politicians deserve
+all the ridicule men of more practical tendencies can pour upon them.
+One would fancy that it must sometimes occur even to them that, as in
+warfare the efforts of two opposing mobs, led by generals who
+perpetually differed among themselves, would cause more rapine and
+confusion, and ensure an even less satisfactory result, than those of
+two armies captained by men accustomed to discipline, and striking blows
+only where blows could be effective; so in the constant movement of
+public affairs a multitude of wrangling counsellors would bring ruin
+upon the State, where a struggle between two opposing parties,
+representing distinct principles, would clear a path in which it could
+safely tread.
+
+No one, therefore, should be frightened out of taking part in politics
+by the idea that there is anything wrong in being a partisan. A working
+man joins a trade union, in order that by strengthening his fellows he
+may strengthen himself; a religious man becomes a member of a Christian
+church, so as to assist in spreading the truth he cherishes; and any one
+who dearly holds a political principle ought to attach himself to a
+party, that he may secure for that principle the success which, if it is
+worth believing in, is worth striving for.
+
+
+
+
+V.--WHY NOT HAVE A "NATIONAL" PARTY?
+
+
+It is sometimes asked, even by those who would agree generally that
+partisanship is not unworthy, whether all the old distinctions of
+Liberal and Conservative, Tory and Radical, are not out of date, and
+whether it is not possible to form a "National" party. The idea of such
+a formation has been "in the air" for a long time, and has been put
+forward with more frequency since the breach in the Liberal ranks upon
+the Irish question. But although politicians as eminent as Mr.
+Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill have given countenance to the
+idea, it has as yet resulted in nothing of practical value.
+
+Mr. Chamberlain has argued that "our old party names have lost their
+force and meaning," but, even if they had, the suggested appellation
+must be held to be a misnomer. It is a contradiction in terms. If the
+whole nation be agreed upon a certain course, it is not a national
+"party" which advocates it; if it be not agreed, no section, no
+half-plus-one, has the right to arrogate to itself the adjective. The
+last time any faction did so was at the general election of 1880, when
+the supporters of Lord Beaconsfield attempted to claim the title even
+when they were being swept out of their seats wholesale by the flowing
+tide of national indignation. All honest politicians work for what they
+consider the benefit of the nation, and no portion of them has a title
+to assume that it alone is righteous.
+
+The inappropriateness of the name, moreover, is not only general but
+particular. The proposed combination, according to the statesman already
+quoted, is to "exclude only the extreme sections of the party of
+reaction on the one hand, and the party of anarchy on the other." But
+who is to define how far a reactionary may go without being considered
+"extreme," and who in the English Parliament is "an anarchist"?
+
+Further, a "national party" must be presumed to represent the
+nation--that is the whole of the United Kingdom. But the projected body,
+if it opposed Home Rule, would ignore the wishes of 85 out of the 101
+popularly elected representatives of Ireland; 44 out of the 70 popularly
+elected representatives of Scotland; and 26 out of the 30 popularly
+elected representatives of Wales; as well as the whole body of the
+Gladstonian Liberals in England. At the last general election, 1,423,765
+persons in this kingdom cast their votes on the "Unionist," and
+1,341,131 on the Liberal side; and the latter number could scarcely be
+ignored when a "national" party is being formed.
+
+In accordance with the words of the immortal Mr. Taper--"A sound
+Conservative Government, I understand; Tory men and Whig measures"--the
+Tories have promised to bring in Liberal Bills; but the process will be
+regarded by many with the same feelings as those of Mr. Disraeli when he
+charged Sir Robert Peel with the petty larceny of Whig ideas, as did
+Lord Cranborne (now Lord Salisbury) when he denounced Mr. Disraeli's
+political legerdemain in perpetrating a similar offence, and as did
+another prominent politician when he said, "The consistency of our
+public life, the honour of political controversy, the patriotism of
+statesmen, which should be set above all party considerations--these are
+things which have been profaned, desecrated, and trampled in the mire by
+this crowd of hungry office-seekers who are now doing Radical work in
+the uniform of Tory Ministers.... I will say frankly that I do not like
+to win with such instruments as these. A democratic revolution is not to
+be accomplished by aristocratic perverts; and I believe that what the
+people desire will be best carried into effect by those who can do so
+conscientiously and honestly, and not by those who yield their assent
+from purely personal or party motives." These words were spoken in 1885;
+and the speaker was Mr. Chamberlain.
+
+The new party to exist must have organization, and as by its very
+constitution all Liberal and Radical associations would have to be
+excluded, the Primrose League alone would be ready to hand. But he who
+pays the piper calls the tune, and what that tune would be can easily be
+guessed. Liberals and Radicals would necessarily be kept out of the
+combination, for men who consider themselves entitled to twenty
+shillings in the pound, and who might be content to accept ten as an
+instalment, would not take ten as payment in full of some of their
+bills, and a "first and final dividend" of nothing on others they hold
+of value. And the Radicals and other Gladstonian Liberals being left
+out, the remaining party must be overwhelmingly Conservative, and the
+fighting opinion of a party is that of its majority.
+
+It is thus not an enticing prospect for any thoroughgoing lover of
+progress. What hope is there of a sound reform of the House of Lords
+from a party closely wedded to the aristocracy? Of disestablishment in
+Scotland and Wales, to say nothing of England, from a party relying for
+much of its power upon the clergy? Of a drastic change in the land or
+the game laws from a party propped up by landlords and game preservers?
+Of an improved magistracy from a party deriving great influence from the
+country squires? Of a popular veto upon licensing from a party to which
+belong nine-tenths of the publicans? Of a progressive income tax or the
+more equitable arrangement of the death duties from a party which has
+become increasingly attractive to the large capitalists? Of, in fact,
+any great reform whatsoever from a party which places "vested interests"
+in the forefront to the frequent exclusion of justice?
+
+A party formed in the fashion thus projected would be simply a house of
+cards, carefully built, as such houses usually are, by those who have
+nothing better to do--pretty to look at, but turned over by the first
+breeze. Lobby combinations such as this are hothouse plants; brought
+into the open they die. In Carlyle's "French Revolution," much ridicule
+is poured upon the wondrous paper constitutions of the Abbé Siéyes,
+which somehow would not "march." Within the last few years the Duc de
+Broglie was famous throughout Europe for the clockwork arrangements he
+made for France, and the constant failure that awaited them. The
+"national party" recalls the works of both duke and abbé, and, like
+them, would resemble nothing so much as a flying machine, constructed
+upon the most approved principles by really skilled workmen, and
+scientifically certain to succeed, but having, when tested, only one
+defect--it will not fly.
+
+
+
+
+VI.--IS ONE PARTY BETTER THAN THE OTHER?
+
+
+It is perfectly natural to be asked, after trying to prove that
+partisanship is praiseworthy, and that a "national" party is out of the
+question, whether one party is so much better than the other that it
+deserves strenuous and continued support. For the purposes of the
+argument, it is necessary to consider only the two great parties in the
+State--the Liberal and the Tory. These represent the main tendencies
+which actuate mankind in public affairs--the go-ahead and the
+stand-still. Differences in the expression of these tendencies there are
+bound to be, according as circumstances vary; but, generally speaking,
+the Tory is the party of those who, being satisfied with things as they
+are, are content to stand still, while the Liberal is the party of those
+who, thinking there is ample room for improvement, desire to go ahead.
+
+The recent history of our country is all in favour of the Liberal
+contention. If two men ride on a horse one must ride behind, and if two
+parties take opposite views of the same measure one must be wrong. The
+best testimony to the fact that, as a whole, the Liberal policy pursued
+by this country for more than half a century has been right, is,
+therefore, that even when the Tories have been in the majority they have
+not attempted to reverse it. Every great question that has been agitated
+for by the Liberals as a body, except Home Rule, which has yet to be
+settled, has been settled in the way they wished; and has more than once
+been carried to the last point of success by the Tories themselves. Not
+even the staunchest Conservative would urge a return to the system of
+rotten boroughs, would repeal the Education Act, re-establish the Irish
+Church, or renew open voting; and the Tories who would re-enact the Corn
+Laws continue few.
+
+Lord Salisbury has contended that, even if the Liberals have always been
+right and the Tories wrong, it should make no difference to the
+present-day voter; and, speaking at Reading in the autumn of 1883, he
+asked--"Would any of you go to an apothecary's shop because the previous
+tenant was a very good man at curing rheumatism? You would say, 'It
+matters little to me whether the former tenant was a skilful man or not;
+all that concerns me is the skill of the present tenant of the
+establishment.'" But supposing, to carry on Lord Salisbury's
+illustration, this new tenant could say, "I have in my possession a
+recipe of my predecessor which proved itself an infallible cure for
+rheumatism; I prepare it in the same fashion; it will have the same
+result." Would one not reply, "I will rather trust the recipe which has
+always done good, even though in the course of nature it has changed
+owners, than put myself in the hands of the opposition chemist, who,
+though exceedingly old and eminently respectable, never effects a cure,
+but whenever he is called in leaves the patient worse than he finds
+him?"
+
+And when Lord Salisbury strove to make his point more clear, he did not
+mend matters much. "It is only the existing party, whether Liberal or
+Conservative," he said, "that really concerns you; success, wisdom, and
+justice do not stick to organizations or buildings--they are the
+attributes of men. It is by their present acts and their present
+principles that the two parties must be judged." Even if this be
+allowed--and, carried to its logical extent, it would justify every
+piece of "political legerdemain" (the phrase applied by Lord Salisbury
+himself to Mr. Disraeli's Reform Bill) the Tory party has ever
+perpetrated, or may ever attempt--Liberals need not shrink from the
+test. For the Tories, as they have ever done, are now shrinkingly and
+fearsomely following in the paths the Liberals years ago laid down, with
+just sufficient deviation to prove that the old Adam of reaction is not
+dead. Whether it be free trade, or parliamentary reform, or the
+closure, they initiate nothing; but when the Liberals have cleared the
+way, they are eager to adopt all that they have previously denounced,
+and to claim as their own principles they have throughout professed to
+abhor. Seeing that the Liberals borrow nothing from the Tories, while
+the Tories borrow a very great deal from the Liberals, we can judge the
+two parties, as Lord Salisbury wished, by their present acts and their
+present principles, and show that the Liberal is the more worthy of
+popular support.
+
+It is, of course, not to be wondered at that such a desire to ignore the
+past should be expressed by a politician who, from his maiden speech to
+his most recent efforts, has denounced Liberal ideas; who, at various
+stages of his parliamentary career, has opposed the spread of popular
+education, the extension of the suffrage, the creation of the ballot,
+the emancipation of the Jews, the extinction of Church rates, the full
+admission of Dissenters to the Universities, the abolition of purchase
+in the army, the repeal of the taxes on knowledge, the throwing open of
+the Civil Service to the people, the right of Nonconformists to be
+buried in their parish churchyard, the remission of long-standing and
+obviously unpayable Irish arrears, and the destruction of the property
+qualification for members of Parliament; whose sympathy for his fellows
+may be gathered from his insinuated comparison of the Irish to
+Hottentots, and his declaration that it is "just" that the children of
+those who have contracted marriage with their deceased wife's sister
+should be bastardized; whose taste for diplomacy was shown by his
+direction to a Viceroy to "create" a pretext for forcing a quarrel upon
+Afghanistan; whose regard for the strictness of truth was displayed in
+his denial of the authenticity of a well-remembered secret memorandum;
+whose love for liberty was evidenced by the lukewarmness with which he
+watched the struggles for freedom in Italy and Bulgaria, and the hearty
+and continuous support he gave to the slave-holding faction in America;
+and whose affection for the people may be judged from the fact that,
+throughout his political life, his name has never been identified with a
+single piece of constructive legislation for their welfare. "By their
+fruits shall ye know them" is applicable to politics, therefore; as
+Lord Salisbury, by so strenuously endeavouring to ignore the maxim,
+practically admits; and at the risk of putting aside the canon of
+criticism adopted by the noble marquis, let me show some of the fruits
+of modern Liberal policy.
+
+I rise in the morning and go to my breakfast; my tea, my coffee, my
+sugar, and my ham are all of easy price because of the reductions in
+import duties made by Liberal Governments. I take up my newspaper, and I
+have it so cheaply because Mr. Gladstone, despite the utmost efforts of
+the Conservatives, secured the repeal of the paper duty. I go to
+business, and, as I write my letter or my postcard, I cannot but reflect
+that a Liberal Ministry in 1840 allowed me to send the one for a penny,
+and a Liberal Ministry in 1870 to send the other for half that sum. I
+proceed to dinner, and find that bread, cheese, and much of my dessert
+are the more available because of Liberal remissions. And as in the
+evening I visit the theatre, the very opera glasses I hold in my hand
+are the cheaper because, in one of his Budgets, Mr. Gladstone included
+these among the hundreds of other articles from which he removed a small
+but galling tax.
+
+These are some, and only some, of the material benefits resulting from
+the Liberal policy. What of the political, what of the social, what of
+the moral benefits? If I am an Englishman, I am proud of the fact that
+no longer is the national flag allowed to float over a slave; if I am a
+Scotchman, I rejoice that my country has been freed from the
+extraordinary system of mis-representation which weighed upon it like a
+nightmare before 1832; if I am an Irishman, I am not forced at the point
+of the bayonet to pay tithes to an alien Church, to liquidate arrears
+for rack-rents owing from the time of the famine, or to give an
+exorbitant rent for the result of my own improvements; if I am a
+Churchman, my Church has been strengthened by the repeal of enactments
+which provoked opposition, while providing no good for the Establishment
+they professed to serve; if I am a Nonconformist, I am no longer liable
+to have my goods seized in support of a Church in which I do not
+believe, I have the right to be married in my own place of worship, and
+to be buried by my own minister by the side of my fathers; if I am a
+Catholic, I have been liberated from certain restrictions upon my
+religion, which I resented as an insult and a wrong; if I am a Jew, I
+can sit with the peers, in the Commons, or on the judicial bench; if I
+belong to the army, and am an officer, my rise is made easy--if I am a
+private, my rise is made possible, by the abolition of purchase; if I am
+either soldier or sailor, I owe it mainly to Liberal exertions that
+discipline is no longer maintained by the lash; if I am a merchant
+seaman, my life is the better protected because of the efforts of a
+Liberal member of Parliament; if I am in the Civil Service, I have the
+greater chance of success because of the destruction of that system of
+nomination, which, however advantageous to the aristocracy, was fatal to
+modest merit; if I am a student, I can go to a University with the
+certainty that not now shall I be deprived of the reward of my exertions
+because my conscience prevents me from subscribing the Thirty-nine
+Articles; if I am a tradesman, my goods are freed from many a customs
+duty which formerly restricted their sale; if I am a farmer, I can vote
+without fear of my landlord, my lands have been to some extent saved
+from the depredations of hares and rabbits, and my tenure has been
+rendered more certain than ever before; if I am an artisan, the fruits
+of combination have been secured to me, my employer has been made liable
+for accidents arising from either his carelessness or his greed, my vote
+has been obtained, and by the ballot has been protected; if I am the
+child of the poorest, a school has been opened for me where a sound
+education can be procured at a small cost; in fact, in whatever station
+I may chance to be placed, I cannot but feel in my every-day life the
+beneficent influences of the policy advocated by leaders of advanced
+thought, and adopted by Liberal Ministries during the past fifty years.
+
+If, then, I am asked to justify the Liberal party by showing what it has
+done, I answer that, by timely reform, it has saved England from the
+continental curse of frequent revolution; that, in striving for the
+greatest happiness of the greatest number, it has in especial elevated
+and educated the masses, for whom it has provided cheap food for both
+body and mind; and that it has struggled, and in the main successfully
+struggled, to secure civil and religious equality for all. And in the
+future as in the past, with perfect liberty as its fixed ideal, and with
+peace, retrenchment, and reform as the methods by which it wishes that
+ideal to be obtained, it will press onward and upward, and ever onward
+and upward, until England, now regarded as the mother of free nations,
+shall be but one of a gigantic brotherhood of freedom, embracing every
+civilized people that may then inhabit the globe.
+
+
+
+
+VII.--WHAT ARE LIBERAL PRINCIPLES?
+
+
+After this recital of Liberal deeds, it may fairly be asked, "What are
+Liberal principles?" and these it is not easy to define off-hand. There
+are certain general truths which are the commonplaces of both parties,
+and no serious attempt has yet been made to lay down a system of
+principles with which none except Liberals can agree. But there are
+differences that underlie the action of the two parties which are
+unmistakable, and are worth finding out.
+
+If one were to ask the first half-dozen Liberals he met for a definition
+of their principles, varying and perhaps vague replies would be
+received. For in politics, as in other matters that combine speculation
+with practical action, it is only the few who speculate, while the many
+are content to act. And even most of those who tried to answer would be
+apt to reply that Liberal principles could be summed up in the old party
+watch-word--"Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform," thus confounding Liberal
+principles with Liberal aims.
+
+That these aims are well worth striving for has long been an accepted
+doctrine of the party; but, in trying to gain them, we have to adapt
+them to circumstances, and are not called upon in every single emergency
+to push them to their logical extent. Logic, after all, is only a pair
+of spectacles, not eyesight itself; and attempts to arrange human
+affairs upon too precise a basis frequently end, as France so often has
+shown, in failure. We long for peace, but not for peace at any price; we
+ask for retrenchment, but not an indiscriminate paring down of
+expenditure for the sake of showing a saving; and we struggle for
+reform, but not to cut all the branches off the trees on the chance of
+improving their appearance.
+
+Before, in fact, we have been able to struggle at all for these or any
+other points in politics, certain principles have had to be acted upon
+by generations of progressive thinkers, which have developed and
+strengthened our liberties. It is, perhaps, presumptuous to attempt to
+lay down in a few words a basis of Liberal principle, but I would submit
+that that basis may be found in the contention that
+
+_All men should be equal before the law_;
+
+that, as a consequence,
+
+_All should have freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of
+action_;
+
+and that, in order to secure and retain these liberties,
+
+_The people should govern themselves_.
+
+With regard to the first point, I do not contend that all men are, or
+ever can be, equal. Differences of mental and physical strength, of
+energy and temperament, and of will to work, there must always be; and
+in the struggle for existence, which is likely to grow even keener as
+the world becomes more filled, the fittest must continue to come to the
+top, as they have done and deserve to do. A law-made equality would not
+last a week, but much law-made inequality has lasted for centuries, and
+it is against this that Liberals as Liberals must protest. We object to
+all law-made privilege, and we ask that men gifted with equal capacities
+shall have equal chances. We do not claim any new privilege for the
+poor, but we demand the abolition of the old privileges, express and
+un-express, of the rich. Something was done in the latter direction when
+the system of nomination in most departments of the civil service and
+that of purchase in the army were got rid of. But as long as in the
+higher departments of public affairs a man has a place in the
+legislature merely because he is the son of his father; as long as in
+the humbler branches no one unpossessed of a property qualification can
+sit on certain local boards; and as long as in daily life the facilities
+for frequent appeal, devised by lawyers within the House for the benefit
+of lawyers without, provide a power for wealth that is often used to
+defeat the ends of justice, so long, to take these alone out of many
+instances, shall we lack that equality of opportunity which we demand
+not as a favour but a right.
+
+But if every man is to be equal before the law, he must have the right
+to think as his reason directs; to discuss as freely as he thinks; and
+to act as he pleases, so long as his neighbour is not injured in the
+honest discharge of his duties, or the common weal put in jeopardy.
+"Give me," said Milton, "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue
+according to conscience, above all liberties"--for it is certain that
+with freedom of thought and discussion all other liberties will follow.
+John Mill carried this principle to the fullest extent when he argued
+that "if all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion, and only one
+person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified
+in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be
+justified in silencing mankind." To all such sweeping generalizations
+there are, however, possible exceptions. No man would be much inclined
+to blame Cromwell for suppressing the pamphlet "Killing no Murder,"
+which directly advocated his own assassination; even the strongest lover
+of free discussion would not be prepared to allow the systematic
+circulation of exhortations to blow up our public buildings, and
+directions as to the best way of doing it; and instances may conceivably
+arise--and an invasion one of them--where absolute freedom of
+publication and debate would form a national danger. Our liberties,
+therefore, would be sufficiently protected if we recognized the right of
+every man to speak and to act as he pleases, "so long as his neighbour
+is not injured in the honest discharge of his duties, or the common weal
+put in jeopardy."
+
+In order, however, that men may be able to think, speak, and do as they
+deem right, it is necessary that the people shall rule, and that the
+majority, when it has made up its mind, shall have the power to carry
+out its decree. Even the Tories of these days will not dispute this
+principle, and, therefore, Liberals cannot claim it as at this moment
+their own; and yet, broadly speaking, the root idea of the Tory party is
+the aristocratic theory that the few ought to govern the many, while
+that of the Liberal party is the democratic, that the many ought to
+govern the few.
+
+In the days before the mass of the people were a real power in the
+affairs of the State, this difference was very clearly marked, for the
+Tories then were under no necessity to conceal their belief that the
+"common herd" were not to be trusted in political concerns. And it is
+useful, as showing what the high Tory doctrine on this point really was,
+to recall the fact that a judge on the bench, less than a century ago,
+in summing up at a political trial, laid it down as a doctrine not to be
+questioned that "a government in every country should be just like a
+corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed interest,
+which alone has a right to be represented. As for rabble, who have
+nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? What
+security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their
+property on their backs, and leave the country in the twinkle of an eye;
+but landed property cannot be removed." And another judge at a political
+trial within the present century went even further in denying to the
+people not merely the right of interference with public affairs, but
+even of comment upon them. "It is said," he observed, "that we have a
+right to discuss the acts of our legislature. This would be a large
+permission indeed. Is there to be a power in the people to counteract
+the acts of the Parliament; and is the libeller to come and make the
+people dissatisfied with the Government under which he lives? This is
+not to be permitted to any man,--it is unconstitutional and seditious."
+We have outgrown such doctrines as these; and, thanks to the efforts of
+generations of Liberals who have passed to their rest, the right of the
+"rabble who have nothing but personal property"--or, for the matter of
+that, no property at all--to take part in settling the affairs of the
+State, whether by criticism or active interference, is solidly
+established.
+
+It may be argued that as the Tories of to-day have accepted democracy,
+the Liberals have no right to claim the principles here laid down as if
+they were without exception their own. But this Tory acceptance of
+democratic ideas is only partial, and a party which mainly depends upon
+the aristocracy for support can never adopt them with consistency and
+enthusiasm. The very existence of an hereditary legislature violates the
+principle that all men should be equal before the law; the theory upon
+which a State-established Church rests is equally a violation of the
+right of every one to think, speak, and act as he chooses; and the
+continuous efforts of the Tories to limit the franchise, and to erect
+barriers against the majority having their will, are utterly opposed to
+the view that the people should govern, and harmonize with the old idea
+that the people should be governed.
+
+It must not be imagined that these differences between the parties mean
+nothing, or that we are beyond all danger of losing the advance we have
+made. The ease with which we might slip back into despotism is shown by
+the manner in which the Tories resort to coercion--or, as they prefer to
+term it, "exceptional legislation"--when a majority of the Irish people
+has to be cowed. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the abolition
+of trial by jury, the extinction of liberty of the press, and the denial
+of the right of public meeting have been frequently enacted against the
+majority of the people of Ireland, because their views on the political
+situation have not accorded with those of the majority of the people of
+England. And though they have all failed, and repeatedly failed, a
+variation of the same old plan is put in operation to-day as if it were
+a newly-discovered and infallible remedy for every popular ill.
+
+Easy-going folk are apt to reply that, as these things concern only
+Ireland, it is of no special moment to ourselves, and that England is
+safe from any revival of a despotic system. Even if this were true it
+would be false morality, and false morality makes bad politics. But it
+is not true. Despotism is a disease which spreads, and any development
+of it applied to one part of the body politic might, in conceivable
+circumstances, be used as a precedent to apply it to the whole. And if
+it be said that in these happy days the men of England have the
+undisputed right to think as they like and talk as they will, it can be
+answered that not one of the shackles upon freedom of thought and
+freedom of action has been voluntarily struck off by the Tories, and
+that it is only lately that they prevented a member of Parliament for
+years from taking the seat to which he had been four times elected,
+because he avowed what he believed upon theological questions.
+
+The difference between the two parties, even in the present general
+acceptance of a democratic system, may be put in words once used by Mr.
+Chamberlain--"It is the essential condition, the cardinal principle of
+Liberalism, that we should recognize rights, and not merely confer
+favours." With us, the suffrage is the right of every free citizen; with
+the Tories, it is a favour conferred upon the working by the moneyed
+classes. We demand religious equality; the Tories are willing to give
+toleration. But favours we do not ask, and toleration we will not have.
+
+Liberals, in fact, are prepared substantially to subscribe to the
+principles laid down more than a century since in the American
+Declaration of Independence--a document which sounded the knell of
+despotism on its own side of the Atlantic, and awoke echoes which shook
+down another despotism on ours. "We hold," said that document, "these
+truths to be self-evident--that all men are created equal; that they are
+endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among
+these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure
+these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just
+powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of
+government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the
+people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government,
+laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
+such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and
+happiness."
+
+These, broadly speaking, are Liberal principles; and when one has
+absorbed them thoroughly, there comes to him that Liberal sentiment,
+that enthusiasm for his fellows, which feels a blow struck at any man's
+freedom, in any part of the whole world, as keenly as if it were struck
+at his own.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.--ARE LIBERALS AND RADICALS AGREED?
+
+
+It may be thought that by dealing only with "the fundamental principles
+of the Liberal party," the Radicals were put aside as if they had no
+separate existence; and to a large extent this is true, for Radicals are
+simply advanced Liberals. The principles just asserted are common to all
+members of the progressive party. There are differences as to the time
+at which certain measures directly flowing from them shall become a
+portion of the party's platform; and that is all.
+
+A great deal of the prejudice which used to exist against those called
+"Radicals" has died away, but traces of it linger still; and it will be
+well to see what Radicalism, as a phase of Liberalism, really is. It may
+sound strange to be told that the Whigs were the Radicals of an earlier
+day, and that they sometimes carried their Radicalism to the point of
+revolution. In these times it is becoming increasingly doubtful whether
+those who call themselves by what was once the honourable title of
+"Whig" have any claim to be considered members of the Liberal party; and
+there are many who consider that they are now more truly conservative
+than the Conservatives themselves. The Whigs tell us that they are only
+acting as the drag on the wheel; but this implies that we are always
+going down hill. That we do not believe. We hold that we are
+progressing; and a drag which would act upon the coach as it climbs the
+hill is a product neither of prudence nor common sense.
+
+The bulk of the party of progress in these days may be said to combine
+Liberal traditions with Radical instincts. The two can mingle with the
+utmost ease, and, though they may run side by side for some time before
+they join, the steady stream of the one and the rapid rush of the other
+always unite at last in one broad river of liberalizing sentiment, which
+fertilizes as it flows.
+
+From the time when Bolingbroke wrote of some measure that "such a remedy
+might have wrought a _radical cure_ of the evil that threatens our
+constitution" to the date, a century later, when those who wished to
+introduce a "radical reform" into our representative system were called
+by the name, there were many Whigs who talked Radicalism without being
+aware of it; but when the title had been given to a section of the
+Liberal party, it became for a long period a term of reproach. Mr.
+Gladstone, once speaking at Birmingham, quoted a definition of the early
+Radicals which described them as men "whose temper had been soured
+against the laws and institutions of their country;" and he admitted
+that there was much justification for their having been so. But one can
+quite understand that men of a soured temper were not likely to be
+popular with the placid politician who stayed at home, or the
+place-hunter who went to the House of Commons; and the bad meaning, once
+attached to the name, remained affixed to it for a very long time.
+
+Mr. Gladstone, in the speech referred to, was the first great English
+statesman to try and remove the reproach; and this he did by defining a
+Radical as "a man who is in earnest." This was flattering, but as a
+definition lacked precision, for Tories are often in desperate earnest.
+Many Radicals would assert that the very name--coming, as it of course
+does, from the Latin word for "root"--tells everything; that it
+signifies that they go to the root of all matters with which they deal,
+and that, where reform is needed, it is a root and branch reform they
+advocate.
+
+To this it may be replied that to go to the root of everything is not
+always practicable and is not necessarily judicious. If a tree be
+thoroughly rotten, if it be liable to be shaken to the ground by the
+first blast, and thereby to injure all its surroundings, it should
+certainly be cut down, and as soon as it conveniently can be. But if the
+tree has only two or three rotten branches, there is no necessity to go
+to its root. If one does, it will very probably kill a good tree which,
+with only the decayed portions removed, might bear valuable fruit. As
+with trees, so with institutions; and what seems to be forgotten by many
+who call themselves Radical is that, in a highly-complex civilization
+such as ours, we have to bear with some things that are far from ideal,
+simply because of that force of do-nothingness which, powerful in
+mechanics, is as great in political life.
+
+A friend who has long worked in the Liberal cause once observed: "The
+misfortune is that it is difficult to tell what a man's ideas of public
+policy are from the mere fact of his calling himself a Radical. If by
+Radical is meant Advanced Liberal--a Liberal determined to push forward
+with all practicable speed, a Liberal who is in earnest--then I can
+understand it, and I will readily take the name. But if by Radical is
+meant a somewhat hysterical creature, who is ready to fight for every
+fad that tickles his fancy, as he seems to be in some cases, or a
+cantankerous being whose crotchets compel him to sever himself from all
+other workers, as he is in others; if he is of the extreme Spencerian
+school, and demurs to most legislation on the ground that it is
+over-legislation, or of the extreme Socialist school, and demands that
+Government shall do everything, and individual effort be practically
+strangled by force of law, I am not a Radical, and hope never to be
+called one."
+
+But the practical Radicalism which is one of the greatest factors in
+Liberal policy at the present day, is far removed from the schools just
+depicted. The reasonable Radical is not a believer in any of the
+schemes--as old as the hills and yet unblushingly preached
+to-day--which, by some legislative hocus-pocus, some supreme stroke of
+statecraft, will "put a pot on every fire and a fowl in every pot;" will
+endow each widow and give a portion to all unmarried girls; will feed
+the poor without burdening the community; and will make all the crooked
+paths straight without undue trouble to ourselves. He holds that
+
+
+                     Diseases desperate grown
+     By desperate remedies are removed,
+     Or not at all;
+
+
+but he does not consider all diseases to be of the character described;
+he does not refuse the half-loaf because for the moment the whole one is
+impossible of attainment; and he does not repudiate other honest workers
+in the cause of progress because their pace is not quite so swift, and
+their point of view somewhat different.
+
+In the constant striving after a high ideal, there is in the Radical's
+heart a resolute desire to emerge from any rut into which politics may
+have degenerated. For the very reason of his existence is that, if there
+be an abuse in Church or State which agitation and argument can remove,
+all honest endeavours must be made to remove it. He cannot forget that
+many abuses have been got rid of by these means, and he profits by the
+lesson to attack those which remain. It is their extinction at which he
+aims. Earnestness, enthusiasm, and devotion to principle are his
+weapons, and these he will not waste in fruitless longings after a
+perfect State, but will use them to make the State we possess as perfect
+as is possible. In all things he will aim at the practical; he will
+remember that compromise is not necessarily cowardly, and that it is
+possible for those who disagree with him to be as honest in their views
+and as pure in their aims as himself. And in striving for the greatest
+happiness of the greatest number, he will never forget that the greatest
+number is all.
+
+The answer may be made that this is an ideal Radical, and that the real
+article is very different. So many have been taught to think, but they
+are wrong. There are some rough diamonds in the Radical party, it is
+true; but, so long as they be diamonds, we can afford to wait a little
+for the polish. They are bigoted it may be said, and bigotry is hateful.
+But bigots are just as useful to a reform as backwoodsmen to a new
+community; they clear away obstacles from which gentler men would
+shrink; rough and occasionally awkward to deal with, they make the
+pathways along which others can move.
+
+But, it is sometimes asked, where are the old philosophical
+Radicals--men of the stamp of Bentham, and Grote, and James Mill? Dead,
+all of them, having done their life's work faithfully and well; and
+their successors have to look at politics from the standpoint of
+to-day, and not of half a century ago. And when the Tories say that
+these were especially admirable men, it must not be forgotten that their
+ideas were as strongly opposed and their persons as bitterly assailed by
+the Tories of their own day as are the ideas and the persons of the
+unphilosophical Radicals--if they are to be called so--of this present
+year of grace.
+
+The Radicals of to-day have their faults, and there shall be no attempt
+to conceal them. Many who call themselves by the name discredit it by
+impatience of opposition, readiness to attribute interested motives to
+those differing from them, and intolerance towards those who exercise in
+another direction what they emphatically claim for themselves--absolute
+freedom of thought, speech, and action. Some among them also are prone
+to be led aside by a catching phrase, without troubling to ask what it
+really means; and, in order to strengthen their forces, allow themselves
+to be connected with any movement that may for the moment be popular.
+And even more, but these of a much higher stamp, are carried away by the
+dangerous delusion that in any political system can be found perfect
+happiness.
+
+No honest Radical will deny the existence of these faults or be offended
+that they should be pointed out. But the essential purity of aim and
+depth of honest fervour possessed by the Radicals of this country
+deserves all recognition. At heavy sacrifice to themselves they have led
+the van in every great political movement, and their instinct has been
+proved to be right. They have held aloft the lamp of liberty in times of
+depression when Liberals of feebler soul would have hidden it beneath a
+bushel in the hope of brighter days. And, even were their failings more
+far-reaching than any that can be urged against them, their services as
+pioneers of freedom would entitle them to the heartiest thanks of all
+who have entered into their heritage because of the efforts the Radicals
+have made.
+
+Radicals and Liberals, then, are agreed as to principle though they
+differ in methods, for the Liberal is a very good lantern, but a lantern
+which requires lighting; and it is the Radical who strikes the match.
+
+
+
+
+IX.--WHAT ARE THE LIBERALS DOING?
+
+
+There has now been told a great deal about the principles which the
+Liberals entertain, and a list has been given of the many glorious
+things the Liberals have done; but the question of greatest immediate
+interest is what the Liberals are doing, for we cannot live upon the
+exploits of the past, but upon the performances of the present and the
+promises of the future.
+
+Although the Liberals at this moment are concentrating their main
+attention upon the question of self-government for Ireland, there are
+other important matters affecting the remainder of the United Kingdom
+which occupy a place in their thoughts, and which will form their future
+party "cry."
+
+It has, of course, often been remarked that men when in Opposition call
+out for a great deal which they fail to accomplish when in office; but
+discredit does not of necessity ensue. It certainly shows that in
+certain instances men do not come up to their ideal, but does that prove
+the ideal to be wrong? Does it not rather prove that those who adopted
+it, like mortal men everywhere and in all ages, were fallible? Despite
+every drawback and every backsliding--and such drawbacks and
+backslidings are admittedly many--it is better to have a high ideal and
+fail frequently to attain it, than to have no definiteness of purpose
+and take the chance of blundering into the right.
+
+None should think lightly of the power of a popular cry. It was with the
+shout of the leading tenet of their new creed that the Arabs fought
+their way from Mecca to Madrid; it was with the exclamation "Jerusalem
+is lost!" that the Crusaders marched across Europe to battle with the
+Saracen; it was with the device "For God and the Protestant Religion"
+that William of Orange swept the Stuarts out of Britain; and it was with
+the burning words of the "Marseillaise" that the raw levies of France
+defied and defeated the trained armies of Europe. For the popular cry
+voices the popular emotion, and when the popular emotion is at its
+height its force is irresistible.
+
+To touch the heart of the people must, therefore, be one aim of any
+democratic party; and that is why the politician who makes no allowance
+for human passion, prejudice, or prepossession is a mere dreamer, who
+deserves and is bound to fail. The fashion of the German philosopher
+who, on being asked to describe a camel, evolved the animal from his
+inner consciousness, is that in which some of our political guides
+create their ideas of the world around them. They sit in the same
+armchair as of old, and do not perceive how the conditions have changed.
+They continue to imagine that the clique of some club-house controls
+public events, and that the whisper of the party whip is all-powerful
+with the constituencies. They do not recognize that voters are not now
+an appanage of the Reform or the Carlton, because the groove they have
+hollowed out for themselves is too deep to allow them to look over the
+edge. But in nothing more than in politics is it true that the proper
+study of mankind is man.
+
+And, if one moves among the masses of his fellows, he will find a
+growing desire to put to practical use the tools the State has given
+them. Household suffrage and the ballot were not an end but a means, and
+the question which politicians should ask themselves in this day of
+comparative quiet is to what end these means shall be put. Those who
+talk with working men know that there is a vague discontent with things
+as they are, which, if not directed into proper channels, may become
+dangerous, for in many quarters the old ignorant impatience of taxation
+is giving place to an ignorant impatience of the rich. No good will come
+of shutting our eyes to the existence of this feeling; the question is
+how in the fairest and fittest manner it can be eradicated.
+
+It must not be forgotten that the working classes have only recently
+obtained direct political power, and that there is still much
+uncertainty among them as to the best uses to which it can be put. There
+would be nothing immoral in their using that power to better their own
+interests. Men, after all, are but mortal; and, just as the upper
+classes before 1832 used the power of Parliament to further their own
+ends, and just as later the middle classes, when they were uppermost,
+attended carefully to themselves, so the working classes will do when
+they recognize their strength. And this is only saying that men being as
+they are, "Number One" will be the most prominent figure in their
+political calculations, whether that number represents a peer of the
+realm or a labourer on the roads.
+
+This is not the place to enter into the question of how far the State
+ought to interfere with social problems. The fact to be emphasized is
+that there is an increasing body of opinion, especially among the
+working classes, that certain social problems will have to be attended
+to. Any politician who attempts to forecast the future--more especially
+any Liberal who wishes to draw up a party programme--must recognize
+this, and act according to his convictions after fully considering it.
+
+The politics of the future will, therefore, have a distinctly social
+tinge, but they must include also many questions which are regarded
+to-day, and will continue to be regarded, as of a partisan character. It
+is requisite, then, to the right understanding of Liberal policy that a
+broad view should be taken of the matters which are likely within no
+distant date to become planks of the party platform. Calm discussion now
+may save misapprehension then, and if we can see exactly whither we are
+going, we shall be able with the more certainty to pursue our journey.
+And if, in the course of the discussion, what at the first blush appears
+an extreme view is taken, remember always the old truth that half a loaf
+is better than no bread--that is, if the half-loaf be good bread and
+honestly earned, and not to be accepted as an equivalent for the whole,
+if that be wished for and attainable.
+
+Subject to this condition, the Liberal party can do no better than
+consider what is likely to come within the scope of its future
+exertions; and although it is right to take up one thing at a time in
+order that that one thing may be done well, good will be effected by at
+once endeavouring to answer the main questions now before us. Upon the
+spirit in which these are discussed, and the manner in which they are
+replied to, much of the future of popular government in England will
+depend. The scientific naturalist of to-day tells us that it is an idle
+fable which states that the ostrich hides its head in the sand with the
+idea of escaping observation; but really so many of our leading
+politicians execute a variation of this manoeuvre in regard to the
+questions of the future, that the ostrich need not be ashamed to be
+stupid in such eminent company.
+
+A preliminary to the discussion in detail of questions which go to the
+root of many of the most important matters in politics is a resolution
+not to be led aside from any course one may think right by the fear of
+being called hard names, or by the use of certain venerable but
+weather-worn phrases. It is so easy to endeavour to damage political
+opponents by applying to them such names as Separatists or Socialists,
+Atheists or Revolutionaries, that one cannot wonder that the practice is
+frequently adopted by the Tory party. But hard words break no bones, and
+the politician who is frightened by a nickname may be a very estimable
+person, but he is no good in a fight.
+
+Similarly we can afford to despise certain of the phrases which with
+some politicians do duty for argument. No one should be turned back from
+doing what he thought to be right in the circumstances of to-day by
+being reminded of that mysterious entity "the wisdom of our ancestors."
+What sane man would conduct a shop as it was conducted 500 years since?
+And where would science be if we still swore by the skill of the
+alchemists? Accumulated experience in the varied transactions of life is
+held to improve man's judgment and capacity; why should it not be
+similarly held to improve the judgment and capacity of States? Let any
+one who sighs after the wisdom of our ancestors apply in imagination the
+political maxims in vogue even a hundred years ago to the affairs of
+this present, and then let him say honestly whether he would wish by
+them to be governed.
+
+Another fine-crusted example of a worn-out phrase is that in praise of
+"the good old times." We are invited to believe that in some unnamed
+age, England was better and brighter, and her people happier and richer,
+than to-day, and mainly because rulers were obeyed in all things and no
+questions asked. But particulars are lacking; and these sketches of the
+glories of "the good old times" are like nothing so much as Chinese
+pictures, displaying an abundance of colour but no perspective, an
+amazing imagination but an absence of exact likeness to anything ever
+seen by mortal man.
+
+"Dangerous innovations" also is a phrase at which no one should be
+alarmed. No great good has ever been accomplished without many excellent
+persons considering it a "dangerous innovation." The Scribes and the
+Pharisees, and, after them, the Roman Empire, denounced and persecuted
+the Christian religion upon this ground; the most powerful Church in
+Christendom, with similar belief and similar lack of success, used every
+engine at its command to suppress the Reformation. As in religious so in
+political affairs. King John would doubtless have described Magna Charta
+in just such terms; the partisans of Charles the First certainly held
+that opinion concerning the demand of Parliament to control the Church,
+the army, and the monarchy itself; the opponents of every measure of
+reform--political, social, or religious--have used the phrase. From the
+greatest to the smallest reform it has been the same. In the early years
+of this century a Parochial Schools Bill, because it did not give all
+power to the clergy, was opposed by the then Archbishop of Canterbury
+with the words, "Their lordships' prudence would, and must, guard
+against innovations that might shake the foundations of religion." When,
+in later times, gas was introduced, the aristocratic dwellers in western
+London protested with equal force against such an innovation as the new
+illuminant; and Lord Beaconsfield, in the opening chapters of the last
+of his novels, sketched with ironic pen the attempts of high-born ladies
+to prevent the spread of light. Thus, in things sublime and in things
+ridiculous, the cry of "dangerous innovation" has been raised until it
+has been rendered contemptible.
+
+Equally futile is the fear that the Liberals are about to propose "the
+impossible." There is nothing in politics to which that word can be
+applied, as even the most cursory study of our history will show. When
+men say that certain measures can "never" be carried, they are more
+likely to be wrong than right. In 1687 it would have been deemed
+impossible to place the Crown upon a strictly parliamentary basis; in
+1689 this was accomplished. In 1830 the most sanguine reformer scarcely
+dared hope that borough-mongering would in his lifetime be destroyed,
+and the first popularly elected Parliament was chosen in 1832. In 1865,
+none could have dreamed that household suffrage in the boroughs was
+near; in 1867 it was adopted by a Tory Government. In 1867 he would have
+been a hardy prophet who would have foretold the speedy downfall of the
+Irish Episcopal Establishment; and the Act of Disestablishment was
+placed upon the statute book in 1869. Such instances should of a surety
+teach men to be modest in their forecasts of what is possible in
+politics.
+
+In, therefore, pursuing our search into the why and the wherefore of the
+politics of the future, we must put aside phrases and come to facts. The
+phrases will die, but the facts will remain; and the more closely we
+grasp these latter the more certain will those Liberal principles which
+have done so much for the past, do even more for the future.
+
+And, when we come to the facts, we must not forget that a political
+question is not necessarily unpractical because it cannot be immediately
+dealt with; for good is accomplished by the calm discussion of points
+which are bound some time to be raised, and which, if undebated now, may
+be settled in a gust of popular passion. As Mr. John Morley has well
+observed--"The fact that leading statesmen are of necessity so absorbed
+in the tasks of the hour furnishes all the better reason why as many
+other people as possible should busy themselves in helping to prepare
+opinion for the practical application of unfamiliar but weighty and
+promising suggestions, by constant and ready discussion of them upon
+their merits."
+
+
+
+
+X.--SHOULD HOME RULE BE GRANTED TO IRELAND?
+
+
+The question of Irish self-government is for the present the greatest
+that concerns the Liberal party, and in current politics, as Mr.
+Gladstone has truly and tersely put it, Ireland blocks the way. This, of
+course, is not so simply because Mr. Gladstone said it, and even less is
+it so because he wished it. The question stands in the path of all other
+great measures of legislative reform, for the sufficient reason that, at
+the first opportunity after the franchise was enjoyed by every
+householder, Ireland declared emphatically, and by a majority
+unparalleled in modern political history, in favour of freedom to manage
+her own domestic affairs.
+
+It must be obvious that, when all the popularly-elected members for
+three out of four provinces into which one of the countries which form
+this kingdom is divided, pronounce against the existing system of
+government, and when a majority of those for the other province side
+with them, that that system cannot continue to exist with the good will
+of those whom it most intimately affects, and can only be maintained by
+force. Such as have followed Mr. Gladstone in this matter do not believe
+in the maintenance of a government against the constitutionally declared
+will of the governed, and are agreed that the Irish demand for the
+management of purely domestic affairs ought to be granted on the grounds
+of justice, expediency, and sound Liberal principles.
+
+They hold that to grant the demand would be just, because under the
+present system the vast majority of Irishmen have no practical control
+over those by whom they are governed; that it would be expedient,
+because the kingdom is weakened by the continual disaffection of one of
+its component parts; and that it would accord with sound Liberal
+principles, in that the overwhelming majority of the Irish electorate
+have asked for Home Rule through the constitutional medium of the
+ballot-box.
+
+"The liberty of a people," says Cowley, "consists in being governed by
+laws which they have made themselves, under whatever form it be of
+government." This definition, which applies strictly to England, applies
+not at all to Ireland. The English system of government has broken down
+there so completely that all parties profess to be agreed that something
+must be devised in its place. Liberals have always held that a people or
+a class knows better what is good for it than any other people or any
+other class, however enlightened or well-meaning. That has been one of
+the main reasons for giving the suffrage to the poor, the ignorant, and
+the helpless, because the experience of ages has taught that the rich,
+the educated, and the powerful, while well able to take care of
+themselves, are either too careless or have too little knowledge to take
+the same care of others. And as with the suffrage, so with
+self-government. Any extension must be granted upon broad principles:
+small concessions grudgingly given are always accepted without
+gratitude, and used to extort greater.
+
+"Well," it may be said, "I am willing to give Ireland a large measure of
+self-government, but I won't yield to agitators." This is one of the
+oldest of all replies to demands for reform. How could anything be
+gained in politics without agitation? The Tories swear they will yield
+nothing until agitation has ceased; and if it ceases, if only for a
+moment, they declare it is evident there is no popular wish for reform.
+"Proceed, my lords," said Lord Mansfield, when the American colonies
+revolted--"proceed, my lords, with spirit and firmness; and when you
+shall have established your authority, it will then be time to show
+lenity." And their lordships proceeded; but the "time to show lenity"
+never came, for it was such counsels which lost the American colonies to
+the British Crown.
+
+"But," it will be added, "this is not an ordinary agitation; it is a
+revolutionary one." In some of its phases that is true, and it is all
+the more reason why its cause should be closely examined. It is the
+English themselves who have taught the Irish that ordinary
+constitutional agitation gains them nothing. If it had not been for the
+organization of the Volunteers, Grattan's Parliament of 1782 would never
+have been granted; the Duke of Wellington in 1829 admitted that he
+yielded Catholic Emancipation to the threat of civil war; it needed the
+terrible crimes of the early "thirties" to arouse England to the
+necessity for abolishing an iniquitous system of levying tithe; the
+Fenian outbreaks, the attack on a prison van at Manchester, and the
+blowing up of a gaol in London, opened the eyes of the English to the
+need for disestablishing the Irish Church and clipping the claws of the
+Irish landlords; the fearful winter of 1880 led to the granting of still
+further protection to the tenants; and to the "plan of campaign" of the
+winter of 1886 was it owing that a Tory Government felt compelled to
+still further encroach upon the property and privileges of the landlords
+of Ireland. As long as Ireland has held to constitutional agitation--as
+witness that for Catholic Emancipation from 1801 to 1825, and that for
+tenant right from 1850 to 1868--so long has England refused to grant a
+single just demand; and this is exactly what the Tories are doing now.
+Is it any wonder that Irish agitation should have become revolutionary
+when that is the only kind we have rewarded? In the relations between
+the governing classes and popular movements there has all through been
+this difference--in England, revolution has been staved off by reform;
+in Ireland, reform has been staved off till there was revolution.
+
+"But," it may be continued, "it is not so much that the agitation is
+revolutionary as that it is criminal which makes me object." But a
+movement ought not to be called criminal because of the excesses of a
+few of its extreme partisans. No great popular agitation has ever been
+free from lewd fellows of the baser sort, who have given occasion to the
+enemy to blaspheme. But did English Liberals hesitate to support Mazzini
+because he was accused of favouring assassination; to sympathize with
+the French Republicans because Orsini prepared bombs for the destruction
+of Napoleon III.; or to-day to wish well to those Russians who conspire
+for liberty because the wilder spirits among them have assassinated one
+Czar and attempted to assassinate another? In our own history, are the
+Covenanters to be condemned because some of them murdered Archbishop
+Sharpe; the early Radicals because Thistlewood and his fellows plotted
+to kill King and Cabinet; the Reformers of 1831 because of the Bristol
+riots and the destruction of Nottingham Castle; or those of 1866 because
+the Hyde Park railings were thrown down? When it is remembered that even
+such a man as Peel could, in the midst of a heated controversy, accuse
+such another as Cobden of conniving at assassination, we should be
+careful how we accept the testimony of any partisan concerning the
+criminality of an agitation to which he is opposed.
+
+These objections touch, after all, only the fringe of the matter, and
+another which is frequently urged--that the Irish agitation is a
+"foreign conspiracy" because it receives aid from the United
+States--does not go much closer to the root. But this, like the others,
+may be disposed of by English examples. Did not Englishmen aid, both by
+men and money, in liberating Greece and uniting Italy? Did they not help
+by subscriptions the insurrections in Hungary and Poland, and, when the
+former failed, did not many of them take the refugees into their homes?
+Did they not even raise a fund to assist the slave-holding States when
+in rebellion? And in all these cases, except in a remote degree the
+last, they had no tie in blood, but only one in sympathy, with those
+concerned. That the Nationalist movement has been largely aided from the
+United States is undoubted; but that aid has mainly come from those of
+Irish birth or parentage who have been driven across the Atlantic to
+seek a home. And when it is said that, because of this help, a
+self-governed Ireland would rely upon the United States to the detriment
+of England, may we not ask why it is that Italy does not rely upon
+France, though it was France that struck the first effective blow for
+Italian unity; or Bulgaria upon Russia, though without the
+blood-sacrifice of Russia that principality would never have occupied a
+place on the European map? However much it may be to be regretted,
+gratitude does not play any large part in international affairs.
+
+When the more serious objections to the granting Home Rule are urged
+they are no more difficult to meet. "Ireland is not a nation," it is
+said; "its people are of different races." The argument has been used
+before by the Tories, and the value of it may be judged by an example.
+The late Lord Derby, as leader of the Tory party, addressed the House of
+Lords in 1860 in savage denunciation of the efforts then being made to
+secure the unity of Italy; and to the contention that all the
+inhabitants of that peninsula were Italians, he answered, in the words
+of _Macbeth_ to his hired murderers,
+
+
+       Aye, in the catalogue ye go for men;
+     As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
+     Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are cleped
+     All by the name of dogs.
+
+
+And those who remember the unbridgeable differences which then appeared
+to exist between the Sardinian and the Sicilian, the Florentine and the
+Neapolitan, the dweller in Venice and the resident in Rome, will know
+that the perfect unity between them which now makes Italy one of the
+Great Powers would have been considered as unlikely as any between a
+Belfast man and an inhabitant of Cork to-day.
+
+"The Irish are not fit for self-government," is the next contention. If
+this be so, the shame is ours in not having given them the opportunity
+for being trained. We did not refuse to liberate the slaves until they
+were proved to be fit for freedom; we did not decline to give the
+labourers the suffrage until they were proved to be capable of rightly
+using it; for we knew in each case that no such proof could be afforded
+until the opportunity was offered. No proof that the Irish are not able
+to manage a Parliament is given by the corruption of the
+semi-independent body which they enjoyed from 1782 to 1799; for that
+consisted entirely of Protestants, mainly chosen by a band of
+borough-mongers, whom Pitt had to buy out at a high price. The same
+thing exactly was said by the Tories--sneers about the pigs and all--of
+the Bulgarians in 1876; and they have had good reason since to change
+their minds. What reason is there to believe that the Irish would be
+less able to manage their own affairs than the people of Bulgaria?
+
+"But they are naturally lawless." Where is the proof? It is true that in
+certain mountainous districts of Kerry and Clare there have been
+outbursts of moonlighting, but these have been as nothing compared with
+the prevalence of brigandage in Greece before the Greeks were allowed to
+rule themselves, or in Italy before the Italians founded their united
+kingdom. Where there is little popular respect for the law, there
+lawlessness flourishes; where the people make their own laws, there
+lawlessness is put down with a strong hand.
+
+"If they had the power they would persecute the Protestants." This is a
+prophecy, and a prophet has the advantage of being able to soar above
+proofs. But the fact that every prominent defender of national rights in
+Ireland for the last century and a half, except O'Connell, from Dean
+Swift down to Mr. Parnell, has been a Protestant, should count for
+something. The fact that Protestants have again and again been returned
+to the Corporations of the most Catholic cities should count for much.
+And the fact that, when for years not a single one of the 450 English
+members was a Roman Catholic, several of the 103 Irish members, even
+from the most Catholic districts, were Protestants, should count for
+more. Such religious persecution as exists in Ireland is certainly more
+at Belfast than at Cork.
+
+"Giving them a Parliament would break up the empire." Why should the
+empire be broken up because there was extended to Ireland the principle
+we have granted to Australia and Canada, New Zealand and the Cape? How
+is it that the German Empire continues united, though the Reichstag, its
+Imperial Parliament, is one body, and the Prussian Parliament, the Saxon
+Parliament, the Würtemberg Parliament, and the Bavarian Parliament are
+quite others? Is there no union between Austria and Hungary, or between
+Sweden and Norway, though each has its Parliament, and are the United
+States disintegrated because every one of the States has its own Senate
+and House of Representatives? If one were asked to name two of the
+strongest nations outside our own, Germany and the United States would
+be the reply; and in each there is a system of Home Rule for the
+separate portions.
+
+"But did not the United States crush the Confederates when secession
+was demanded?" Of course they did; the United States fought against the
+South separating from the North, as we should against Ireland separating
+from England. But every State which joined the Confederacy possessed as
+ample a measure of Home Rule as the Liberals now propose for Ireland;
+and, to the lasting honour of the Northern States, that measure was
+restored soon after the war. Home Rule the South had, and has still;
+separation the South asked for, and did not receive.
+
+"The Irish are ungrateful people; whatever you give them they ask for
+more." Would it not be well to first ask what the Irish have had to be
+grateful for? Granting that we yielded Catholic Emancipation, reformed
+the tithe system, disestablished the Church, and legalized tenant right;
+why, after all these things, should we expect gratitude? The old phrase
+that "gratitude is a lively sense of favours to come" may be unduly
+cynical; but is it not absurd to ask that recompense for the doing of
+acts of simple justice? Former generations of Englishmen deprived the
+Irish of their rights. To what thanks are later generations entitled for
+simply restoring to the Irish the rights of which they had been robbed?
+"Be just and fear not," was said of ancient time: "Be just and expect
+not gratitude," should be added to-day. And when it is stated that "the
+Irish ought to accept what we choose to give them," it must be replied
+that this is the purely despotic argument which has already done England
+sufficient injury by losing her the United States.
+
+It is only in this, the briefest, fashion that an answer has been
+sketched to the various arguments and assumptions against Home Rule. In
+determining to grant it, the Liberals are acting strictly according to
+their old policy of favouring struggling nationalities. The support
+given by Burke to the cause of America; by Fox to Ireland; by Canning
+(in this, as in some other matters, truly Liberal) to Greece; by
+Palmerston to Italy; and by Mr. Gladstone to Bulgaria, indicates with
+sufficient clearness the traditional Liberal position. For a century we
+have been telling the whole world the advantages of autonomy; are we
+now to decline to adopt, in similar circumstances, the remedy for
+discontent we have all along preached to, and sometimes forced upon,
+others?
+
+The Liberals say with Landor, "Let us try rather to remove the evils of
+Ireland than to persuade those who undergo them that there are none."
+They are utterly opposed to the idea that it is right to give a people
+free representation and then deliberately to ignore all that that
+representation asks. They are, it is true, in a minority at this moment,
+but they do not forget that all great causes have three stages--first to
+be laughed at, next to be looked at, and last to be loved. Home Rule has
+certainly reached the second stage; it will soon reach the third. The
+Liberals have been beaten before, but they have always won in the end.
+And it is well to be beaten sometimes. If life were all sunshine we
+should find it oppressive; an occasional cloud serves to temper the
+heat. To the Liberals, as to nature itself, a misty morning is often the
+prelude to the brightest day.
+
+
+
+
+XI.--WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH THE LORDS?
+
+
+In dealing with the other questions which the Liberals will have to
+consider, it will be well to take them in what may be called their
+constitutional order, and a beginning, therefore, may be made with the
+reform of the House of Lords. The theory upon which that House is upheld
+is that it is an assembly of our most notable men, called to rule either
+by descent from the great ones of the past, or by the proved capacity of
+themselves in the present, who discuss every question laid before them
+with impartiality, and who act as a check upon the hasty and
+ill-considered legislation of the House of Commons.
+
+So much for the theory: what of the fact? Those peers who are not
+creations of to-day mainly spring either from Pitt's plutocrats or from
+those who have been granted their patents because of having lavishly
+spent their money in electoral support of some party; those who can
+claim their peerage by direct descent from the great ones of the past
+can be numbered by tens, while the whole body is numbered by hundreds;
+and just as a sprinkling of successful lawyers, soldiers, and brewers
+adds nothing to its historical character, it in no sense brings the
+peerage into clear and close contact with the people. As to the
+impartiality displayed by the House of Lords, it is notorious that in
+these days it is little other than an appanage of the Carlton Club, and
+that, whatever the Tory whips desire it to do, it accomplishes without
+demur. And its power as a check upon hasty and ill-considered
+legislation may be judged from the fact that it never dares reject a
+measure which public opinion strongly demands and upon which the Commons
+insist.
+
+When the history of the House of Lords is studied, it will be found
+that during the past century it has initiated no great measure for the
+public good, and a hundred times has wantonly mutilated or impotently
+opposed the reforms the people asked. The mischief it has done touches
+every department of public life. Whether it was to throw out a bill
+abolishing the penalty of death for stealing in a shop to the value of
+five shillings, on the ground stated by one of the bishops in the
+majority that it was "too speculative to be safe;" to again and again
+vote down every proposal to relieve Roman Catholics and Jews from civil
+disabilities; to pander to the will of George IV. in the prolonged
+persecution of his wife; or to defeat measures calculated to place the
+electoral power in the hands of the people--the House of Lords has
+always been one of the main forces in the army of darkness and
+oppression. Remember that every one of the reforms the Liberals have
+secured within the last 50 years has been distasteful to the House of
+Lords, and calculate the worth or wisdom of that institution.
+
+It does not add to the estimation of either the worth or the wisdom that
+the Lords have ultimately accepted what they have bitterly opposed, for
+if they have consistently been a stumbling-block in the path of every
+reform which the people now cherish their tardy repentance is of little
+avail as long as they pursue the same obstructive course. And it is not
+merely measures which they throw out, but measures which they mutilate,
+that render them a power for harm. For the Lords are like rabbits; it is
+not so much what they swallow as what they spoil which makes them so
+destructive.
+
+Those who defend the institution as it exists should, therefore, be
+called upon to point to some one definite case in recent history in
+which it can be said, "Here has the House of Lords done good." Mere talk
+about the admirable administrators and the dexterous debaters it
+contains is no argument; for if the legislative functions of the peers
+were abolished to-morrow, those among them who were worthy a seat in the
+House of Commons would have no difficulty in securing it. What Liberals
+object to is the being subjected to the caprices, the passions, and the
+prejudices of some five hundred men, the majority of whom are not
+merely unskilled in legislative faculty and unqualified in
+administrative experience, but are drawn from a single class out of
+touch and sympathy with the mass of the people.
+
+It is not the least of the evils of the present system that the
+attendance at the sittings of the Lords is of so perfunctory a nature.
+Even during the discussion of important measures not more than sixty or
+seventy peers, out of over five hundred, are commonly present, while ten
+or twelve is not an unusual number to deal with Bills. As Erskine May
+has pointed out, "Three peers may wield all the authority of the House.
+Nay, even less than that number are competent to pass or reject a law,
+if their unanimity should avert a division, on notice of their imperfect
+constitution." And he furnishes an instance where an Irish Land Bill,
+"which had occupied weeks of discussion in the Commons, was nearly lost
+by a disagreement between the two Houses, the numbers, on a division,
+being seven and six."
+
+Adding to their number does not improve the average attendance, and yet
+the pace at which that number is growing is a scandal. In 1885, the
+first time since 1832, the total membership of the House of Commons was
+enlarged, not without trepidation and despite the fact that every member
+would be directly responsible to a constituency. The increase was only
+twelve, and a Premier often creates within a year as many legislators on
+his own account, who, with their successors, are responsible to no one
+for their public conduct. Is it not an absurdity to speak of ourselves
+as freely governed and ruled only by our own consent when a Prime
+Minister can make as many legislators as he chooses, and there be none
+to gainsay him?
+
+If it were only that under the present system the drunken and the
+dissolute, the blackleg and the debauchee are allowed to sit in the
+Lords and make laws for us and our children, we should have a right to
+demand that the institution should be "mended or ended." The former
+process has now distinctly been adopted as a plank in the Liberal
+platform, and the question of reform can, therefore, no longer be put on
+one side.
+
+There are many Radicals who say that as the House of Lords, if it agrees
+with the Commons, is useless, and if it disagrees is dangerous, its
+abolition as a legislative body should at once be made a plank in the
+party programme. They argue further, that to reform will be to
+strengthen it, and that, by the reasoning just given, this is
+undesirable. But the main point is to secure the best legislative
+machine we can, and there is much to be said for the improvement of the
+House of Lords into a Senate which shall be in fact what the present
+institution is in theory--a body of sage statesmen, experienced in
+affairs, and elected for a specified term, so as to be directly amenable
+to the people, and not removed from obedience to public opinion.
+
+As a first step to any reform, the creation of hereditary peerages,
+conferring a power to legislate, ought to be stopped. "The tenth
+transmitter of a foolish face" ought no longer to be able to transmit
+with the foolishness a power over the lives and liberties of his
+fellow-men. If there is any one who continues honestly to believe that
+because a man has secured a peerage by his brains (and the proportion of
+creations upon that ground is exceeding small) his successors are likely
+to prove good legislators, he would do well to procure a list of those
+peers who are descended from "law lords;" and he would find that while
+not one of them is distinguished for great political or administrative
+skill, there are various notorious instances, which will occur to every
+reader of the daily newspaper, of those distinguished for exactly the
+reverse.
+
+One minor reform in the constitution of the House of Lords ought to be
+pressed at once, and that is the removal of the bishops from their
+present place within it. Not only has no one section of religious
+persons the right to a State-created ascendency over others, but all
+parties are agreed in the most practical form that bishops as bishops
+have no inherent right to legislative power. In 1847, when the bishopric
+of Manchester was created, it was provided that the junior member of the
+episcopal bench for the time being should not have a seat in the Lords,
+and thirty years later, when the Government of Lord Beaconsfield made
+further new bishoprics, it similarly did not venture to add to the
+number of spiritual peers; there are consequently always four or five
+waiting outside the gilded chamber until the death of their seniors
+shall let them in.
+
+What Liberals, therefore, demand is that the House of Lords shall be
+thoroughly reformed. The bishops must be excluded, no more hereditary
+legislators created, and a system devised by which the House shall
+become a Senate so chosen as to be directly responsible to the people,
+whose interests it is assumed to serve. A sprinkling of life peers would
+aggravate instead of lessen the difficulty. An hereditary legislator
+may, for the sake of his successors, be careful not too grievously to
+offend the people; an elected legislator, for his own sake, will be the
+same; but a legislator who was neither one nor the other would have no
+such check, and all experience has shown that corporations elected for
+life become cliquish or even corrupt, for want of the frequent and
+wholesome breeze of public opinion.
+
+
+
+
+XII.--IS THE HOUSE OF COMMONS PERFECT?
+
+
+There was a time, and that not far distant, when the question "Is the
+House of Commons perfect?" would have been considered by many
+well-intentioned and easy-going persons to be impertinent, even if not
+actually irreverent. But we live in days when every institution has to
+submit to the test of free discussion, and its usefulness and efficiency
+have to be proved, if it is to retain its place in the political system.
+And as there can be little doubt that, for many reasons, a feeling has
+been widely growing within the past few years that the House of Commons
+is neither as useful nor as efficient as it ought to be, the popular
+reverence for that great assembly has somewhat diminished; and it
+behoves all who wish to preserve parliamentary government in its fullest
+and freest form to examine the causes of apparent decay and to suggest
+methods of amelioration.
+
+The preservation intact of the powers and privileges of the House of
+Commons must be the desire of every lover of freedom; but the conduct of
+its business must be brought into harmony with modern methods, and the
+mechanical side of the assembly made as perfect as possible. Not from me
+will fall one word derogatory to the venerable "mother of free
+parliaments." The House of Commons has done too much for England, its
+example has done too much for liberty the wide world through, to allow
+any but the ribald and the unthinking to speak lightly of its history or
+scornfully of its achievements. For the People's Chamber is not merely
+the most powerful portion of the High Court of Parliament; it is not
+alone the central force of the British Constitution, to which kings and
+nobles have had, and may again have, to bow; it is the directly elected
+body before whose gaze every wrong can be displayed, and to whose power
+even the humblest can look for redress. It deals forth justice to the
+myriad millions of India as to a solitary injured Englishman; it is a
+sounding board which echoes the claims of a single peasant or an entire
+people; and it practically commands the issues of peace and war,
+involving the fate of thousands, and of life and death, involving that
+of only one. No policy is vast beyond its conception, no person
+insignificant beyond its sight. It is a mighty engine of freedom,
+responsive to the heart-throbs and aspirations of a whole people, which
+has baffled tyrants, liberated slaves, and raised England to that
+position among the nations which our children and our children's
+children should be proud to maintain.
+
+Such is the assembly which needs reform. Often enough and with much
+success has there been raised a cry for "parliamentary reform," but this
+has meant an amendment of the method of electing members, not of the
+manner of conducting business; and it is this latter which now is
+urgently required. The stately ship which has sailed the ocean of public
+affairs for six centuries has naturally attracted weeds and barnacles
+which cling to its hull and retard its progress. These must be swept
+away if the vessel is to pursue a safe and speedy course; and as little
+irreverence is involved in the process as in cleaning and repairing the
+old _Victory_ herself.
+
+The cardinal defect of the existing system is that it strives to do
+modern work by ancient modes, an attempt which is as certain to fail in
+public concerns as it would be if any one were sufficiently ill-advised
+to try it in private. And when there is contemplated on the one side the
+vast and growing mass of affairs cast upon the consideration of
+Parliament, and on the other the rusty and creaking machinery employed
+to cope with it, little wonder can be felt that much needful work is
+left undone, and a deal of that which is accomplished is done badly.
+
+By granting to Ireland the right to manage her domestic affairs, and by
+providing some system by which England, Scotland, and Wales can in local
+assemblies each deal for herself with her own concerns, much will be
+accomplished in the way of real parliamentary reform. But even then more
+will remain to be done. The multiplied stages of each measure laid
+before the House of Commons must be lessened. It is possible to-day to
+have a debate and a division upon the motion for leave to introduce a
+bill, upon the first reading, the second reading, the proposal to go
+into committee, the report stage, the third reading, and the final
+proposition "That the bill do pass," while financial bills have even
+more stages to go through; and although, of course, all these
+opportunities for almost unlimited obstruction are not often made use
+of, they exist and should be diminished.
+
+Another fruitful source of wasted parliamentary time is the provision
+that if a bill is dropped at the end of a session, however far it may
+have progressed short of actual passing, it has to be started afresh
+when the House re-assembles, and every stage has to be as laboriously
+again gone through as if the measure had never been heard of before. One
+can understand why a new Parliament should start with a clean sheet, for
+no decision of a previous one in favour of the principle of a certain
+measure can bind it to pass that measure into law. But within the limits
+of the same Parliament, a decision once given should be so far binding
+that it should not be necessary for a bill to pass the stage of second
+reading four or five years running, because effluxion of time had
+prevented it passing into law during any of the sessions.
+
+Against such waste of time as this--waste which is imposed by the very
+rules under which Parliament works--the closure is no remedy. It is a
+weapon with which it is right that the majority should be armed, but it
+requires great skill in the wielding lest the legitimate efforts of the
+minority be stifled. What is wanted is the better ordering of the whole
+machine. When private bills and purely local business are taken
+elsewhere, when the stages of each measure are lessened, and when bills
+which have passed their second reading are not killed at the session's
+end, but allowed to remain in a state of animated expectancy, even then
+other means will have to be sought to make the machine move more surely
+and with greater expedition.
+
+Something has been done to this end by the earlier hour of assembling
+and fixed hour of adjourning which the House has now adopted. But why
+should not the process be carried further, and the affairs of the
+country be settled by day instead of by night? The first answer is that
+it would not be possible for a legislative body to do its business
+during the day; and a sufficient answer should be that the French
+Assembly and the German Reichsrath do theirs during that period. The
+next is that Ministers could not get through their work if the hours of
+meeting were made earlier; the reply is to the same effect--that what
+French and German Ministers can accomplish, English Ministers must be
+taught to do. A further contention is that such barristers and business
+men as are members would not be able to attend sooner than at present;
+and the answer of many as to the barristers would be that it were well
+for the country if three-fourths of those in the House never attended at
+all, for it is largely owing to the number of lawyers in Parliament that
+the law is a complicated and costly process, often proving an engine of
+injustice in the hands of the rich, and a ruinous remedy for the injured
+poor; while as to the business men who cannot attend earlier than now,
+their number is so exceedingly limited that their convenience ought not
+to be consulted to the detriment of parliamentary institutions. There is
+one more argument which would be of greater weight than all the rest if
+present conditions were likely to continue, and that is, that it would
+be a serious hindrance to private bill legislation, because members
+would be loth to serve on committees during the time the House was
+deliberating; but it is obvious to all observers of the parliamentary
+machine that the greater portion of private business will have soon to
+be delegated to other bodies, and the main point of an undeniably strong
+argument will thus be destroyed.
+
+But even such a reform in the hours of work would not expedite matters
+to a sufficient extent, if the present power of unlimited talk be
+preserved. Every member has the right of speaking once at each stage of
+a bill, and as many times as he likes during committee. If the number of
+stages be lessened, as they are likely to be, there will not be much to
+be objected to in the continuance of this right; but its retention
+should be contingent upon the shortening of each speech. This is a
+proposal which can be justified on "plain Whig principles," and has
+certainly a plain Whig precedent. For Lord John Russell, when Prime
+Minister, brought forward in 1849 a proposal to limit the duration of
+all speeches to one hour, except in the case of a member introducing an
+original motion, or a minister of the Crown speaking in reply. The
+proposal fell through, but that it was made by so cautious a Premier is
+a proof that there is much to be said in favour of compulsorily
+shortening speeches.
+
+The proposition that Parliaments should be chosen more frequently in
+order that they may preserve a closer touch with the people should be
+earnestly pressed forward. In the early days of the House of Commons
+annual Parliaments were practically the rule, an assembly being summoned
+to vote supplies and do certain necessary business and then dissolved.
+When matters were put upon a more certain footing, after the Great
+Rebellion, Parliaments elected for three years were ordained, and this
+term was extended to seven years shortly after the Hanoverian Accession,
+in order to guard against a Jacobite success at the hustings, which
+might seriously have endangered an unstable throne. The time has now
+come to ask that a term adopted in a panic, and for reasons which have
+long passed away, should be shortened. A four years' Parliament has been
+found to be long enough for France, Germany, and the United States; and
+as the average of the last half-century has proved a seven years' period
+to be unnecessarily long for England, the briefer should be enacted. Now
+that the suffrage is on so wide a basis, it is essential that members of
+Parliament should be in as close touch with the people as possible. Once
+elected, members frequently forget that they are not the masters of
+those who have chosen them, and that, though called in one sense to rule
+the country, there is another sense in which they are called to serve.
+It is necessary that this truth should be enforced upon such members as
+are apt to ignore it, and shorter Parliaments would enforce it.
+
+There are some who believe that by payment of members a better
+representation of the people would be secured. The example of other
+countries can certainly be quoted in favour of such a proposition, but
+there appears no necessity for any general payment in England. As,
+however, it is in the highest degree desirable that representatives of
+every class in the community should appear at Westminster, some
+provision should be made by which members, upon making a statutory
+declaration of the necessity for such a course, would be able to claim a
+certain moderate allowance for their expenses during the session. There
+would be nothing revolutionary in this; the fact of members being paid
+would be merely a return to the practice which prevailed for close upon
+four centuries after the House of Commons was established upon its
+present basis.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.--IS OUR ELECTORAL SYSTEM COMPLETE?
+
+
+Many would be surprised if told that there remained serious deficiencies
+in our electoral system; and would ask, "How can that be? We now have
+the ballot at elections, household suffrage in both counties and
+boroughs, and a nearer approach to equal electoral districts than the
+most sanguine Radical ten or even five years ago would have thought
+possible?"
+
+But has the suffrage really been extended to every householder? As a
+fact, it has not; it is largely a merely nominal extension; and tens of
+thousands of qualified citizens are disfranchised for years at a time by
+the needless restrictions and petty technicalities which now clog the
+electoral law. Registration should be so simplified that every qualified
+person would be certain of finding his name on the list; and the duty of
+compiling a correct register should be imposed upon some local public
+official, compelled under penalty to perform it.
+
+The common belief is that a twelvemonth's occupation qualifies for a
+vote, but all that it does is to qualify for a place on the register,
+which is an altogether different matter, the register being made up
+months before it comes into operation. At the very least, a man must
+have gone into a house a year and a half before he has a vote for it,
+and it often happens that he has to be in it for two years and a
+quarter, and even more, before he possesses the franchise. Let me state
+such a case. A man goes into a house at the half-quarter in August,
+1888; he will not be entitled to be placed on the register in the
+autumn of 1889, because he was not occupying on July 15 of the previous
+year; if he continues to occupy, he will, however, be placed there in
+the autumn of 1890; but it is not until January 1, 1891, that he will be
+able to exercise the suffrage. So that all taking houses from July 15,
+1888, are in the same position as those who take them up to July 15,
+1889, and will have to wait for a vote until 1891.
+
+"But," it may be said, "when a man once has his vote he is able to
+retain it as long as he holds any dwelling by virtue of 'successive
+occupation.'" That is so only as long as he remains within the
+boundaries of the constituency wherein he possessed the original
+qualification. He may move from one division of Liverpool to another, or
+from one division of Manchester to another, or from one division of
+Birmingham to another, and retain his vote by successive occupation; but
+if he goes from Liverpool to Birkenhead, from Manchester to Salford, or
+from Birmingham to Aston, his vote is lost for the year and a half or
+the two years and a quarter before explained. The effect of this is most
+apparent in London, where thousands of working men are continually
+moving from one district to another, treating the whole metropolis as
+one great town, but by passing out of their original borough they are
+disfranchised. And this is the more a grievance because the
+Redistribution Act, though dividing the larger provincial towns into
+single-member districts, left them as boroughs intact; while the old
+constituencies in London were not merely divided, but split up into
+separate boroughs. Lambeth thus became three boroughs--Lambeth,
+Camberwell, and Newington--each with its own divisions; Hackney was
+severed into the boroughs of Hackney, Shoreditch, and Bethnal Green;
+Marylebone into the boroughs of Marylebone, Paddington, St. Pancras, and
+Hampstead; and so throughout the metropolis. And the consequence of the
+purely artificial nature of the boundary lines thus created is that many
+a man who merely moves from one side of the street to the other, or even
+from one house to another next door, is disfranchised for a couple of
+years. The obvious remedy for this peculiar evil is that London should
+be treated as one single borough, like Liverpool, Manchester, and
+Birmingham; but the remedy for the whole evil is that when a man has
+once qualified for a place on the register, proof of successive
+occupation in any part of the country should suffice to give him his
+vote in the constituency to which he moves.
+
+When we pass from the household to the lodger franchise, we are faced by
+one of the hugest shams in the electoral system. There are certain
+constituencies which contain hundreds of lodgers, and of these not more
+than tens are on the register. The reason is twofold: it is not merely a
+trouble to get a vote, but there is a yearly difficulty in retaining it.
+For a lodger, as for a household vote, a twelvemonth's occupation is
+necessary to qualify, and the purely nominal nature of this
+qualification is the same in both; but the lodger has the additional
+hardship of being deprived of even as much benefit as "successive
+occupation" gives the householder, for if he moves next door, though
+with the same landlord, he is disfranchised, while the landlord retains
+his vote. And, further, he has to make a formal claim for the suffrage
+every succeeding summer, an operation too troublesome for the vast
+majority of lodgers to undergo, and one from which the householder is
+spared. And thus this particular franchise is a mockery, and the
+proportion of lodger voters to qualified lodgers is absurdly small.
+
+Of course, the term "householder," equally with the term "lodger,"
+presupposes at present that the one who bears it is a man, and, equally
+of course, an agitation is on foot to give the franchise to women. This
+is a matter which is likely to be settled in favour of the other sex,
+and the only question is as to how far it should go. The extreme
+advocates of female suffrage would give it to married women, but what
+appears the growing opinion is that spinsters and widows, qualified for
+the suffrage as men are qualified, should receive it; and this is a
+settlement which will probably soon be reached.
+
+Much dissatisfaction would continue to be felt, even were these points
+granted, if "faggot-voting" were still suffered, or a single person
+allowed to possess a multitude of votes. The "forty-shilling freehold"
+is a prolific source of bogus qualifications: abolished in Ireland by
+the Tories because it gave the people too much power, it ought to be got
+rid of throughout the kingdom by the Liberals because it leaves the
+people too little. For it is largely by its means that some men are able
+to boast that they can exercise the franchise in six, or ten, or even a
+dozen constituencies. Men of this type occupy themselves at a general
+election by travelling around, dropping a vote here and a vote there,
+and they ought to be restrained. That this can be done without violating
+any right is evident even under the present system. However many
+qualifications a man obtains, he can vote for only one of them in any
+constituency; and more, if he has qualifications in every division of
+the same borough he has, when the register is made up, to state for
+which division he will vote, and in that division alone can he claim a
+ballot paper. If it is right to prevent him from having more than a
+single vote in any one division--or, which is a still stronger point, in
+any one borough--it must be equally right to limit him to a single vote
+throughout the country. "One man, one vote," should be the rule in a
+democratic state. If a person possesses qualifications for various
+constituencies, let him be called upon to do what he is now compelled to
+do if he has qualifications for different parts of the same
+constituency--vote for only one of them; and that one should be the
+place in which he habitually resides.
+
+An indirect method of practically securing the "one man, one vote,"
+result would be to have all the elections throughout the country on the
+same day. Under the existing system, the polls drag on for weeks, and
+not only does this distract the attention of the nation and put a
+hindrance to business for a far longer period than is necessary, but it
+has the further evil effect of causing many voters in the constituencies
+which are later polled to waver until they see whither the majority
+elsewhere are tending, and then "go with the stream." The only instance
+in recent electoral history when the later polls reversed the verdict of
+the earlier was at the general election of 1885, when the boroughs,
+speaking broadly, voted Tory and the counties Liberal; but that, owing
+to the recent extension of the county franchise, was an abnormal period,
+and the rule is that the stream gathers as it goes, and the waverers are
+swept into the torrent. That it is possible for a great country to be
+polled on the same day is evident from the examples of Germany and
+France, and it is only adherence to worn-out forms which prevents its
+accomplishment here.
+
+The remedy, therefore, for the anomalies caused by the defective
+"successive occupation," the presence of "faggot voters," and the
+prolongation of the pollings, is simply to treat the kingdom as one vast
+constituency, in which a man once on the register remains as long as he
+has a qualification, in which no one has more than a single vote, and in
+all the divisions of which the poll is taken on the same day.
+
+This suggested single constituency would, of course, resemble the great
+county and borough constituencies of to-day in having divisions, but it
+would not be single in the sense proposed in Mr. Hare's original scheme
+of "proportional representation," by which the possessor of a vote could
+cast it where and for whom he liked. Those who have adopted Mr. Hare's
+ideas, while modifying his methods, have not been successful in
+discovering any feasible plan for representing public opinion in the
+proportion in which it is held, the sort of Chinese puzzle proposed by
+Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Courtney having failed to commend itself to any
+practical politician. It is wrong, however, to imagine that the present
+system of single-member districts roughly secures that the minority
+shall be duly represented while the majority retains its due share of
+power; for it was proved in some striking instances, the very first time
+it was put in operation, that, so far from retaining, it often
+sacrifices the rights of the majority. At the general election of 1885
+the Liberals of Leeds cast 23,354 votes, and the Tories 19,605, and yet
+the latter gained three seats and the former only two; the Sheffield
+Liberals won but two seats with 19,636 votes, while the Tories secured
+three with 19,594; and the Hackney Liberals could win only one seat with
+9,203 votes, and the Tories two with 8,870; while, on the other side,
+the Southwark Tories, with 9,324 votes, returned one member, and the
+Liberals, with 9,120, returned two. The reason is obvious: a party with
+overwhelming majorities in one or two districts is liable to be beaten
+by narrow majorities in most of the divisions, and the minority thus
+elects a majority of members. The present system, therefore, is
+evidently imperfect. It was adopted in haste and without due
+discussion; it has failed in France, Switzerland, and the United States;
+and in at least the divided boroughs it ought to give place to double or
+triple member districts.
+
+The question of having second ballots, so as to provide that, as in
+Germany and France, where there are several candidates and none secures
+an absolute majority of votes given, another ballot shall be held, is
+not an immediately pressing one, though much may be said in its favour;
+but that of the payment of election expenses out of the rates ought to
+be dealt with at once. It is highly unfair that a candidate should be
+fined heavily, by the enforced payment of the official expenses, for his
+desire to serve the country in Parliament; and it is the more unfair
+because the official expenses of elections for town councils, school
+boards, and boards of health and of guardians are paid by the public.
+
+This fine helps to keep men of moderate means out of the House, though
+their abilities might prove to be most useful there; and another method
+by which the wealthy have the advantage in parliamentary contests ought
+equally to be attended to. People are forbidden by law to hire
+conveyances for carrying voters to the poll, but they are allowed to
+borrow them, with the result that constituencies on an election day
+swarm with carriages of peers and other rich people, who have nothing
+whatever to do with the district, and who yet affect by this influence
+the voting. The use of carriages should not be prohibited, for the aged
+and infirm ought not to be disfranchised; but no importation of vehicles
+should be allowed, and while an elector, and an elector only, should be
+entitled to use his own, it should, as a means of identification, be
+driven by himself. Such a provision would largely diminish the present
+interference of peers in elections. They may address as many meetings as
+they like; but, as long as they have a legislative assembly of their
+own, they must not be allowed to use their wealth and position to
+interfere with the voters for the Commons House of Parliament.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.--SHOULD THE CHURCH REMAIN ESTABLISHED?
+
+
+From the great concerns of the State it is natural to come to the
+Church, and when that point is arrived at, the problem of
+disestablishment at once arises. "_Can_ the Church be disestablished?"
+is a question sometimes put, and the answer is plain, for that answer is
+"Most certainly," and a further question "Where is the Act establishing
+the Church?" as if the non-production of such an enactment would prevent
+Parliament from severing the link which binds Church and State, may be
+replied to by another. Supposing one asked, "Where is the Act
+establishing the monarchy?" would the non-production of that measure
+prove that it is not a parliamentary monarchy under which we live? By
+the Act of Succession, Parliament "settled" the monarchy; by various
+Acts in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Elizabeth, and Charles
+II., Parliament has "settled" the Church. There is no authority in this
+realm higher than Parliament; and if Parliament chooses to "unsettle"
+either monarchy or Church, it can do so.
+
+This is no new-fangled Radical idea; it is an old Whig principle.
+Charles Fox, in a debate just a century since, observed, while
+favourable to the principle of religious establishments, "If the
+majority of the people of England should ever be for the abolition of
+the Established Church, in such a case the abolition ought immediately
+to follow." Macaulay, in his essay on Mr. Gladstone's youthful book on
+"Church and State," was clearly of the same opinion. And Lord
+Hartington, in his declaration a few years ago that if the majority of
+the people of Scotland desired disestablishment their desire ought to
+be satisfied, completed the chain of Whig traditional opinion.
+
+If upon such a matter one is not content to swear by the Whigs, the
+verdict of the bishops may be accepted. Dr. Magee, of Peterborough, has
+declared that "Our Church is not only catholic and national: she is
+established by law--that is to say, she has entered into certain
+definite relations with the State, involving on the part of the State an
+amount of recognition and control, and on the part of the Church
+subjection to the State."
+
+The very use of the common term "The Church of England as by law
+established" involves recognition of the fact that what the law has done
+the law can undo. And if any one doubts the power of Parliament in this
+matter, let him read a table of the statutes passed in the session of
+1869, and he will find that the most important of all of them was "An
+Act to put an end to the Establishment of the Church of Ireland." Now,
+the legal position of the Irish Establishment and the English
+Establishment was identical. Is any further proof required that, if
+Parliament chooses, the latter can at any moment be severed from the
+State?
+
+It is sometimes said that Nonconformist bodies are equally established
+with the Church because they are subject to the law, as regards the
+construction of their trust-deeds, and other matters, of which the
+courts of justice have occasionally to take cognizance. But that is as
+if it were argued that all persons who come within the enactments
+affecting the relations between employer and employed should be
+considered servants of the Crown as well as those engaged in the
+government offices. The difference is plain: the law regulates all, the
+Government employs only some. The Crown appoints the Archbishop of
+Canterbury, but has no right to choose the President of the Wesleyan
+Conference; Parliament can deal with the salaries of the bishops, but
+cannot touch the stipend of a single Congregational minister.
+
+There being no doubt that, if the people will, the Church can be
+disestablished, a further question remains, "Ought it to be so dealt
+with?" and the reply in the affirmative is based upon the lessons of
+the past, the experiences of the present, and the possibilities of the
+future.
+
+The Church, though possessed of every advantage which high position and
+vast wealth could supply, has failed to be "national" in any true sense
+of the word. So far from embracing the whole people, it has gradually
+become but one of many sects; and, had it not been for the efforts of
+those who conscientiously dissented from its doctrines and its practice,
+a great portion of the religious life we see in England to-day would not
+have existed. Further, and from the time of its settlement on the
+present basis, it has been the consistent friend to the privileged
+classes, and foe to any extension of liberties to the mass of the
+people. In defence of its position and emoluments it has struck many a
+blow for despotism. The harassing and often bloody persecutions of
+Nonconformists and Roman Catholics in England and Wales, and of
+Covenanters and Cameronians in Scotland, were undertaken at its desire
+and in its defence; while the hardships and indignities inflicted for
+centuries upon the Catholics of Ireland were avowedly in support of "the
+Protestant interest"--a Protestantism of the Establishment, in which the
+Presbyterians were allowed little share. In its pulpits were found the
+most eloquent defenders of the English slave trade, which was from them
+declared to be "in conformity with principles of natural and revealed
+religion;" and when Romilly strove to lessen the horrors of the penal
+code, its bishops again and again came to the rescue of laws the
+disregard of which for the sanctity of human life can in these days
+scarcely be conceived. And when it was proposed to give to some extent
+the government of the country to the people whom it mainly concerned, it
+was the bishops who threw out the first Reform Bill.
+
+At this present the efforts of the better men within the Establishment
+are hampered by the State connection. It cannot bring its machinery into
+harmony with the growing needs of the time without appealing to a
+Parliament in which orthodox and heterodox, Catholic and Atheist, Jew
+and Quaker, Unitarian and Agnostic sit side by side, and to which a
+Hindoo has twice narrowly escaped election. By a Prime Minister
+dependent upon the will of this body its bishops are chosen; by a Lord
+Chancellor equally so dependent are many of its ministers appointed.
+Because of the necessity for going to Parliament for every improvement,
+little improvement is made. Private patronage is left untouched; the
+scandal of the sale of livings remains unchecked; criminous clerks are
+often allowed to escape punishment because of the cumbrous methods now
+provided; and disobedient clergymen defy their bishops and go to prison
+rather than conform to discipline, the law which permits persistent
+insubordination and provides an unfitting penalty remaining unaltered
+because Parliament has too much to do to attend to the Church.
+
+As to the future, things are likely to be worse instead of better. Then,
+as now, the connection between State and Church will injure both--the
+State because it is an injustice to all outside the Establishment that a
+single sect should be propertied and privileged by Parliament, and the
+Church because it is as a strong man in chains attempting to walk but
+only succeeding to painfully hobble.
+
+In how many ways disestablishment would benefit the Church, let Dr.
+Ryle, Bishop of Liverpool, declare:--"(1) It would doubtless give us
+more liberty, and enable us to effect many useful reforms. (2) It would
+bring the laity forward into their rightful position, from sheer
+necessity. (3) It would give us a real and properly constituted
+Convocation. (4) It would lead to an increase of bishops, a division of
+dioceses, and a reconstruction of our cathedral bodies. (5) It would
+make an end of Crown jobs in the choice of bishops, and upset the whole
+system of patronage. (6) It would destroy all sinecure offices, and
+drive all drones out of the ecclesiastical hive. (7) It would enable us
+to make our worship more elastic, and our ritual better suited to the
+times." True, the bishop adds that the value of these gains must not be
+exaggerated; but if disestablishment can do even as much good as this to
+the Church, it cannot be the bad thing some of its opponents would have
+us believe.
+
+But it is sometimes urged that if the Church were disestablished, there
+would be no State recognition of religion, and England would become
+un-Christian. Is not this a technical rather than a real argument? Would
+the number of Christians in this country be lessened by a single one if
+the Church were deprived of State support? Was not the same thing said
+when Jews were admitted to Parliament and Atheists claimed admission?
+And has England ceased to be Christian because Baron de Worms is sitting
+on one side of the Speaker and Mr. Bradlaugh on the other?
+
+A more real argument is that disestablishment would break up the
+parochial system; but those who use it impute a discreditable
+lukewarmness to their own community. Seeing what the Wesleyans, the
+Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the other dissenting denominations
+have done to spread religion in every village in England and Wales; what
+the Free Kirk has accomplished in Scotland; and what the Roman Catholic
+Church has effected in Ireland--and all without a penny of State
+endowment, and dependent alone for success upon the gifts of their
+members--is it to be believed that the adherents of the Episcopal
+Church, among whom are included the wealthiest men in the country, will
+permit that institution to perish for lack of aid? Is not experience all
+the other way? Is not that of Ireland in particular a striking testimony
+to the wisdom of substituting the voluntary system for State support?
+Upon this point the testimony of two Irish Protestant bishops is
+abundant proof. The Bishop of Ossory, Ferns, and Leighlin averred, in
+1882, that "no one could look attentively upon our Church's history
+during the last ten or twelve years without perceiving that, by the good
+hand of God upon them, there had been a decided growth in all that was
+best and purest and most important. Never in his recollection had their
+Church been more clear or united in her testimony to Christian truth, or
+more faithful in every good word and work;" and Lord Plunket, the
+Archbishop of Dublin, has congratulated his clergy that disestablishment
+saved the Church from being involved in the land agitation, adding, "The
+very disaster which seemed most to threaten our downfall has been
+overruled for good."
+
+The question is likely, however, to be considered a more immediately
+pressing one for Scotland and Wales than for England. In Scotland it is
+the Presbyterian and not the Episcopalian form of Christian government
+which is State supported; and the fact that forms so opposed in striking
+points of doctrine and practice should be established on the two sides
+of the Tweed, is an interesting commentary upon the system generally.
+When the majority of the members for Scotland demand disestablishment,
+and press that demand upon us, it will as assuredly be granted as was
+the like demand from Ireland just twenty years ago. And "the Church of
+England in Wales"--supported by a small minority, and never enjoying the
+confidence of the body of the people--should similarly be dealt with,
+according to the wish of the Welsh parliamentary representatives.
+
+The continued existence of the Church of England as an establishment is
+the largest question of all, and it is one which politicians will have
+to face, if not this year or next year, yet in the early years to come.
+It is only its continued existence "as an establishment" which is in
+dispute, for it would be a slanderous imputation upon its sons if it
+were said that a withdrawal of State support would cause its collapse as
+a religious body. The very strides it has made during the last few
+years, which are sometimes urged in its defence, have been made not by
+State help but by voluntary effort; and if that voluntary effort had
+free scope, the good effect would be greater and more lasting.
+
+What is wanted is that which Cavour asked, "A Free Church in a Free
+State," for both would be benefited by the process, and particularly the
+former. When the late Lord Beaconsfield was asked why, in the height of
+Tory reaction, he made no effort to re-establish the Irish Church, he
+replied that there was a difference between cutting off a man's head and
+putting it on again. But the illustration was imperfect, for it is a
+strange kind of decapitation which strengthens the patient; and that was
+the effect in Ireland. And the Irish Church was not only disestablished
+but _disendowed_. In the mind of the practical politician the two
+processes are inseparable.
+
+
+
+
+XV.--WOULD DISENDOWMENT BE JUST?
+
+
+The question, "Would disendowment be just?" is admittedly a crucial
+point to determine when the whole subject comes up for settlement, for
+there are many defenders of the Establishment who exclaim, "We are quite
+prepared for the severance of the Church from the State, but only upon
+condition that she retains her endowments."
+
+But the two concerns cannot be separated. Supposing the Government
+engaged an officer to perform certain functions, and that, in process of
+time, finding these functions not fulfilled, it determined to sever the
+connection, would the officer be justified in demanding not only
+consideration for his long service and his life interests, but that his
+salary should be paid to himself and his descendants in perpetuity,
+though directly neither he nor they would again render service to the
+State? If it be contended that the illustration is not applicable,
+because the Church receives no aid from the State, issue can be joined
+at once.
+
+For what is the first question that naturally arises? It is as to the
+source from which the Church originally derived her revenues. "Pious
+benefactors, stimulated by the wish to benefit their fellows and save
+themselves," is the reply of the average Church defender. But any
+attempt to prove this fails. Does a solitary person believe that every
+proprietor of land in each parish of England and Wales voluntarily and
+spontaneously imposed a tithe upon his possessions? Is it not an
+admitted fact that it was by royal ordinance such an impost was first
+levied, and by force of law that it has since been maintained?
+
+This most ancient property of the Church in England, the tithe, is a
+law-created and law-extorted impost for the benefit of a particular
+sect. As far back as the Heptarchy, royal ordinances were given in
+various of the kingdoms of which England was composed directing the
+payment of tithes; and that the far greater portion of these were not
+voluntary offerings is indicated in Hume's account of the West Saxon
+grant in 854. "Though parishes," he observes, "had been instituted in
+England by Honorius, Archbishop of Canterbury, two centuries before, the
+ecclesiastics had never yet been able to get possession of the tithes;
+they therefore seized the present favourable opportunity of making that
+acquisition when a weak, superstitious prince filled the throne, and
+when the people, discouraged by their losses from the Danes and
+terrified with the fear of future invasions, were susceptible of any
+impression which bore the appearance of religion."
+
+When England became one kingdom, and tithes were extended by royal
+decree to the whole realm, penalties soon began to be provided for
+non-payment, Alfred ordaining "that if any man shall withhold his
+tithes, and not faithfully and duly pay them to the Church, if he be a
+Dane he shall be fined in the sum of twenty shillings, and if an
+Englishman in the sum of thirty shillings;" and William the Norman,
+speedily after the Conquest, directed that "whosoever shall withhold
+this tenth part shall, by the justice of the bishop and the king, be
+forced to the payment of it, if need be." These provisions are part of
+the common law of England, and they effectually dispose of the idea that
+the tithe was a voluntary offering which the farmer to-day ought to pay
+because of the supposed piety of unknown ancestors.
+
+The proceeds of the tithe--which originally, according to Blackstone,
+were "distributed in a fourfold division: one for the use of the bishop,
+one for maintaining the fabric of the church, a third for the poor, and
+a fourth to provide for the incumbent"--were the first great source of
+revenue to the Church; but in the course of centuries that revenue was
+largely added to by gifts. It was not uncommon for a man to hand over
+his property to a monastery upon condition that he was allowed a
+sufficiency to keep him; while the money given for the provision of
+masses for the dead was a considerable aid to the Church in the Middle
+Ages. And as the monks were exceedingly keen traders, their wealth was
+increased by farming, buying, and selling to a degree that at length
+tempted the cupidity of a rapacious king. It was during that period that
+our great cathedrals and all our old parish churches were built; and
+when, because of a divorce dispute, the Eighth Henry resolved to cut the
+Church in England altogether adrift from the Church of Rome, he adopted
+a measure of Disendowment which, though not complete, was very sweeping,
+and proved in the most absolute form the right of the State to deal as
+it willed with the property of the Church.
+
+In the preamble of the Act dissolving the lesser monasteries, it is
+declared that "the Lords and Commons, by a great deliberation, finally
+be resolved that it is and shall be much more to the pleasure of
+Almighty God, and for the honour of this His realm, that the possessions
+of such small religious houses, now being spent, spoiled, and wasted for
+increase and maintenance of sin, should be used and committed to better
+uses." The State in this asserted a right it had never forfeited, and
+which, by successive Acts of Parliament, has been specifically retained.
+No one to-day would defend the fashion in which Henry took property
+which had been devoted to certain public uses and lavished it upon
+favourites and friends. The main point, however, is not the manner of
+disposal, but the fact that it could be disposed of at all; and when any
+one doubts the power of the State regarding the property of the Church,
+a reference to what Parliament has done in the matter is sufficient to
+show constitutional precedent for Disendowment.
+
+But though much was taken from the Church at the Reformation period,
+much was left, and it was left to a body differing in many important
+particulars from that which had been despoiled. As Mr. Arthur Elliott,
+M.P., a Whig writer, observes in his book "The State and the Church,"
+"It would be to give a very false notion of the position of the Church
+towards the State to omit all mention of the sources from which, as
+regards its edifices, the Church of England finds itself so
+magnificently endowed. In the main, the wealth of the Church in this
+respect was inherited, or rather acquired, at the time of the
+Reformation, from the Roman Catholics, who had created it. The Roman
+Catholics and the English nation had been formerly one and the same.
+When the nation, for the most part, ceased to be Catholic, these
+edifices, like other endowments devoted to the religious instruction of
+the people, became the property of the Protestant Church of England, as
+by law established."
+
+The new Act of Parliament Church--for it had its doctrines and its
+discipline defined by statute--became possessed, therefore, of the
+cathedrals, the churches, much of the glebe, and a large portion of the
+tithe that had been given or granted to the Roman Catholic communion,
+which had held the ground for centuries. And succeeding monarchs, with
+the exception of Mary, so confirmed and added to these gifts that "the
+Judicious Hooker" was led to exclaim--"It might deservedly be at this
+day the joyful song of innumerable multitudes, and (which must be
+eternally confessed, even with tears of thankfulness) the true
+inscription, style, or title of all churches as yet standing within this
+realm, 'By the goodness of Almighty God and His servant Elizabeth, we
+are.'"
+
+And it was not only "His servant Elizabeth" who, among monarchs since
+the Reformation, has assisted the Houses of the Legislature to
+pecuniarily aid the Church. Queen Anne surrendered the first fruits, or
+profits of one year, of all spiritual promotions, and the tithe of the
+revenue of all sees, in order to create a fund for increasing the
+incomes of the poor clergy; but Queen Anne's Bounty comes straight out
+of the national pocket, for, had our monarchs retained this source of
+income, it would have been taken into account when the Civil List was
+settled at the commencement of the reign, and at least £100,000 a year
+saved to the Exchequer. And the nation has even more directly helped the
+fund, Parliament having, between 1809 and 1829, voted considerably over
+a million towards it.
+
+But this is not all. Dealing merely with national money appropriated to
+Church purposes during the present century, it may be added that in 1818
+Parliament voted a million sterling for the purpose of building
+churches, that in 1824 a further sum of half a million was granted for
+the same purpose, and that a subsequent amount of close upon ninety
+thousand pounds has to be added to the total. And not only by large
+grants did Parliament help the Church. In the old days of Protection,
+when almost every conceivable article was taxed, the duty chargeable on
+the materials used in the building of churches was remitted, this
+amounting between 1817 and 1845 to over £336,000. A drawback was also
+granted on the paper used in printing the Prayer Book, and this, while
+the paper duty was levied, could scarcely have averaged less than a
+thousand a year. In small things, as in great, Parliament helped the
+Church, for an Act of George IV. specifically exempted from toll the
+carriage and horses used by a clergyman when driving to visit a sick
+parishioner.
+
+I claim, therefore, that the State has a right to dispose of such
+property of the Church as was not given to it in recent times by private
+donors, knowing it would be appropriated to the purposes of a sect; and
+I claim it because the tithes were law-created, because the bulk of the
+possessions passed from one communion to another by force of law, and
+because the State has continued to pecuniarily aid the Church throughout
+the centuries during which she has existed. And, if constitutional
+precedent be demanded, they are to be found in abundance upon the
+statute book, notably in the measures affecting the monasteries, the
+Tithe Commutation Act, and the Act putting an end to the Established
+Church in Ireland.
+
+If it be urged, as it sometimes is, that, because the original royal
+ordinance enforcing tithes was granted before our regular parliamentary
+system was in existence, Parliament has no power to deal with it, it
+must be answered that in all matters within these realms, touching
+either life or property, Parliament is supreme. And, as bearing even
+more directly upon the point raised, it may be added that rights of toll
+and market, granted to boroughs by royal charter before Parliaments were
+chosen as at present, have been altered and abolished by Parliaments
+since; and that Magna Charta itself, signed many years before Simon de
+Montfort called the first House of Commons into being, has been
+modified, and often modified, since that event.
+
+If further proof be wanted, not only of the power but of the will of
+Parliament to interfere directly in the monetary affairs of an
+Established Church, the Act disendowing the Irish Establishment eighteen
+years ago, and another passed fifty years since, chopping and changing
+the salaries of the English bishops, may be referred to. And, regarding
+a further measure of the last half-century, the words of such a sturdy
+Conservative as Lord Brabourne, used in a letter written in 1887, are
+eminently satisfactory:--"The Tithe Commutation Act was nothing more nor
+less than the assertion by the State of its right to deal with tithes as
+national property."
+
+But, it may be said, the property, whether contributed by private
+benefaction or royal grant, was distinctly given to the Church, and
+ought not, therefore, to be taken away. I dispute both points of the
+contention. The property was allotted to a Church which acknowledged the
+supremacy of the Pope, and it is used by one which abjures it; to a
+Church possessed of seven sacraments, and used by one with only two; to
+a Church believing in transubstantiation, and used by one holding that
+doctrine to be a dangerous heresy; to a Church with an unmarried clergy,
+and used by one in which the large families of the poorer parsons are
+their stumbling-block and reproach; to a Church which performed its most
+sacred mysteries in the Latin tongue, and used by one whose ceremonies
+are delivered in a language understanded of the people. If it be true
+that the Church to-day is the Church as it has always been, why, in the
+name of common reason, was Cranmer, the Protestant, burned by Mary, and
+Campion, the Jesuit, hanged by Elizabeth?
+
+From the fact that the Church of England is not a corporation--that is,
+it has not property in its own right, and what is possessed by its
+members is vested in them not as proprietors but as trustees--there
+flows the consequence that it is mainly the life interests of those
+engaged in clerical work which have to be considered. And those life
+interests will be considered and generously dealt with when the time for
+disendowment arrives.
+
+And then comes a question which many will deem of all-importance--"How
+is the Church to exist afterwards?" or, to put the point in the
+extremest fashion, and in the words addressed to the clergy in the very
+first of the "Tracts for the Times," "Should the Government of the
+country so far forget their God as to cut off the Church, to deprive it
+of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claims
+to respect and attention which you make upon your flock?" And the answer
+is that, if the Church be worthy to exist, it will be able, like other
+religious bodies, to stand upon the open and constant manifestation of
+its own excellences.
+
+Look around and see what the voluntary system has done. In England it
+has planted a place of worship in every corner of the kingdom; in Wales
+it has saved from spiritual starvation a populace neglected by the
+Establishment; in Scotland it has founded a Free Church by sacrifices
+which were the marvel and the pride of a preceding generation; and in
+Ireland it has secured to the mass of the people the ministrations of
+their own religion, despite every bribe, persecution, and lure. Is it in
+England, where the Episcopalian system has most that is wealthy and all
+that is socially influential on its side, that a State endowment is
+needed to provide for its professors what the miners of Cornwall and the
+labourers of Carmarthen, the hardy toilers in the Highlands, and the
+poverty-stricken peasants of Connemara provide for themselves? If this
+be so, then no greater indictment could be levelled against the process
+of Establishment, no more certain proof could be afforded of the evils
+which follow in its train, than that it produced such a mean coldness of
+soul. But the supposition is so dishonouring to the great body of
+church-goers that its use proves the straits in which the defenders of
+the existing system find themselves.
+
+Disendowment would undoubtedly reduce the larger salaries allotted to
+the clergy, and probably increase the smaller. A parson would then be
+paid according to his value to the parish, whether as preacher or
+administrator, and he would not draw a thousand a year for doing
+nothing, while his curate received eighty or a hundred for performing
+the work. The Church would no longer be a rich man's preserve, wherein
+younger sons could obtain comfortable family livings, while their duty
+was done by ill-paid deputies. We should no longer see an Archbishop of
+Canterbury, with a salary of £15,000 a year, begging upon a public
+platform for worn-out garments for the poorer working clergy. A primate
+is conceivable at a third the cost, and the money thus saved to the
+Church alone would prevent the necessity for such a humiliating
+proceeding as openly asking for old clothes for toiling clergymen. With
+disendowment, in short, men would be paid according to their merits and
+not their family connections--according to their work and not their
+birth. And, further, the scandal of the sale of livings--the shame of
+the public advertisement of cures of souls as eligible according as they
+are in a hunting country, or near a fishing river, or close to "good
+society"--would be done away with. Would all these gains count as
+nothing to the Church, considered as a religious body?
+
+The process of disendowment, then, is the necessary accompaniment of
+disestablishment; it is possible; it is just; and its effects would make
+for good. It is necessary, because if the Church is to be severed from
+the State on the ground that it has failed in its mission, it would be
+obviously out of the question to leave it possessed of the property
+given to it to secure that mission's due performance. It is possible,
+because Parliament is not merely supreme in all such matters, but has
+shown within the past few years its capacity for disendowing a Church
+having precisely the same rights and privileges as the English
+Establishment. It is just, because no one sect has the right to property
+granted it on the ground that it represented the religious sentiment of
+the whole nation. And it would make for good in giving a more
+distinctively religious character to the clergy, in paying them
+according to their deserts and not according to the length of the purse
+that purchased them their livings, and in freeing a religious system
+from the ignoble associations of the auction mart.
+
+Upon these grounds it is demanded that, with disestablishment,
+disendowment shall come. Life interests will be respected; all modern
+gifts to the Episcopalians as a distinct sect will be fairly dealt with;
+further than this the Establishment is not entitled to demand, and
+further than this Liberals will not be prepared to go.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.--OUGHT EDUCATION TO BE FREE?
+
+
+A question which is intimately connected in many minds with the Church
+is that of national education. It stood next to it in order in that
+early programme of Mr. Chamberlain which demanded "Free Church, free
+schools, free land, and free labour."
+
+This matter of free schools is not likely to create as much opposition
+as it would have done even a short time since, for no question awaiting
+settlement is ripening so rapidly. Experience is teaching in an
+ever-increasing ratio that certain defects exist in our system of
+national education which hinder its full development, some of which, at
+least, could be avoided by the abolition of fees.
+
+The progress which has been made in public opinion within only half a
+century regarding the amount of aid that should be given to elementary
+schools, encourages the hope that more will yet be given, and that very
+speedily. It is but a little more than fifty years ago that a Liberal
+Ministry led the way in devoting a portion of the national funds to this
+purpose; and no one unacquainted with the history of that period could
+guess the number and the weight of the obstacles thrown in the way of
+even such a modest proposal as that Ministry made. The Tories, while not
+particularly anxious that the mass of the people should be educated at
+all, were decidedly desirous that such teaching as was given should be
+under the direct control of the Church. Archbishops and bishops, Tories,
+high and low, joined to continually hamper the development of any system
+of national education which afforded the Nonconformists the least
+privilege; but despite their every effort the movement spread. The
+annual grant of £20,000, which was commenced in 1834, grew by leaps and
+bounds. In a little more than twenty years it had become nearly half a
+million for Great Britain alone; in thirty years it had increased by
+close upon another quarter of a million; and in fifty years (and the
+growth in the meantime had been mainly the fruit of the Education Act,
+passed by the Liberal Ministry in 1870) it had touched three millions.
+And that sum, vast as it was, represented only the amount granted from
+the national exchequer, being supplemented by an even larger total
+raised by local rates.
+
+So far has the nation gone in the path of State-aided and rate-aided
+education, and the question is whether it is not worth while to go the
+comparatively little way further which is needed to make elementary
+education free. For the fees which are now paid do not represent a
+quarter of the amount which the teaching costs. And not only so, but the
+existence of these fees is a continual hindrance to the working of the
+Act. The effect of the fee is to keep out of the board schools thousands
+of children who ought to be in them; and the attempt to enforce its
+payment increases the odium which almost necessarily attends upon
+compulsion.
+
+"But," it will be said, "where a parent is too poor to pay, the fee can
+be remitted." That is true, and the extent to which the system of such
+remission is carried in some districts is one of the strongest arguments
+in favour of free education. It is desirable to get the children into
+the schools, but it is highly undesirable to do this by practically
+pauperizing the parents. If elementary education were free to all, all
+could partake of it without any appearance of favour on the one hand or
+shame on the other. But the independent poor have now the choice of
+making themselves still poorer by paying the fee for the education they
+are bound to have administered, or of losing their independence by
+asking the school board or the poor-law guardians for relief. And the
+consequence, of course, is that many who have no independence to lose,
+and are the least deserving of help, receive the assistance they are
+never backward to ask.
+
+"What is worth having is worth paying for" is a remark sometimes made
+in this connection, but is it not as applicable to the State as to the
+individual? For it is for no philanthropic but for a decidedly practical
+reason that the country assists education. All men in these days admit
+that the most cultivated people, like the most cultivated individual
+man, has the best chance of success. With educated Germany, and educated
+France, and educated America pressing us hard, it is a necessity of
+existence for England to be equally educated. And seeing that the school
+board rate and the Government grant mount higher and higher and the fees
+become lower and lower, the only practical question is whether the State
+had not better boldly step in, abolish fees which are a hindrance to
+educational progress, pay the whole amount instead of three-quarters,
+and provide free teaching for all.
+
+If such a consummation were secured, the status of what are now called
+voluntary schools would of necessity be materially altered. As at
+present applied, the name "voluntary" affixed to the schools of the
+National Society and similar bodies is very much a misnomer. It conveys
+that the schools are supported by voluntary subscriptions; but this is
+true in only a limited degree, for it is the Government grant--that is,
+money taken out of the pocket of every one who pays taxes, direct or
+indirect--which keeps them in existence. And, therefore, when Churchmen
+complain, as some of them are occasionally ill-advised enough to do,
+that they not only subscribe to their own schools but have to pay the
+rate as well, ought it not to be enough to remind them that their
+schools are supported not alone for educational but for sectarian
+purposes, and that, if they wish to proselytize, they must pay, in
+however inadequate a degree, for the privilege? The real hardship is
+that those who do not believe in the clerical system of education have
+to pay heavily by means of taxation to keep up establishments over which
+they have not the least control, and which are used by the clergy for
+denominational ends.
+
+One result, then, of free education would be, not to destroy the
+voluntary schools, but to put them under the control of those who really
+and not nominally pay for keeping them up. If Churchmen demand schools
+of their own, they must support them out of their own pocket and not out
+of other people's, though it may be well that, under a stringent
+"conscience clause" and with direct popular control, they should still
+share in the taxpayers' grants. As matters stand, the national
+schoolmaster is too often treated as if he were a mere servant of the
+clergyman, an idea which, with free education and popular government of
+all State-aided schools, would be bound to cease.
+
+The cry raised by some clergymen when the Education Act was passed, that
+the undenominational system would be fruitful only in producing "astute
+scoundrels and clever devils," has died away. It is doubtful whether
+anybody ever really believed it; it is certain that no man with a
+reputation to lose would now repeat it. And, that being the case, the
+excuse for keeping up at the public expense two rival sets of
+schools--one sectarian and the other undenominational--has so largely
+disappeared that the onus of proving its necessity lies upon its
+advocates, and the burden of paying for it should be shifted upon the
+right shoulders.
+
+Of course it is said that this proposal of free education is only
+another step towards Socialism, but no one should be frightened by
+phrases. Socialism has as many varieties as religion--some as bad and
+some as good--and from them must be selected those worth having. If,
+upon consideration of the whole case, free education be thought to be
+one of these, the fact that it is called Socialistic will not weigh to
+its disadvantage with a single sensible man.
+
+What, then, is it that is asked, and why is it demanded? It is asked
+that elementary schools shall be freed from fees, and entirely supported
+out of the public funds, local and imperial; that advanced and technical
+education shall be made cheap and accessible, in order that those who
+want to progress can do so with as few hindrances as possible; and that
+all schools supported by public money shall be placed under popular
+control, and the schoolrooms, out of educational hours, made available
+for public use.
+
+These things are demanded because by the present arrangements the
+progress of compulsion is hampered, the deserving and independent poor
+are inequitably dealt with, and the cost of collecting the fees is out
+of all proportion to their value when received. Already the public pay
+three-quarters of the cost of elementary education, and they do it for
+the benefit of the community; if payment of the remaining quarter would
+increase the efficiency of the system, even only to a corresponding
+degree, it would be worth making. "Vested interests" might object; but
+the national welfare must override them, though there is no intention of
+dealing with them otherwise than fairly. Due allowance would be made for
+the subscriptions which have been raised towards the erection and
+support of the voluntary schools; but the nation has rights as well as
+individuals, and, in considering any compensation which may be demanded
+by the managers of such institutions, if free education be adopted, the
+public money which has been expended upon them must be taken into
+account equally with the private.
+
+This much is certain: although England will not be able to hold her own
+simply with "the three R's," and advanced and technical education
+should, therefore, be widely spread, it is our duty to make "the three
+R's" as widely known as we can. It is not a question of principle, but
+of policy. Opposition to any education at all for the masses has
+disappeared; the State and the parish already pay most of the cost; if
+the system can be made more perfect by the abolition of fees, fees will
+have to be abolished.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.--DO THE LAND LAWS NEED REFORM?
+
+
+Immediately the question of the land is touched, a whole host of
+opponents to progress are roused to fierce and continuous action,
+though, as all politicians in these days affect a belief in the
+necessity for land reform, the question appears at first to be more one
+of degree than of principle. But, at the very outset, it is necessary to
+face the fact that there is an active propaganda going on which denies
+that any reform, even the most sweeping, will be of avail, and asserts
+that it is the very existence of private property in land which must be
+done away with.
+
+In what is termed "Land Nationalization" a very dangerous fallacy
+exists. The first thing to be asked of any one who advocates it is to
+define the term. It is vague; it is high-sounding; but what does it
+mean? If it means that the State is to take into its keeping all the
+land without compensating the present holders, it proposes robbery; if
+it means that the process is to be accompanied by compensation, it would
+entail jobbery. There are thousands who, by working hard, have saved
+sufficient to buy a small plot on which to erect a house. Is that plot
+to be seized by the State without payment? And if fair payment be given,
+and the taint of theft thus removed, does a single soul imagine that a
+Government department would be able to manage the land better than it is
+managed at present? Are our Government departments such models of
+efficiency and economy that such a belief can be entertained for a
+moment? What may fairly be demanded of all advocates of the
+nationalization or municipalization of the land is that they shall
+clearly show that the process would be honest in itself, just to the
+present holders, and likely to benefit the whole community. Unless they
+can do all these things, generalities are of no avail.
+
+The land, it is sometimes urged, has been stolen from the people; but it
+cannot have been stolen from those who never directly possessed it: and,
+whatever may be said of the manner in which the large properties were
+secured centuries ago, much of the land has changed hands so often that
+most, at least, of the present holders have fairly paid for it. There is
+an old legal doctrine that the title of that which is bought in open
+market cannot afterwards be called in question, and that applies to the
+present case. And when we are told that there cannot exist private
+property in land because that commodity is a gift of God to all, is it
+not the fact that, in an old country like ours, land is worth little
+except it be highly cultivated; that the labour, the manure, and the
+seed are private property without the shadow of a doubt; and that it is
+these we largely have to pay for when agricultural commodities are
+bought? Upon the same ground it is sometimes contended that we should
+have our water free because it falls from the heavens; but nature did
+not provide reservoirs, or lay mains, or bring the pipes into our
+houses; and for the sake of obtaining water easily we must pay for the
+labour and appliances used in collecting and distributing it. And the
+value of these illustrations, both as to land and to water, is to teach
+an avoidance of sounding generalities and a resolve to look at all
+questions in a practical light.
+
+Recognizing, therefore, that private property in land has existed, is
+existing, and is not likely to be abolished, the duty of progressive
+politicians is to see how the laws affecting it can be so modified as to
+benefit a considerably larger portion of the community than at present.
+And three of the points which have been most discussed, and which now
+are nearest settlement, are the custom of primogeniture, the law of
+entail, and the enactments relating to transfer.
+
+After spurning for many years the Liberal demand for the abolition of
+the custom of primogeniture--by which the land of a man dying without a
+will passes to the eldest son, to the exclusion of the rest of the
+family--the Tories in 1887 themselves proposed it; and in the House of
+Lords only one peer had sufficient courage to stand up in defence of a
+custom which the whole peerage had sworn by until that time. It puzzles
+any one not a peer to understand how a distinctly dishonest practice
+could have existed so long, save for the utterly inadequate reason that
+its tendency was to prevent large estates from being broken up, and that
+there were those who imagined that large estates were a benefit to the
+country. In actual working, however, it did not affect the largest
+estates but the smallest, and primogeniture was thus a question touching
+much more closely those of moderate means than the possessors of great
+wealth. A large holder of land is an exceedingly unlikely person to die
+without a will; a small holder frequently does so, with the result of
+much injustice to and suffering among his family.
+
+A practical instance is worth a hundred theories upon a point like this,
+and here are some such which have come under my own notice within the
+past few months. A man possessed of a small landed property died
+intestate; his daughter, who had ministered to his wants for years, was
+left penniless, the whole of the property going to the eldest son.
+Another similarly circumstanced, whose stay and comfort during his old
+age had likewise been a daughter, shrank, with the foolish obstinacy of
+the superstitious, from making a will; his friends, recognizing that, if
+he failed in this obvious duty, the daughter would be thrown without a
+penny on the world, while the eldest son, who for various reasons had
+not the least claim upon his father, would take everything, besought the
+old man to act reasonably; and almost at the last moment he did. In a
+third case, a fisherman, who for eighteen years had been paying for a
+piece of land through a building society, was drowned in a squall; and
+his savings, designed for the support of himself and his wife, were
+swept straight into the pocket of his eldest son. Now in all these
+instances, had the money been invested in houses, ships, consols--in
+fact, anything but land--it would, in case of no will being made, have
+been divided among the whole family in fair proportion. The accident of
+it being put into land caused wrong and suffering in two cases, and
+wrong and suffering were very narrowly avoided in the third. The
+abolition of primogeniture, therefore, is much more needed by the
+working and the middle classes than by the rich, whose lawyers very
+seldom allow them to die without a will.
+
+The law of entail is on its last legs, as well as the custom of
+primogeniture, and the Tories, by Lord Cairns' Settled Land Act, and a
+subsequent amending measure, have practically admitted that it is
+doomed. Entail affects the community by giving power to a man to fetter
+his land with a multitude of restrictions for an indefinite period; it
+makes the nominal owner only in reality a life tenant; and by cramping
+him upon the one side with conditions which may have become out of date,
+and tempting him on the other to limit his expenditure on that which is
+not wholly his own, the development of the land is impeded, and the
+progress of agriculture hampered by force of law. Entail, like
+primogeniture, has been defended on the ground that it tends to keep
+large estates intact; but it is now so generally believed that a more
+widespread diffusion of land is desirable, that it is only necessary
+here to state the argument.
+
+A more widespread diffusion of the land will not, however, be attained
+unless the process of transfer is at once cheapened and simplified. The
+lawyers reap too much advantage from the present system, and many a man
+refrains from buying a plot he would like because the cost of transfer
+unduly raises the price. If it were provided that all estates should be
+registered and their boundaries clearly defined, there would be no more
+difficulty and expense in transferring a piece of land than is now
+involved in selling a ship. In these days buyer and seller are parted by
+parchments; and many who would like a plot, but who do not see why they
+should pay, because of the lawyers, ten, or fifteen, or twenty per cent.
+more than its value, put their money into concerns in which
+meddlesomeness created by Act of Parliament does not mingle.
+
+Simpler and cheaper transfer would be a step towards the more general
+ownership of land by those who till it. Let all artificial aids to the
+holding together large estates by power of Parliament be abolished, let
+transfer be cheapened and simplified, and then let him who likes buy.
+Free trade in land is what we ask, and when it is attained land will be
+able to be dealt with the same as any other commodity, and those who
+want a piece can have it by paying for it.
+
+But although it may not be desirable for the State to interfere in
+England for the creation of a peasant proprietary, it is needful that
+Parliament should do something tangible in the direction of securing
+allotments for the labourers. Upon that point, as upon primogeniture and
+entail, the Tories profess to be converted; but as their Allotments Bill
+of 1887 appears in practice to be a sham, it is necessary that such
+amendments should be introduced as may render it a reality.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.--SHOULD WASTE LANDS BE TILLED AND THE GAME LAWS ABOLISHED?
+
+
+A dozen or fourteen years ago the questions attempted now to be answered
+were put much more frequently than at present. In the last days of the
+first Gladstone Administration and the earliest of the second Government
+of Mr. Disraeli, Liberals were looking for other worlds to conquer; and
+many of them, not venturing upon such bold courses on the land question
+as have since been adopted by even moderate politicians, fastened their
+attention upon the waste lands and the game laws. No great results came
+from the movement; other and more striking questions forced themselves
+to the front; and we are almost as far from a legislative settlement of
+the two just mentioned as in the days of a more restricted suffrage.
+
+This is the more surprising because the points named are of practical
+importance to the agricultural labourer, and the agricultural labourer
+now holds the balance of political power. But it is not likely that this
+state of quietude upon two such burning topics will long continue, for
+the country voter is certain soon to profit by the example of his
+brethren in the towns, and to demand that his representatives shall
+attend to those concerns immediately affecting his interests.
+
+And first as to the question of waste lands. Town-bred theorists who
+have never walked over a mile of moorland are apt sometimes to talk as
+if all the uncultivated land in the country was in that condition
+because of the wicked will of those who own it, and to argue that, if
+only an Act of Parliament could be secured, the waste lands would
+blossom like the rose. They have the same touching faith in the efficacy
+of legislation as had Lord Palmerston when he put aside some difficulty
+with the exclamation, "Give me an Act of Parliament, and the thing will
+be done." But facts are often too strong for legislation, however well
+intentioned and skilfully devised, and those about much of our waste
+land come within the list.
+
+A large portion of uncultivated land is mountain and moor, the greater
+part of which it would be impossible to make productive at any price,
+and the remainder could not be turned to account under a sum which would
+never make a profitable return. Those who think it an easy matter to
+cultivate waste land should visit that portion of Dartmoor which is
+dominated by the convict establishment. There they would see many an
+acre reclaimed, but, if they were told the cost in money and labour,
+they would be convinced that, were it not for penal purposes, both money
+and labour might be put to better use elsewhere. And if it be argued
+that the State should step in and advance all that is required to
+cultivate such waste as can by any possibility be brought under the
+plough, it must be asked why the taxpayer (for in this connection the
+State and the taxpayer are one and the same) should add to his burdens
+for so small a return.
+
+But there is, without doubt, a large amount of land in this country
+which now produces nothing, and which could be made to produce a deal.
+That which is absorbed by huge private parks, scattered up and down the
+kingdom, forms a great portion of this; and though, for reasons which
+are mainly sentimental, one would not wish to see all such private parks
+turned into sheep-walks or turnip-fields, there is the consideration
+that property--and peculiarly property in land--has its duties as well
+as its rights, and that those who wish to derive pleasure from the
+contemplation of large spaces of cultivable but not cultivated land, and
+in this way prevent such from being of any direct value to the
+community, ought to pay for the privilege. The rating of property of
+this kind at the present moment is ridiculously low; it should at least
+be made as high as if the land were devoted to some distinctly useful
+end.
+
+As with parks, so with sporting lands. The rating of the latter is
+utterly inadequate; and although it maybe true that much of the land,
+especially in England, devoted to sporting purposes, is of little value
+for anything else, it is equally true that a great deal of it,
+particularly in Scotland, is fit for cultivation, and that tenants have
+been cleared from it to make room for deer and grouse. In all cases
+where the land would have value if cultivated, the owner ought to be
+made pay as if that value were obtained, seeing that for his own
+pleasure he is depriving the community of the chance of obtaining
+increased food. It would be too drastic a measure to adopt the Chinese
+method of hanging proprietors who did not till cultivable land; but many
+a landowner, if made to feel his duty through his pocket, would do that
+duty rather than pay.
+
+From the question of sporting lands to that of the game laws is a very
+short step. It may be that we have heard less of the latter during the
+last few years, because the Hares and Rabbits Act, passed by the second
+Gladstone Government in the first flush of its power, has done much to
+reconcile the tenant-farmers to the present state of things, by removing
+the grievance they most keenly felt.
+
+The Act referred to provides (to quote Mr. Sydney Buxton's summary)
+"that every occupier of land shall have an inalienable right to kill the
+ground game (hares and rabbits) concurrently with any other person who
+may be entitled to kill it on the same land; that the ground game may
+only be killed by the occupier himself or by persons duly authorized by
+him in writing; that the use of firearms is confined to himself and one
+other, and they may only be used during the day; that those authorized
+to kill the game in other ways (poison and traps, except in
+rabbit-holes, are prohibited) must be resident members of his household,
+persons in his ordinary service, and any one other person whom he
+employs for reward to kill the game; that tenants on lease do not come
+under the provisions of the Act until the termination of their lease."
+
+This was such a concession to the tenant-farmers that it is little
+wonder that those of them who had groaned under the ground game should
+have felt generally satisfied with it; and although a wail has been
+going up from certain sportsmen that if the Act be not speedily amended
+the hare will become as extinct as the mastodon, it is not the least
+likely to be altered in the direction they wish. If amended at all, it
+will be so as to bring winged game within its provisions.
+
+No one acquainted with rural life can doubt that the game laws, as at
+present administered, are a fruitful source of demoralization and crime.
+They demoralize all round, for they pollute the seat of justice by
+allowing such game preservers as are county magistrates to wreak
+vengeance upon all who transgress upon their pleasures; they lower the
+moral standard of the gamekeepers, whose miserable employment turns them
+into spies of a peculiarly unpleasing description; they make the rural
+police a standing army for the preservation of game; and they consign to
+gaol many a man who, but for these laws, would be honest and free.
+
+Such as would see justice most openly travestied should sit in a country
+police court and hear game cases tried. Let them notice the ostentatious
+fashion in which some magistrate, while a summons in which his game is
+concerned is being heard, will (as is carefully noted in the local
+papers) "withdraw from the bench" by taking his chair a foot back from
+his fellows and friends. Let them hear evidence upon which no man
+charged with any other offence would ever be convicted. Let them see the
+vindictive sentences that are passed. And then let them go home and
+think over the fashion in which that which is nicknamed "justice" is
+administered to any man unlucky enough to have offended a gamekeeper or
+a policeman, and to be charged as a poacher.
+
+In the good old hanging days, a man was sentenced to death in a western
+county for sheep-stealing. The sentence was the usual one, but other
+sheep-stealers had been let off the capital penalty for so many years
+that it was greatly to the astonishment of the district that this one
+was hanged. Then people began to think, and, remembering that he had the
+reputation of being a clever poacher, they saw that he had been paid off
+for the new and the old. It is much the same in the rural districts
+to-day. In game cases the presumption of the English law courts that a
+man shall be held to be innocent until he is proved guilty is
+systematically reversed. The unsupported word of a gamekeeper is
+considered to be worth that of half-a-dozen ordinary men; and it is not
+uncommon for a defendant convicted of some offence, totally unconnected
+with the game laws, to have his penalty increased because the
+superintendent of police has whispered to the justices' clerk, and the
+clerk to the magistrates, the fatal word "poacher." Those who live in a
+town can scarcely conceive the open fashion in which justice is degraded
+by the county magistrates when the game is in question. But, if any
+would bring it home to themselves--and the strongest words are too faint
+to picture the reality--let them go to some rural court, where the
+justices do not imagine that the light of public opinion can be brought
+to bear upon them, and see how poachers are tried.
+
+If it were only because of the widespread demoralization they cause, the
+game laws ought to be repealed. They are avowedly kept up for the
+benefit of the class which does little or no work, and they fill the
+prisons at our expense to preserve a sport in which we have no share and
+no wish to share. And, if they are to be retained on the statute book at
+all, their administration should, at the very least, be taken from those
+who are practically prosecutor, jury, and judge in one, and placed in
+impartial hands.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.--OUGHT LEASEHOLDS TO BE ENFRANCHISED?
+
+
+The proposal to enfranchise leaseholds--that is, to enable a
+leaseholder, upon paying a fair price, to claim that his tenure be
+turned into freehold--is a comparatively new one in the field of
+practical politics; but it has come to the front so rapidly that it is
+already far nearer solution than others which have agitated the public
+mind for many years. The grievance had for a long time been felt, and in
+some parts of the kingdom sorely felt; but a ready remedy had not
+suggested itself, and the subject slept.
+
+The grievance is this--that the present system of leases for lives or
+for a term of years causes frequent loss to the leaseholder and much
+injury to the community, benefiting only the owner of the soil. The
+remedy would be to empower a leaseholder to demand from the ground
+landlord that the land shall be transferred to him upon payment of its
+fair value, as appraised by some public tribunal.
+
+And first as to the results which flow from the present state of things.
+These vary with the circumstances, and some of the circumstances demand
+study. Leases, broadly speaking, are of two kinds--those which are
+granted on lives and those which are for a specified term of years. Of
+the two, the former are the more objectionable, as they frequently work
+gross injustice. A lease is granted which shall expire at the death of
+the third of three persons named in the deed. Under that lease a man
+builds a house; the first life expires, and the leaseholder has to pay a
+fine--or, as it is called, a heriot--of a specified sum; the second
+dies, and another fine has to be paid; and when the third passes away,
+the property and all upon it revert to the landlord. Is it not easy to
+see that no particular chapter of accidents is required to terminate any
+three given lives within a comparatively short period, while, if an
+epidemic occurred, ground landlords everywhere would reap a rich harvest
+from the ready falling in of leases for lives?
+
+One instance out of thousands may be quoted of how the system works. "A
+piece of land which let for £2 an acre as an agricultural rent was let
+for building purposes at £9 an acre, and divided into eleven plots. On
+one of these a poor man built a cottage, at a cost of £60, on a ground
+rent of 16s. 6d. The term was for three lives and one in reversion. The
+charge for the lease was £5. On the expiration of each of the three
+lives £1 was payable as a fine or heriot, and £10 was to be paid on
+nominating the life in reversion. All the four lives expired in
+twenty-eight years. The landlord thereupon took possession of the house.
+He had thus received in twenty-eight years, besides the annual ground
+rent, the following sums:--£5 for the lease, £10 for nomination of life
+in reversion, £3 as heriot on the expiration of the three lives--in all
+£18; and, in addition, the house built at the expense of the victim,
+which he sold for £58."
+
+The reply may be made, "But, granting that leases for lives often have
+cruel results, is not the remedy in the hands of those who want leases?
+Why do they take those for lives?" For this reason--that in some parts
+of the country it is the only way by which a building plot can be
+obtained, and that, as long as the possibility of securing so good a
+bargain is legalized, so long will the more unscrupulous among the
+landlords force an intending tenant to accept that or nothing.
+
+Leases for long terms of years do not as readily lend themselves to the
+chance of legal robbery, but they have their own ill effects. Houses are
+built in flimsy fashion upon the express idea that they are intended to
+last only the specified term; and during the expiring years of the
+lease, repairs are grudged, and the dwellings rendered unhealthy to the
+occupier and unsafe to the passers-by. If a man has a house which is
+erected upon leasehold land, and therein builds up, by his own skill
+and industry, a good business, he is absolutely at the mercy of the
+ground landlord when the lease expires. The rent is raised because of
+the success his own faculties have secured, onerous conditions in the
+way of repairs are imposed, and what can he do? "If you don't like it,
+you can leave it," is the landlord's reply; but there is many a business
+which does not bear transplanting, and if the tenant be on a large
+estate it might happen that, if he did not accede to the owner's terms,
+he would have to move to a far-distant part of the town, or even--as at
+Devonport and Huddersfield among other places--out of the town
+altogether, and that would mean ruin. And thus he is practically
+compelled to struggle on in order to increase the wealth of the
+landlord, who has done nothing, at the expense of himself, who has done
+all.
+
+And this is not always the worst, for in many cases landlords for
+various reasons will not renew at any price, and the tenant has perforce
+to go the moment his lease expires. A certain Whig duke--and, of course,
+a zealous defender of "the rights of property"--conceived the idea, upon
+coming into his estates some years ago, that a village stood too near
+his park gates. Not brooking that herdsmen and traders should stand
+between the wind and his nobility, he directed that, as leases fell in,
+the tenants should be cleared out, graciously, however, offering them
+other plots some three miles away. And the tenants had to leave the
+homes in which they had been born and where their parents had lived
+before them, and to see them tumble down in utter ruin, in order that so
+mighty a person as a duke should not be shocked by the sight of the
+common herd. It was one of the thousand cases in life where a man had a
+right to do that which it was not right for him to perform.
+
+Another fashion in which grievous injustice to the leaseholder can be
+done is frequently illustrated. It has happened, and happened very
+recently, that a ground landlord has granted leases for a term of years;
+that, upon the strength of these agreements, houses have been built; and
+that upon the landlord's decease it has been discovered by some skilful
+lawyer that the dead man had had no power, under an entail or
+settlement, to grant such leases; whereupon the heir has invoked the law
+to cancel the whole, and has seized everything upon the land. This is
+legal, but is it commonly honest?
+
+In other ways the leasehold system is an injury not only to individuals
+but to the community. A west country town, where all the land is held by
+one man, has been crippled in every attempt to expand and improve by the
+impossibility of obtaining a freehold plot. What person in his senses
+would erect a substantial factory or a large concern of any kind upon a
+comparatively short lease? Men embark upon such enterprises in order
+that, as year follows year, their property may become more valuable, not
+that year by year it may become less so by the growing nearness of the
+time when it will pass to the landlord, who has never contributed a
+penny or a thought to the success of the concern, the building
+containing which, at the expiration of the lease, he can call his own.
+
+For all these unfairnesses to individuals, hindrances to trade, and
+injuries to the community, is proposed the remedy stated--that a
+leaseholder who has twenty (or, as some suggest, ten or fifteen) years
+to run, shall be empowered to demand that his land be made freehold upon
+the payment of its value, as assessed by some specified tribunal.
+
+The first objection is that this would be an undue interference with
+"the rights of property." But it has already been laid down by
+Parliament that such "rights" can be set aside in the public interest
+upon the payment of fair compensation; and what has been done in regard
+to the making of railways can be done respecting the building or the
+preserving of houses. The existing system is an injury to the community;
+and as the price to be paid for its abolition, whether wholly or in
+part, would be assessed by a tribunal constituted by Parliament, the
+landlords would have no more reason to complain than they now have when
+compelled to sell a portion of their property to a railway company.
+
+The next plea is that it would interfere with "freedom of contract."
+Upon the general question of what that freedom is, how far it now
+exists, and in how large a degree the State has a right to interfere
+with it, one need not speak, for in this matter of leases Parliament
+has already stepped in to "interfere with freedom of contract." It
+having been found that some landlords were accustomed to insert in
+leases oppressive provisions for forfeiture in certain conditions, the
+Legislature empowered the courts to lift from the leaseholders covenants
+which unduly burdened them. And if a precedent is asked for the
+particular remedy proposed, the Acts enabling any copyholder to
+enfranchise his holding should be consulted.
+
+If it be said that, should such a power be granted by law, no one
+possessing land would let on a long lease, it may be answered that this
+would be no great evil, seeing how the leasehold system has worked. But
+as landowners will want in the future as in the past to let or to sell,
+and as it is not to be supposed that any man will take a lease of less
+than twenty years and build upon the land, the owners will accommodate
+themselves to circumstances, and dispose of their property as best they
+can.
+
+Owners in other countries do so, and why not here? Such a leasehold
+system as that of England is practically unknown elsewhere. In France,
+it is true, something of the kind exists, but we seek for it in vain in
+Germany and Austria, in Russia and Switzerland, or in Spain and
+Portugal; while in Italy, where no leases for over thirty years are
+permitted, a tenant can convert his property into freehold by redeeming
+the rent.
+
+The supporters of leasehold enfranchisement, therefore, have on their
+side not only the practical evils of the present system, but
+parliamentary precedent and continental custom. These should suffice to
+persuade all who study the matter that the time for a change has come,
+and that the way in which that change is proposed to be effected is just
+and equitable.
+
+
+
+
+XX.--WHOSE SHOULD BE THE UNEARNED INCREMENT?
+
+
+There is a school of politicians which reply to all such proposals as
+have been sketched for practical land reform: "They do not go far
+enough, for they would merely transfer the unearned increment from the
+present freeholders to the present leaseholders, and we want it
+transferred to the community." This "unearned increment" is a matter of
+which we are likely to hear a deal in the immediate future, for since
+John Mill stated the theory it has been much talked of, and to-day more
+than ever. It is sometimes contended, in fact, that, supposing all the
+projected reforms carried and in full and untrammeled action, "the
+absorption of the unearned increment by private individuals would
+perpetuate an evil which would swallow up whatever good those reforms
+might have a tendency to bring about."
+
+What then is the theory upon which so much may depend? It cannot be
+better stated than in the words of Mill:--"Suppose that there is a kind
+of income which constantly tends to increase, without any exertion or
+sacrifice on the part of the owners: those owners constituting a class
+in the community, whom the natural course of things progressively
+enriches, consistently with complete passiveness on their own part. In
+such a case it would be no violation of the principles on which private
+property is grounded, if the State should appropriate this increase of
+wealth, or part of it, as it arises. This would not properly be taking
+anything from anybody; it would merely be applying an accession of
+wealth, created by circumstances, to the benefit of society, instead of
+allowing it to become an unearned appendage to the riches of a
+particular class. Now this is actually the case with rent."
+
+When Mill's "Principles of Political Economy" was published, this theory
+of the State absorbing, in whole or in part, the "unearned increment" of
+the land, was regarded by many as so utopian that it was put aside with
+a scoff, and was thought to have been settled with a sneer. But it has
+struck deep root into many a Radical mind, and those who believe in it
+ask it to be shown how it is either dishonest as a theory or would be
+impossible in practice.
+
+There need be no attempt to do either, for Mill himself made an
+important restriction in his definition of what should be done which
+relieves it from the stigma of dishonesty or impracticability. He
+believed that "it would be no violation of the principles on which
+private property is grounded, if the State should appropriate this
+increase of wealth, _or part of it_, as it arises." It may be agreed
+that the State could fairly appropriate a part of this increment, and
+this might be done by means of taxation. But that is a very different
+matter from taking the whole.
+
+One who argues in favour of the latter plan, submits this
+contention:--"The area of a county, for purposes of illustration, may be
+taken as a fixed quantity. Now, the demand for land will increase, and
+as a corollary the price of land will rise, exactly in proportion to the
+increase of population. This additional value is not brought about by
+either independent industry, ingenuity, or the outlay of capital on the
+part of any private individual: it is a growth entirely due to the
+increase of the community: it is of enormous value, is extracted from
+the dire necessities of the whole population, and goes into the pockets
+of private individuals who have never done anything to create it."
+
+But does the illustration hold good whether applied to such a limited
+area as a county or to the country at large? It is not the case that the
+demand for land increases and its price rises exactly in proportion to
+population; and it is as little the case that its increased value, if
+any, is "extracted from the dire necessities of the whole population."
+For while the number of our inhabitants is increasing, the value of such
+land as ministers directly to their wants in the provision of food and
+clothing is decreasing. If all the bread that is eaten, beef that is
+killed, and wool that is worn, were raised within these shores, there
+would be a semblance of truth in the illustration; but we have left the
+days when we lived on our own produce far behind, and the British farmer
+would only be too happy if the picture thus presented were even
+approximately like reality.
+
+It may be replied that bread and beef and wool do not exhaust the
+catalogue of men's requirements from the land; and they do not, for we
+require plots upon which to build, and good houses are just as necessary
+as cheap food. But even where land is made more valuable by its becoming
+used for building purposes, is there any justice in either the State or
+a municipality taking the whole increased value? Let the case be that of
+a man who thinks that he sees a chance of a town expanding, and who
+purchases a piece of land which will be of little use to anybody unless
+his idea proves correct, but which will bring him a good profit if he
+has skilfully foreseen. Why should he not be as fairly paid for his
+skill and foresight as if he had bought a house on a similar belief? The
+reply is, "The quantity of land is limited; that of houses is not;" but
+that is only true up to a certain and very definite point; and with the
+reforms which have already been suggested, and with a fairer system of
+taxing the land, the community would gain all it could fairly ask.
+
+My contention, shortly put, is this--That the State has a right to share
+in the increased value of all property, landed or otherwise; and that,
+in the case of land, it has an additional, though limited, claim,
+because of the conditions upon which that commodity passed into private
+ownership. Those who work for wages have to pay income tax immediately
+those wages touch a certain point; as they rise, so does the payment
+increase; and, after a given amount, the tax is proportionately much
+heavier. Why should not the same principle be applied to income of every
+sort from land as to income of every sort from wages, profits, or
+invested capital?
+
+It is not so at present, as a study of the land tax will show.
+Nominally that tax is four shillings in the pound on the full annual
+value, but actually what does it stand at? It was fixed by Parliament in
+the seventeenth century, the semi-owners of the land, who had held their
+property under certain weighty conditions of contributing military
+strength to the King, and who had managed by degrees to slip through
+their obligations, agreeing thus to tax themselves as a compensation for
+the burden that had been lifted from them. But in 1798 it was
+enacted--by a Parliament in which practically only landowners were
+represented--that the valuation upon which the tax was to be paid should
+be that of 1692, when on its then conditions it was first levied. And
+the consequence is that, although this later Act directed that it should
+be assessed and collected with impartiality, in parts of the country
+which have stood still the tax now is not far from the original sum,
+while it amounts in the immediate neighbourhood of such a city as
+Liverpool to about a fifth of a farthing in the pound. It may not be
+feasible, because of the manner in which much of the impost has been
+"redeemed," and it might in some cases be unjust, to raise the land tax
+at once to four shillings in the pound on the valuation of 1888 instead
+of 1692; but the same Parliament which put the clock back has the power
+to bring it up to the proper time; and, at least, something could be
+done to lessen the loss the State is now made to suffer.
+
+There is another way in which landowners could justly be called upon to
+pay a portion of the unearned increment to the State, and that is
+through the taxation of ground-rents. This is a point which keenly
+touches the towns, and deserves the early attention of Parliament. At
+present the great ground landlords escape their fair share of the
+burdens which fall heavily upon those who take their leases. And, so
+certain are some of them that the taxing time will soon come, that they
+are already selling a portion of their town estates, so as to "get out
+from under" before that period arrives.
+
+It may therefore be submitted that, with a fairer land tax and the
+taxation of ground rents, we should secure to the State the proportion
+of the "unearned increment" to which she is justly entitled. Those who
+would go further must be prepared to prove that property in land is so
+different in every essential from all other kinds that it would be
+honest for the State to absorb the whole unearned increment of the one,
+and to levy only an income and property tax on the other.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.--HOW SHOULD LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT BE EXTENDED?
+
+
+It is always consolatory to find amid the welter of party politics some
+topic upon which all say they agree, and such a topic certainly is that
+of the reform of local government. Politicians of every shade have long
+professed their desire for such a reform, and it ought now to be within
+measurable distance of accomplishment.
+
+Upon the great question of the extension of self-government to Ireland I
+have already spoken; and in regard to the purely domestic affairs of all
+the four divisions of the kingdom--England, Scotland, and Wales, as well
+as Ireland--it need only here be added that the solution of much of the
+difficulty which springs from an overburdened Parliament will be found
+in devolving upon a special authority for each the right of dealing with
+its own local concerns. But, as to three of the four divisions, it is
+not so pressing a question as that which is commonly known as the reform
+of local government, and the main proposition touching which is summed
+up in the demand for county councils.
+
+This is a matter which more intimately touches the country districts
+than the towns, for in all the latter of any size there are popularly
+elected municipal councils, which exercise much power over local
+affairs. The only exception is the greatest town of all, for London was
+specifically exempted (by the action of the House of Lords) from the
+reform effected in all other cities and boroughs by the Municipal
+Corporations Act of 1835. There is a Corporation of the City of London;
+but this body, against which a very great deal can be said, has
+authority only over one square mile of ground, the remaining 119 square
+miles upon which the metropolis stands being governed by vestries,
+trustee boards, and district boards of works, all connected with and
+subject to the Metropolitan Board of Works--or Board of Words, as it was
+once irreverently but truly called--which is not chosen directly by the
+ratepayers, but is selected by the vestries, who themselves are elected
+by handfuls of people, the general public paying them no heed. And thus
+it comes to pass that the greatest and wealthiest city in the world is
+worse governed than the smallest of our municipal boroughs, for nine out
+of ten ratepayers take not the least interest in electing the vestries,
+and not one ratepayer in a hundred could tell the name of his district
+representative on the Metropolitan Board of Works, now proposed, by even
+a Conservative Administration, to be abolished.
+
+It is not a small concern, this of reforming the government of London,
+for it affects four millions of people--a number not far short of the
+population of Ireland; but politicians in the mass, as even the keenest
+metropolitan municipal reformer will admit, are more interested in the
+general question of local government.
+
+Speaking broadly, the defects of the system proposed to be reformed are
+that of the popularly elected bodies there are too many, and that the
+great governing body is not elected at all. In a certain town of 3000
+inhabitants, there are at this moment a Town Council, a School Board, a
+Burial Board, and (because under the Public Health Act an adjoining
+parish was tacked on) a Local Board of Health; while, notwithstanding
+that it sends representatives to a Board of Guardians for the whole
+Union, it had until recently, and in addition to the other bodies, a
+Local Board of Guardians, chosen under a special Act. And, beyond all
+these, a Highway Board meets within its borders, which has to be
+consulted and negotiated with whenever a road leading into the town
+needs to be re-metalled or an additional brick is required for a
+neighbouring bridge.
+
+As if all these boards were not sufficient to keep the district in good
+order, there is the Court of Quarter Sessions, which has jurisdiction
+in various details that the multitude of small bodies cannot touch.
+These latter have one justification, however, that the former cannot
+claim, and that is that, despite there being magistrates who are members
+of the boards of guardians by virtue of their office, and although the
+more property one possesses the more votes one can give for certain of
+the local bodies, these in the main are popularly elected, and are,
+therefore, directly responsible to the ratepayers for the manner in
+which their trust is used.
+
+It is quite otherwise with the Court of Quarter Sessions. This consists
+only of magistrates, such magistrates being appointed by the
+Lords-Lieutenant of counties, and the appointments being made mainly on
+political grounds. As a rule, the holders of that distinguished position
+are Tories, and they take good care that the magistrates shall be Tories
+also. It is not long since it would have been impossible to find a
+single Liberal on the commission of the peace for Huntingdonshire; and
+when comparatively recently it was pointed out to the Lord-Lieutenant of
+Essex that an almost exactly similar state of things prevailed in that
+shire, he replied he did not consider there was a Liberal in the whole
+county who was socially qualified for the magisterial bench. The idea of
+making a banker or a merchant a justice of the peace was too shocking;
+and thus the commercial classes and a good half of the population
+(giving the other half to the Tories) were completely unrepresented, not
+merely on the bench, but in the Court of Quarter Sessions, which
+governed the affairs and spent the money of the county.
+
+There is no necessity to prove that these courts have spent the county
+monies wantonly or with conscious impropriety in order to show this
+condition of things to be wrong. In imperial affairs, the doctrine that
+taxation without representation is tyranny has been asserted to the
+full; in municipal matters, since the Act of 1835, the same has
+prevailed; but in county concerns it has been non-existent. The
+magistrates represent no one but themselves, their party, and their own
+class; they are necessarily swayed by the passions and prejudices that
+party and class possess; and, seeing that the English people long ago
+refused power over the national purse to an unrepresentative body like
+the House of Lords, it is surprising they have until now allowed power
+over the local purse to be in the hands of such equally unrepresentative
+bodies as the courts of quarter sessions.
+
+The line which the immediate reform of local government must take is,
+therefore, the creation of a directly-elected body to deal with county
+affairs, and the federation of such of the smaller boards as have to do
+with the more purely district concerns, both of which points the Cabinet
+of Lord Salisbury appear disposed to concede. But upon the former point
+Liberals will claim that the whole--and not merely three-fourths--of the
+County Councils shall be directly elected, for the system of aldermen,
+included in the Municipal Reform Act by the House of Lords, has been
+used for partisan purposes, as it was intended to be, and the same
+effect will follow in the case of the counties if the same cause is
+provided.
+
+Any system, in fact, which involves "double election" tends to make the
+body concerned hidebound and cliquish. A county alderman once chosen,
+especially if he were a squire, as he most likely would be, would have
+to behave himself in most outrageous fashion ever to lose his post. The
+ratepayers might grumble, but it would be difficult in the extreme to
+dislodge him, for he would be removed from their direct control, and the
+Council would consider it ungracious to get rid of an "old servant." If
+one wants to know how this double election operates, let him ask some
+clear-sighted Londoner who is acquainted with the manner in which his
+own city is ruled. He will be answered that for scandalous and wanton
+expenditure not many bodies can equal the Metropolitan Asylums Board,
+the members of which are mainly chosen by the various boards of
+guardians; while for jobbery and general mismanagement it is even beaten
+by the Metropolitan Board of Works, which is elected by the several
+vestries. And he will add that this chiefly arises from the fact that
+the ratepayers have no direct control over either of these bodies, and
+that the good result of such direct control was shown by this fact--that
+when the metropolitan ratepayers considered that the School Board, which
+is directly elected, was practising extravagance, they placed at the
+bottom of the poll those responsible for the policy, with the effect
+that considerable savings were speedily effected.
+
+And therefore now, when County Councils are being established, all
+Liberals will have very carefully to watch the points upon which the
+Tories and Whigs may combine in an attempt to give the country a
+semblance without the reality of representative local self-government.
+What must be insisted upon is--(1) That the Councils shall be entirely
+elective; (2) that the ratepayers shall directly elect; (3) that there
+shall be no property qualification for membership; (4) that the voting
+shall be by household suffrage--one householder one vote; and (5) that
+women ratepayers shall have the same right of voting for county as for
+town councils.
+
+With such a Council in each county, or, in the case of Lancashire and
+Yorkshire, in each great division of a county, we should have a central
+local organization, to which highway boards, local boards of health,
+village school boards, and other small bodies could be affiliated; and
+it is not impossible that, as a development of the system, the various
+bodies controlling the destinies of our lesser towns could be federated
+to save friction, trouble, and expense; while, above all, it must be
+insisted that the representatives of the ratepayers shall have full
+control over the police.
+
+It is a truism that without good citizens the best of governments must
+fail; but our experience of the House of Commons and of the many town
+councils has shown that the improvement of the machinery and the handing
+over of control to the great body of the people have brought
+public-spirited men to the front to do the duties required. As it has
+been at Westminster and in the towns, so will it be in the counties.
+England has become greater and freer, our towns have expanded and
+benefited, owing to the whole of the inhabitants having a direct voice
+in the rule; and the counties will correspondingly improve when the same
+is applied.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.--HOW IS LOCAL OPTION TO BE EFFECTED?
+
+
+Intimately connected with the question of county government is that of
+local option; and the problem of transferring the licensing power from
+an irresponsible bench of magistrates to a specially elected body, or to
+a direct vote of the ratepayers, has ripened towards settlement in a
+remarkable degree since the day--just twenty years since--when Mr.
+Gladstone wrote to the United Kingdom Alliance that his disposition was
+"to let in the principle of local option wherever it is likely to be
+found satisfactory," and thus used in relation to this question for the
+first time, as far as is known, a phrase which has become famous.
+
+No leading politician to-day disputes that some form of local option
+must speedily be provided; but, as a body, they have been shy of
+touching a problem that presents a host of difficulties, and the attempt
+to settle which could not fail to arouse a number of enemies. What
+those, therefore, who wished for local option have had to do was to show
+the body of electors that it was reasonable and just, and to trust that
+their appreciation of these two qualities would lead them to its
+support.
+
+As to its being reasonable, the very fact that the granting of licences
+even now is in the hands of the magistrates, and not in those of a
+Government department, indicates that it is intended that local feeling
+shall be consulted. This, in fact, was specifically stated in an Act of
+1729, which, after reciting that "inconveniences have arisen in
+consequence of licences being granted to alehouse-keepers by justices
+living at a distance, and, therefore, not truly informed of the occasion
+or want of ale-houses in the neighbourhood, or the character of those
+who apply for licences," enacted that "no licences shall in future be
+granted but at a general meeting of the magistrates acting in the
+division in which the applicant dwells."
+
+Just a hundred years later, Parliament thought fit to withdraw from the
+magistrates--who, at the least, knew something of "the occasion or want
+of alehouses in the neighbourhood, or the characters of those who apply
+for licences"--the power over applications for beerhouse licences; and
+the result showed that even the most modified form of local option was
+better than none. The Act of 1830, "to permit the general sale of beer
+and cider by retail in England," provided that "any householder desirous
+of selling malt liquor by retail in any house" might obtain a licence
+from the Excise without leave from the magistrates. Within five years
+another Act had to be passed demanding better guarantees for the
+character of those applying for such licences, the preamble declaring
+this to be necessary because "much evil had arisen from the management
+of houses" created by the previous statute. Other amending Acts
+followed, and in 1882 the magistrates were once more given complete
+jurisdiction over beer off-licences, with the result that in the borough
+of Over Darwen alone the renewal was at once refused of 34 out of 72
+licences of the kind, a decision which, it is important to note as
+bearing upon a point yet to be raised, was upheld by the Queen's Bench
+on appeal.
+
+It is not merely a matter of historical interest, but it has very
+distinctly to do with the argument in favour of local option, to show
+that the magistrates for four centuries have had committed to them the
+duty of seeing that the needs of the district were no more than
+satisfied. In 1496, a statute directed "against vacabounds and beggers"
+empowered two justices of the peace "to rejecte and put awey comen
+ale-selling in tounes and places where they shall think convenyent;" and
+in 1552 another Act confirmed this exercise of authority. In 1622, the
+Privy Council peremptorily directed the local justices to suppress
+"unnecessary alehouses;" and in 1635 the Lord Keeper, in his charge to
+the judges in the Star Chamber previous to their going circuit,
+denounced alehouses as "the greatest pests in the kingdom," and added
+this significant hint: "In many places they swarm by default of the
+justices of the peace, that set up too many; but if the justices will
+not obey your charge therein, certify their default and names, and I
+assure you they shall be discharged. I once did discharge two justices
+for setting up one alehouse, and shall be glad to do the like again upon
+the same occasion."
+
+These facts show that the theory upon which our licensing system has
+grown up is that the wants of a locality shall be strictly borne in
+mind, and of late years the wishes of a locality have more and more been
+considered. No one would deny that magistrates as a whole pay greater
+attention to those wishes to-day than they were accustomed to do even as
+recently as fifteen years ago; and when new licences are applied for
+memorials against their grant, signed by the inhabitants, are allowed to
+have considerable weight with the bench. But that, after all, is only
+the result of indirect and irregular pressure. What Local Optionists
+desire is that the pressure shall be made direct and customary.
+
+The reasonableness of demanding that local wishes shall control the
+issue of licences is proved by the facts adduced, and the justice is
+equally capable of being shown. If a locality determines that no fresh
+licences shall be granted, or that certain old ones shall be taken away,
+no more injustice will be done than if the magistrates under the present
+system did the like. No compensation has ever been granted to the holder
+of a licence the renewal of which a bench has refused; and although the
+majority of such refusals has been because of ill-conduct, there have
+been many cases (and those at Over Darwen were among them) where the
+magistrates have not renewed because they did not think the house was
+required. The fact stands that a publican's tenure is in its nature
+precarious; he holds his licence from year to year at the pleasure of
+the magistrates; he would hold it in the same fashion were Local Option
+secured. And the fact that the power of refusal to renew a licence would
+pass from an irresponsible bench to either the whole of the ratepayers
+or a body specially elected by them for the duty, would not entitle him
+to demand a compensation then that does not exist for him now.
+
+A great difficulty of the problem lies in consideration of the manner
+in which the popular power shall be exercised. "Local Option" is a
+somewhat elastic phrase, adopted by many who have never troubled to
+think what it may involve. Broadly speaking, there are three methods by
+which it might be carried into effect: (1) By placing the power of
+licensing in the hands of the Town Councils or the proposed County
+Councils; (2) in those of specially-elected licensing boards; or (3) in
+those of the ratepayers, who would exercise by ballot a "direct veto."
+
+It is the first plan that finds favour with most of our statesmen. It
+was prepared to be adopted by the last Liberal Ministry, and is by no
+means so novel as many suppose. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835,
+as originally drawn, contained a clause giving the Town Councils the
+power of granting alehouse licences, but the proposition was abandoned.
+The Local Government Bill of Lord Salisbury's Administration has a
+similar provision, giving the licensing to the County Councils; but to
+this has been urged the objection that these bodies will have sufficient
+business to attend to without having the public-houses placed on their
+shoulders. When our system of popular education was fixed upon its
+present basis, it was resolved that the work should be done by specially
+chosen school boards. Mr. Forster at first proposed that these boards
+should in the towns be selected by the Municipal Councils; but it was
+felt by the House of Commons that so special a function demanded direct
+election, and direct election was provided, with the best results. And
+if the licensing power is to be vested in a representative assembly and
+local option is to be anything but a sham, it must be placed in the
+hands of those elected by the ratepayers for that special purpose, so
+that no bye-issues of waterworks, or paving, or the increase of rates
+shall affect the one distinct question of the public-house.
+
+The extreme temperance section argue that even such Licensing
+Boards--directly elected by the ratepayers for the specific
+purpose--would not meet the requirements of the case, and that nothing
+short of a popular vote can be accepted. But why should the
+representative system be abolished and a direct vote established in this
+case, any more than in the equally burning questions settled every day
+by Parliament, and the lesser but still important matters decided by
+town councils and school boards? We in England long ago made up our
+minds that the most excellent way to get public work done is to choose
+the best men, give them the requisite authority, and then allow them to
+do the duty to which they are called. And if we can disestablish a
+church, revolutionize the land system, or reform our institutions from
+top to bottom through our representatives, without a direct vote of the
+people, the question of renewing public-house licences can scarcely
+demand so exceptional a process as is by some suggested.
+
+My answer, therefore, to the question, "How is Local Option to be
+worked?" as well as to the kindred temperance question, "How is Sunday
+closing to be settled?" is, "By means of licensing boards, directly
+elected by the ratepayers." And if this solution be adopted, our
+licensing system will be placed upon a basis at once more safe and more
+free from friction or the likelihood of injustice than any other that
+has been proposed.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.--WHY AND HOW ARE WE TAXED?
+
+
+Taxes are the price we pay for being governed: they defray interest upon
+money borrowed and wages for protection and service. The fact that they
+are called by a name which is to many obnoxious, or that they are handed
+to the State instead of to an individual, ought not to blind us to their
+real nature--that they are the price of services rendered. The name is
+nothing. In churches the money we pay is called a pew-rent or an
+offertory; in clubs it is a subscription; to doctors or lawyers a fee;
+to tradesmen a price; to railway companies a fare; for personal services
+wages; for the loan of a house rent; for life or fire insurance a
+premium; and for water a rate. All are in a measure taxes; and if it be
+answered that the difference is that these payments are voluntary, may
+not the same be said of much that is called "indirect taxation"?
+
+When the subject is considered, there are three questions which
+naturally demand reply.
+
+
+     1. Why are we taxed?
+     2. How are we taxed? and
+     3. How ought we to be taxed?
+
+
+To the first question some answer has already been given. Put in the
+simplest fashion, the reply would be that it is cheaper to pay taxes and
+be taken care of than not to pay them and have to take care of
+ourselves. As members of an organized society, we have to provide for
+external protection and internal service--for the army and navy as a
+safeguard against enemies from without, for the officers of the law as a
+safeguard against depredators within, for the means of government, for
+education, and for a large number of other matters designed for the
+security of our persons and property and for the welfare and advancement
+of the community. We have further to pay the interest upon the National
+Debt--money borrowed by the State at times of emergency to prosecute
+such wars as Parliament had sanctioned.
+
+In point of fact, taxes are a substitution for personal service. The
+State in England once compelled this as a means of raising an army; and,
+though this form of personal service was long ago commuted by the
+payment of a sufficient sum through taxation for the maintenance of a
+standing force, the State has only waived, not abrogated, the right.
+Even as lately as the last century people in our country districts had
+to give six days in the year to the repair of such highways as were
+under the management of the justices of the peace. In the one case the
+personal service has been commuted into a tax, in the other into a
+rate--the difference being that a tax is imperially and a rate locally
+levied--it being found that forced labour of the kind indicated is more
+wasteful and less efficacious than hired labour; and, if any want to
+know how wasteful and how inefficient, they can find abundant
+illustrations in the history of the old _régime_ in France, or that of
+the Egyptian fellaheen.
+
+There has been indicated the difference between imperial and local
+taxation--the one being a tax imposed by the State and the other a rate
+levied by a local authority. The object in each case is similar; but,
+while the cost of the central administration, the army and navy, and the
+superior courts of justice, with the interest on the National Debt, is
+paid by taxes, that of lighting, draining, and other purely local
+matters is defrayed by rates, and that of the police, the poor, the
+highways, and education comes out of taxes and rates combined.
+
+So much for the _why_ of being taxed; let us now consider the _how_. At
+present the receipts of the State are derived from direct and indirect
+taxation, together with a form which may be said to come under both
+these heads. The most familiar mode of direct taxation is the Income
+Tax; of indirect, the Customs and Excise; and of that which savours of
+both, the stamp duties and the profits from the Post Office.
+
+These methods of taxation are, as far as England is concerned,
+comparatively modern. In the earlier days of settled government in this
+country, the mode of taxing was different and somewhat fitful, causing
+much trouble in the collection, and sometimes forming the pretext for
+revolt. "Aids" to the King were a frequent means of oppression long ago;
+and as far back as the time of John they were felt as a grievance, Magna
+Charta providing that the King should take no aids without the consent
+of Parliament, except those for knighting the lord's eldest son, for
+marrying his eldest daughter, and for ransoming the lord from captivity
+(the lord, it being remembered, holding at that time his land direct
+from the sovereign). "Benevolences"--a charming name for an unpleasing
+idea--were also in vogue in the Middle Ages, and, although specifically
+declared by an Act of Richard III. to be illegal, were levied in a
+fashion which caused much discontent. "Loans" were another form of
+raising money which the nation resented, as Charles I. found to his
+cost; while a "Poll Tax," as all men know, drove Wat Tyler into
+rebellion. "Subsidies" and "Tenths" and other taxing devices equally
+failed in the long run to answer the desired purpose of filling the
+National Exchequer; and after the Restoration all such gave place to a
+system by which the Customs, the Excise, and the Land Tax provided most
+of the money required.
+
+Gradually the proceeds of the Land Tax dwindled, and direct taxation was
+almost extinct when, in the throes of the great war with France, which
+lasted, with slight intervals, for twenty-two years, the younger Pitt
+revived it in an Income Tax, the form in which it is now mainly known.
+With the end of the war this ceased, and the proceeds of indirect
+taxation were again chiefly those upon which the State relied. What the
+result was, how in every direction trade was hampered and public comfort
+destroyed, has been summed up for all time in one of Sydney Smith's
+essays; and the quotation is worth re-perusal by everybody interested in
+the subject, and especially by those who to-day are wishing to get rid
+of the main form of direct taxation we possess--the Income Tax, as
+revived by Sir Robert Peel.
+
+Uttering, in 1820, a warning to the United States to avoid that spirit
+which we now call "Jingoism," Sydney Smith wrote--"We can inform
+Jonathan what are the inevitable consequences of being too fond of
+glory--TAXES upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers
+the back, or is placed under the foot; taxes upon everything which it is
+pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; taxes upon warmth, light,
+and locomotion; taxes on everything on earth and the waters under the
+earth--on everything that comes from abroad or is grown at home; taxes
+on the raw material; taxes on every fresh value that is added to it by
+the industry of man; taxes on the sauce which pampers man's appetite,
+and the drug that restores him to health; on the ermine which decorates
+the judge, and the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man's
+salt, and the rich man's spice; on the brass nails of the coffin, and
+the ribands of the bride--at bed or board, couchant or levant, we must
+pay. The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his
+taxed horse, with a taxed bridle, on a taxed road; and the dying
+Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid 7 per cent., into a
+spoon that has paid 15 per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz
+bed, which has paid 22 per cent., and expires in the arms of an
+apothecary who has paid a licence of a hundred pounds for the privilege
+of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed
+from 2 to 10 per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for
+burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on
+taxed marble; and he is then gathered to his fathers--to be taxed no
+more."
+
+Ludicrous as the picture seems, it was correctly painted for the time it
+depicted; and it is first to Sir Robert Peel and next to his greatest
+pupil, Mr. Gladstone, that we owe the change from the harassing indirect
+taxation of the past to the comparatively innocuous forms of it we have
+to-day. But it is still from indirect taxation that most of our revenue
+is derived. The heads of that revenue, as given officially, are--(1)
+Customs, (2) Excise, (3) Stamps, (4) Land Tax, (5) House Duty, (6)
+Income Tax, (7) Post Office, (8) Telegraph Service, (9) Crown Lands,
+(10) Interest on Advances for Local Works and Purchase Money of Suez
+Canal shares, and (11) Miscellaneous. Of all these, Excise stands first
+by several millions, while Customs are far ahead of any of the rest,
+Stamps and Income Tax being the next best paying sources of revenue.
+And, in some form or other, every one among us--the peer who smokes a
+cigarette, the peasant who drinks a pint of beer, and the very pauper
+who sends a letter to a friend--has indirectly to contribute his quota
+to the Exchequer, while all who earn more than £150 a year have to pay
+Income Tax; and those who inherit property, probate, legacy, or
+succession duty.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.--HOW OUGHT WE TO BE TAXED?
+
+
+It being certain that, as long as we are citizens of any sort of State,
+we shall be called upon to pay for its maintenance, the question "How
+ought we to be taxed?" is one of considerable moment to all. Grumble we
+may, but pay we must.
+
+Some think they would solve the problem at a stroke by substituting
+direct for indirect taxation. They argue that people should know exactly
+what they are paying for the service of the State; and that direct
+taxation is not only a more logical but a more economic method of
+raising the revenue. They show that the consumer of duty-bearing
+articles pays not only the duty but a percentage upon it as interest to
+the middleman; and a striking instance of this was afforded in the fact
+that when, in 1865, Mr. Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, took
+sixpence a pound off the tax on tea, the retail price of that article
+immediately fell eightpence.
+
+But it may be feared that those who argue in favour of entirely direct
+taxation make small allowance for the weaknesses of human nature. I may
+prove to demonstration to the first person I meet that he is paying more
+than he ought to do because of the working of the indirect system, and
+that to this wastefulness is added the sin of ignorance as to what he
+actually does pay; but the chances are ten to one that he will reply
+that, hating all taxation as the natural man does, he would rather not
+know to what extent he was being mulcted, and that, if the whole amount
+were annually and in a lump sum presented to his view, he would never
+find it in his heart or his pocket to pay it.
+
+To the sternly logical this attitude will appear sad, if not absolutely
+sinful; but we have to take man as we find him, and it is of little use
+attempting to run straight athwart his deepest prepossessions for so
+small a result as even the substitution of direct for indirect taxation
+would attain. But there is a further point, which even the political
+logician must bear in mind, and that is what the practical effect would
+be of sweeping away all duties of Customs and Excise.
+
+If we could secure a "free breakfast table" by liberating from toll tea,
+coffee, cocoa, currants, raisins, and other articles of domestic
+consumption, all would rejoice--though, in the present state of our
+finances, no Chancellor of the Exchequer is likely to sacrifice the five
+millions of revenue now raised from those commodities. But the English
+people will think a good many times before striking tobacco, spirits,
+and wine off the Customs list, with the more than 13 millions they
+produce, or spirits and beer off the list of the Excise, with the 13
+millions in the one case and the 8½ millions in the other that we now
+receive from them. Even if any one can imagine for a moment that the 27
+millions here involved could be made up by some new direct tax, it does
+not need an extensive acquaintance with our social history to be aware
+that the result of removing the duties from the various intoxicants
+would be widespread national demoralization.
+
+The taxation of the future, therefore, as of the past, will certainly
+include Customs and Excise. Some items may be struck off both; that a
+free breakfast table can be secured should be no dream; and it may be
+fairly hoped that the hindrances to trade involved in such licences as
+those for auctioneers and hawkers--who ought no more to be fined by the
+Government for practising their employment than butchers, bakers, or
+other traders--will soon be swept away. But upon beer, wine, spirits,
+and tobacco--their importation, manufacture, and sale--the tax-gatherer
+will continue, and rightly continue, to lay his hand.
+
+Similarly, there will be no disposition to abolish the probate, legacy,
+and succession duties, but every disposition to strengthen them, and
+especially the last of them. The "Death duties" at present are
+inequitably levied; great fortunes do not pay as large a proportion as,
+relatively to small ones, they ought to do: and landed property is
+lightly let off compared with other forms.
+
+But it is a comparative few who will be touched even by this much-needed
+reform; and taxation, to be fair, must touch all round. The Income Tax,
+obnoxious as from some aspects all will admit it to be, has almost
+infinite capacities of being made useful to the State; and the question
+which practical statesmen will soon have to consider is the direction in
+which that usefulness can best be developed.
+
+As at present levied, this tax does not affect those whose incomes are
+below £150; if their incomes are between that sum and £400, the tax is
+paid upon £120 less than the correct figure; while if they exceed £400
+the full tax is levied.
+
+Now these regulations act unfairly in various directions. In the first
+place, the tax starts at too high a figure. Until a few years ago it
+began at an income of £100--a deduction of £80 being allowed--and there
+is no reason why it should not begin at £50, so that every man earning a
+pound a week in wages should be made to see as by a barometer how the
+national expenditure was rising or falling--though it never falls. And,
+however little he might be called upon to pay, there would be a distinct
+gain in so many additional capable citizens knowing from experience what
+an extra penny on the Income Tax means, for they would thereby be taught
+more closely to watch how the national money is got rid of, and their
+pockets consequently made the lighter.
+
+In the next place, the regulations now in force make no distinction
+between a precarious and a settled income, causing the tradesman or
+professional man, whose revenue dies with him, to pay as heavily as his
+neighbour who has inherited or acquired property, of which those
+dependent upon him will not be deprived by his decease. As the point was
+put in a motion made many years ago in the House of Commons by Mr.
+Hubbard (now Lord Addington), "the incidence of an Income Tax touching
+the products of invested property should fall upon net income, and the
+net amounts of industrial earnings should, previous to assessment, be
+subject to such an abatement as may equitably adjust the burden thrown
+upon intelligence and skill as compared with property." Upon this point,
+it is true, Mr. Gladstone has been antagonistic to the view here held;
+he opposed this very motion, and years before it was introduced he
+declared that it was not possible for him to conceive a plan which would
+secure the desired end. But it is also true that more than thirty years
+ago, and in his very first Budget speech, he intimated that "the public
+feeling that relief should be given to intelligence and skill as
+compared with property ought to be met, and may be met"; and that as
+plans he could not conceive in 1853 have become realized achievements
+with him before 1888, this concerning a differentiated Income Tax may
+yet be added to the number.
+
+The words of Cobden upon the point are as true to-day as when they were
+uttered. Speaking upon the Budget of 1848, he dwelt upon the
+inequalities of the Income Tax, which was then still talked of by
+Chancellors of the Exchequer as a temporary measure. "Make your tax
+just," he said, "in order that it may be permanent. It is ridiculous to
+deny the broad distinction that exists between incomes derived from
+trades and professions, and those drawn from land. Take the case of a
+tradesman with £10,000 of capital; he gets £500 a year interest, and
+£500 more for his skill and industry. Is this man's £1000 a year to be
+mulcted in the same amount with £1000 a year derived from a real
+property capital of £25,000? So with the cases of professional men, who
+literally live by the waste of their brains. The plain fair dealing of
+the country revolts at an equal levy on such different sorts of
+property. Professional men and men in business put in motion the wheels
+of the social system. It is their industry and enterprise that mainly
+give to realized property the value that it bears; to them, therefore,
+the State first owes sympathy and support."
+
+There is a further injustice under the present system, and that is that,
+when a man has passed the £400 limit, he has to pay as heavy a
+percentage upon his income, precarious or permanent, as the wealthiest
+millionaire among us. The struggling tradesman, the hardly-pressed
+professional man, every one who depends upon his brains for his living,
+has to pay as heavily as the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Westminster,
+and the Duke of Portland, to whom the brains they possess makes no
+difference to their income, and whose property has been secured not by
+efforts of their own, but of others.
+
+Is it any wonder, then, that the demand should be growing for a
+graduated Income Tax? It is one upon which Mr. Chamberlain has spoken
+plainly. At Ipswich, in January, 1885, he said--"Is it really certain
+that the precarious income of a struggling professional man ought to pay
+in the same proportion as the income of a man who derives it from
+invested securities? Is it altogether such an unfair thing that we
+should, as in the United States, tax all incomes according to their
+amount?... Prince Bismarck some time ago proposed to the Reichstag an
+Income Tax, to be graduated according to the amount of the income, and
+to vary according to the character of the income. We already have done
+something in that direction in exempting the very smallest incomes from
+taxation. But I submit that it is well worthy of careful consideration
+whether the principle should not be carried a little further." And at
+Warrington, eight months later, he observed--"I think that taxation
+ought to involve equality of sacrifice, and I do not see how this result
+is to be obtained except by some form of graduated taxation--that is,
+taxation which is proportionate to the superfluities of the taxpayer.
+When I am told that this is a new-fangled and a revolutionary doctrine,
+I wonder if my critics have read any elementary book on the subject;
+because if they had, they must have seen that a graduated Income Tax is
+not a novelty in this country. It existed in the Middle Ages, when those
+who exercised authority and power did so with harshness to their equals,
+but they knew nevertheless how to show consideration for the necessities
+of those beneath them."
+
+The first answer to the demand for a graduated Income Tax will, of
+course, be that it would be "confiscation"--a word by which the rich are
+ever striving to frighten others from making them pay their proper share
+to the State; and one may be content to rest in this matter upon the
+apparent paradox of Disraeli: "Confiscation is a blunder that destroys
+public credit; taxation, on the contrary, improves it; and both come to
+the same thing." The fact, as has before been stated, is that taxation
+is the price we pay for protection; and the more we have to protect, the
+more we ought to pay.
+
+And, as Mr. Chamberlain observed, this suggestion of a graduated tax is
+no new-fangled or revolutionary idea: it is one for instances of which
+it is not even necessary to go back with him to some vague reminiscences
+of the Middle Ages, for it exists in various degrees at the present
+time. It is only dwellings of over the annual value of £20 that are
+liable to inhabited house duty; houses of less than £30 rateable value
+have in various districts certain water privileges for nothing which
+those of greater value have to pay for; and the difference in the death
+duties, according to the degree of relationship of the legatee,
+indicates that the law recognizes the reasonableness of graduating the
+burden according to the shoulders which have to bear it. And when we
+come to the Income Tax itself, we find not merely that incomes under
+£150 are exempt, while those between that sum and £400 are subject to
+reductions which lessen the percentage of the tax to be paid compared
+with those above the last given figure, but that no other a Chancellor
+of the Exchequer than Mr. Gladstone has acknowledged the principle of
+graduation, and that in the most practical way; for in his Budget of
+1859, when the rate of the tax stood at 5d. and he proposed to add
+another 4d., he coupled with it the proviso that incomes from £100 to
+£150 (£100 being the then initial point) should pay only 1½d. extra.
+
+The argument sometimes used that the heavier taxation of large incomes
+would tend to discourage thrift by putting a penalty upon its results is
+disposed of by every-day experience. Does a man cease to wish to earn
+£150 because that sum will make him liable to Income Tax, or £400
+because that will bring him fully within its scope? We know such a man
+does not exist, and why should the conditions be changed if the
+graduation went further than at present?
+
+Here, then, is the claim for a graduated Income Tax, and, after the
+examples which have been given, it cannot honestly be argued that such a
+system is either immoral in design or impossible of execution. What is
+wanted is that the burden of taxation shall be equalized by fixing the
+greater weight upon the shoulders that ought most to bear it. No single
+citizen should be exempt from a share, and by preserving indirect
+taxation upon luxuries and starting a direct tax at the lowest
+reasonable point, every one will have to pay something. But by
+rearranging the death duties and graduating the Income Tax we shall
+secure that those who have most to lose, and, therefore, who demand most
+from the State, shall pay the State in proportion to their demand.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.--HOW IS TAXATION TO BE REDUCED?
+
+
+At no moment in recent years was it more desirable to urge a demand for
+retrenchment in the national expenditure, and probably at no moment
+could such a demand be urged with more chance of good result. For the
+recent revelations made upon the highest authority as to the
+wastefulness which characterizes our Government departments have aroused
+in the public mind not merely indignation at the spendthrifts who rule
+us but determination to put an end to much of their extravagance.
+
+The only way in which taxation can be reduced is to lessen the need for
+taxes, and that can be done in no other fashion than by reducing the
+expenditure. Ministry after Ministry has entered Downing Street with the
+announced determination to exercise retrenchment, and Ministry after
+Ministry has left that haven for office-seekers with the expenditure
+higher than ever. The stock excuse for this state of things is, that as
+the national needs increase, the national expenditure must increase with
+them; but, allowing that this will justify a rise upon certain items,
+the question which will have to be pressed home to every Minister and
+would-be Minister, to every member of Parliament and would-be member, is
+this--"Is the money that is disposed of spent in economical fashion and
+to the best advantage?" And he will have to be a very thick-skinned
+specimen of officialdom who will venture to reply "Yes" to the question.
+
+In the estimates for the navy, the army, and the Civil Service, there is
+abundant room for the pruning knife, while to the principle which
+underlies the granting of many of the pensions there ought to be
+applied the axe. Of course, as long as we possess an empire which
+exceeds any the world has ever seen for the vastness of its extent and
+its resources, so long must an army and navy be maintained; and even if,
+by a reverse of fortune, every one of our colonies were cut off from us,
+an army and navy would still be needed for our own protection. They are
+as necessary to a nation, situated like our own, as a fire-brigade to a
+town; and it would be folly, and worse, to starve them into
+inefficiency. What money is needed, therefore, to place the defences of
+the country--whether those defences be men, ships, forts, or coaling
+stations--in such a state of efficiency as shall avoid the chance of
+national disaster should war burst upon us, ought to be definitely
+ascertained and cheerfully granted.
+
+But is the money now voted for the army and navy expended to the best
+advantage, or is not a large portion of it wasted in useless and
+ornamental adjuncts? We have not yet reached the point attained by that
+Mexican force which is traditionally stated to have contained
+twenty-five thousand officers and twenty thousand men: but the number of
+superior officers of both services is altogether out of proportion to
+the size of the force. In order to stimulate what is called the "flow of
+promotion," officers are placed on the retired list at a ridiculously
+early age, and the country is deprived of, while having to pay for, the
+services of those who are in the prime of life, and still capable of
+doing their full duty, in order that room may be made for their juniors
+to climb into their places, those juniors themselves being soon
+supplanted, and the "flow of promotion" going merrily on--at our
+expense. And the hollowness of the pretension that all this is for the
+country's good is shown by the fact that, while a determined effort was
+made by the Horse Guards to compulsorily retire Sir Edward Hamley, the
+finest tactician England possesses, the Duke of Cambridge is suffered to
+remain commander-in-chief long after the age at which any other officer
+would have been shifted. This is only one example of how all rules,
+salutary and otherwise, are put aside when courtiership demands, for
+there is a distinct danger, to which the country should be awakened, of
+our services being royalty-ridden.
+
+Royalty, it is true, has not yet invaded the Civil Service, though the
+scions of the reigning house are so rapidly increasing in number that
+the prizes even of this department are likely, at no distant date, to be
+snatched from the skilled and deserving; but this particular Government
+department has plenty to be purged of, notwithstanding. Put in the
+shortest fashion, the complaint the public have a right to bring against
+the Civil Service is that it is over-manned and over-paid. A large
+section of its members--and those located at the various offices in
+Whitehall afford a glaring instance--commence work too late, leave off
+too early, and even when on their stools have not enough to do. Their
+number should be lessened, and their hours increased. Ten to four, with
+an interval for lunch, is a working period so scandalous in its
+inadequacy that even the Salisbury Ministry has condemned it, and has in
+some fashion, but at the country's expense, been striving to make it
+longer. No private business could possibly pay if it adopted such a
+system; and what must be done is to treat the Government service upon
+the same lines as a flourishing private concern. The old notion that a
+State should provide a maximum of pay for a minimum of work, and that a
+Government office should be a paradise for the idle and incompetent,
+must be swept away. It is nothing less than a scandal that taxes should
+be wrung in an ever-increasing amount from the toilers of the country to
+pay for work which, under efficient management, could be better done at
+a less price.
+
+With this question of pay there is linked that of pensions. It is often
+urged that men join the public service at a less rate of pay than the
+same abilities could obtain in other walks of business life, not merely
+because of the security of tenure, but because they know there is a
+pension to follow the work. This is exceedingly to be doubted; and
+although it would be unjust to deprive of pensions those who have
+entered Government employment under present conditions, the question
+ought very seriously to be considered whether it would not be wise for
+the State to pay, as private firms do, for the services actually
+rendered, and for individual thrift to be allowed to provide for illness
+or old age. Or, if it be thought desirable to maintain the pension
+system, the Government servants should be called upon, like the police,
+to contribute out of their wages to a superannuation fund. The system of
+pensions, as at present in operation, is indefensible upon sound
+business principles, and taxpayers have something better to do with
+their money than continue to spend it for sentimental reasons.
+
+As to hereditary pensions, there is no need to say much. Thanks to Mr.
+Bradlaugh these are in a fair way to be disposed of; but it will still
+need that a keen watch be kept, to prevent the State being further
+robbed by any fanciful scheme of commutation. It may be taken as settled
+that no further pensions will be granted for more than one life; but
+pensions for a single life, as now arranged, often prove an intolerable
+burden upon the revenue. A favourite device of the Government offices is
+to "reorganize" departments, with the result of placing a new set of
+officials upon the pay sheet and an old set upon the pension list. Many
+of the latter will be comparatively young men, capable of doing service
+in other departments; and, if they are not wanted in one, they ought to
+work for their pay in another. But that is not the way in which the
+State does its business. They are pensioned off with such astounding
+results as was seen in the case of one official, whose place was
+abolished in 1842, who was pensioned at the rate of nearly £2500 a year,
+and who lived until 1880; or of another, whose office was abolished in
+1847, who was pensioned in £3100, and who, up to this date (for he is
+believed still to be living), has drawn over £120,000 from our pockets
+without having done a single day's work for the money. And not only is
+the "reorganization" system a means of lightening the national pocket
+without good result, but the "ill-health" device has the same effect.
+Annuitants live long, as all insurance offices will tell you, and it is
+proved by the fact that there are pensioners still on the list who
+retired from the Government service between forty and fifty years ago
+because of "ill-health."
+
+Here, then, are some of the fashions in which the country is defrauded;
+they could be multiplied, but the samples should suffice to arouse the
+attention of all who bewail the continual increase of taxation. The
+State is evidently regarded by a large section of the population as a
+huge milch-cow, which shall provide an ever-flowing stream; and this
+view will continue to be held as long as our legislators are not forced
+by the constituencies to give due heed to economy. Nothing practical in
+that direction can be done until the House of Commons has a thorough
+control over the national expenditure. At present the control it
+exercises partakes so largely of the nature of a sham that it is not
+worth considering; its scrutiny must become active and persistent, and
+it should be directed to the pickings secured in high places as well as
+in low--to the receivers of heavy salaries as well as of light wages.
+The tendency has too long been to exhibit economy in regard to the small
+people and to pass over the extravagances which feed the large, and that
+is a tendency which will have to be stopped.
+
+No one desires to lessen the efficiency of the public service; but as no
+one would seriously dream of saying that that quality is at this moment
+its most distinguishing feature, good rather than harm would be done by
+the exercise of sound economy. It is only by lopping off the
+extravagances which have grown up like weeds in our Government
+departments, and which are now choking much of their power for good,
+that the taxes can ever be reduced. And so it is the bounden duty of the
+Liberals to raise their old banner of Retrenchment once again.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.--IS FREE TRADE TO BE PERMANENT?
+
+
+Before leaving the consideration of taxes, the question of Free Trade
+must be dealt with. A very few years ago it would have been thought as
+unnecessary to discuss the wisdom of continuing our system of Free Trade
+as of lengthening the existence of the House of Commons; but we are
+to-day threatened with the revival of a Protectionist agitation, and it
+is necessary to be argumentatively prepared for it.
+
+It is impossible within my limits to say all that can be said in favour
+of Free Trade or all that ought to be said against Protection; but it
+should be the less necessary to do the former, because the proof that it
+is working evil to the country must rest with those who assert it, and
+that proof they do not afford.
+
+The main contention of the Protectionists--Fair Traders some of them
+call themselves, but the old distinctive name is preferable--is that the
+free importation of corn has ruined agriculture, and of other goods has
+crippled manufactures. And, having assumed this to be correct, their
+remedy is to place such a duty upon all imported articles which compete
+with our own productions as to "protect British industry."
+
+First for the complaint. Is it true that the system of free imports has
+ruined agriculture and crippled manufactures? There is no doubt that the
+farming interest has been very seriously hit by a series of inadequate
+harvests and the growth of foreign competition; and there is as little
+doubt that, if such a duty were placed upon imported grain as would make
+its culture in England profitable under the present conditions, the
+farmers would thrive, even if the poorer among us starved. No one can
+deny that, if there is to be Protection at all, the agricultural
+interest demands it the most, but we will see directly whether such a
+tariff as would make profitable the growth of wheat is practicable. As
+to the crippling of manufactures, there is something to be said which is
+as true as it may be unpalatable. Without denying that the free
+importation of foreign goods, coupled with the heavy duties levied by
+other countries upon our exported articles, has seriously diminished the
+profits of certain of our manufacturers, and has thereby injured the
+persons by them employed, those who have watched the recent course of
+British trade are compelled to see that other causes have been at work
+to account for much of the depression.
+
+Making haste to be rich has had more to do with that depression than the
+weight of foreign competition. Manufacturers who scamp and merchants who
+swindle; folks who endow churches or build chapels to compromise with
+their conscience for robbing their customers and blasting the honour of
+the English name--these are the men who deserve to be pilloried when we
+talk of depression. We _do_ want fair trade in the sense of honest
+trade, for it is the burning desire for gain, the resolve to practise
+any device that leads to money-making, which is injuring the British
+manufacturing industry far more than the foreigner. The sick man who
+disliked a wash was at last, in desperation, recommended by his doctor
+to try soap; the manufacturers who size their cottons to the rotting
+point, and the merchants who have been accustomed to sell German cutlery
+with a Sheffield label, should be told, when they cry out upon
+depression, to try honesty. And when they whine, as they sometimes do,
+that it is the demand for cheap goods that makes such a supply, they
+must be reminded that the butcher who sells bad meat, or the baker who
+adulterates his bread, pleads the same excuse, but it does not save
+either from being branded as a cheat.
+
+There is a further point which will account for the loss of British
+trade in foreign markets, and that is the lack of adaptability to new
+circumstances shown by English traders. And this is displayed all
+round. Our farmers ought to know by this time that they cannot compete
+by wheat-growing with the United States, Canada, or India; but they will
+not comprehend that they can compete with foreign countries in the
+matter of butter, eggs, cheese, fruit, and poultry. And the consequence
+is that we are paying many millions yearly to France, Holland, Belgium,
+and America for articles that our own farmers ought to supply; and that
+the largest cheesemongers in London find it cheaper, easier, and quicker
+to import all their butter from Normandy than to buy a single pound in
+England. It is the same with our manufacturers. An American firm had a
+large order to give for cutlery; they asked terms which the English
+manufacturer rejected because they were novel; and a German at once
+seized the chance, and kept the trade. In New Zealand there was wanted a
+light spade for agricultural purposes; the English manufacturer would
+not alter his pattern to suit his customers; and the whole order went to
+the United States. In China the people wish for a cotton cloth which
+will not vanish at the first shower of rain; Manchester is so accustomed
+to heavily size its goods that it cannot change; and the China trade in
+that commodity is going elsewhere. Before, then, we complain of foreign
+competition--a complaint which is bitterly heard to-day as against
+England in France, Germany, Austria, and the United States--let us be
+certain that we are doing all we honestly can to cope with it.
+
+Some there are who say that they are in favour of Free Trade in the
+abstract, but that they will not support it as long as it is not
+accepted by other nations. This is about as sensible as a decision to
+cheat in business as long as some of our neighbours cheat would be
+honest, and is exactly on a level with the old death-bed injunction of
+the miserly parent--"My son, make money--honestly if you can, but make
+money." And when it is stated, as it sometimes is, that Free Trade was
+adopted by this country only on the understanding that it would be
+universally agreed to, it is a sufficient answer that Sir Robert Peel,
+in introducing his measure for the repeal of the Corn Laws,
+observed:--"I fairly avow to you that in making this great reduction
+upon the import of articles, the produce and manufacture of foreign
+countries, I have no guarantee to give you that other countries will
+immediately follow our example."
+
+When the Protectionists, call themselves by what name they will and use
+what arguments they may, ask us to change our present system, we first
+then deny their assumption that England is going to the dogs, and next
+we ask what they propose to put in its place. Upon a plan they find it
+impossible to agree. Some would tax corn lightly, others as heavily as
+would be required to make its growth certainly profitable to the farmer;
+some would fix a duty only upon manufactured articles, others upon
+everything which is imported that can be raised here; some would admit
+goods from our colonies at a lighter rate than from foreign countries,
+others would put them all on the same level. Out of this chaos of
+contradictions no definite plan has yet been evolved, and none is likely
+to be.
+
+The corn question is the first difficulty, and will long remain so.
+Wheat, in the autumn of 1887, was selling at 28s. a quarter; on the
+average it cannot be grown to pay at less than 45s.; yet it is only a
+5s. duty which is being dangled before the farmer. But if he is to lose
+12s. a quarter he will be little farther removed from ruin than if he
+loses 17s.; he will as much as ever resemble the traditional refreshment
+contractor who lost a little upon every customer, but thought to make
+his profit by the number he served; and the agricultural interest in its
+wildest dreams cannot imagine that Englishmen are likely to impose a
+duty raising the price of wheat 60 per cent. A rise of 10 per cent. in
+the price of bread means a rise of 1 per cent. in the death-rate, and if
+a duty of 17s. were imposed, that rise would be 6 per cent. What would
+this mean? That where 100 persons die now, 106 would die then, and the
+added number would perish from that most awful of all forms of
+death--death from lack of food. And those extra six would not be drawn
+from the well-to-do, from the trading classes, or from the ranks of
+skilled labour, but from those who even now are struggling their hardest
+for bread, and to whom the rise in price of a loaf from threepence to
+fourpence three-farthings would mean starvation. For let it never be
+forgotten that it is upon the poorest that a corn-tax would fall most
+heavily. The peer eats no more bread--probably he eats less--than the
+peasant; even when all his family and servants are reckoned, the
+quantity of bread consumed is comparatively little more than in an
+artisan's household; but while the peasant and the artisan would be made
+to feel with every mouthful that they were being starved in order that
+others might thrive, the few shillings a week that the peer would have
+to pay would be but a drop spilt from a full bucket, the loss of which
+no one could perceive.
+
+Arising out of the proposal for the re-imposition of a corn-tax is a
+consideration which bears upon the idea of levying a duty upon other
+imports. India is rapidly becoming more and more a corn-growing country;
+if it were decided to admit its wheat free, the British farmer would
+continue handicapped; if it were resolved to tax it, India would
+necessarily retaliate by protecting its own cotton industries: and what
+would Lancashire say to that?
+
+The fact is that, when the proposal to protect industries all round is
+considered, the difficulties of securing a feasible plan are found to be
+insurmountable. The simplest way, of course, would be to place a duty
+upon everything that entered our ports, and to follow that American
+tariff which commenced with a tax upon acorns, and was so jealous of
+interference with native industries that it fixed a duty upon skeletons.
+And if it be replied that the line should be drawn at manufactured
+articles, the question must be asked at once how these are to be
+defined. One can understand shoemakers desiring to place a duty upon
+foreign-made boots, but they would object to have the price of leather
+increased by a tax upon the imports of that material. The tanner and
+currier would strongly favour a tax upon leather, while perfectly
+willing that hides should be admitted free. But the free importation of
+hides would affect the farmer, who would have as much right to
+protection as either tanner or bootmaker. And so the price of boots from
+the beginning would be raised to everybody, less boots would be bought,
+and the whole community, as well as the particular trades concerned,
+would suffer. Take the woollen industries again. Manufacturers might
+like cloths to be taxed, but would be willing to see yarns admitted
+free. Spinners would place a duty upon yarns, but would let wool alone.
+But the farmer would again step in and demand that the price of his wool
+should not be lowered by free importation. If Protection is started
+there is no stopping it; no line can fairly be drawn between the
+importation of raw material and manufactured articles; every trade will
+want to be taken care of. And we shall be driven back to the time when,
+in order to protect the farmer, all bodies had to be buried in woollen
+shrouds; and, to protect the buckle maker, the use of shoestrings was by
+law prohibited. More; we shall be driven back to the period when the
+artisan and the labourer saw wheaten bread but once a year, when it was
+barley alone they could afford to eat, and when the rent of the landlord
+was the one consideration for which Parliament cared, and the welfare of
+the poor the last thing of which Parliament dreamed.
+
+One can understand why the Protectionist movement should have supporters
+in high places. There are landlords who are tired of seeing their rents
+continuously fall, and are as anxious as ever their fathers were to make
+the community pay the difference between what the land can honestly
+yield and the return its possessor desires; and there are manufacturers
+who are disgusted to find that the days when colossal fortunes could be
+rapidly made are departing.
+
+It is the duty, therefore, of every Liberal to resist the least approach
+to a reversal of the present fiscal policy. For it is not a mere
+question of taxation; it is not even a question only of money; it is a
+question of life and death to the poor. And every man who knows to what
+a depth of misery Protection brought this country less than fifty years
+since, and who feels for those who are hardly pressed, will strive to
+the uttermost against any renewal of the system which, while enriching a
+few, impoverishes the many, and, to add bitterness to its injustice,
+involves death by starvation.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.--IS FOREIGN LABOUR TO BE EXCLUDED?
+
+
+Another of the remedies suggested by political quacks for depression in
+trade is the revival of the system of "protecting British labour" by
+preventing the immigration of foreigners--a process which, by the good
+sense of all Englishmen, has been abolished for centuries.
+
+It is easy, of course, to take what at first sight may seem the
+"popular" side upon this question. There would be no difficulty in
+summoning a meeting of English bakers in London, and telling them that
+they were being ruined because German bakers are overrunning their
+trade; or gathering a small army of clerks, and informing them that but
+for foreign, and particularly German, competition, the native article
+would have a better chance; or assembling a serried array of
+costermongers, and persuading them that, if it were not for Russian,
+Polish, and German Jews, who swarm the metropolitan thoroughfares with
+their handcarts, their own barrows would attract more customers. But the
+whole idea of excluding foreigners because they become competitors is
+not merely a confession of weakness and incapacity which Englishmen
+ought never to make, but it is so contrary to the spirit of freedom
+which has been cherished in this country for ages that no Liberal ought
+for a moment to give it countenance.
+
+And, to put it on the most sordid ground, where would England and
+English trade have been had such a principle been acted upon by other
+countries? No people in the world has so much benefited by freedom of
+movement in foreign lands as ourselves. Go where one may, he will find
+Englishmen to the fore--not only as traders but as workers. What they
+have done in the colonies and in the United States is patent to all men,
+but it is not alone in Saxon-speaking lands that they have flourished.
+If one visits Italy to-day, he will find Englishmen working in the
+Government dockyards; when Russia wanted railways it was Brassey and his
+navvies who made them, and when she needed telegraphs it was English
+linesmen who stretched the wires; while in Brazil on every hand
+Englishmen are pushing to the front. And there is a lesson to be learned
+from that passage in the diary of Macaulay, which records how, on a
+visit to France, he met some English navvies, with the leader of whom he
+entered into talk: "He told me, to my comfort, that they did very well,
+being, as he said, sober men; that the wages were good, and that they
+were well treated, and had no quarrels with their French
+fellow-labourers."
+
+China for a long series of ages acted upon the principle of keeping out
+the foreigner, and upon various pretexts we fought her again and again
+to secure our own admission. Japan was equally exclusive, and for a
+longer time; but even Japan has found out the mistake of trying to live
+in "a garden walled around." As far back as the date when Magna Charta
+was signed, the right of foreign merchants to reside and to possess
+personal effects in England was recognized; and although the blindness
+and bigotry of succeeding times banished the Jews in one age and the
+Flemings in another, we long ago established the right of free entry. It
+is true that, in the fit of reaction provoked by the French Terror,
+Alien Acts were passed conferring upon the Crown the power of banishing
+foreigners, but these were superseded half a hundred years ago, and
+their revival is not to be looked for.
+
+It may be retorted that the United States Congress has taken a different
+view, for, in addition to various measures adopted in recent years to
+prevent the immigration of Chinamen, an Act was passed in 1885 "to
+prohibit the importation and migration of foreigners and aliens, under
+contract or agreement to perform labour in the United States, its
+territories, and the district of Columbia." The effect of that measure,
+coupled with an amending Act adopted two years later, according to
+English official authority, is "to subject to heavy penalties any person
+who prepays the transportation, or in any way assists the importation or
+migration of any alien or foreigner into the said countries under
+agreement of any kind whatsoever made previously to such importation, to
+perform there labour or service of any description (with a few
+exceptions). Masters of vessels knowingly conveying such aliens render
+themselves liable to fine or imprisonment, and the aliens themselves are
+not allowed to land, but are returned to the country whence they came."
+
+This law, even if it had not been rendered ridiculous by an attempt to
+bring ministers of religion within its scope, and even also if it had
+not proved practically a dead letter, does not, however, go far in the
+direction of excluding foreign labour. For men of all nations are as
+free to proceed to the United States to-day as ever they were, the only
+condition being that they shall not, before landing, have made
+themselves secure of finding work. If the same law were applied in
+England, and even if not a single person evaded (as it would be
+remarkably easy to evade) its provisions, it would not affect one in a
+hundred of the foreigners who come hither to compete with our own
+people. Does any one imagine that the German bakers and clerks and
+costermongers, who are now so much in evidence, have before landing
+entered into a contract of service?
+
+If they have not, what further measure could be taken? Ought we to pass
+a law prohibiting every foreigner from landing? Should we add to it the
+condition that, if he will swear he is a _bonâ fide_ traveller, he may
+be allowed to remain a few weeks under strict surveillance of the
+police, who will not only watch very carefully that he does no stroke of
+work while in England, but will see to it that he is promptly expelled
+when his time is up? Are our customs officers to search incoming ships
+for aliens as they do for tobacco, and is the penalty for smuggling
+foreigners to be the same as for smuggling snuff? The project of totally
+excluding foreign labour would be as impossible of accomplishment as it
+would be repellent to attempt.
+
+"But," some will answer, "is it right that we should be deluged with
+foreign paupers, who come upon our rates without paying a penny towards
+them?" That is quite another matter, and does not affect the question of
+foreign labour in any but an indirect way. It certainly is not right
+that we should be burdened by foreign paupers; and England would be
+acting in perfect consistence with the principles of liberty and justice
+if she did as the United States and the Continental countries have done,
+in prohibiting the landing of paupers, and insisting upon sending them
+back to the place whence they came. This is a matter of municipal rather
+than international law; and a repetition of such a scandal as that of
+the Greek gipsies, who were excluded from various European ports, and
+were yet suffered to land here and to become a nuisance and a burden,
+ought not to be allowed.
+
+What is being argued against is not the enactment of a law to exclude
+foreign paupers, but of one to exclude foreign workers. But even if the
+former were to be proposed, it would have to be narrowly watched, lest
+it should be so drafted as to deprive England by a sidewind of the title
+of an asylum for the oppressed which she has so long and proudly worn.
+For it is at the right of asylum that some of the advocates of exclusion
+wish to strike. In the United States there is being formed a party to
+strengthen the "Contract to Labour" Law, which avowedly wishes "to stop
+the import of lawless elements"--an elastic phrase which might cover any
+body of persons who wished for reform. And in England, Mr. Vincent, the
+proposer of the Protectionist resolution adopted by the Tory conference
+at Oxford in 1887, stated that "the indiscriminate asylum afforded here
+has long been regarded by continental Governments as an outrage on good
+order and civilization." He may rely upon it, however, that the English
+love for the right of asylum is not to be destroyed by the wish or the
+opinion of any despotic Government on earth, and that a right which
+shook down the strong Administration of Lord Palmerston, when in an evil
+hour he menaced it at the bidding of Louis Napoleon 30 years since, will
+withstand the threatenings even of a conclave of chosen Conservatives.
+
+Many things are possible to a Tory Government, and it may be that, in
+the endeavour to secure some puff of a popular breeze to fill its
+sails, it will pander to the section which demands the exclusion of
+foreigners. But how could such a measure be proposed by a Ministry which
+has among its members the Duke of Portland, whose family name, Bentinck,
+proclaims his Dutch descent; Mr. Goschen and Baron Henry de Worms, whose
+names no less emphatically announce them to have sprung from German
+Jews; and Mr. Bartlett, who, though he tells the world by means of
+reference-books that he was born at Plymouth, forgets to add that this
+is not the town in England but one in the United States?
+
+But it is not to be believed that England will in this matter forget her
+traditions. We, who are descended from Briton and Saxon, from Norman and
+Dane, have had reason to be proud of our faculty of absorbing all the
+foreign elements that have reached these shores, and turning them to
+good account. When our Puritan fathers were hunted down in England, it
+was in a foreign clime they made their home; when other Englishmen have
+lacked employment, it is to foreign lands they have gone; and the
+hospitality extended to them by the foreigner we have returned. Go into
+Canterbury Cathedral to-day, and there see the chapel set apart for the
+French refugees, driven from their country for conscience' sake;
+remember how, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the unhappy
+Huguenots fled to England to do good service to their adopted country by
+establishing here the manufacture of silk. Never forget how advantageous
+it has been for Englishmen to have the whole world open to their
+endeavours; and hesitate long before attempting to deny to others that
+right of free movement in labour which has been and is of such immense
+advantage to ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.--HOW SHOULD WE GUIDE OUR FOREIGN POLICY?
+
+
+By a natural process of thought, the consideration of the proposed
+exclusion of foreign labour leads to that of foreign policy generally;
+and although the vast questions involved in our external relations are
+not to be solved in a few lines, an attempt to lay down some general
+principles upon the matter can hardly be wasted, for of all things
+connected with public affairs, foreign policy is that of which the
+average voter knows the least, and for which he pays the most. The
+yearly twenty-seven millions as interest on the National Debt is a
+perpetual legacy from the foreign policy of the past; while an equally
+turbulent one in the present would increase the already heavy
+expenditure on the navy and army to an alarming extent. But as all
+questions covered by the phrase cannot be put in the simple form "Shall
+we go to war?" there is a necessity for the leading principles which
+should govern them to be considered.
+
+A good guide to the future is experience of the past, and our English
+history will have taught us little if it has not shown that many a war
+has been waged which patience and wisdom might have avoided. And
+although we have never avowedly gone to war "for an idea," as Louis
+Napoleon said that France did concerning the expedition in which he
+stole two Italian provinces, it has been because of the devotion of our
+statesmen to certain pet theories that much shedding of blood is due.
+
+One of these theories is that some nation or other is "our natural
+enemy." France for several centuries held that position, and it was as
+obvious to one generation that the word "Frenchman" was synonymous with
+"fiend" as it was for another to link "Spaniard" with "devil" and for a
+nearer still to consider that the Emperor Nicholas of Russia and "Old
+Nick" were one and the same. Just now the "natural enemy" idea is
+happily dormant, if not dead; but its evil effect upon our foreign
+policy has been all too plainly marked in many a page of history.
+
+Another theory, and one which has had a more far-reaching extent, is
+that it is incumbent upon the nations of Europe to maintain "the balance
+of power." This, again, is a phrase which has lost much of its old
+force; but a Continental struggle might cause it to bloom once more with
+all its baleful effects. Speaking about a quarter of a century ago, Mr.
+Bright, considering the theory to be "pretty nearly dead and buried,"
+observed of it to his constituents: "You cannot comprehend at a thought
+what is meant by that balance of power. If the record could be brought
+before you--but it is not possible to the eye of humanity to scan the
+scroll upon which are recorded the sufferings which the theory of the
+balance of power has entailed upon this country. It rises up before me,
+when I think of it, as a ghastly phantom which during 170 years, whilst
+it has been worshipped in this country, has loaded the nation with debt
+and with taxes, has sacrificed the lives of hundreds of thousands of
+Englishmen, has desolated the homes of millions of families, and has
+left us, as the great result of the profligate expenditure which it has
+caused, a doubled peerage at one end of the social scale and far more
+than a doubled pauperism at the other. I am very glad to be here
+to-night, amongst other things, to be able to say that we may rejoice
+that this foul idol--fouler than any heathen tribe ever worshipped--has
+at last been thrown down, and that there is one superstition less which
+has its hold upon the minds of English statesmen and of the English
+people."
+
+The theory which was thus unsparingly denounced held that we, as a
+nation, have a right to interfere to prevent any other nation from
+becoming stronger than it now is, lest its increased strength should
+threaten our interests. Politicians of the old school were accustomed to
+assure us that, although the name might not have been known to the
+ancients, the idea was; and, with that almost superstitious regard which
+used to be paid to Greek and Roman precedents, Hume, in one of his
+"Essays," related that "in all the politics of Greece, the anxiety with
+regard to the balance of power is apparent, and is expressly pointed out
+to us even by the ancient historians;" he was of opinion that "whoever
+will read Demosthenes' oration for the Megalopolitans may see the utmost
+refinements on this principle that ever entered into the head of a
+Venetian or English speculatist;" and, having quoted a passage from
+Polybius in support of the theory, he observed: "There is the aim of
+modern politics pointed out in express terms."
+
+But "the aim of modern politics" has been changed within the past
+century. Since the era which closed with Waterloo in 1815, England,
+Austria, Russia, France, and Germany have held in turn the dominant
+power in the councils of Europe, and the balance has been so frequently
+disturbed that the mapmakers have scarcely been able to keep pace with
+the changes of the frontiers. Look back only thirty years, and see what
+has occurred. Instead of Italy being "a fortuitous concourse of atoms,"
+or merely "a geographical expression," she is the sixth great Power, the
+kingdom of Sardinia, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Papal States,
+the grand duchies of Lucca, Parma, Tuscany, Modena, and the rest, with
+Venetia (in 1858 an Austrian possession) thrown in, having been combined
+to form that old dream of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and their
+fellow-revolutionaries, "United Italy, with Rome for its capital." In
+the place of a congeries of petty kingdoms and states, always jarring,
+and with Austria and Prussia ever struggling for the mastery, we see a
+German Empire, formed by the kingdom of Hanover being swept out of
+existence, and those of Bavaria, Saxony, and Wurtemburg, with various
+grand duchies, placed under the domination of Prussia. In the same
+period Russia has gained and France has lost territory; the Ottoman
+Empire has been "consolidated" into feebleness; and the kingdoms of
+Roumania and Servia, with the principality of Bulgaria, have been called
+in their present shape into being. All this has seriously disturbed the
+"balance of power;" but what could England have done to hinder the
+process if she had wished, and what right would she have had to attempt
+it if she had dared?
+
+And in addition to the disturbance of the "balance of power" by process
+of war and revolution, there is that which comes from physical,
+educational, industrial, and moral causes. Some nations have a greater
+faculty than others of securing success in the markets of the world, and
+these develop their natural resources in such fashion as to outstrip
+their neighbours. If we ought to be continually fighting to prevent
+other countries from aggrandizing themselves in point of territory, we
+ought equally to do so to hinder them from becoming disproportionately
+powerful in point of wealth. But as there is no man among us so insane
+as to suggest the latter, so, it may be hoped, will there soon be none
+to instigate the former. It is now over twenty years since even a Tory
+Administration felt constrained to omit from the preamble of the Mutiny
+Bill some words relating to the preservation of the "balance of power";
+and if anything had been needed to cast undying ridicule upon the theory
+it was the plea of King Milan that he went to war with Prince Alexander
+in 1885, because the union of Bulgaria with Eastern Roumelia had
+disturbed the "balance of power" in the Balkan States.
+
+Another idea upon which it is often sought to provoke war is "regard for
+the sanctity of treaties." There is an honest sound about this which has
+caused it to deceive many worthy folk, but who in his heart believes
+that there is any "sanctity" about treaties? Nations, as a fact, abide
+by treaties just as long as it suits their purpose, and not a day
+longer. Take the Treaty of Vienna, which after 1815 was to settle the
+affairs of Europe for ever. The disruption of Belgium from Holland was
+the first great blow at its provisions, and one after another of these
+subsequently became a dead letter. The Treaty of Paris, concluded after
+the Crimean War, Russia deliberately set aside in a most important part
+as soon as she conveniently could. The Treaty of Frankfort, between
+Germany and France, will last only as long as the French do not feel
+themselves equal to the task of wresting back Alsace-Lorraine. And the
+Treaty of Berlin, the latest great European compact of all, entered into
+after the Russo-Turkish War, has already been violated in various
+directions, and is daily threatened with being violated in more. A
+treaty, in fact, is not like an agreement between equal parties, in
+which one gives something to the other for value received; it is
+customarily a bargain hardly driven by a conqueror as regards the
+conquered, and one from which the latter intends to free himself as soon
+as he has the chance. And so, whenever any one talks about the "sanctity
+of treaties," let us first see what the treaties are, and under what
+circumstances they were obtained. It will then be sufficient time to
+consider the amount of reverence which is their due.
+
+But there is a further theory upon which war is made, and that is the
+most sordid of all, for, discarding all notions of honour and glory, it
+simply avers that we ought to physically fight for commercial
+advancement. A recent writer who seeks to tell us all about "Our
+Colonies and India; how we got them, and why we keep them," devotes his
+first chapter to attempting to prove that nothing but desire for gain
+actuated our forefathers in every one of their great wars, or, to use
+his own illustration, "we were afraid that our estate was going to be
+broken up; we had a large family; and we spent money and borrowed money
+to keep the property together, and to extend it. From our point of view,
+as a nation, we have to set one side of our account against the other
+and see whether our transaction paid. It is," he adds, "very often said
+that England has very little to show for her National Debt. Nothing to
+show for the National Debt! It is the price we pay for the largest
+Colonial Empire the world has ever seen." This is probably the most
+naked exposition of the worst side of the saying that "Trade follows the
+flag" which has in late years been published; but that the idea which
+underlies it still actuates a certain school of statesmen is shown by
+the fact that Lord Randolph Churchill justified the expedition to Upper
+Burmah--as long, tedious, and destructive a business as it was promised
+to be short, easy, and dangerless--on the ground that the new territory
+would "pay."
+
+Now here are certain principles which have guided the foreign policy of
+the past, and which stand as beacons to warn us against dangers in the
+future. That we shall escape war for all time to come is not to be hoped
+for, but, by considering the crimes and blunders and bloodshed which
+have flowed from previous methods, something may be done to avoid it.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.--IS A PEACE POLICY PRACTICABLE?
+
+
+The question whether a settled adherence to the principles of
+non-intervention is compatible at once with our interests and our honour
+is one upon which much of the future of England may depend. The answer
+is not to be found in sneers at a "peace-at-any-price policy," which has
+never been adopted by any section of our countrymen, or in panegyrics
+upon the virtues evolved by war, made by men who sit comfortably in
+their arm-chairs while they hound others on to bloodshed. It is a
+question which of necessity can only be answered in certain cases as the
+circumstances arise, but there is nothing either cowardly or
+dishonourable in considering the general principles involved in a reply.
+
+Looking at the world as it stands, it seems almost beyond hope that war
+will ever cease. It is true that we have got rid of blood-letting in
+surgery and that we have got rid of blood-letting in society, and it
+may, therefore, seem to some that there is a chance of getting rid of
+blood-letting between States. A century since, the doctor's lancet and
+the duellist's pistol were rivals in slaughter, and all but fanatics
+thought their abolition impossible. What will be said of war in the time
+to come?
+
+Whatever may be said of it then, we know what can be said of it now. It
+is a grievous curse to the nations engaged, and a calamitous hindrance
+to civilization. It is a barbarous and illogical method of settling
+international disputes, which decides only that one side is the
+stronger, and never shows which side is the right. The cynical saying
+that God is on the side of the big battalions is true at bottom. We
+laugh to-day at the old custom of "Trial by battle," recognizing that
+the innocent combatant was often the weaker or less skilful, and that
+the guilty consequently triumphed. But "Trial by battle," as between
+nations, is equally absurd, if any one imagines that it shows which is
+the righteous. Who would contend that France was in the right when
+Napoleon Bonaparte, in his early career, by his superior skill in
+tactics, swept the nations of Europe before him at Arcola and Marengo,
+Austerlitz and Jena, and that he was in the wrong when, in the waning of
+his powers, he was irretrievably ruined at Waterloo? That Denmark was in
+the wrong because the combined forces of Austria and Prussia crushed her
+in the struggle over Schleswig-Holstein, and that Prussia was in the
+right when, after she and her neighbour had quarrelled like a couple of
+thieves over their booty, she placed the needle-gun against the
+muzzle-loader and overwhelmed Austria? The spirit which impels each
+combatant to call upon the Almighty as of right for assistance, and
+which leads the victor to sing a _Te Deum_ at the struggle's close, is a
+blasphemous one, which should not blind us to the criminality of most
+wars. To hurl thousands of men into conflict in order to extend trade or
+acquire territory is an iniquity, disguise it by what phrases we will.
+In private life the man who steals is called a thief, the man who kills
+is called a murderer; why in public life should the nation which steals,
+and which kills in order to steal, be differently treated? If there be
+retributive justice beyond the grave, Frederick the Great and Napoleon
+Bonaparte, who in cold blood and for selfish motives sacrificed tens of
+thousands of lives, will stand at the murderers' bar side by side with
+those lesser criminals who have gone to the gallows for a single
+slaughter.
+
+Let us look at war, therefore, as it is--a direful necessity, even when
+justified by self-preservation, a flagrant crime when entered upon for
+the extension of territory or trade. It is easy to raise the cry of
+patriotism whenever a war is undertaken, but the patriotism that pays
+others to fight is a cheap article which deserves no praise. As for the
+bloodthirsty bray of the music halls, which even English statesmen have
+not disdained to stimulate in favour of their policy, it is abhorrent to
+cleanly-minded men; the ethics of the taproom and the patriotism of the
+pewter-pot are not to their taste; and when it is seen that the most
+sanguinary writers and the most blatant talkers are the last to put
+their own bodies in peril, it cannot but be concluded that their theory
+is that patriotism is a virtue to be preached by themselves and
+practised by their neighbours.
+
+But though a reckless or merely aggressive war is not only the greatest
+of human ills but the gravest of national crimes, an armed struggle is
+in certain instances a necessity. Self-preservation is the first law of
+nature; and as no man would condemn another for slaying, if no milder
+measure would do, one who attempted to kill him, and the law would
+regard such a course as justifiable homicide, so a nation is right to
+fight against invasion, and would deserve to be extinguished or enslaved
+if it did not. "Defence, not defiance," the motto of our volunteers,
+should be the motto of our statesmen; and then, if an enemy attacked us,
+we should be able to give a good account of ourselves.
+
+In order to act up to this motto, we must dabble as little as possible
+with affairs that do not directly concern us. We should cease to think
+that we are the arbiters of the world's quarrels--we have enough to do
+to look after our colonies and ourselves--and we should withdraw from
+such entangling engagements as we have, and enter upon no fresh ones.
+When, for instance, we are urged to formally join the Triple Alliance,
+we must ask why we should bind ourselves to fight France and Russia
+because Germany would like to pay off old scores, Austria wishes to get
+to Salonica, and Italy is eager to assert her position as the
+latest-created "Great Power." As it is, a Continental struggle, such as
+is bound to come in the near future, may sufficiently involve us. No one
+seems quite to know whether we are or are not bound by treaty to defend
+the territorial independence of Belgium; but as it is through "the
+cockpit of Europe" that Germany may next attempt to assail France, or
+France try to reach Germany, the question is a very important one.
+Would it not be better to settle that before we proceed to bind
+ourselves with the chains of an alliance which could do us little good,
+but might easily effect considerable harm?
+
+Non-intervention has again and again been proved to be an honourable and
+beneficent policy. There has been scarcely a great war within the last
+thirty years in which we have not been urged by some section in this
+country to interfere. The Franco-Austrian conflict in 1859, the civil
+war in America, the Austro-Prussian attack upon Denmark, the
+Franco-German war, and the Russo-Turkish struggle--in every one of these
+we were urged to interfere on behalf of our interests or our honour, or
+both. In none did we do so, and who to-day will argue that abstention
+was wrong? There are some politicians who appear wishful to see
+England's finger in every international pie, and the same old arguments,
+the same vehement appeals, are used whenever there is a struggle abroad.
+And when the next occurs, and these weather-beaten arguments and appeals
+are again brought to the fore, let those who may be swayed by them turn
+to the files of the newspapers which instigated intervention in all of
+the cases named; and let them reflect that non-intervention proved the
+best course in every one, and that what did so well before is most
+likely to do well again.
+
+But, even if we sedulously pursue this policy, there are occasions when
+differences arise with other States, and the question is how these can
+be composed. In the large majority of cases the remedy will be found in
+arbitration. Here, again, we shall be confronted with assertions about
+honour and patriotism, which experience has proved to be worthless. Two
+striking instances have been afforded of the value of international
+arbitration. The greater is that which solved the difficulty between
+ourselves and the United States concerning the Alabama claims. Here was
+a matter in which England was distinctly in the wrong, and, as long as
+the sore remained open, so long was there danger of war ensuing between
+the two great English-speaking nations of the earth. When Mr.
+Gladstone's first Government resolved to submit it to arbitration, no
+language was too vehement for some of our Tories to apply to the
+process. It was dishonourable, unpatriotic, and pusillanimous; but Mr.
+Gladstone persevered, and with what result? The dispute was settled, the
+sore was healed; and is there a solitary man among us who will contend
+that the better plan would have been to send into their graves thousands
+of unoffending men, and to perpetuate, perhaps for generations, a
+quarrel which has been so happily decided as now to have almost faded
+out of mind? The other instance is afforded by the resolve, in the
+spring of 1885, to refer the dispute with Russia concerning the Penjdeh
+conflict to arbitration. There were threatenings of slaughter on every
+hand, for weeks there appeared a danger of our being launched into war
+for a strip of Afghan territory, worthless alike to Russians, Afghans,
+and ourselves, and upon a conflict of testimony as to the original
+aggression, which even yet has not been composed. The agreement to
+submit the matter to the King of Denmark, though his arbitrament
+ultimately was dispensed with, gave a breathing time to Russia and
+England both; and who now would argue that we ought to have gone to war
+because of Penjdeh?
+
+Therefore, if we adhere to a policy of non-intervention in disputes that
+do not directly concern us, and of arbitration in those in which we
+become involved, we shall be following a course which the immediate past
+has proved to be not only peaceful but honourable and agreeable to our
+interests. "The greatest of British interests is peace," once observed
+the present Lord Derby; and the truth of the saying is unimpeachable.
+And when we are told that, strive as we will, war sometimes must come,
+one is reminded of the saying of a far greater statesman than Lord
+Derby, and one upon whose patriotism none has been able to cast a slur.
+It was Canning who, when told that a war in certain circumstances was
+bound to come sooner or later, replied, "Then let it be later."
+
+If, however, we wish England to pursue a peaceful policy, we must teach
+the people to believe that it is as honourable as it is practicable, and
+as truly patriotic as both. It is a mistake to think that the masses
+will oppose war merely because of the suffering and loss it entails;
+there are considerations beyond these which the artisan feels as keenly
+as the aristocrat, the peasant as the peer. The sentiment which resents,
+even to blood-shedding, an insult to the national flag, may be often to
+be deprecated but never to be despised; for when the people shall care
+nothing for the country's honour, the days of independent national
+existence will be drawing to a close. And, therefore, when it is argued
+that a peace policy is practicable, it is held to be so only because it
+is honourable, patriotic, and just.
+
+
+
+
+XXX.--HOW SHOULD WE DEAL WITH THE COLONIES?
+
+
+The foreign relations of England are necessarily complicated by her
+colonial concerns; and these deserve the most careful consideration,
+because at any moment they may arouse the hottest political dispute of
+the day. In considering the colonies we have to ask three questions: (1)
+How and why did we get them; (2) How and why do we keep them; and (3)
+Ought we to force them to stay?
+
+At the history of the why and how we acquired our colonies, it is
+impossible here to do more than glance. By settlement as in the case of
+Australasia, by conquest as in that of Canada, and by treaty cession as
+in that of the Cape, have been obtained within the past three centuries
+practically all that we have. The wish for expansion has continually
+made itself felt, and the frequent result of war as well as of peaceful
+discovery has been to gratify it. And the consequence of both conquest
+and discovery has been the acquisition of a colonial empire vaster in
+extent and resources than the world has ever seen.
+
+Having got our colonies, there are various reasons for retaining them.
+The imperial spirit, which is elated by expansion and would be deeply
+wounded by contraction, has been a prominent factor in causing England
+to take a leading position in the world's affairs; and it is one which
+none interested in her prosperity will despise. Even if there were no
+material reasons for keeping our colonies, this sentiment would cause
+many Englishmen, and probably the majority, to regard with the deepest
+distrust any movement having a tendency to separate the colonies from
+the mother country.
+
+But there are material reasons for binding the colonies to us which
+none will ignore. They form not only an outlet for our surplus labour
+and enterprise, but give us markets of high importance to our trade.
+Emigrants who go to Canada or Australia not merely remain attached by
+obvious considerations to the English connection, but continue to be our
+customers in a very much larger degree than if they went to the United
+States or any other foreign country. Those who study the statistics of
+our export trade will recognize that if we lost the custom of our
+colonies--and this we should be likely to do if we lost the colonies
+themselves--the consequences to our commerce would be very serious.
+
+Thus there are reasons of the highest sentiment, as well as of
+commercial expediency, for retaining the possessions the hard fighting
+and determined enterprise of many generations of Englishmen have
+acquired; but the question which is needed to be answered in much more
+fulness than either of the others is that which may affect the politics
+of the near future: Ought we, if any of our self-governing colonies
+desire to secede, to force them to stay?
+
+A distinct difference has been made in the form of this question between
+the self-governing colonies and the dependencies--a distinction arising
+from the very nature of things. There is a chasm between the
+consideration of letting Australia or letting India go, which is too
+wide to be bridged. Australia consists of various colonies, peopled by
+Englishmen or the descendants of Englishmen, who have the fullest means
+of constitutionally expressing their desires. India has a vast concourse
+of deeply-divided peoples, who have no bond of union, whether of race,
+religion, or common descent, and who are in no sense self-governed. In
+the argument about to be set forward, therefore, it is to be understood
+that only the colonies, and not the dependencies, are in consideration.
+
+Broadly speaking, it may be submitted with regard to our self-governing
+colonies that we are bound in honour to keep them as long as they will
+stay, and in conscience not to detain them when they are able and
+willing to go. Having acquired them, and given the most practical
+guarantees to protect them, we ought to hold to our implied bargain at
+any cost, and to defend them with as much energy as our native soil.
+But, just as a parent's duty to a child is to do everything to protect
+and assist him in his period of growth, so is it equally his duty, when
+the training-time has been accomplished, to set no hindrance in the path
+of his acquiring an independent position. And the relation of parent to
+child has a true likeness to that of England to her self-governing
+colonies.
+
+If it be asked whether this question of what should be done in case of a
+proposed separation ought to be raised at the present moment, the reply
+is that events are forcing the matter forward, and that it is well to
+consider in a time of comparative quiet a problem which may convulse the
+nation from end to end if urged upon us in a storm.
+
+For rumblings of the storm have already been heard from the three great
+self-governing portions of our colonial empire. Sir Henry Parkes, the
+Premier of New South Wales, in an article published no long time since,
+and in the very act of proposing a scheme by which he imagined the
+mother country and the colonies might be knit more closely together,
+uttered a warning that separation might within the next generation be
+pushed to the front, for "there are persons in Australia, and in most of
+the Australian Legislatures, who avowedly or tacitly favour the idea."
+And he added: "In regard to the large mass of the English people in
+Australia, there can be no doubt of their genuine loyalty to the present
+State, and their affectionate admiration for the present illustrious
+occupant of the throne. But this loyalty is nourished at a great
+distance, and by tens of thousands, daily increasing, who have never
+known any land but the one dear land where they dwell. It is the growth
+of a semitropical soil, alike tender and luxuriant, and a slight thing
+may bruise, even snap asunder, its young tendrils."
+
+When we turn from Australia to Canada, the same warning is in the air.
+In the autumn of 1887, the remarks of Mr. Chamberlain at Belfast,
+repudiating the principle of commercial union between Canada and the
+United States, evoked strong protests from some leading newspapers in
+the Dominion against the idea of England interfering if such a union
+were agreed upon. The Toronto _Mail_ put the matter in a nutshell when
+it observed--"Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. Canadians
+have not ceased to love and venerate England, but have simply reached
+that stage of development when their choice of what is best for
+themselves, be it what it may, must prevail over all other
+considerations." Should it be said that this is only an utterance of our
+old friend "the irresponsible journalist," it may be added that the
+practice of Canadian statesmen appears to be in accordance with the
+principles of Canadian writers. This was certainly the opinion of our
+own _Standard_, which, in an article in 1887 upon the increases in the
+Canadian tariff directed against imported iron and steel, wrote--"The
+obvious truth of the matter is that Canada has given no thought to our
+interests at all, but only to her own.... Of course these Canadians are
+a most 'loyal' people for all that, and if they can get us to lend them
+our money they will flatter us and heap sweet-sounding phrases upon us,
+till the most voracious appetite for such is cloyed to sickness. It is
+only when we expect them to pay us our money back, or at least to put up
+no barriers against our trade with them, that we find out how hollow
+these phrases are. No federation of the empire can take place under any
+guise while its leading colonies, which love us so exceedingly, strive
+their utmost to injure our trade.... Why should we waste a drop of our
+blood or spend a shilling of our means to shelter countries whose
+selfishness is so great that they never give a thought to any interest
+of ours? That is the question the Protectionist colonies are forcing
+Englishmen to ask themselves, and it is as well that it should be
+bluntly put to them now."
+
+Cape Colony is as ready as Australia or Canada to resent the least
+interference from the mother country. Sir Gordon Sprigg, its Premier,
+referring at a public meeting late in 1887 to a Bill which the Imperial
+Ministry had been asked to disallow, observed that, if it should be
+disallowed, it was not a question of this particular Bill, but whether
+the colony was to have a free government, or whether necessary
+legislation in South Africa was to be checked by irresponsible persons
+at home, and they were to go back to the old Constitution, and be
+governed by a people six thousand miles away, knowing little of the
+requirements of the inhabitants of the Cape.
+
+Therefore, we have to face a growing opinion among the self-governing
+colonies that they will allow England no controlling voice in their
+internal affairs; and the question will present itself to many
+Englishmen whether it is right that we should be saddled with the
+responsibility of defending colonies which resent any interference, and
+use their tariffs to lessen our trade. As long as they require help we
+are bound in honour to give it; but when they demand, as at some time
+they will demand, separation, the conviction they are now impressing
+upon us that they can do without England, will materially strengthen the
+desire to say to them, "Go in peace."
+
+Even if such a consideration did not exist, one might hope that England
+would never repeat the enterprise once attempted against what are now
+the United States, and try to crush a growing nation of our own children
+when wishing to take its own place in the economy of the world. Some
+will answer that all danger of such a contingency would be avoided by
+the adoption of a sound plan of imperial federation; but where is that
+sound plan to be looked for? Even the most ardent advocates of the
+principle do not venture upon a plan. They are content to talk of
+sympathy rather than develop a system; but sympathy does not go far when
+practical considerations are concerned. It may be argued that sympathy
+went a long way when a detachment from New South Wales assisted our
+military operations in the Soudan; but the experiment was a dangerous
+one which ought not to be often repeated. Franklin in his autobiography
+tells us that it was the defeat of Braddock's force which first taught
+the American colonists that it was possible to hope for independence;
+and the lesson needs remembering.
+
+What those who advocate imperial federation have to prove is that it is
+practicable to persuade each portion of this vast empire to pay and to
+fight for every other portion. As long as England does both the paying
+and the fighting, things may go smoothly. But if England went to war
+with France over the New Hebrides, in order to protect the interests of
+Australia, what would Newfoundland say on being asked to share the
+bill? Similarly, if England engaged France over the bait question, so as
+to preserve the fishing trade of Newfoundland, how would Australia like
+to be taxed for the fray? And if we fought the United States on the
+fisheries dispute in order to please Canada, does any one imagine that
+Australia or Cape Colony would agree to additional imposts for the
+lessening of our National Debt? It is when considerations like these are
+discussed that imperial federation appears a pleasing dream rather than
+a probable reality.
+
+And, therefore, when we discuss our future dealings with the colonies,
+we ought to know how far we intend to go. As long as they remain with
+us, we ought to do our utmost to preserve the most friendly relations;
+but, having given them self-government, we ought to impress upon them
+the necessity for self-preservation. And if, when they can not only rule
+but protect themselves, they should ask to be freed from even the
+nominal allegiance to the English Crown which is all they now give, they
+should be suffered to go, in the hope and belief that they would
+prosper.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.--SHOULD THE STATE SOLVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS?
+
+
+Though we have been discussing at this length our foreign and colonial
+relations, we must never forget that there is a "condition of England
+question" which claims the closest attention. The politics of the future
+will be largely coloured by considerations arising from our social
+developments; and it is important to decide whether the State ought to
+attempt to solve social problems, and how far it ought to interfere in
+the relations between man and man.
+
+There is just now so much talk about Socialism that it is desirable to
+examine the principles which underlie State-interference with private
+affairs. Those who like to divide men into strictly defined parties are
+accustomed to describe their fellows as Socialists and Individualists;
+and, although there is no Socialist who would prevent all liberty of
+personal action, and no Individualist who would protest against every
+form of State-interference, the distinction is fair enough if it be
+understood that the Socialist believes that the State should do as much
+as possible, and the Individualist that it should do as little as
+possible, for those who dwell within its limits.
+
+The view of the former is concisely stated in the programme of the
+Social Democratic Federation, in which are urged the immediate
+compulsory construction of healthy artisans' and agricultural labourers'
+dwellings, free compulsory education for all classes, with at least one
+wholesome meal a day in each school, an eight hours' working day,
+cumulative taxation upon all incomes above a fixed minimum, State
+appropriation of railways with or without compensation, the
+establishment of national banks absorbing all others, rapid extinction
+of the National Debt, nationalization of the land, and organization of
+agricultural and industrial armies under State control on co-operative
+principles. These are merely claimed to be palliative measures, which
+should be followed by others more drastic; but they suffice to show the
+present-day Socialistic idea.
+
+Against this extreme Socialist view must be set the extreme
+Individualist, which has been expressed by Mr. Spencer, who says--"There
+is reason to believe that the ultimate political condition must be one
+in which personal freedom is the greatest possible, and governmental
+power the least possible; that, namely, in which the freedom of each has
+no limit but the like freedom of all; while the sole governmental duty
+is the maintenance of this limit." And the main idea of this statement
+had been anticipated in the remark, a couple of thousand years ago, by
+one of the greatest of Greek philosophers--"The truth is that the State
+in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is the best and most
+quietly governed, and the State in which they are most willing is the
+worst."
+
+The real question, of course, is not between any such extreme views, for
+Mr. Spencer would not deny that the State sometimes must interfere, and
+Mr. George would be the last to plead against the use of all individual
+effort. But though the limits of State-interference are what we have to
+determine, it is necessary first to consider whether the State should
+interfere at all.
+
+An obvious answer is that the State interferes already in many a social
+problem, and that no one seriously proposes to do away with that
+interference. But even those who would thus reply may not be aware of
+the extent to which the State makes its influence felt in social
+affairs. The administration of justice and the protection of the
+commonwealth are necessarily, in all civilized communities, the affair
+of the State. But beyond these limits, the ruling authority, whether
+exercised through imperial or local officials, wanders at many a point.
+
+The Poor-law is a striking instance of this fact, for it is a piece of
+legislation the Socialistic tendency of which none can gainsay, the
+State practically asserting that no one need starve, and providing food
+and shelter, under certain conditions, for all who are unable, or even
+unwilling, to work. The system of national education is another instance
+of Socialistic legislation; it makes me pay towards the education of my
+neighbour's child, not for any immediate benefit to myself, but for my
+ultimate benefit as a citizen of an improved State. And the ruling
+authority goes further even than compelling me to feed the poor and
+educate the young, for it interferes, presumably for my good, with my
+liberty in many a detail.
+
+From birth to death the State, even under present conditions, steps in
+at point after point to direct one's path. Within forty days of being
+born I am compelled by the State to be registered; within three months I
+am equally constrained to be vaccinated; from five years old to
+thirteen, with certain limitations, I have to be sent to school; and,
+should my parents be so sensible as to apprentice me to a trade, a fee
+has to be paid to the State for the indentures. When I marry it is at a
+State-licensed institution; when I die it is by a State-appointed
+officer that my decease is certified. And in the interval, the State
+prevents me from obtaining intoxicating liquor except from certain
+individuals and within specified hours; it compels me, if I am a
+house-owner, to effect my sanitary arrangements in a given way; and if I
+am a house-holder, to keep my pavement free from snow. From the highest
+details to the lowest, then, the State even now interferes; whether I
+fail to have my child vaccinated or my chimney swept, it steps in; and
+those who argue that Individualism is a theory so true that
+State-interference should be abolished, have a number of fruits of that
+State-interference to get rid of before they can claim the victory.
+
+But probably even those who imagine that they are extreme Individualists
+would not wish to remove from the Statute Book such specimens of
+State-interference as are now upon it. If they did, the clearance would
+indeed be great. For imagine what the effect would be if, in addition to
+the other measures indicated, we got rid of all the enactments affecting
+labour, and again allowed the employment of climbing boys as
+chimney-sweeps, of women and small children in mines, of men and women
+in white-lead works without precaution of any kind, of sailors in the
+merchant service without the protection of lime-juice against scurvy and
+of survey against sinking; picture what the population of our
+manufacturing districts would by this time have become without the
+protection afforded by the Factory Acts; remember what an improvement
+has been made in the way of guarding dangerous machinery, owing to the
+penalties inflicted upon careless owners by the Employers' Liability
+Act; and then answer whether State-interference is necessarily a bad
+thing.
+
+Within the limits which experience has shown to be desirable, it is a
+good thing; and it is no answer to this assumption that it has sometimes
+failed to secure the object aimed at. As long as nothing in this world
+is perfect, we cannot expect the action of the State to be; the only
+test in every case is an average test. If such State-interference as we
+see has on the whole done well, the balance must be struck in its
+favour; and in human affairs a favourable balance is all we have a right
+to anticipate.
+
+The Individualistic ideal may be a good one, but it is the
+Individualistic real we have to examine. And what would become of the
+poor, the weak, and the helpless if the State stood aside from all
+interference with the affairs of men? That the rich and the powerful
+would grind them to powder in their struggles for more riches and
+greater power. The days of universal brotherhood have never
+existed--and, what is more, never will exist--and that State which
+protects the weak against the strong and the poor against the rich is
+the best worth striving for.
+
+An ideal condition of society would be that in which every able-bodied
+person would have to work for a living with body, brains, or both; but
+birth and bullion play so large a part under present circumstances that,
+while we may sigh for the ideal, we must recognize the real. And this
+applies to all thinkers on our social affairs--to the extreme Socialist
+as to the extreme Individualist. The mystery of life cannot be solved by
+logic, and the pain, the poverty, and the crime which that mystery
+involves dissipated by law.
+
+It must constantly also be borne in mind that mankind is not governed
+by material considerations alone, but is largely swayed by sentiment;
+and any system which ignores this and treats men simply as calculating
+machines is bound to fail. Thus it is that, while men accept the latest
+doctrines of social science, they do not act upon them. They sympathize
+with Mr. Spencer's account of an ideal State in which the governmental
+power is the least possible, but they pay the education rate, support
+compulsory vaccination, and express not the slightest wish to see
+public-houses open all night. It is in this as in other theoretical
+affairs--our minds agree, but our hearts arbitrate. A parent may accept
+most thoroughly the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, but he will
+strive his utmost to preserve life to a crippled or lunatic child. And a
+trader may indicate assent when he hears that the employed ought to be
+paid only the amount which would secure similar services in the labour
+market; but, if he is even commonly honest in his dealings with his
+fellows, he will not discharge an old servant because he can obtain
+another for something less.
+
+But no sooner do some men secure a fact than it begets a theory, and
+truth thus becomes the father of many lies. It is well enough that every
+one should strive to be independent of external help, but it is not
+within the bounds of the possible that every one can be perfectly so;
+and that being the case, the State, as the protector of all, is bound to
+interfere. What has to be decided is the limit of such interference; and
+although upon that point no precise line can be drawn, for as conditions
+vary so must the limit change, discussion may serve to show that all the
+truth lies in neither of the contending theories, but in a judicious use
+of both.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.--HOW FAR SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE?
+
+
+To precisely limit the interference of the State in private affairs has
+been urged to be impossible, for the boundaries of such interference are
+ever changing, and will continue ever to change as the circumstances
+vary. In some respects the State has more to say about our domestic
+concerns, in others less, than it formerly had; but there never was a
+time when it left us altogether alone, and there is never likely to be.
+
+When people groan about "grandmotherly government," and talk hazily of
+"good old times" when such was unknown, they speak with little knowledge
+of the social history of England. They forget that there was a day when
+under penalty men had to put out their fires at a given hour; that later
+they were directed to dress in a fashion presumed to be becoming to
+their several ranks; that at one period they had to profess Catholicism
+under fear of the fagot, and at another Protestantism under penalty of
+the rope; that in later days they had to go to church to escape being
+fined, and even until this century had to take the Sacrament in order to
+qualify for office; that in other times they were allowed to bury their
+dead only in certain clothing; that a section of them had to give six
+days in the year to the repair of the highways; and that in divers
+further ways their individual liberty was fettered in a fashion which
+would not now be tolerated for a day.
+
+The State, in fact, has always claimed to be all-powerful, and has never
+assigned set limits to its demands. It has asserted, and still asserts,
+rights over that which is intangible, which it has not created, and
+which in its origin is superhuman. If a man has used a stream for his
+own purposes for a given period, the State secures him a right of use,
+protecting him from interference in or providing him compensation for
+that which neither he nor the State made or purchased. If another has a
+window which is threatened with being darkened by a newer building
+adjacent, the State steps in to assure him of the retention of his
+"ancient light." And when people have for a series of years walked
+without hindrance across land belonging to others, the State gives to
+the commonalty a right of way, which, however seemingly intangible,
+often seriously deteriorates the value of the property over which it is
+exercised.
+
+In the gravest concerns of man as well as in those which merely affect
+his comfort or his purse, the State intervenes. It used to assert by
+means of the press-gang its right to seize men for service in war; and
+it could at this day order a conscription which would compel all in the
+prime of life to pass under the military yoke. It can and does direct
+property to be seized for public purposes, upon compensation paid, from
+an unwilling owner; and it can and does take out of our pockets a
+proportion of our income, which proportion it has the power to largely
+increase, in order to pay its way.
+
+That which does all these things is for convenience called "the State,"
+but in present circumstances it is really ourselves. The nation is
+simply the aggregate of the citizens who compose it, and each one of
+us--especially each possessor of a vote--is a distinct portion of the
+State. The misfortune which attends upon the frequent use of the word is
+that many persons seem to think that there is some mystic power called
+"the State" or "the Government," which can dispense favours, spend
+money, and do great things--all from within itself. But neither State
+nor Government has any money save that which we give it, and no power
+except that which is accorded by the constituencies. And, therefore,
+when people cry out for "the State" to do this or "the Government" to do
+that, they should remember that _they_ are portions of the force they
+beseech, and that if what is to be done costs money they will have to
+pay their share; and this much it is highly useful to recollect when
+appeals are more and more being made to the State for help.
+
+Let us start, therefore, with the conviction that the State, which is
+simply ourselves and others like us, has no power beyond what the people
+give it, and no money but what the people pay; that it has throughout
+our history attempted to solve social problems, and is doing so still;
+and that it is as sure as anything human can be that if it did not
+interfere in certain cases to aid the struggling, to put a curb upon the
+tyrannous, and to regulate divers specified affairs, the poor and the
+helpless would be the principal sufferers, and greed of gain and lust of
+power would be in the ascendant.
+
+But it would be easy to push this interference too far. Admitted that
+the State has done certain things for us, and, in the main, done them
+well, this affords no argument that it should do everything in the hope
+that equal success would follow. There is an assumption dear to pedants
+and schoolboys that because one does _this_ he is bound to do _that_,
+but neither our daily lives nor our State concerns are or ought to be so
+governed. They are largely regulated by circumstances, with the idea of
+doing the best possible under existing conditions. For there is no
+infallible scheme of government or of society, and the system must be
+made to suit the people and not the people to suit the system.
+
+And although the State, in certain departments of its interference, has
+done well, it has not brilliantly succeeded where it has entered into
+competition with private enterprise. Just as public companies are worked
+at a greater cost than the same concerns in the hands of individual
+proprietors, so Government enterprises are always highly expensive and
+often disastrous failures. It did not need the recent revelations
+concerning the waste, the jobbery, and the wanton extravagance of
+certain of our departments to inform those who knew anything of the
+public offices or the Government dockyards, that such things were the
+customary results of the system. Stroll through a private dockyard and
+then through a public one; visit a large mercantile office and then a
+Government department in Whitehall; and decide whether the State is a
+model master. It may be said that it is simply the system that is to
+blame, but surely the universality of evil result from the same cause
+should teach a lesson.
+
+There may be asserted the possible exception of the Post-office to the
+charge that the State fails where it competes with private enterprise;
+and no one would deny that that department does good work, and that, if
+all others were like it, there would be less reason to complain. But it
+must not be forgotten that the Post-office, as far as the main portion
+of its business--letter-carrying--is concerned, does not compete with
+private enterprise, for it possesses by law the monopoly of the work;
+and that the cheapness of postage, upon which it prides itself, is
+largely secured by making the people of London pay at least twice as
+much as they would if competition existed for the letters they send
+among themselves, in order that they and others may, for the same money,
+forward letters to Perth or Penzance. As to the Government monopoly of
+the telegraphs, the result, while beneficial in a certain degree, has
+had this effect--it has partially strangled the telephone system; and
+that will hardly be claimed as a triumph.
+
+Any suggestion, therefore, for making the State interfere still further
+with private enterprise ought to be most carefully weighed. The question
+really is whether it has not already done as much in this direction as
+it ought, and whether, generally speaking, the limits now laid down are
+not sufficiently broad.
+
+What it does is this: it undertakes by means of an army and navy our
+external defence; secures by the police our internal safety; makes
+provision by which no person need starve; enforces upon all a certain
+amount of education; and enjoins a set of sanitary regulations for the
+protection of the community from infectious or contagious disease. These
+are the main items of its work, but beyond them it provides the means of
+communication by post and telegraph; fixes in certain degree the fares
+on railways and the price of gas; encourages thrift by the institution
+of savings banks; and gives us all an opportunity for religious exercise
+by the provision of an Established Church.
+
+The objectionable part of this is that which directly interferes with
+personal opinion or private enterprise. The noble saying of
+Cromwell--"The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of
+their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that
+satisfies"--spoken before its time, as even some of the Protector's
+friends may have considered, must now be extended to the contention that
+the State has no concern whatever with the opinions of its citizens, and
+that it ought not to endow any sect at the expense of the rest.
+Concerning the competition with private enterprise, the State, in
+providing a system of national education and a postal and telegraph
+service, has gone to the verge of what it should do in such a direction.
+
+While, therefore, the State should not abandon any function it now
+exercises, the severest caution ought to be used before another is
+undertaken. All attempts of the ruling power to interfere too closely
+with the private concerns of men--as witness the sumptuary laws and
+those against usury--have defeated themselves, and it is not for us to
+revive systems of interference which, even in the Middle Ages, broke
+down. It is no answer that some things are going so badly that
+State-interference may be considered absolutely necessary, and that it
+is merely the extremity of nervousness that hinders the experiment being
+tried. Caution is not cowardice, and no man is called upon to be
+foolhardy to prove his freedom from fear.
+
+When it is said that, in certain directions, matters have come to such a
+pass that the State must more actively interfere, let us note that
+extremes meet upon this as upon so many other matters; for the cry that
+"the country is going to the dogs" is nowadays raised as lustily by some
+friends of the working man as ever it has been by the retired colonels
+and superannuated admirals whose exclusive possession it was so long.
+And the remedy suggested is that the State should do this, that, and the
+other, with an utter ignoring of the fact, which all history proves,
+that the creation of an additional army of officials would strangle
+enterprise and stifle invention. Thus from the general, it will be
+necessary to go to the particular, and to ask how far the proposed
+remedy would be effectual. The principle here argued is that the State
+should concern itself simply with external defence, internal safety,
+the protection of those unable to guard themselves, and the undertaking
+of such work for the general good as cannot be better done by private
+enterprise; and this principle holds good against many a nostrum now put
+forward as an infallible remedy for social ills.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII.--SHOULD THE STATE REGULATE LABOUR OR WAGES?
+
+
+Among the many social questions which the pressure of circumstances may
+soon make political is that of the State regulation of the hours of
+labour. The president of the Trades Union Congress for 1887 advocated,
+for instance, the passing of an Eight Hours Bill; and it is desirable to
+consider whether this would in any respect be a step in a right
+direction.
+
+The argument for such a measure appears in principle to be this: that
+the classes dependent upon manual labour for their livelihood have too
+many hands for the work there is to do; that those who do get work toil
+too long; and that both evils would be remedied by restricting the hours
+of labour, more men thus finding employment and all working well within
+their strength.
+
+Against these points may be set others: that England has already been
+severely affected by competition with countries where the hours are
+longer and the pay less; that any further restriction of hours without a
+corresponding reduction of pay would be ruinous to our trade; and that
+it is highly probable that the majority of workmen would prefer to
+labour for nine hours at their present wages than for eight hours at
+less. The last contention, of course, might be answered by an enactment
+fixing not only the hours to be worked but the wages to be paid. If this
+is wished for, it should be clearly put; but before any step is taken
+towards either such measure, several points concerning each, which now
+appear more than doubtful, should be made clear.
+
+A fallacy underlying much of the contention in favour of any such
+enactment is the idea that the community is divided into two distinct
+classes--the producing and the consuming. As a fact, there are no
+producers who do not consume, though there are some consumers who do not
+produce. But is even that an unmixed evil? There is a further fallacy
+which arbitrarily divides us into capitalists and labourers; but every
+man who can purchase the result of another's labour is a capitalist, and
+that much-denounced person will never be got rid of as long as it is
+easier to buy than to make.
+
+A third class which secures the condemnation of many is "the
+middle-man." It is easy to denounce him, but he is a necessity at once
+of commerce and of comfort. If one wants some coffee at breakfast, he
+cannot go to Java for the berry, the West Indies for the sugar, the
+dairy-farm for the milk, and the Potteries for the cup from which to
+drink. So far from the middle-man unduly increasing the price of those
+articles, he lessens it by dealing in bulk with what it would pay
+neither the producer nor the purchaser to deal with in small quantities;
+and not only lessens the price but, in regard to the commodities of a
+distant land, renders it practically possible for us to have them at
+all.
+
+It is equally useless to rail at competition as if it were inherently
+evil, for there will be competition as long as men exist to struggle for
+supremacy. And competition keeps the world alive, as the tide prevents
+the sea from stagnating. Occasionally the waves break their bounds, and
+loss and tribulation result; but the power for good must not be ignored,
+because the power for evil is sometimes prominent.
+
+To talk of the working classes as if they thought and acted in a body is
+another delusion. Not only this. The frequent assumption that somebody
+or other can speak on behalf of "the people" is a mistake. When it is
+done, one is entitled to ask what the phrase means? "The people" are the
+whole body of the population, and no one section, even if a majority has
+a right to exclusively claim the title. In legislating, regard must be
+had to the interests of all and not to those of a part, however
+numerous; and this brings us straight to the question of interfering by
+enactment with the price or the amount of labour.
+
+It is curious to note that the demand which is now being raised by some
+Trade Unionists on behalf of labour is similar in principle to that
+which was used for centuries by the propertied classes against labour.
+The Statute of Labourers, passed in the reign of Edward III., fixed
+wages in most precise fashion, settling that of a master mason, for
+instance, at fourpence and of journeymen masons at threepence a day. And
+as lately as only eight years after George III. came to the throne, all
+master tailors in London and for five miles round were forbidden under
+heavy penalties from giving, and their workmen from accepting, more than
+2s. 7½d. a day--except in the case of a general mourning. Subsequently,
+statesmen grew more wise, and, in the closing years of last century, the
+younger Pitt refused to support a bill to regulate the wages of
+labourers in husbandry. But it is singular that, whereas Adam Smith
+could say that "whenever the Legislature attempts to regulate the
+difference between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always
+the masters," to-day it is the workmen who promise to become so.
+
+If it be replied that it is State interference with the hours alone and
+not with the wages that is demanded, it may be submitted that if the one
+is done it will be a hardship to the worker rather than a boon if the
+other be not attempted. For, if a man, by working nine hours a day,
+could earn, say, 27s. a week, it is obvious that for eight hours a day
+he would not earn more in the same period than 24s., unless Parliament
+insisted that he should receive the higher sum for the less work. But is
+Parliament likely to do anything of the kind; if it did do it, would it
+be found to be practicable; and, if it were found to be practicable,
+would it be just?
+
+Parliament is not likely to do anything of the kind, because the
+experience of centuries has taught us that it is impossible to fix wages
+by statute. It was tried over and over again, first by enactments
+applying to the whole country, and then by regulations for each county,
+settled by the local justices of the peace; but, though the experiment
+was backed by all the forces of law, it broke down so utterly that in
+time it had to be got rid of.
+
+Even if the return could be secured of a majority to Parliament pledged
+to the proposal, would it be likely to be any more practicable to-day
+than it was in olden times? We are now an open market for the world. If
+hours were lessened and wages not reduced, imported articles from
+foreign countries would become much cheaper than our own goods, and
+would be bought to the detriment of English workers. Is it proposed by
+the promoters of a compulsory eight-hours working day that we should
+have Protection once more, and a prohibitory tariff placed upon all
+manufactured goods brought from abroad in order to keep up the price of
+English articles?
+
+And, further, if it were practicable, would it be just? It would be
+unjust to the employers, who would have to pay present prices for
+lessened work; it would be unjust to the toilers, in that it would
+prevent them from making a higher income by working more; and it would
+be unjust to the consumers, in making them give a greater price for the
+commodities they required. Those who propose the compulsory eight hours
+would presumably wish wages to be maintained at the present standard; it
+would hardly be a popular cry if it would have the effect of bringing
+wages down.
+
+If the Legislature is to interfere at all in this direction, the old
+proposal had better be put forward at once--
+
+
+     Eight hours' work, eight hours' play,
+     Eight hours' sleep, and eight shillings a day.
+
+
+This, at least, would have the merit of simplicity, and the more
+comprehensive proposal is as just and as practicable as the limited one
+now put forward. But even as to the limited one, it would be well to
+know how far and to what persons it would be applied. If the answer is
+"The working classes," the further question is "How are these to be
+defined?" Sailors, for instance, are working men, but no one would
+seriously propose to apply the eight hours' system to them. Granting
+they form an extreme exception, how are we to deal with shopkeepers and
+all whom they employ? The shopkeepers may be put aside as "capitalists"
+or "middle men," and, therefore, undeserving of sympathy or
+consideration; but those behind their counters are distinctly workers.
+Are they all to be included in the eight hours' proposal? If so, either
+one of two things: the shops will be shut sixteen hours out of the
+twenty-four, or their keepers will have to employ half as many hands
+again as they now do. "Good for the unemployed" may be replied, but who
+would have to pay for the additional labour? The consumers, of course,
+for no law is going to be passed keeping tea and sugar, hats and coats
+at their present price; and it would be those that live by weekly wages
+who would thereby suffer the most. And if, in order to obviate such
+consequences, all who work in shops were to be excluded from the
+benefits of an Eight Hours Act, it would be grossly unjust that tens of
+thousands of toilers, as much entitled to consideration as those
+employed in any factory or mill, should be kept at work in order to
+minister to the convenience of their fellows, set free from a portion of
+their labour by the action of Parliament.
+
+And this leads to a consideration of the proposal that all shops, with
+certain limited exceptions, shall be closed at a given hour. For the
+general reasons applicable to other employments, any such proposition
+ought to be strongly opposed. It would be a grievous hardship to the
+smaller tradesmen, with many of whom the best chance of making a living
+is after the great establishments have closed, and an intolerable
+nuisance to the working classes who can only shop at what a legislator
+might consider a late hour. If attempted to be put in operation, it
+would necessitate the creation of an army of informers and inspectors to
+see that it was not evaded, and it would create an amount of annoyance
+to honest and hard-working traders for which no expected benefits from
+it could compensate. The small tradesman, threatened by the co-operative
+society on the one side and the "monster emporium" on the other, has
+enough to do to live, without being harassed by a law which he would be
+tempted constantly to evade, and which, if not evaded, might prove his
+ruin.
+
+Much the same argument may be used concerning a point which, if the
+State interferes with the hours of labour, is certain to be raised, for
+it would have to be plainly stated whether all men would be forbidden
+under penalty to work overtime. If any such proposal is to be made, how
+is it to be carried out? Are we to have an additional body of
+inspectors, prying into every man's house to see whether extra work was
+being done; or is the hateful system of "the common informer" to be
+revived for the special benefit of working men?
+
+The argument is not weakened by the fact that, in various directions,
+not only has the Legislature passed enactments interfering with the
+amount and the price of labour, but that some of these continue in
+active operation. By means of the Factory Acts, for instance, it has
+directly intervened for the protection of women and children, and in so
+doing has been acting within that part of its duty which demands that it
+shall stand between the unprotected and overwhelming power. But there is
+no strict parallel between the case of the adult males of the working
+classes and that of those women and children who have to toil. The
+former have again and again shown their power of preserving their own
+interests by combination; and the evils of State interference where it
+can possibly be avoided appear sufficient to induce the belief that it
+is to combination that the working classes ought still to trust. If they
+cannot by this means put down overtime--and as yet they have not been
+able to do so--they cannot expect their countrymen to raise prices and
+run the risk of commercial ruin by doing for them what they ought to be
+able to do for themselves.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV.--SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE WITH PROPERTY?
+
+
+Having dealt with the manner in which the State interferes with labour,
+which to most is their only property, it is necessary to consider how it
+deals with capital, which is the fruit of labour, and how it thus
+interferes with some of what are termed "the rights of property."
+
+This has been done in order to avoid greater ills, as in the case of the
+fixing of fair rents by judicial courts in Ireland and certain districts
+of the Highlands of Scotland; in others to prevent endless dispute and
+loss, as in the disposal, in specified proportions, of the personal
+property of those who die without a will; in a further series to prevent
+a virtual monopoly from becoming tyrannous, as in the compulsion of
+railway companies to run certain third-class trains, and not to charge
+beyond a stated fare, or the restriction of the profits of gas companies
+to 10 per cent. unless a specified reduction in price is made to the
+consumers; in others, yet, for the supposed advantage of a class, as in
+the custom of primogeniture, which gives all real property (that is,
+land) to the eldest son of a father who dies intestate; and, in others,
+for the presumed benefit of the community, at the expense of individual
+efforts, as in the limitation of the duration of patents for inventions
+to seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years, and of copyright in books to
+forty-two years from the date of publication, or for the author's life
+and seven years after, whichever of these terms may be the longer.
+
+As to the first three points--the fixing of fair rents in Ireland and
+the Highlands, the due division of the personal property of those who
+die without a will, and the limitation of the power of virtual
+monopolies--there is no need at this day to argue, for all are
+irrevocable. As to the fourth, there is no practical disagreement among
+leading politicians on both sides regarding the desirability of doing
+away with the custom of primogeniture, as enforced by law. But as to the
+fifth, it may be submitted that the State goes too far or not far
+enough.
+
+Our legislators have been exceedingly tender towards every description
+of property except that created by certain of the highest phases of
+brain-power. If a man invents a machine which may save millions to the
+community, he loses all specific property in his invention after a given
+period of years; if he writes a book which may elevate mankind, his
+family are similarly condemned after a certain period to forfeit all
+claim upon the fruits of his labour. But if, instead of putting his
+brain to such uses, he merely makes a machine or lends a book for hire,
+there is no law to step in and deprive him of the profits if either
+machine or book lasts a century.
+
+Why this difference? The theory appears to be that the community is
+entitled to profit after a certain period by the brains of its members,
+when used in the creative or inventive direction; but if the claim be
+good, has not the State an equal right to profit after a similar period
+by the brains of its members when used in trading ways? Why should
+brains exercised in one direction be handicapped in comparison with
+those exercised in another? The answer may be that the inventor or
+author employs no capital, that the trader does, and that, therefore,
+whatever profit the former is allowed to make is a profit upon nothing,
+while in the latter case the profit is directly upon the capital
+employed, which ought not to be interfered with.
+
+But this is to adopt the fallacy that capital is necessarily the same
+thing as money. The capital of an inventor or an author is his brains,
+which he expends upon his invention or his book; and the community has
+exactly the same right to deprive the widow and the orphan of a fortune
+because it was made by a lucky speculation, for instance, forty-two
+years before, as of their property in a book because it was published
+that length of time previous. It is true that the State does not fully
+exercise this right, and protects the family of the mere money-maker
+while it despoils that of the brain-worker; but the principle is one
+which contains larger possibilities than the former have yet realized.
+
+The argument that it is for the benefit of the community that only a
+certain amount of time should be given to the inventor or the author in
+which to make a profit is dangerous, because it can so easily be applied
+to other species of property. Why not to the body of the machine as well
+as to its principle, why not to the pages of the book as well as to what
+they contain? And even if it is never pushed so far, there are certain
+species of property now protected by the law which will not improbably
+be attacked upon this same ground of "the benefit of the community"
+before very long; and it is difficult to see how they can be defended as
+long as the statutes affecting copyright and patents exist.
+
+The most striking of such kinds of property is that in minerals. A man
+buys an estate for farming, grazing, or, it may be, purposes of
+pleasure. Some time afterwards minerals are found beneath it, and,
+though he has neither placed them there nor may assist to get them out,
+he is privileged to charge "mining royalties" upon every ton that is
+raised as long as there is any to be obtained. Why should not his power
+in this direction be limited? He takes everything and gives nothing; the
+author or inventor gives everything and takes little. It would be as
+much for "the benefit of the community" to have the former's minerals
+after a given period, with no reward to himself, as to have the latter's
+books or machines. Why, then, should bullion be carefully protected and
+brains despoiled? If it be replied that when a man has bought a plot of
+ground it is his to the centre of the earth at one side and to the sky
+on the other, may it not be submitted that the former portion of the
+right ought to be restricted, while the latter certainly does not exist,
+for the law steps in at point after point to control his use of the land
+between the surface and the sky?
+
+The State, therefore, interferes with property, as it is, in a most
+material degree: instances of such interference have been scattered
+through these pages, and the tendency of the future is likely to be
+towards more than less interference. And there is hardly any that can be
+proposed, even of the extremest kind, for which it would not be possible
+to find a precedent.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV.--OUGHT THE STATE TO FIND FOOD AND WORK FOR ALL?
+
+
+The State thus interfering with both capital and labour, it is sometimes
+contended that its duties ought to be so extended as to find food and
+work for all. There is a captivating sound about the proposition which
+has commended it to many without a due weighing of the probable results.
+It is a matter upon which a hasty generalization, though springing from
+the purest motives, may do vast harm, and is one, therefore, which all
+ought most carefully to consider before expressing an opinion upon it.
+
+Cardinal Manning, in an article published in the winter of 1887, carried
+the theory of the public duty of feeding the hungry to its extremest
+point in these words--"All men are bound by natural obligations, if they
+can, to feed the hungry. But it may be said that granting the obligation
+in the giver does not prove a right in the receiver. To which I answer
+that the obligation to feed the hungry springs from the natural right of
+every man to life, and to the food necessary for the sustenance of life.
+So strict is this natural right that it prevails over all positive laws
+of property. Necessity has no law, and a starving man has a natural
+right to his neighbour's bread."
+
+With all deference, the last sentence must be stated to be false, both
+in logic and morals. If it were true, it would justify immediate raids
+by the starving upon the nearest baker's shop, and one wonders what the
+Cardinal would say if he happened to be the baker. Granting that every
+one has a right to live, there is no equivalent right to live at other
+people's expense. It is true that, by our Poor Law, a system has been
+created by which no one need starve, but that does not justify the theft
+of bread. There is a preliminary question to be put even in the case of
+the starving, and that is as to why they are in that condition. If it be
+because they have been idle, or drunken, or generally worthless, as in
+many cases it is, the mere fact that they are starving does not entitle
+them to sack a baker's shop. They will be fed by the Poor Law if they
+take the necessary steps, but if they are able-bodied they will have to
+work for their food; and as most human beings have to do the same, where
+is the hardship?
+
+It will be replied by some that the Poor Law works harshly towards the
+deserving poor, but that is an argument for amendment, not for abolition
+or indiscriminate extension. And if it be further said that the food
+supplied is meagre and the lodgings rough, it must be remembered that
+the poor-rate is paid by a very large number whose food is no more
+plentiful and whose lodgings are certainly worse. As for the argument
+that some people starve rather than "enter the house," it is not easy to
+see what relief could be given by the State without infringing that
+spirit.
+
+But there is a question most intimately affecting this matter which,
+though of the highest importance, cannot be discussed here as it
+deserves, and that is the question of population, concerning which Mill
+truly says, "Every one has a right to live. We will suppose this
+granted. But no one has a right to bring creatures into life, to be
+supported by other people. Whoever means to stand upon the first of
+these rights must renounce all pretension to the last. If a man cannot
+support even himself unless others help him, those others are entitled
+to say that they do not also undertake the support of any offspring
+which it is physically possible for him to summon into the world.... It
+would be possible for the State to guarantee employment at ample wages
+to all who are born. But if it does this, it is bound in
+self-protection, and for the sake of every purpose for which government
+exists, to provide that no person shall be born without its consent....
+It cannot, with impunity, take the feeding upon itself and leave the
+multiplying free."
+
+And so, while the Poor Law ought to be carried out in the humanest and
+most liberal fashion compatible with the interests of the poor who pay
+the rates as well as the poor who benefit by them, any movement for so
+extending it as to bring more persons under its operation, and thus to
+further pauperize the community, would be dangerous. We had enough of
+that under the system swept away by the Act of 1834, the hideous
+demoralization caused by which should be studied to-day by those who are
+eager for a freer dispensation of State relief.
+
+The arguments against the State going further than at present in the
+direction of giving food to all are equally good as against providing
+work for all. Relief works have ever been centres of corruption and
+waste of the worst type, while "national workshops" have not been so
+brilliant a success in the form of dockyards and arsenals as to warrant
+an extension of the system to all the trades we practise.
+
+The theory that the State is bound to provide work for all was never
+more concisely put than in the original draft of the French Republican
+Constitution after the Revolution of 1848, the seventh article of which
+ran thus: "The right of labour is the right which every man has to live
+by his labour. It is the duty of Society, through the channels of
+production and other means at its command, hereafter to be organized, to
+provide work for such able-bodied men as cannot find it for themselves."
+But even a Government imbued with Socialistic tendencies found this to
+be much too strong, and modified it thus: "It is the duty of Society by
+fraternal assistance to protect the lives of necessitous citizens,
+either by finding them work as far as possible, or by providing for
+those who are incapacitated for work and who have no families to support
+them." Yet the modified form was not found to work well in actual
+practice, and the history of the failure of the French National
+Workshops of 1848 remains as an eloquent testimony to the fact that the
+State ought to interfere as little as possible with industrial
+enterprises and private concerns.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI.--HOW OUGHT WE TO DEAL WITH SOCIALISM?
+
+
+Even the considerations already put forward do not exhaust the social
+question, for only in the briefest fashion have been touched the
+important points which that question involves. And there is yet left to
+be discussed the attitude which ought to be adopted towards that body of
+opinions upon public affairs vaguely known as "Socialism."
+
+The attitude of some is simply denunciatory, for there is a class of
+politician which always imputes base motives to those with whom it
+disagrees, and which is so proficient in abuse that it apparently thinks
+it a waste of time to argue. That class has been painfully in evidence
+in regard to the Socialists. It is considered that--so true is the old
+proverb that if you give a dog a bad name you may as well hang
+him--nothing more need be done respecting a new and therefore unpopular
+doctrine than to so label it as to ensure its repudiation by honest but
+unthinking men. And thus the name "Socialist" is applied as equivalent
+to thief; and men utterly ignorant of what the words imply link
+Socialist to Nihilist, Communist to Anarchist, as if each were equal to
+each, and all therefore equal to one another.
+
+This has been the favourite device of the opponents of all new
+doctrines, political or social, philosophical or religious. To be
+ridiculed, to be persecuted, even to be slain has been the fate of the
+would-be elevators of their kind, as the roll of fame, which includes
+the names of Socrates and Galileo, Luther and Savonarola, Voltaire and
+Roger Bacon, Mazzini and Darwin will testify. The Socialists now are
+hardly called worse names than were applied to geologists fifty years
+ago, and to Evolutionists but the other day. Atheists, of course, they
+have been named, for Atheist is the epithet customarily applied by
+ignorant and bigoted men, who have made God in their own image, to those
+more zealous in endeavouring to raise humanity.
+
+Against any such method of dealing with public questions all fair-minded
+men should strongly, and without ceasing, protest. And as Socialism is
+spreading among the masses, it is in the highest degree important that
+the fact should be studied calmly and without prejudice. Hard words
+break no bones, and contumely tends to strengthen any cause in which
+there is an atom of good.
+
+Socialism, therefore, should be dealt with in an inquiring and not an
+abusive spirit, and with the determination to accept from it whatever of
+good to the community we may find it to contain. There is another method
+which Prince Bismarck has been trying for years, and with the signal
+lack of success that always comes from trying to stamp out an opinion by
+force of law. In presumed defence of "society" and "order"--two
+excellent things, but often the excuse for despots to perpetrate cruel
+injustice upon the liberty-loving and the poor--he has secured law after
+law for the purpose of "putting down Socialism;" men have been torn from
+their homes because of their opinions; the right of public meeting has
+been placed at the mercy of the police; the press has been gagged, and
+every means taken to stamp out a body of opinions some of which even the
+German Chancellor himself cannot help sharing. And with what result?
+That, after ten years of this wretched work, the Socialists--though
+prevented from public meeting, speaking, or writing--are multiplying in
+Germany in an ever-growing proportion; that in Berlin, the capital of
+the empire, they number tens of thousands of electors as their
+adherents; and that Prince Bismarck is ever asking for extended powers
+to crush a force which, in its free state, as yielding to the touch as
+water, is mighty when compressed.
+
+With an even greater power of police, and no restriction at all from the
+laws, the Czar has failed as signally to extirpate Nihilism. Ideas
+cannot be killed in this fashion, though their holders can be and are
+rendered more dangerous. Mill certainly considered that "the dictum
+that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant
+falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into
+commonplaces, but which all experience refutes;" and he was of opinion
+that "no reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been
+extirpated in the Roman Empire." But it may be submitted that, when
+arguing about the persecution of ideas to-day, we must not forget the
+immense additional force given to them by means of printing. The secret
+presses of Germany and Russia "spread the light;" and there is nothing
+so certain as that the very charm which comes from the possession of
+that which is prohibited aids in strengthening a movement which is under
+the ban of the law.
+
+But, it may be said, the efforts of those who would attempt to put down
+Socialism are not to be considered in the light of political
+persecution, and are not to be compared with religious persecution, for
+they are directed solely to the suppression of "anti-social" doctrines,
+the adoption of which would be fatal not only to States as they now
+exist, but to society itself. A more precise definition must be asked,
+however, of the doctrines thus described. Though opposed to an eight
+hours' bill, to land nationalization, and to national workshops, leading
+points in the Socialist programme, I cannot conceive how, if they were
+all adopted within the next year, such dire results could from them
+flow.
+
+Every new body of doctrine which gives hope to the masses and threatens
+the domination of the privileged among men has been described with equal
+virulence by its antagonists. Read the charges upon which Christians
+were condemned under the Roman Empire; read those brought against Luther
+and his co-reformers when first Protestantism threatened the Church of
+Rome; remember those thrown at the Puritans when they tried to secure
+for Englishmen liberty of thought and action. They were in every case
+that the doctrines were anti-social; that if adopted they would wreck
+the then condition of society; and that they were in the highest degree
+perilous to the State. For it is the fate of all preachers of a new
+doctrine to be treated as rogues until their persecutors are proved to
+be fools.
+
+Admittedly there are some theories advanced by men calling themselves
+Socialists which, if adopted, would seriously conflict with the existing
+order of society; but to condemn every proposal put forward as Socialist
+because there are Socialists who have said strange, and sometimes
+stupid, things would be monstrous. It is a controversial trick of a
+peculiarly poor order to attempt to hold the leaders of any movement
+responsible for the hare-brained ideas of some of their followers. Not
+to repudiate them is not to signify agreement, or our party leaders
+would possess some of the most extravagant doctrines ever conceived by
+man.
+
+Besides, one must always sever the conventional beliefs from the real.
+No sensible person considers Christianity untrue because even the
+churches would regard him as a madman who literally adopted the
+injunction to sell all that he had to give to the poor. In any body of
+doctrines there are always some which its adherents hold, but do not
+stand by.
+
+And, therefore, charity as well as common sense demands that the tall
+talk on both sides--for there is not a great deal to choose between them
+in this respect--should cease; but the trick is too easily learned to be
+quickly dropped. The idea of the well-to-do that all would go smoothly
+if it were not for "agitators" and "mob-orators" is as absurd as the
+contention of the Socialist that most of our ills are due to the
+"profit-monger." Your "agitator" or your "mob-orator" would have not the
+least influence if he did not voice the feelings, the longings, and the
+hopes of his silent friends. And as for the "profit-monger," is not the
+workman who is better off than the poorest among his fellows deserving
+the name?
+
+Let us have fair play all round to ideas as well as to men. If, in the
+supposed interests of society, every movement designed to upraise the
+poor is suppressed, the tendency must be to force men towards Anarchism
+and Nihilism, by causing them to wish to destroy that order of things
+which to them acts so unjustly. Despair is a fatal counsellor, and those
+who would identify the welfare of the State with that of the mere
+money-getter are its frequent cause. It is easier to raise the devil
+than to lay him, and appeals to the merely animal instinct in
+man--whether to protect his own property or to take that of others,
+with a complete ignoring of his duties as well as his rights--must end
+in ruin and shame.
+
+"There is among the English working classes," once observed Sir Robert
+Peel, "too much suffering and too much perplexity. It is a disgrace and
+a danger to our civilization. It is absolutely necessary that we should
+render the condition of the manual labourer less hard and less
+precarious. We cannot do everything, but something may be effected, and
+something ought to be done." Though nearly forty years have passed since
+that statesman's death, we are still groping blindly for the something
+which ought to be done for the poor; and such strength as Socialism
+possesses is derived from the general spread of the feeling which Peel
+put into words, and which no politician--much more no statesman--can
+afford to neglect.
+
+And that is why the politics of the future will be largely affected by
+the social questions now coming to the front. From the opinions of many
+who are pressing them forward one may profoundly differ, but justice
+demands that all they advance should be examined without prejudice, and
+with the determination to accept that which is good, from whatever
+quarter it may come.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII.--WHAT SHOULD BE THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME?
+
+
+While the social problem, however, is developing, we have the political
+problem to face; and, therefore, the immediate programme of the Liberal
+party now demands consideration. In some detail have been presented the
+arguments from a Liberal point upon all the great public questions which
+are either ripe or ripening for settlement. It has not been possible to
+go minutely into every point involved; a broad outline of each subject
+has had to suffice; but it may be trusted that each has been
+sufficiently explained for us now to consider which should occupy the
+forefront in the Liberal platform.
+
+Mr. Bright observed, in days not long since, when he was honoured by
+every man in the party as one of its most trusted leaders, that he
+disliked programmes. What he preferred, it was evident, was that when
+some great question--such as the repeal of the Corn Laws or the
+extension of the suffrage, with both of which his name will be ever
+identified--should thrust itself to the front by force of circumstances,
+it should be faced by the Liberal party and dealt with on its merits;
+and what he opposed, it was equally evident, was the formulation of any
+cut-and-dried programme, containing a number of points to be accepted as
+a shibboleth by every man calling himself Liberal or Radical, and by its
+hide-bound propensity tending to retard real progress.
+
+The Irish question is one of those great matters which has thrust itself
+to the front by force of circumstances, which should be faced by the
+Liberal party and dealt with on its merits, and which, until it is so
+faced and dealt with, will stand in the path of any real reforms. The
+evil effects of the discontent of four millions of people at our very
+doors are not to be got rid of by shutting our eyes to them; and the
+intensification of those evil effects which is to-day going on is a
+matter which must engage the attention of every Liberal.
+
+But, out of dislike for any cut-and-dried programme of several measures
+to be accepted wholesale and without question, the party must not be
+allowed to drift into aimlessness. As long as it exists it must exist
+for work, and its fruit must not be phrases but facts. Liberalism can
+never return to the days when it munched the dry remainder biscuit of
+worn-out Whiggery. A hide-bound programme may be a bad thing, but
+nothing worse can be imagined than the string of airy nothings which
+used to do duty for a policy among the latter-day Whigs. Take the
+addresses issued by them at the general election of 1852 as an instance,
+and which have been effectively summarized thus:--"They promised (in the
+words of Sir James Graham) 'cautious but progressive reform,' and (in
+those of Sir Charles Wood) 'well-advised but certain progress.' Lord
+Palmerston said he trusted the new Liberal Government would answer 'the
+just expectation of the country,' and Lord John Russell pledged it to
+'rational and enlightened progress.'"
+
+Now, in these days, we want something decidedly more definite than that,
+and, if our leaders could offer us nothing better, we should have either
+to find other leaders or abandon our aims. Happily we need do neither,
+for the Liberal chiefs, with Mr. Gladstone at their head, are prepared
+to advance with the needs of the times, and to advocate those measures
+which the circumstances demand and their principles justify.
+
+In the forefront of our efforts at this moment stands, and must continue
+to stand until it is settled, the question of self-government for
+Ireland. Stripped of all quarrel upon point of detail, the Liberal party
+is pledged, while upholding the unity of the Empire and the supremacy of
+the Imperial Parliament, to give the sister country a representative
+body sitting in Dublin to deal with exclusively Irish affairs. The day
+cannot be long delayed when an attempt must be made to place the local
+government of Ireland upon a sounder and broader basis than at present.
+When it arrives, the Liberal party has its idea ready. Details can be
+compromised; the principle cannot be touched. For Liberals are convinced
+that, by whatever name it may be called, and by whatever party it may be
+introduced, Home Rule must come, and that, for the sake of all the
+interests involved, Imperial and Irish, it will be in the highest degree
+desirable to grant it frankly and fully, with due regard to the
+interests concerned.
+
+Linked with this point is another regarding Ireland upon which the
+Liberal party will entertain not the smallest doubt. The Coercion Act
+has been used for partisan purposes by dependent and often incompetent
+magistrates, and it must be repealed. Upon this point there can be no
+compromise. Every man hoping to be returned by Liberal votes at the next
+election must pledge himself to the immediate, total, and unconditional
+repeal of the Crimes Act of 1887.
+
+The next item in the accepted Liberal programme is the disestablishment
+of the Church in Wales, as well as of the Scottish Kirk. Each is a
+purely domestic matter which ought to be settled according to the wishes
+of the majority of the people affected. As to the wishes of Wales, no
+one can have a doubt; and though the declaration of Scotland, through
+its representatives, is not so emphatic, it is sufficiently clear for
+Liberals to support the demand.
+
+But, after all, these points touch only Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.
+England is the largest portion of this kingdom, and its claims must not
+be ignored. A great Parisian editor used to say that the description of
+a woman run over on the Boulevards was of more interest to his readers
+than that of a battle on the Nile. It would be well if politicians would
+take this idea to heart. Little use is it to talk of the despotism
+practised in Ireland, of the hardships endured by the crofters in
+Scotland, and of the injustice done to the tithepayers in Wales, if we
+are not prepared to apply the same principles to London as to Limerick,
+to Chester as to Cardigan, and to Liverpool as to the Lews. The average
+man will not be satisfied of the sincerity of those who keep their eyes
+fixed upon distant places, and are full of sympathy for the oppressed
+who are afar off, but can spare no time for the grievances existing at
+their doors.
+
+And as, therefore, if Liberalism is to be again in the ascendant in the
+councils of the Empire, England must be won, it is well to emphasize the
+contention that England will never be won by a party which ignores her
+wants. Home Rule for Ireland, disestablishment for Scotland and Wales,
+are good things, and they will have to be granted when our majority
+comes; but what will that majority do for England?
+
+Without attempting to lay down a programme, it may be said that there is
+one English problem to which Liberalism will have at once to apply
+itself, and that is the problem of the land. The time is past for
+talking comfortable platitudes upon this matter, for we find that Tories
+can do that as glibly as Liberals, and with the same lack of good
+result. The very least that can be demanded--in addition to the
+abolition of the custom of primogeniture and an extensive simplification
+of the process of transfer--is a thorough reform of the laws affecting
+settlement, the taxing of land at death in the same proportion as other
+descriptions of property, the placing of the land tax upon a basis more
+remunerative to the Exchequer, and a large measure of leasehold
+enfranchisement. And when candidates talk in future of being in favour
+of "land reform," they must be definitely pinned down as to their views
+upon such points as these.
+
+That Free Trade will remain a plank in the Liberal platform, not to be
+dropped or tampered with, goes without saying. It is a point as much
+beyond question as the existence of Parliament itself, and concerning it
+as much cannot be observed as regarding the latter. For, while our trade
+system must remain free, both Houses stand in need of reform. The Lords,
+in Mr. John Morley's phrase, must be mended or ended, and the path of
+legislative progress in the Commons made more smooth. The laws in every
+way affecting the return of members to the latter likewise stand sorely
+in need of reform, and that reform cannot be ignored by the Liberal
+party.
+
+Further, Liberals are agreed that localities shall have greater power in
+various directions, and upon the liquor traffic in especial, of
+deciding upon their own affairs. The tendency of recent days has been to
+take these out of the hands of those most intimately concerned, and to
+vest supreme power in a body of Government clerks at Whitehall. That is
+a tendency which must be reversed. We are advocating decentralization in
+regard to Ireland; we are being led to advocate it in regard to Wales
+and Scotland; England must similarly be benefited, and the red-tape of
+Whitehall unwound from our purely local concerns.
+
+Peace and Retrenchment must continue to be inscribed on the Liberal
+banner as well as Reform. Preference for international arbitration over
+war must distinguish our party; a determination to be as free as
+possible from all entangling engagements with foreign powers must always
+be with us. And there must ever be displayed a resolve to place the
+Government service upon the same business-like and efficient basis as
+private concerns, to get rid of the notion that it is work to be lightly
+undertaken and highly paid, and to emphasize the contention that the
+taxbearer shall have full value from every one of his servants for the
+wages he pays.
+
+Above all, the greatest care must be taken by every Liberal to
+preserve--aye, and to extend--individual liberty. Men cannot dance in
+fetters, and all enactments which unnecessarily hinder the development
+of private enterprise, and all traditions which interfere with the
+fullest enjoyment of the rights of speech and action, must be swept
+away.
+
+While thus giving our attention to the more purely political questions
+as they arise, Liberals must never forget that the poor we always have
+with us. Ours is a gospel of hope for the oppressed; it must equally be
+a gospel of hope for the hard-working. We want our working men to be
+civil, not servile; our working women to use courtesy, and not a
+curtsey. We wish to see the end of a system by which a bow is rewarded
+with a blanket and a curtsey with coal. The man who too frequently bends
+his back is likely to become permanently affected with a stoop, and the
+old order of hat-touching, bowing, and scraping must disappear. We do
+not deny that it is right that men should respect others, but it is
+often forgotten that it is equally right that they should respect
+themselves.
+
+In dealing with things social, as well as things political, we must
+always remember that it is flesh and blood with which in the result we
+have to deal. Some thinkers ignore sentiment, do not believe in
+kindness, and treat men like machines, forgetting that even machines
+require oil. It is not for philosophers with homes and armchairs and a
+settled income to ask whether life is worth living; that question is for
+the poor and the lowly and the down-trodden, to whom the struggle for
+existence is not a matter for theorizing or moral-drawing, but is a
+never-ending, heart-breaking, soul-destroying reality.
+
+So, if Liberalism is to live, it must be liberal in fact as well as in
+name. A Liberal who talks of equal rights on the platform and swears at
+his servants at home, who waxes wroth against a national oppressor and
+treats those poorer than himself like serfs, is as little deserving of
+respect as a Liberal policy which solely considers the externals of
+either liberty or life. A programme based upon such a policy must fail,
+and deserves to fail; and if we are to have a platform at all, it must
+be one upon which the rich man and the son of toil can stand side by
+side.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII.--HOW IS THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME TO BE ATTAINED?
+
+
+It is natural to ask how, when the Liberal programme has been framed, it
+is to be attained. Measures no more come with wishing than winds with
+whistling; and if our principles are to be put into practice, it will
+only be by our joining those of similar mind.
+
+Not every politician, even if his ideas be sound, is a practical man.
+The disposition to insist that no bread is better than half a loaf is
+one that commends itself to me neither in business nor in daily life,
+but it is one upon which many a man of Liberal leanings acts, to the
+detriment of the principles he professes to hold dear. Insistence upon
+the one point to the exclusion of the ninety-nine, and readiness to join
+enemies who disagree on the whole hundred rather than friends who
+disagree on only the one, are qualities unpleasantly prominent in many
+otherwise worthy men. It cannot too often be urged that politics, like
+business or married life, can only be carried on by occasional
+give-and-take. The partner who persists in always having his own way;
+the husband who is ever asserting authority over his wife; and the
+politician who will never yield an iota to his friends--all are alike
+objectionable, and deserve no particle of consideration from those
+around them.
+
+A spurious independence is another hindrance in the path of progress.
+Faith without works is occasionally worth commendation in public life;
+but one must be certain that the faith is genuine, and for most
+political "independence," that cannot be claimed. Diseased vanity,
+disappointed ambition, and deliberate place-hunting have more to do with
+that kind of thing than devotion to principle. "The fact is that
+individualism is very often a mere cloak for selfishness; it is the name
+with which pedants justify the pragmatic intolerance which will not
+yield one jot of personal claim or unsatisfied vanity to secure the
+triumph of the noblest cause and the highest principles." When Mr.
+Chamberlain wrote those words he was undoubtedly right.
+
+Whenever, therefore, one is called upon to admire some outburst of
+independence which splits a political party or hinders the progress of a
+cause, he should look very closely at the history of those concerned. He
+should not forget that, just as there are people who are much too
+independent to touch their hats for civility, though they would for a
+sixpence, there are politicians who are far too spirited to stick to
+their party but not to bid for place. Happily these latter seem never
+able to avoid using certain stock phrases, which should put others on
+their guard. When a man says he prefers country to party, or vaunts that
+his motto is "measures not men," he lays himself open to just suspicion,
+because he talks as political impostors have long been accustomed to
+talk; when he proclaims his readiness to recognize the virtues of his
+enemies, you may be certain that he will speedily show himself keenly
+alive to the failings of his friends; and a politician never begins to
+boast that he is a representative and not a delegate until he has ceased
+to represent the opinions of those who sent him to Parliament.
+
+More estimable than these, but still people who must not be allowed to
+hamper the operations of the Liberal party, are the constitutional
+pedant and the rigid doctrinaire. Nothing is more lamentable than the
+endeavours of the former to prove by precedent that nothing ought to be
+done in the nineteenth century differently to how it was done in the
+seventeenth; and nothing more filled with the promise of disappointment
+than the theorizings of the latter as to what measures would secure us a
+perfect State.
+
+It is with persons as well as with principles that we have to deal, and
+in politics we must not despise the humblest instruments. History, like
+the coral reef, is made grain by grain and day by day, and often by
+agents as comparatively insignificant. The old idea that the people's
+leaders must come from "the governing classes," or, better still, "the
+governing families," does not harmonize with democratic institutions. As
+to "the governing families" part of it, that may be brushed aside at
+once as being as absurd in theory as it is untrue to all recent English
+history; for who have been our most brilliant and successful statesmen
+since the present fashion of constitutional government was established?
+Who were Walpole, Pitt, Burke, Fox, Canning, Peel, Cobden, Gladstone,
+and Disraeli? Even as this book is written the Tories in the House of
+Commons are nominally led by Mr. Smith, and practically by Mr. Goschen.
+The instinct of the people has taught them the best leaders, as it has
+taught them the best principles.
+
+A clear-headed working man is a better political counsellor than a
+muddle-minded peer. There are plenty of working men who are not
+clear-headed, as there are plenty of peers who are not muddled of mind;
+but the instinct of the mass is far more likely to be sound than that of
+the class. In the course of English history the masses have usually been
+right and the classes wrong. The former have been less selfish, more
+ready to redress injuries, and keener to oppose tyranny. And even where
+the masses have been in the wrong, it has often been because their
+instinctive sense of right has led them to sympathize with a man or a
+cause, undeserving of regard, but apparently exposed to the persecutions
+of the great.
+
+Thus, in order to make the Liberal cause succeed, zeal must be combined
+with unity and toleration with courage, and our energies must be so
+concentrated by organization as to make them most effective when battle
+is joined. For the private soldiers in the great army of progress, there
+is no advice so sedulously to be rejected as that of Talleyrand, "Above
+all, no zeal." If there is not within Liberals a burning desire to
+forward their principles, they have no right to complain if those
+principles stand still. A Liberal who is lukewarm is like a joint
+half-cooked--of no practical service until possessed of more heat; and
+it is the duty of every earnest man among us to keep the political oven
+at baking point.
+
+But with zeal there must be unity. Differences on details must not be
+allowed to separate friends. There is not always a sufficiency of
+tolerance displayed towards those who do not see eye to eye with the
+others. Agreement in principle is the pass-key which should open to all
+Liberals the door to unity with their brethren; divergence on detail
+should be settled inside. "Take heed," said Cromwell, "of being sharp,
+or too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object
+little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning
+matters of religion." To no modern Liberal can his principles be dearer
+than was his religion to Cromwell, and the great champion of liberty's
+words ought to be laid to heart by each one of us.
+
+With all toleration, there must be no lack of courage. It is not asked
+of most to make sacrifices in the Liberal cause, far less to become
+martyrs in its behalf; but unless the martyr-spirit remains to the
+party, ready for action should occasion arise, Liberalism will wither
+into wastedness. But even courage will fail of its result without
+concentration, for the undisciplined mass is no match for the
+disciplined army. To succeed, there must be organization; and if
+Liberals will not associate for common purposes they will deserve to be
+beaten. All holders of progressive principles ought to attach themselves
+to the Liberal Association of their own constituency; if there is a
+Radical Club as well, they cannot do better than join it; for the more
+links that exist between all sections of the party, the stronger will be
+the bond uniting them. Personal likes or dislikes ought not to affect
+men in the matter. A Liberal is not worthy the name who, because he is
+not asked to the house of the president of the local association,
+declines to join; and equally unworthy of it is he who, because he does
+not ask the president of the Radical Club to his own house, objects to
+put up for membership. Personal and social considerations of this kind
+are out of place in politics, and a man's freedom from them may almost
+be taken as a test of the reality of his Liberalism.
+
+There are many ready to criticize those who do a party's work, but who
+never lift a finger to assist their efforts. These are the beings who,
+at election times, hinder the helpers by carpings, who are never slow to
+assume a share of credit in case of victory, and are ever eager to throw
+the blame upon others in event of defeat. Battles are not won by such as
+these. Every Liberal to whom his principles are dear should show it by
+joining with his fellows, striving his hardest in his own constituency,
+and never ceasing to display in his life and by his works that
+Liberalism to him is not a name but a principle, increasingly dear as it
+is hampered by desertion, threatened with danger, or in peril of defeat.
+If he did that, there would be needed no further answer to the question,
+"How is the Liberal Programme to be attained?" for what was required
+would have been accomplished.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX.--IS PERFECTION IN POLITICS POSSIBLE?
+
+
+It is sometimes asked whether, after all the struggling of public life,
+perfection in politics is possible. But in what department of human
+affairs _is_ perfection possible? Is it in medicine? Mark the proportion
+of those born who die before they are five years old. Is it in science?
+The scientist is still engaged, as Newton was, in picking up shells on
+the shore of a vast ocean of knowledge which he is unable yet to
+navigate. Is it in religion? Ask the Christian and the Confucian, the
+Mahommedan and the Buddhist to define the word, before giving an answer.
+When medicine, and science, and religion have reached universally
+acknowledged perfection, politics may be hoped to follow in their wake;
+but until that period it is needless to expect it.
+
+The very idea that it is possible has been the cause of many delusions,
+and delusions are dangerous. Read Plato's "Republic," More's "Utopia,"
+and Harington's "Oceana," and you will perceive how far the ideal is
+removed from any conceivable real. It may be that from these works good
+has flowed, since the evident impossibility of making the whole plan of
+use has not prevented political thinkers taking from them such ideas as
+were practicable, and grafting these upon existing institutions, with
+benefit to the State. But the dreamy schemes of the eighteenth century,
+the influence of which has not yet died away, were of a different order.
+For, in the endeavour to change society at a stroke, blunders were made
+which have caused lasting injury; and these should teach us that the
+true ideal in politics is that which does not attempt to bend men, or
+break them if necessary, to suit the machine, but makes the machine to
+fit the men. The philosopher is a useful personage, but the attempt to
+rule men from a library customarily results in disaster. The problem of
+life cannot be solved like a proposition in Euclid; there, squares
+always are squares and circles never anything else; but in every-day
+existence the square is often forced to be circular by the rubbing off
+of the angles. And too often it will be found that the philosopher,
+because of his lack of practical acquaintance with his fellow men,
+exaggerates both what he knows and what he does: he blows a bubble and
+calls it the globe; lighting a candle, he thinks it the sun.
+
+All history teaches that the road to heaven does not lie through Acts of
+Parliament, and that under the best laws the saints would not be many
+and the sinners would be far from few. No more pernicious nonsense is
+talked than that all our social misery, crime, and degradation is due to
+bad laws. The political student cannot doubt that much misery may be
+mitigated, crime prevented, and degradation made impossible by good
+laws, and it is that knowledge which should stimulate every Liberal to
+lose no opportunity of improving the conditions under which we live. But
+it is to display an ignorance of human nature that is really lamentable,
+or a desire to flatter human weakness that is beneath contempt, to tell
+the people that, if only certain changes were made in the constitution
+of the State or of society, all would be well, none would suffer, and
+crime and poverty would be known only as traditions of the past.
+
+It is not necessary to assert the old theological dogma that, left to
+himself, man is irredeemably bad, in order to believe that a great many
+bearing the name are very far from good. There is, unhappily, hardly a
+family in the country that has not one black sheep--or, at the best, one
+speckled specimen--to deplore. Do we not all know the idle worthless son
+of good and hard-working parents, a curse to his own and to all with
+whom he comes in contact? The laws affecting him are the same as those
+which affect his brothers: they prosper, he fails. Why? Because they
+are worthy, he is worthless; and there is no conceivable state of
+society in which he could be, or ought to be, served as well as they.
+Certainly there are bad men who flourish, and good who wither away; but
+the political system which should prevent the possibility of this has
+not yet been invented--and never will be.
+
+Therefore it is one of the most dangerous of political delusions to
+believe that any possible reform can make all men prosperous and
+contented. It is just as likely as that this would be brought about by
+the universal practice of the old distich--
+
+
+     Early to bed and early to rise
+     Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,
+
+
+as if chimney sweeps, milkmen, and market gardeners had a monopoly of
+those excellent qualities. The possession of an ideal is a good thing,
+as long as it is not allowed to overshadow the real; and those whose
+ideal causes them to ignore the indolence and vice of their fellows are
+blind guides who would lead us into a ditch.
+
+Therefore, while perfection in politics will never be realized, and the
+belief that it can be is fraught with danger, it should be urged upon
+all to think out the possibilities of the future, and to have a
+political ideal at which to aim. Mine is a State in which all men shall
+be equal before the law, every one have a fair chance according to his
+virtues, his talents, and his industry, and none be advanced because of
+hereditary or legalized privilege. A State in which all men are free,
+and wherein there is a fair field and no favour, is that for which
+Liberals should strive. Even when it is secured we shall still have with
+us the idle and the vicious, for those specimens of humanity will never
+perish from out the land; but the workful and the sober-minded will have
+a better chance of success than they have to-day, and the State will be
+benefited thereby.
+
+Extension of individual liberty, abolition of inherited or other
+privilege--those points really sum up the Liberal ideal. If it be said
+that it does not promise to fill the people's stomachs, it must be
+replied that stomach-filling is not the special concern of political
+life. That is a matter for the people to accomplish; let us remove every
+legalized hindrance to their doing it by their own capacities, but when
+we have done that they must do the stomach-filling for themselves. The
+State may and does feed the unfortunate, but, if it is to feed the idle,
+it will have to make the idle work for their food. There is no necessity
+either in law or in morals to tax those who work for the advantage of
+those who do not; and the most perfect State will be that in which the
+lazy and worthless will be made to labour, and the toilers be protected
+from being by them despoiled.
+
+What we ask is equality of opportunity, and we have much to do before
+that can be obtained. There are some who say that they do not believe in
+elevating the working classes, because it would leave the ground floor
+of the social edifice untenanted. But the tenants are tired of being on
+the ground, and wish to see how the upper story justifies its existence,
+and in that they are right. With equality of opportunity, many to whom
+we are now called upon by convention to bow will sink to their proper
+level, while the men who work by brain or hands will acquire their
+rightful position in the social state. But without the fullest political
+liberty, this will never be attained, and we must strive jointly for
+both.
+
+The political ideal at which we should aim is embraced in the words of
+Lincoln--"that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
+shall not perish from the earth," and to that may be added that equality
+of opportunity shall be conceded to each one of us. Let us gain this,
+and as perfect a State as imperfect human nature can design or deserve
+will be ours.
+
+
+
+
+XL.--WHERE SHALL WE STOP?
+
+
+When the late Lord Shaftesbury was in the House of Commons, and was
+engaged in the apparently endless task of attempting to reform the
+factory laws, he brought in a bill to regulate the labour of children in
+calico-print works. He had already done much, but he wished to do more,
+and on being asked by his opponents, "Where will you stop?" he replied,
+"Nowhere, so long as any portion of this gigantic evil remains to be
+remedied."
+
+In the same spirit may be answered the question sometimes asked as to
+where Liberals will be prepared to stay the reforming hand. A period
+cannot be put to progress any more than a limit to literature, or to
+science a stopping-place. True, we have got rid of the greater
+tyrannies: divine right of kings, personal rule, borough-mongering--all
+are dead. We have got rid of the greater inequalities: purchase in the
+army, nomination in the civil service, have gone the way of the separate
+form at school, the distinctive tuft at the University, for the sons of
+peers. We have got rid of the old Tory idea that the people have nothing
+to do with the laws except to obey them; we now possess household, we
+may soon possess adult, suffrage. But are we, therefore, to do no more?
+Because we travel faster than our fathers, do we frown upon all
+improvements in locomotion? Because we no longer suffer from the Plague,
+the Sweating Sickness, and the Black Death, do the doctors sit with
+folded arms? No; for the motto of the race is progress, and until every
+tyranny, every iniquity, and every inequality which trouble us in
+public life are vanquished, we cannot in our conscience cease from
+attack.
+
+Remember always the saying of Turgot, the great French economist, "It is
+not error which opposes the progress of truth: it is indolence,
+obstinacy, the spirit of routine, everything that favours inaction."
+Much that hinders our advance comes from forgetfulness of what
+Liberalism has done, and what, therefore, it is still capable of doing.
+A politician once remarked, "Suppose that for but a month after the
+passing of any great measure of reform, such as the repeal of the Corn
+Laws, the extension of the suffrage, or the establishment of a national
+system of education, only the Liberals could have gained the benefit and
+the Tories been left outside, wouldn't the Tories have joined us in a
+hurry to help reap the advantage the Liberals had secured?" There is no
+doubt as to the answer; but even as the sun shines upon the unjust as
+well as upon the just, so the beneficent stream of Liberal legislation
+fertilizes the waste lands of Toryism equally with the possessions of
+those who have prepared its course.
+
+Yet it is this forgetfulness against which we have mainly to contend.
+The age in which we live is so distinguished for progressive sentiment,
+so noteworthy for the number and the magnitude of its reforms, that even
+Liberals are occasionally in danger of letting slip some of the good
+effects which struggle has won by nodding contentedly at the strides
+that have been taken, heedless of the enemy ever anxious to push back
+the shadow on the dial. Fortunately for the preservation of our
+liberties, the drowsiness is seldom allowed to glide into sleep, for an
+awakening is furnished by the premature shouts of triumph of those whose
+highest interest would be to remain silent, for it is only thus that
+success to them is possible.
+
+But while in the calm of supposed security, while, for instance,
+enjoying the belief that the Crown, as a governing power, is now in
+England non-existent, we are suddenly aroused by the argument that the
+possible feelings of the Sovereign with regard to a probable Irish
+Ministry are to be considered in antagonism to Home Rule; while we are
+indulging the hope that Free Trade rests upon as firm a basis as
+parliamentary government, we see the Conservative party coquetting with
+Protection; while we regard equality before the law as practically
+admitted by all, we have constantly brought to our notice the belief of
+the county magistrate that that which done by his son would be food for
+laughter, done by his hind deserves hard labour; while sunning ourselves
+with the thought that religious liberty has been absolutely secured, we
+have witnessed a member of Parliament, thrice elected by a free
+constituency, thrice rejected by the House of Commons, and even thrown
+by the police from its doors, upon theological grounds and theological
+grounds alone; and while imagining that freedom of speech, of action,
+and of the press was beyond challenge even by the Tories, men in London
+have been wounded and imprisoned for asserting the right of public
+meeting, and many sent to gaol in Ireland for doing that which in
+England, Wales, and Scotland would be as perfectly legal as it was
+perfectly right: when we see such things we are brought to recognize
+that our liberties, after all, hang by a thread.
+
+It is well, however, that we should have these rude awakenings in order
+to teach us that Toryism is not dead, that it is as ready as ever to
+seize every opportunity for depriving the people of their liberty, to
+rivet the yoke of ascendency upon their shoulders, and to subvert that
+freedom which only slowly and by prolonged struggle has been wrested
+from the great. The adherents of proscription and privilege do not in
+these days talk of the divine right of kings--though even that doctrine
+peeps out when they have occasion to flatter a monarch or an
+heir-apparent; but the equally false doctrine of the divine right of
+Parliaments is persistently put forward, and with the audacious pretence
+that to dispute it is treason to the democracy. We are told that a House
+of Commons once chosen can do as it likes for seven years, and no one
+dare say it "nay;" that its majority may break the pledges upon which it
+was elected, may practise coercion where it promised conciliation, may
+deprive us of every single liberty it was returned to support and
+extend, and that it is the duty of every good subject to sit with folded
+arms, to quietly submit to be despoiled of his rights, and to wait with
+patience until such time as the Prime Minister is sufficiently gracious
+to permit a dissolution, or the Septennial Act closes the Parliament's
+life. The doctrine is fatal to liberty, disguise it by what pretence of
+love for the democracy its upholders may. And is the danger which lurks
+beneath it imaginary? Read the promises upon which the present majority
+in the House of Commons obtained its power; study the fashion in which
+these have been broken; and then consider whether a denial of the divine
+right of Parliaments is, as the Tories contend, treason to the
+democracy.
+
+Liberalism, at all events, will have neither act nor part in any denial
+of popular rights; rather it will be ever on the move towards a fuller
+extension of them. When it is said that the Tories of to-day are to be
+trusted because they go farther than the Liberals of twenty years ago,
+it can be fairly replied, "Even if true (which, if the spirit of things
+be examined, is doubtful), what does it prove? Words change their
+meaning as the world grows older; what yesterday was revolution is
+to-day reform, and to-morrow will be called reaction."
+
+"Onward, and ever onward," must be the motto of the Liberal party. As
+the conditions change, so must our institutions be changed to fit them.
+It cannot be too strongly repeated that in these days we have so much of
+liberty, compared with our forefathers, that some of us are tempted to
+fold our hands, to rest, and to be thankful, and to lose by sloth that
+which has been gained by struggle. The tendency to think that we possess
+all the freedom that the heart of man can desire is one that may act
+upon us as the wish for repose does upon those toiling through the
+snowdrifts, and, in the guise of slumber, may bring death. The heights
+of liberty are not yet scaled; much remains to be done before perfect
+freedom is attained. Let each be able to say with Erskine, "I shall
+never cease to struggle in support of liberty. In no situation will I
+desert the cause. I was born a free man, and I will never die a slave."
+
+The very reason of a Liberal's existence is that, if there is an abuse
+in Church or State which argument and agitation can remove, all honest
+endeavours shall be made to remove it. Many abuses have been abolished
+by these means, but many remain, and it is at the extinction of these
+that Liberals should aim. Let them not lose themselves in fruitless
+longing after a perfect State; let them use their best endeavours to
+make the State we possess as perfect as is possible. In all things let
+them aim at the practical, and let them remember that compromise is not
+necessarily cowardly, and that minor differences should count for little
+when great ends are to be achieved.
+
+The task I allotted myself has now been accomplished. Something has been
+told of the beneficent results of Liberalism, but with the qualification
+that Macaulay added to his description of what has been effected by the
+Baconian system--"These are but a part of its fruits, and of its
+first-fruits; for it is a philosophy which never rests, by which
+finality is never attained, which is never perfect. Its law is progress.
+A point which yesterday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be
+its starting-point to-morrow." The future also has been attempted to be
+sketched--how imperfectly no one knows better than the author. But as
+clearly and concisely as was possible have been stated the principles
+and the aims of the Liberal party. It is to that party that modern
+England owes its liberties, and it is to that party alone that it can
+look for their preservation and extension. Clouds may overshadow its
+immediate future, old friends may drop away, the enemy may be pressing
+at the gate, but Liberalism will live, will thrive, and will make the
+hearts of our descendants glad that there are those who remain faithful
+to it to-day in the midst of dangers and discouragements, which cause
+sinking of heart only to the faint of spirit, and doubt only to the weak
+of soul. Resolved to broaden and strengthen the bounds of freedom, we
+who continue attached to the principles of our party will never swerve
+from the straight course, will never be daunted by the virulence or the
+violence of our opponents, will never forget to strive for that ideal of
+Liberalism--liberty of thought, equality of opportunity, and fraternity
+of aim.
+
+
+UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism
+of To-day, by Alfred Farthing Robbins
+
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Practical Politics, by Alfred F. Robbins.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
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+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 5px; border: none; text-align: right;}
+
+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
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+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of
+To-day, by Alfred Farthing Robbins
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of To-day
+
+Author: Alfred Farthing Robbins
+
+Release Date: April 17, 2011 [EBook #35894]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRACTICAL POLITICS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="bold2"><i>PRACTICAL POLITICS</i></p>
+
+<p class="bold"><i>OR</i></p>
+
+<p class="bold2"><i>THE LIBERALISM OF TO-DAY</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1><span>PRACTICAL POLITICS<br /><span class='smaller'>or the</span><span class="smcap">Liberalism of To-day</span></span><br /><span id="id1">BY</span> <span>ALFRED F. ROBBINS</span></h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">AUTHOR OF</p>
+
+<p class="center">&ldquo;<i>Five Years of Tory Rule</i>;&rdquo; &ldquo;<i>William Edward Forster, the Man and<br />
+his Policy</i>;&rdquo; &ldquo;<i>The Marquis of Salisbury, a Personal and<br />
+Political Sketch</i>,&rdquo; <i>&amp;c.</i></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>REPRINTED FROM THE &ldquo;HALFPENNY WEEKLY&rdquo;</i></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">London<br />T. FISHER UNWIN<br />26 PATERNOSTER SQUARE<br />
+1888</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center">TO<br />My Father,<br />WHOSE DEVOTION TO LIBERAL PRINCIPLES<br />
+HAS FOR SIXTY YEARS<br />NEVER WAVERED,<br />THIS WORK,<br />
+THE OUTCOME OF HIS EXCELLENT TEACHING AND<br />CONSISTENT EXAMPLE,<br />
+IS<br />AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>PREFACE.</span></h2>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p>The Articles here republished are from the columns of the <i>Halfpenny
+Weekly</i>, to the Proprietors of which the Author is indebted for much
+courtesy and consideration. They were written originally in the form of
+letters to a friend, but, though they stand substantially as first
+printed, various alterations have been made consequent upon the
+necessities of a permanent rather than a serial form. The Author does
+not profess to have exhaustively discussed every political question
+which is of practical importance to-day&mdash;for that, within the limits
+assigned, would have been impossible; but he has attempted to furnish a
+body of information regarding the principles and aims of present-day
+Liberalism, not easily accessible elsewhere, which may be useful to
+those whose ideas upon public affairs are yet unformed, and helpful to
+the political cause he holds dear.</p>
+
+<p><span class="s3">&nbsp;</span><i>May, 1888.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CONTENTS</span></h2>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<table summary="CONTENTS">
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2"></td>
+    <td><span class="smaller">PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>I.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WHAT IS THE USE OF A VOTE?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>II.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;IS THERE ANYTHING PRACTICAL IN POLITICS?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>III.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WHY NOT LET THINGS ALONE?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_21">21</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;OUGHT ONE TO BE A PARTISAN?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>V.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WHY NOT HAVE A &ldquo;NATIONAL&rdquo; PARTY?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;IS ONE PARTY BETTER THAN THE OTHER?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WHAT ARE LIBERAL PRINCIPLES?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_41">41</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;ARE LIBERALS AND RADICALS AGREED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IX.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WHAT ARE THE LIBERALS DOING?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>X.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;SHOULD HOME RULE BE GRANTED TO IRELAND?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH THE LORDS?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;IS THE HOUSE OF COMMONS PERFECT?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_71">71</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;IS OUR ELECTORAL SYSTEM COMPLETE?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_77">77</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XIV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;SHOULD THE CHURCH REMAIN ESTABLISHED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_83">83</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WOULD DISENDOWMENT BE JUST?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XVI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;OUGHT EDUCATION TO BE FREE?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_97">97</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XVII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;DO THE LAND LAWS NEED REFORM?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XVIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;SHOULD WASTE LANDS BE TILLED AND THE GAME LAWS ABOLISHED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XIX.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;OUGHT LEASEHOLDS TO BE ENFRANCHISED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_112">112</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>XX.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WHOSE SHOULD BE THE UNEARNED INCREMENT?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;HOW SHOULD LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT BE EXTENDED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;HOW IS LOCAL OPTION TO BE EFFECTED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WHY AND HOW ARE WE TAXED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_132">132</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXIV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;HOW OUGHT WE TO BE TAXED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_137">137</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;HOW IS TAXATION TO BE REDUCED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXVI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;IS FREE TRADE TO BE PERMANENT?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_149">149</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXVII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;IS FOREIGN LABOUR TO BE EXCLUDED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_155">155</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXVIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;HOW SHOULD WE GUIDE OUR FOREIGN POLICY?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_160">160</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXIX.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;IS A PEACE POLICY PRACTICABLE?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_165">165</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXX.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;HOW SHOULD WE DEAL WITH THE COLONIES?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_171">171</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXXI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;SHOULD THE STATE SOLVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXXII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;HOW FAR SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_182">182</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXXIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;SHOULD THE STATE REGULATE LABOUR OR WAGES?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_188">188</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXXIV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE WITH PROPERTY?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_194">194</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXXV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;OUGHT THE STATE TO FIND FOOD AND WORK FOR ALL?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_197">197</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXXVI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;HOW OUGHT WE TO DEAL WITH SOCIALISM?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_200">200</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXXVII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WHAT SHOULD BE THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXXVIII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;HOW IS THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME TO BE ATTAINED?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_211">211</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XXXIX.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;IS PERFECTION IN POLITICS POSSIBLE?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_216">216</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>XL.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;WHERE SHALL WE STOP?</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_220">220</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="bold2">PRACTICAL POLITICS.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<h2><span>I.&mdash;WHAT IS THE USE OF A VOTE?</span></h2>
+
+<p>There are many persons, who, though possessing the suffrage, often put
+the question, &ldquo;What is the use of a vote?&rdquo; Giving small heed to
+political affairs, the issue of elections has as little interest for
+them as the debates in Parliament; and they imagine that the process of
+governing the country is mainly a self-acting one, upon which their
+individual effort could have the least possible effect.</p>
+
+<p>This idea is wrong at the root, and the cause of much mischief in
+politics. We are governed by majorities, and every vote counts. Even the
+heaviest polls are sometimes decided by a majority of a single figure.
+In the history of English elections, many instances could be found
+wherein a member was returned by the narrowest majority of all&mdash;the
+majority of one; and when a member so elected has been taunted with its
+slenderness, he has had a right to reply, as some have replied, in
+well-known words: &ldquo;&rsquo;Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church
+door; but &rsquo;tis enough, &rsquo;twill serve.&rdquo; And not only in the
+constituencies, but in Parliament itself, decisions have been arrived at
+by a solitary vote. The great principle animating the first Reform Bill
+was thus adopted by the House of Commons; and the measure shortly
+afterwards was taken to the country with the advantage thus given it.
+As, therefore, everything of importance in England is decided first in
+the constituencies, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> then in Parliament, by single votes, it is
+obvious that in each possessor of the franchise is vested a power which,
+however apparently small when compared with the enormous number of
+similar possessors elsewhere, may have a direct bearing in turning an
+election, the result of which may affect the fate of some important bill.</p>
+
+<p>So far most will doubtless agree without demur; but, in their
+indifference to political questions, may think that it is only those
+interested in them who have any real concern with elections. This is
+another mistake, for political questions are so intimately bound up with
+the comfort, the fortune, and even the fate of every citizen of a free
+country, that, although he may shut his eyes to them, they press upon
+him at every turn. It would be a very good world if each could do as he
+liked and none be the worse; but the world is not so constituted, and it
+is politics that lessen the consequent friction. For the whole system of
+government is covered by the term; and there is not an hour of the day
+in which one is free from the influence of government.</p>
+
+<p>It is not necessary for one to be conscious of this in order to be
+certain that it is so. When he is in perfect health he is not conscious
+that every part of his body is in active exercise, but, if he stumble
+over a chair, he is made painfully aware of the possession of shins. And
+so with the actions of government. As long as things work smoothly the
+majority of people give them little heed, but, if an additional tax be
+levied, they are immediately interested in politics. And although taxes
+are not the least unpleasant evidence that there is such a thing as a
+government, it is far from the most unpleasant that could be afforded.
+The issues of peace and war lie in the hands of Parliament, although
+nominally resting with the Executive, for Parliament can speedily end a
+war by stopping the supplies; and it is not necessary to show how the
+progress and result of an armed struggle might affect each one of us.
+The State has a right to call upon every citizen for help in time of
+need, and that time of need might come very quickly at the heels of a
+disastrous campaign. It is easy enough in times of peace to imagine that
+such a call upon every grown man will never be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> made; but it is a
+possible call, and one to be taken into account when the value of a vote is considered.</p>
+
+<p>Those who are sent to Parliament have thus the power of embarking in
+enterprises which may diminish one&rsquo;s revenue by increased taxation and
+imperil his life by enforced service. And in matters of less importance,
+but of considerable effect upon both pocket and comfort, they wield
+extensive powers. They can extend or they can lessen our liberties; they
+can interfere largely with our social concerns; their powers are nowhere
+strictly defined, and are so wide as to be almost illimitable. And for
+the manner in which they exercise those powers, each man who possesses a
+vote is in his degree responsible.</p>
+
+<p>There are persons who affect, from the height of a serene indifference,
+to look down upon all political struggles as the mere diversions of a
+lower mental order. That kind of being, or any approach to its attitude
+of mind, should be avoided by all who wish well to the government of the
+country. To sit on the fence, and rail at the ploughman, because his
+boots are muddy and his hands unwashed, is at once useless and
+impertinent; and to stand outside the political field, and endeavour to
+hinder those who are doing their best within, deserves the same
+epithets. When it is said that hypocrites, and humbugs, and self-seekers
+abound in politics, and that there is no place there for honest men,
+does not the indictment appear too sweeping? Has not the same argument
+been used against religion; and is it not one of the poorest in the
+whole armoury of controversy? If there are hypocrites, and humbugs, and
+self-seekers in politics&mdash;and no candid person would deny it, any more
+than that there are such in religion, in business, in science, and in
+art&mdash;is it not the more necessary that every honest man should try and
+root them out? If every honest man abstained from politics, with what
+right could he complain that all politicians were rogues? But no sober
+person believes that all politicians are rogues, and those superior
+beings who talk as if they are deserve condemnation for doing nothing to
+purify the political atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>Some who would not go so far as those who are thus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> condemned, still
+labour under the idea that politics are more or less a game, to the
+issue of which they can afford to be indifferent. This, it may be
+feared, is the notion of many, and it is one to be earnestly combatted.
+Every man owes the duty to the State to assist, as far as he can, those
+whom he considers the best and wisest of its would-be governors. There
+is nobility in the idea that every elector can do something for the
+national welfare by thoughtfully and straightforwardly exercising the
+franchise, and aiding the cause he deems best. Young men especially
+should entertain this feeling, for youth is the time for burning
+thoughts, and it is not until a man is old that he can afford to
+smoulder. The future is in the hands of the young of to-day; and if
+these are indifferent to the great issues of State, and are prepared to
+let things drift, a rude awakening awaits them.</p>
+
+<p>The details of political work need not here be entered upon. All that is
+now wanted is to show that that work is of very real importance to every
+one; and that, unless taken in hand by the honest and capable, it will
+fall to the dishonest and incapable for accomplishment. And as the vote
+is a right to which every free Englishman is entitled, and a trust each
+possessor of which should be called upon to exercise, there ought not to
+remain men on the registers who persistently decline to use it. Absentee
+landlords have been the curse of Ireland, and they will have to be got
+rid of. Abstentionist voters might, in easily conceivable circumstances,
+be the curse of England, and they would have to be got rid of likewise.</p>
+
+<p>The value of a vote may be judged from the fact that it saves the
+country from a periodical necessity for revolution. Everything in our
+Constitution that wants altering can be altered at the ballot-box; and
+whereas the vote-less man has no direct influence upon those affairs of
+State which affect him as they affect every other citizen, the possessor
+of the franchise can make his power directly felt. We are within sight
+of manhood, it may be of adult, suffrage; and if the vote were of no
+value it would be folly&mdash;almost criminal folly&mdash;to extend its use. Those
+who deem it folly are of a practically extinct school in English
+politics. For better or worse, the few are now governed by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> many,
+and the many will never again be governed by the few.</p>
+
+<p>Those who are of the many may be tempted to urge that that very fact
+lessens the worth of the vote in that every elector has the same value
+at the polling booth, and that, however intelligent may be the interest
+he takes in politics, his ignorant neighbour&rsquo;s vote counts the same as
+his own. But that is to forget what every one who mixes with his
+fellow-men must soon learn&mdash;that the intelligent have a weight of
+legitimate influence upon their less-informed fellows which is
+exceedingly great. Our vote counts for no more than that of the man who
+has sold his suffrage for beer; but our influence may have brought
+twenty waverers to the poll, while that of our beer-drinking
+acquaintance has brought none.</p>
+
+<p>A cynic has observed that &ldquo;politics are a salad, in which office is the
+oil, opposition the vinegar, and the people the thing to be devoured.&rdquo;
+But to approach public affairs from that point, and to judge them solely
+on that principle, is as reasonable as to use green spectacles and
+complain of the colour of the sky. Politics should be looked at without
+prejudice, but with the recollection that in them are concerned many of
+our best and wisest men. If that be done, and the mind kept open for the
+reception of facts, there is little doubt of the admission that there is
+a deep reality in politics, and a reality in which every one is concerned.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>II.&mdash;IS THERE ANYTHING PRACTICAL IN POLITICS?</span></h2>
+
+<p>All will possibly admit that, in conceivable circumstances, a vote may
+be useful, but many will not be prepared to allow that politics are an
+important factor in our daily life. War, they would urge, is a remote
+contingency, and a conscription is, of all unlikely things, the most
+unlikely; our liberties have been won, and there is no chance of a
+despot sitting on the throne; and, even if taxes are high, what can any
+one member of Parliament, much less any one elector, do to bring them
+down? From which questions, and from the answers they think must be made
+to them, they would draw the conclusion that, whatever might have been
+the case formerly, there is nothing practical in the politics of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>It would not be hard to show that a conscription is by no means an
+impossibility; that our liberties demand constant vigilance; and that
+individual effort may greatly affect taxation. But even if the answer
+desired were given to each question, the points raised, except the last,
+are admittedly remote from daily life; and, if politics are to be
+considered practical, they must concern affairs nearer to us. This they
+do; and if they affected only the greater issues of State, they would
+not be practical in the sense they now are. It is the small troubles,
+whether public or private, which worry us most. The dust in one&rsquo;s eye
+may be only a speck, but, measured by misery, it is colossal.</p>
+
+<p>The law touches us upon every side, and the law is the outcome of
+politics in having been enacted by Parliament. From the smallest things
+to the greatest, the Legislature interferes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> A man cannot go into a
+public-house after a certain hour because of one Act of Parliament; he
+cannot deal with a bank upon specified days because of another. One Act
+of Parliament orders him, if a householder, to clean his pavement;
+another prohibits him from building a house above a given height in
+streets of a certain width. And while the law takes care of one&rsquo;s
+neighbour by affixing a well-known penalty to murder, it is so regardful
+of oneself that it absolutely prohibits suicide. We are surrounded, in
+fact, by a network of regulations provided by Parliament. We are no
+sooner born than the law insists upon our being registered; we cannot
+marry without the interference of the same august power; and when we
+die, those who are left behind must comply with the formalities the law demands.</p>
+
+<p>It may be answered that this does not sound like politics; that there is
+nothing of Liberal or Tory in all this; but there is. Liberals, for
+instance, have been mainly identified with the demand for the better
+regulation of public-houses; it is to the Liberals that we owe a
+long-called-for reform in the burial laws; and it is due to the Liberals
+that a change in the marriage regulations, particularly affecting
+Nonconformists, is on the eve of being adopted. Social questions are not
+necessarily divorced from party concerns, and the moment Parliament
+touches them they become political. If one looks down a list of the
+measures presented to the House of Commons he will see that from the
+purity of beer to the protection of trade-marks, from the enactment of a
+close-time for hares to the provision of harbours of refuge, from a
+declaration of the size of saleable crabs to the disestablishment of a
+Church&mdash;every subject which concerns a man&rsquo;s external affairs,
+political, social, or religious, is dealt with by Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>Even if only those political matters are regarded which have a
+distinctly partisan aspect, there is more that is practical in them than
+would at first be perceived. &ldquo;What,&rdquo; it may be asked, &ldquo;is local option,
+or county councils, or &lsquo;three acres and a cow&rsquo; to me? I have no
+particular liking for drink; I have not the least ambition to become a
+combination of guardian and town councillor; and I am in no way
+interested in agricultural<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> concerns. When you require me to take an
+active part in promoting the measures here indicated, how, I want to
+know, am I concerned in any one of them?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The answer is that any and all of them should concern the questioner a
+great deal. He imagines he is not directly interested because of the
+reasons put forward. Is he certain those reasons cover the whole case?
+He has &ldquo;no particular liking for drink,&rdquo; and, therefore, would not
+trouble himself to obtain local option. But has he not been a
+sufficiently frequent witness of the crime and misery caused by drink to
+be persuaded that it is the duty of every good citizen to do all that in
+him lies to lessen the evil effects? And as such good results have
+flowed from the stricter regulation of the sale of intoxicating liquors,
+ought it not to be his endeavour to place a further power of regulation
+in the hands of those most interested&mdash;the people themselves?</p>
+
+<p>Establishing county councils may not touch the individual citizen so
+nearly, though it is in that direction that a solution of the local
+option problem is being attempted to be found; and the supposed
+questioner has &ldquo;not the least ambition to become a combination of
+guardian and town councillor.&rdquo; Perhaps not; other people have, and it is
+a legitimate ambition that does them honour. The work performed by town
+councillors, and guardians, and members of school boards is excellent
+service, not only to the locality but the State. The freedom which
+England enjoys to-day is largely owing to the habits of self-government
+fostered by local institutions, the origin of which is as old as our
+civilization, and the roots of which have sunk deeply into the soil. And
+seeing how our towns have thriven since their government was taken from
+a privileged few and given to the whole body of their inhabitants, is
+there not fair reason to hope that the county districts will similarly
+be benefitted by institutions equally representative and equally free?
+And, as the improvement of a part has good effect upon the whole, even
+those who may never have a direct connection with the suggested county
+councils, will profit by their establishment.</p>
+
+<p>With equal certainty it may be asserted that the condition of the
+labourer is of practical importance to every citizen. &ldquo;I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> am in no way
+interested in agricultural concerns,&rdquo; it is said; and if by that is
+simply meant that the objector does not work upon a farm, has no direct
+dealings with agricultural produce, and no money invested in land, he,
+of course, would be right. But even these conditions do not exhaust the
+possibilities of connection with agriculture, which is the greatest
+single commercial interest this country possesses; and, so
+inter-dependent are the various interests, if the largest of all is not
+in a satisfactory state the others are bound to suffer. It is those
+others in which most of us may be specially concerned, but we are
+generally concerned in agriculture; and as the latter cannot be at its
+best as long as the labourers are in their present condition, is it not
+obvious that all are interested in every honest endeavour to get that
+condition improved? This is not the moment to argue the details of any
+plan; but the principle is plain&mdash;the condition of the agricultural
+labourer has passed into the region of practical politics.</p>
+
+<p>There is a school among us, and perhaps a growing one, which, affecting
+to despise such matters as these, wishes to make the State a huge
+wage-settling and food-providing machine. If one talks to its members of
+public affairs, they reply that the only practical politics is to give
+bread-and-cheese to the working classes. But fact is wanted instead of
+theory, demonstration rather than declamation, and, in place of a
+platitude, a plan. For it is easy to talk of a State, in which there
+shall be no misery, no poverty, and no crime; but the practical
+politician will want to know how this is to be secured; and while
+waiting for a plain answer, will decline to be drawn from the questions
+of the immediate present.</p>
+
+<p>No one need sigh for other political worlds to conquer while even such
+problems as have just been noted ask for settlement; and there are
+further departments of public affairs which demand attention, and which
+are pressing to the front. Most would admit that a vote may be useful
+sometimes. I say it is useful always. All would own that the greater
+matters of law and liberty may fairly be called practical politics. I
+add that the lesser matters with which Parliament has to deal, and which
+affect us daily, are equally worthy the name. Let one look<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> around and
+say if &ldquo;everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.&rdquo;
+If he cannot, he ought to strive for the reform of that which is not for
+the best. And as long as he has to strive for that reform, so long will
+there be something practical in politics.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>III.&mdash;WHY NOT LET THINGS ALONE?</span></h2>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Why can&rsquo;t you let things alone?&rdquo; is a question which has often been put
+by those who either care little for politics or who wish to stave off
+reform. It was the favourite exclamation of a Whig Prime Minister, Lord
+Melbourne, and it is still used by many worthy persons as if it were
+really applicable to matters of government. &ldquo;Things&rdquo;&mdash;that is public
+affairs&mdash;can no more be let alone than one can let himself alone, or his
+machinery alone, or his business alone. The secret of perpetual motion
+has not been discovered in the State any more than in science. If one is
+a workman and leaves things alone, he will be dismissed; if a tradesman
+or manufacturer, he will become bankrupt; if a property-owner, ruin will
+equally follow. A man would not leave his face alone because it had been
+washed yesterday; he would not argue that as a face it was a very good
+face, and that one thorough cleansing should last it a lifetime. And the
+Constitution needs as careful looking after as one&rsquo;s business or his body.</p>
+
+<p>A sound Radical of a couple of centuries ago&mdash;and though the name
+Radical had not then been invented, the man Radical was frequently to
+the fore&mdash;put this point in plain words. &ldquo;All governments and societies
+of men,&rdquo; said Andrew Marvell, &ldquo;do, in process of time, gather an
+irregularity and wear away. And, therefore, the true wisdom of all ages
+hath been to review at fit periods those errors, defects, or excesses
+that have crept into the public administration; to brush the dust off
+the wheels and oil them again, or, if it be found necessary, to choose a
+set of new ones.&rdquo; And if Marvell be objected to as an authority, one can
+be given which should satisfy even the staunchest Conservative.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> &ldquo;There
+was never anything by the wit of man so well devised or so sure
+established which in the continuance of time hath not been corrupted.&rdquo;
+That expression of opinion is not taken from any Whig, Liberal, or
+Radical source, but from the preface to the Book of Common Prayer.</p>
+
+<p>There is an older authority still, and that is the proverb which says &ldquo;A
+stitch in time saves nine.&rdquo; One can scarcely read a page of English
+constitutional history without seeing the advances made in the comfort,
+prosperity, and liberty of the people by timely reform; and no man would
+seriously urge our going back to the old standpoints. Yet every reform,
+though we may now all agree that it was for the greatest good of the
+greatest number, was opposed by hosts of people, who talked about &ldquo;the
+wisdom of our ancestors,&rdquo; and asked, &ldquo;Why can&rsquo;t you let things alone?&rdquo;
+It may be said that the grievances under which men labour to-day are
+nothing like as great as those against which our fathers fought.
+Happily&mdash;and thanks to the enthusiasts of old&mdash;that is so; but if they
+are grievances, whether small or large, they ought to be removed. There
+are some who think that a man with a grievance is a man to be
+pitied&mdash;and put on one side. But, even if those so afflicted are apt to
+prove bores, such complaints as are well founded should be attended to.</p>
+
+<p>It is a fact beyond question that there is no finality in politics, and,
+to take two examples from the present century&mdash;the Reform Act of 1832,
+which was thought by its authors to be a &ldquo;final&rdquo; measure, and at the Act
+of Union with Ireland, which the first Salisbury Administration
+described in their Queen&rsquo;s Speech as &ldquo;a fundamental law&rdquo;&mdash;it will be
+seen that the dream of finality in each case has been and is being
+roughly dispelled. What man has done, man can do&mdash;and can undo.</p>
+
+<p>The instances mentioned deserve a closer examination, because they so
+perfectly show the impossibility of standing still in political affairs.
+If ever there was a measure which statesmen of both parties held to be
+final, the Reform Act was that one. During the discussions upon it, the
+word &ldquo;finality&rdquo; was more than once used; Sir Robert Peel two years later
+declared that he considered it &ldquo;a final and irrevocable settlement of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+great constitutional question;&rdquo; and in 1837, as in 1832, its author,
+Lord John Russell, spoke of it as &ldquo;a final measure.&rdquo; Final it was in the
+sense that England would never go back to the days of borough-mongering,
+but there the finality ended. As early as the year after it passed, a
+Liberal member declared in his place in the House that &ldquo;he for one had
+never conceded the monstrous principle that any legislative measure was
+to be final; still less had he ever conceded the yet more monstrous
+principle that the members of that House were entitled by any sort of
+compromise to barter away the rights and privileges of the people.&rdquo; The
+views thus plainly laid down have been put in practice by men of both
+parties; the ten-pound franchise of 1832 gave place in 1867 to household
+suffrage for the boroughs, and this in 1884 was extended to the
+counties. So much for the &ldquo;finality&rdquo; of the one great Act of this
+century to which the word has been applied.</p>
+
+<p>The so-called &ldquo;fundamental law&rdquo; of the Union with Ireland is threatened
+with alteration and amendment in the same fashion as the &ldquo;final&rdquo; Reform
+Act. Already, by the disestablishment of the Irish Church, a large hole
+has been made in it; and a larger will be made when Home Rule is gained.
+There is in England no law of so &ldquo;fundamental&rdquo; a nature that it cannot
+be mended or ended just as the people wish. No generation has power to
+bind its successors; and if the Parliament of 1800 was able to make the
+Legislative Union, the Parliament of to-day is able to unmake it. Upon
+this point&mdash;and it affects not only the general question now being
+argued, but a particular question yet to be discussed&mdash;one of the most
+distinguished &ldquo;Liberal Unionists&rdquo; may be quoted. Mr. Bright, speaking at
+Liverpool in the summer of 1868, observed&mdash;&ldquo;I have never said that
+Irishmen are not at liberty to ask for and, if they could accomplish it,
+to obtain the repeal of the Union. I say that we have no right whatever
+to insist upon a union between Ireland and Great Britain upon our terms
+only.... I am one of those who admit&mdash;as every sensible man must
+admit&mdash;that an Act which the Parliament of the United Kingdom has
+passed, the Parliament of the United Kingdom can repeal. And further, I
+am willing to admit what everybody in England allows with regard to
+every foreign country,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> that any nation, believing it to be its
+interest, has a right both to ask for and to strive for national
+independence.&rdquo; If, then, even a &ldquo;fundamental law&rdquo; can be got rid of, if
+occasion demands and the people wish, what hope can the most lukewarm
+have that things will be let alone?</p>
+
+<p>Politics, in fact, may fairly be called a sort of see-saw: we are
+constantly going up and down, and can never be still. As long as a
+public grievance remains unremedied, so long will there be a call for
+reform; and one may be sure that, though he may come to a ripe old age,
+he will not live enough years to see every wrong made right. Some may
+hide behind the question put and answered eighteen centuries ago; may
+ask, as was then asked, &ldquo;Who is my neighbour?&rdquo; and may seek to avoid
+doing as they would be done by. But, as citizens of a free State, they
+have no right to shirk their duty to those around them. No man who looks
+at society with open eyes can doubt that much can be done by the
+Legislature to better the conditions of daily life. We do wrong if we
+allow others to suffer when efforts of ours can remove at least some of their pain.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, things cannot be let alone in politics any more than in daily
+life; and even if they could, it would not be right to let them. It does
+not need that one should give all his leisure moments to politics, and
+all the energies he can spare from business to public life. But it does
+need that he should pay some heed to that which concerns his fellow-man
+and the society in which he lives; and all should be politicians in
+their degree, not for love of place, or power, or excitement, but
+because politics really mean much to the happiness and welfare of the State.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>IV.&mdash;OUGHT ONE TO BE A PARTISAN?</span></h2>
+
+<p>When we come from &ldquo;first principles&rdquo; to the more immediate topics of the
+day, party considerations at once enter in; and to the question, &ldquo;Ought
+one to be a partisan?&rdquo; I answer &ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo; On the political barometer
+a man ought distinctly to indicate the side he takes&mdash;not stand in the
+middle and point to &ldquo;change.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>There is a great deal talked of the beauty of non-partisanship, of the
+necessity for looking at public matters in a clear white light, and of
+the exceeding glory of those who put country before party. Such of this
+as is not commonplace is cant, and in politics Johnson&rsquo;s advice to
+&ldquo;clear your mind of cant&rdquo; is especially to be taken. When a public man
+talks of putting his country before his party, he surely implies that he
+has been in the habit of putting his party before his country, and that
+man&rsquo;s record should be carefully scanned. For it will very often be
+found that those who boast of placing country before party place
+themselves before either.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours
+the national interest upon some particular in which they are all
+agreed.&rdquo; That is Burke&rsquo;s definition, and it holds good to-day. Superfine
+folk speak as if there were something derogatory in the fact of
+belonging to a party, some lessening of liberty of judgment, some
+forfeiting of conscience. That need not be. There must be give-and-take
+among members of the same party, just as there must be among those of
+the same household, of the same religious connection, and often of the
+same business concern. The necessity to bear and to forbear is as
+obvious in politics as in other matters of daily<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> life, which is only
+saying in a different fashion that in politics, as in everything, a
+man&rsquo;s angles have to be rubbed off if he is to work in company with
+anybody else. But he gives up a portion of his opinions only to retain
+or strengthen those he considers essential. A Churchman is still a
+Churchman whether he is labelled High, Low, or Broad; he may believe
+with Canon Knox-Little, with Bishop Ryle, or with Archdeacon Farrar, and
+continue a member of the Established Church; and it is only when
+conscience compels him to differ from them all upon some essential point
+of doctrine or practice that he becomes a Protestant Dissenter, a
+Unitarian, a Roman Catholic, or, it may be, an Atheist.</p>
+
+<p>As with religion, so with politics. A Conservative is still a
+Conservative, whether he be called a Constitutionalist, a Tory Democrat,
+a Tory, or, as Mr. William Henry Smith was accustomed to describe
+himself, an Independent-Liberal-Conservative. He may be of the school of
+the late Mr. Newdegate, of Lord Salisbury, or of Lord Randolph
+Churchill, and the party bond is elastic enough to embrace him. And when
+it is remembered that the name &ldquo;Liberal&rdquo; covers all sorts and conditions
+of friends of progress, from Lord Hartington to Mr. Labouchere, it will
+be seen that a man must be querulous indeed who cannot find rest for the
+sole of his foot in one or other of the great parties of the State.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt it is easy to quote opinions from some eminent persons in
+condemnation of the party system. There is a saying of Dr. Arnold that a
+Liberal is &ldquo;one who gets up every morning in the full belief that
+everything is an open question;&rdquo; and with this may be coupled a chance
+expression of Carlyle, that &ldquo;an English Whig politician means generally
+a man of altogether mechanical intellect, looking to Elegance,
+Excitement, and a certain refined Utility as the Highest; a man halting
+between two Opinions, and calling it Tolerance;&rdquo; while there may be
+added the quotation, better known than either, &ldquo;Conservatism discards
+Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected
+all respect for Antiquity, it offers no redress for the Present, and
+makes no preparation for the Future.&rdquo; It was the author of these last
+words who uttered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> also the caustic remark, &ldquo;It seems to me a barren
+thing, this Conservatism, an unhappy cross-breed; the mule of politics,
+that engenders nothing.&rdquo; And that author was Benjamin Disraeli,
+afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, this merely shows that hard things have been and can be said
+of all parties, but if they have been as bad as thus represented, is it
+not strange that England has done so well under their rule? It may be
+replied that, whatever has been the case, the fact now is that the old
+parties are dead, and the idea may be echoed of those who wish to keep
+the Tories in power, that only &ldquo;Unionists&rdquo; and &ldquo;Separatists&rdquo; are left;
+but, setting aside the circumstance that the Liberals emphatically
+disclaim the latter title, the facts are against the original assumption.</p>
+
+<p>The history of our Constitution will show that parties bring the best
+men to the front, groups the worst&mdash;the most pushing, pertinacious, and
+impudent of those among them. And when men talk, as some are talking
+to-day, of new combinations&mdash;combinations of persons rather than of
+principles&mdash;to take the place of the old parties, they should be watched
+carefully to see whether they do not degenerate, as other men in similar
+circumstances have done, into mere hungry scramblers for place.</p>
+
+<p>Much of the flabby feeling which pervades some minds in antagonism to
+partisanship has been nourished by the cry of &ldquo;measures, not men.&rdquo; &ldquo;To
+attack vices in the abstract, without touching persons, may be safe
+fighting indeed, but it is fighting with shadows.&rdquo; These words of Pope
+were taken by Junius to enforce his opinion that &ldquo;&lsquo;measures and not men&rsquo;
+is the common cant of affected moderation&mdash;a base counterfeit language,
+fabricated by knaves and made current among fools.&rdquo; &ldquo;What does it
+avail,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;to expose the absurd contrivance or pernicious
+tendency of measures if the man who advises or executes shall be
+suffered not only to escape with impunity, but even to preserve his
+power?&rdquo; If this opinion be put aside as being only that of a clever but
+venomous pamphleteer, an equally strong condemnation of the old
+cuckoo-cry can be quoted from the greatest philosopher who ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+practically dealt with English politics. &ldquo;It is an advantage,&rdquo; said
+Burke, &ldquo;to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals, that their maxims have a
+plausible air, and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles.
+They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin, and
+about as valuable. They serve equally the first capacities and the
+lowest; and they are at least as useful to the worst men as the best. Of
+this stamp is the cant of &lsquo;not men, but measures&rsquo;; a sort of charm by
+which many people get loose from every honourable engagement.&rdquo; And, if
+we go to the gaiety of Goldsmith from the gravity of Burke, it is
+significant that the author of &ldquo;The Good-Natured Man&rdquo; puts in the mouth
+of a bragging political liar and cheat the expression, &ldquo;Measures, not
+men, have always been my mark.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But, it is sometimes said, the very fact of not being a partisan argues
+freedom from prejudice. Does it not equally argue freedom from
+principle? If a man holds a principle strongly, he can hardly avoid
+being what the unthinking call prejudiced. It is surely better to be
+fast anchored to a principle, even at the risk of being called
+prejudiced, than to be swayed hither and thither by every passing
+breeze, like the &ldquo;independent&rdquo; politician&mdash;defined by the late Lord
+Derby as &ldquo;a politician not to be depended upon&rdquo;&mdash;with the liability of
+being wrecked by some more than usually stirring gust.</p>
+
+<p>We have only to look at the political history of the past half-century
+to find that it is the &ldquo;prejudiced&rdquo; men who have done good work, and the
+&ldquo;independent&rdquo; politicians who have made shipwreck of their public lives.
+The former held their principles firmly; they lost no opportunity of
+pushing them to the front; and success attended their efforts. As for
+the politicians who were too proud, or too unstable, or too quarrelsome
+to work in harness with their fellows, the shores of our public life
+have been strewn with their wrecks. The glorious opportunities for good
+that were missed by Lord Brougham, the wasted career of the once popular
+Roebuck are matters of history. And in our own day we can point to Earl
+Grey and Mr. Cowen&mdash;and the narrow escape from a similar fate of Mr.
+Goschen&mdash;as striking instances of the fact that no good thing in
+politics can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> be done by men who cannot or will not join with a great
+party to secure the ends for which they strive. The independent
+politician, in fact, must of necessity appear an incomplete sort of
+man&mdash;always leading up to something and never getting it; everlastingly
+striking the quarters, but never quite reaching the finished hour.</p>
+
+<p>It is not only, however, the crotchety man, or the quarrelsome man, or
+the tactless man, who, because he cannot work with anybody else, poses
+as &ldquo;independent.&rdquo; There are also &ldquo;men of no decided character, without
+judgment to choose, and without courage to profess any principle
+whatever&mdash;such men can serve no cause for this plain reason, they have
+no cause at heart.&rdquo; Burke here clearly describes a large section of
+&ldquo;armchair politicians,&rdquo; who turn many an election without a distinct
+idea of what will be the ultimate result of their action. They are of
+the kind even more forcibly characterized by Dryden a century before&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Damn&rsquo;d neuters, in their middle way of steering,</div>
+<div>Are neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring;</div>
+<div>Nor Whigs, nor Tories they; nor this, nor that;</div>
+<div>Nor birds, nor beasts; but just a kind of bat;</div>
+<div>A twilight animal; true to neither cause,</div>
+<div>With Tory wings, but Whiggish teeth and claws.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Trimmers of this type live and flourish to-day as they lived and
+flourished in the age of Dryden and of Burke, and the airs they give
+themselves of superiority over the ordinary run of politicians deserve
+all the ridicule men of more practical tendencies can pour upon them.
+One would fancy that it must sometimes occur even to them that, as in
+warfare the efforts of two opposing mobs, led by generals who
+perpetually differed among themselves, would cause more rapine and
+confusion, and ensure an even less satisfactory result, than those of
+two armies captained by men accustomed to discipline, and striking blows
+only where blows could be effective; so in the constant movement of
+public affairs a multitude of wrangling counsellors would bring ruin
+upon the State, where a struggle between two opposing parties,
+representing distinct principles, would clear a path in which it could safely tread.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p><p>No one, therefore, should be frightened out of taking part in politics
+by the idea that there is anything wrong in being a partisan. A working
+man joins a trade union, in order that by strengthening his fellows he
+may strengthen himself; a religious man becomes a member of a Christian
+church, so as to assist in spreading the truth he cherishes; and any one
+who dearly holds a political principle ought to attach himself to a
+party, that he may secure for that principle the success which, if it is
+worth believing in, is worth striving for.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>V.&mdash;WHY NOT HAVE A &ldquo;NATIONAL&rdquo; PARTY?</span></h2>
+
+<p>It is sometimes asked, even by those who would agree generally that
+partisanship is not unworthy, whether all the old distinctions of
+Liberal and Conservative, Tory and Radical, are not out of date, and
+whether it is not possible to form a &ldquo;National&rdquo; party. The idea of such
+a formation has been &ldquo;in the air&rdquo; for a long time, and has been put
+forward with more frequency since the breach in the Liberal ranks upon
+the Irish question. But although politicians as eminent as Mr.
+Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill have given countenance to the
+idea, it has as yet resulted in nothing of practical value.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Chamberlain has argued that &ldquo;our old party names have lost their
+force and meaning,&rdquo; but, even if they had, the suggested appellation
+must be held to be a misnomer. It is a contradiction in terms. If the
+whole nation be agreed upon a certain course, it is not a national
+&ldquo;party&rdquo; which advocates it; if it be not agreed, no section, no
+half-plus-one, has the right to arrogate to itself the adjective. The
+last time any faction did so was at the general election of 1880, when
+the supporters of Lord Beaconsfield attempted to claim the title even
+when they were being swept out of their seats wholesale by the flowing
+tide of national indignation. All honest politicians work for what they
+consider the benefit of the nation, and no portion of them has a title
+to assume that it alone is righteous.</p>
+
+<p>The inappropriateness of the name, moreover, is not only general but
+particular. The proposed combination, according to the statesman already
+quoted, is to &ldquo;exclude only the extreme sections of the party of
+reaction on the one hand, and the party<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> of anarchy on the other.&rdquo; But
+who is to define how far a reactionary may go without being considered
+&ldquo;extreme,&rdquo; and who in the English Parliament is &ldquo;an anarchist&rdquo;?</p>
+
+<p>Further, a &ldquo;national party&rdquo; must be presumed to represent the
+nation&mdash;that is the whole of the United Kingdom. But the projected body,
+if it opposed Home Rule, would ignore the wishes of 85 out of the 101
+popularly elected representatives of Ireland; 44 out of the 70 popularly
+elected representatives of Scotland; and 26 out of the 30 popularly
+elected representatives of Wales; as well as the whole body of the
+Gladstonian Liberals in England. At the last general election, 1,423,765
+persons in this kingdom cast their votes on the &ldquo;Unionist,&rdquo; and
+1,341,131 on the Liberal side; and the latter number could scarcely be
+ignored when a &ldquo;national&rdquo; party is being formed.</p>
+
+<p>In accordance with the words of the immortal Mr. Taper&mdash;&ldquo;A sound
+Conservative Government, I understand; Tory men and Whig measures&rdquo;&mdash;the
+Tories have promised to bring in Liberal Bills; but the process will be
+regarded by many with the same feelings as those of Mr. Disraeli when he
+charged Sir Robert Peel with the petty larceny of Whig ideas, as did
+Lord Cranborne (now Lord Salisbury) when he denounced Mr. Disraeli&rsquo;s
+political legerdemain in perpetrating a similar offence, and as did
+another prominent politician when he said, &ldquo;The consistency of our
+public life, the honour of political controversy, the patriotism of
+statesmen, which should be set above all party considerations&mdash;these are
+things which have been profaned, desecrated, and trampled in the mire by
+this crowd of hungry office-seekers who are now doing Radical work in
+the uniform of Tory Ministers.... I will say frankly that I do not like
+to win with such instruments as these. A democratic revolution is not to
+be accomplished by aristocratic perverts; and I believe that what the
+people desire will be best carried into effect by those who can do so
+conscientiously and honestly, and not by those who yield their assent
+from purely personal or party motives.&rdquo; These words were spoken in 1885;
+and the speaker was Mr. Chamberlain.</p>
+
+<p>The new party to exist must have organization, and as by its very
+constitution all Liberal and Radical associations would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> have to be
+excluded, the Primrose League alone would be ready to hand. But he who
+pays the piper calls the tune, and what that tune would be can easily be
+guessed. Liberals and Radicals would necessarily be kept out of the
+combination, for men who consider themselves entitled to twenty
+shillings in the pound, and who might be content to accept ten as an
+instalment, would not take ten as payment in full of some of their
+bills, and a &ldquo;first and final dividend&rdquo; of nothing on others they hold
+of value. And the Radicals and other Gladstonian Liberals being left
+out, the remaining party must be overwhelmingly Conservative, and the
+fighting opinion of a party is that of its majority.</p>
+
+<p>It is thus not an enticing prospect for any thoroughgoing lover of
+progress. What hope is there of a sound reform of the House of Lords
+from a party closely wedded to the aristocracy? Of disestablishment in
+Scotland and Wales, to say nothing of England, from a party relying for
+much of its power upon the clergy? Of a drastic change in the land or
+the game laws from a party propped up by landlords and game preservers?
+Of an improved magistracy from a party deriving great influence from the
+country squires? Of a popular veto upon licensing from a party to which
+belong nine-tenths of the publicans? Of a progressive income tax or the
+more equitable arrangement of the death duties from a party which has
+become increasingly attractive to the large capitalists? Of, in fact,
+any great reform whatsoever from a party which places &ldquo;vested interests&rdquo;
+in the forefront to the frequent exclusion of justice?</p>
+
+<p>A party formed in the fashion thus projected would be simply a house of
+cards, carefully built, as such houses usually are, by those who have
+nothing better to do&mdash;pretty to look at, but turned over by the first
+breeze. Lobby combinations such as this are hothouse plants; brought
+into the open they die. In Carlyle&rsquo;s &ldquo;French Revolution,&rdquo; much ridicule
+is poured upon the wondrous paper constitutions of the Abb&eacute; Si&eacute;yes,
+which somehow would not &ldquo;march.&rdquo; Within the last few years the Duc de
+Broglie was famous throughout Europe for the clockwork arrangements he
+made for France, and the constant failure that awaited them. The
+&ldquo;national party&rdquo; recalls the works of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> both duke and abb&eacute;, and, like
+them, would resemble nothing so much as a flying machine, constructed
+upon the most approved principles by really skilled workmen, and
+scientifically certain to succeed, but having, when tested, only one
+defect&mdash;it will not fly.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VI.&mdash;IS ONE PARTY BETTER THAN THE OTHER?</span></h2>
+
+<p>It is perfectly natural to be asked, after trying to prove that
+partisanship is praiseworthy, and that a &ldquo;national&rdquo; party is out of the
+question, whether one party is so much better than the other that it
+deserves strenuous and continued support. For the purposes of the
+argument, it is necessary to consider only the two great parties in the
+State&mdash;the Liberal and the Tory. These represent the main tendencies
+which actuate mankind in public affairs&mdash;the go-ahead and the
+stand-still. Differences in the expression of these tendencies there are
+bound to be, according as circumstances vary; but, generally speaking,
+the Tory is the party of those who, being satisfied with things as they
+are, are content to stand still, while the Liberal is the party of those
+who, thinking there is ample room for improvement, desire to go ahead.</p>
+
+<p>The recent history of our country is all in favour of the Liberal
+contention. If two men ride on a horse one must ride behind, and if two
+parties take opposite views of the same measure one must be wrong. The
+best testimony to the fact that, as a whole, the Liberal policy pursued
+by this country for more than half a century has been right, is,
+therefore, that even when the Tories have been in the majority they have
+not attempted to reverse it. Every great question that has been agitated
+for by the Liberals as a body, except Home Rule, which has yet to be
+settled, has been settled in the way they wished; and has more than once
+been carried to the last point of success by the Tories themselves. Not
+even the staunchest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> Conservative would urge a return to the system of
+rotten boroughs, would repeal the Education Act, re-establish the Irish
+Church, or renew open voting; and the Tories who would re-enact the Corn
+Laws continue few.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Salisbury has contended that, even if the Liberals have always been
+right and the Tories wrong, it should make no difference to the
+present-day voter; and, speaking at Reading in the autumn of 1883, he
+asked&mdash;&ldquo;Would any of you go to an apothecary&rsquo;s shop because the previous
+tenant was a very good man at curing rheumatism? You would say, &lsquo;It
+matters little to me whether the former tenant was a skilful man or not;
+all that concerns me is the skill of the present tenant of the
+establishment.&rsquo;&rdquo; But supposing, to carry on Lord Salisbury&rsquo;s
+illustration, this new tenant could say, &ldquo;I have in my possession a
+recipe of my predecessor which proved itself an infallible cure for
+rheumatism; I prepare it in the same fashion; it will have the same
+result.&rdquo; Would one not reply, &ldquo;I will rather trust the recipe which has
+always done good, even though in the course of nature it has changed
+owners, than put myself in the hands of the opposition chemist, who,
+though exceedingly old and eminently respectable, never effects a cure,
+but whenever he is called in leaves the patient worse than he finds him?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>And when Lord Salisbury strove to make his point more clear, he did not
+mend matters much. &ldquo;It is only the existing party, whether Liberal or
+Conservative,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that really concerns you; success, wisdom, and
+justice do not stick to organizations or buildings&mdash;they are the
+attributes of men. It is by their present acts and their present
+principles that the two parties must be judged.&rdquo; Even if this be
+allowed&mdash;and, carried to its logical extent, it would justify every
+piece of &ldquo;political legerdemain&rdquo; (the phrase applied by Lord Salisbury
+himself to Mr. Disraeli&rsquo;s Reform Bill) the Tory party has ever
+perpetrated, or may ever attempt&mdash;Liberals need not shrink from the
+test. For the Tories, as they have ever done, are now shrinkingly and
+fearsomely following in the paths the Liberals years ago laid down, with
+just sufficient deviation to prove that the old Adam of reaction is not
+dead. Whether it be free trade, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> parliamentary reform, or the
+closure, they initiate nothing; but when the Liberals have cleared the
+way, they are eager to adopt all that they have previously denounced,
+and to claim as their own principles they have throughout professed to
+abhor. Seeing that the Liberals borrow nothing from the Tories, while
+the Tories borrow a very great deal from the Liberals, we can judge the
+two parties, as Lord Salisbury wished, by their present acts and their
+present principles, and show that the Liberal is the more worthy of popular support.</p>
+
+<p>It is, of course, not to be wondered at that such a desire to ignore the
+past should be expressed by a politician who, from his maiden speech to
+his most recent efforts, has denounced Liberal ideas; who, at various
+stages of his parliamentary career, has opposed the spread of popular
+education, the extension of the suffrage, the creation of the ballot,
+the emancipation of the Jews, the extinction of Church rates, the full
+admission of Dissenters to the Universities, the abolition of purchase
+in the army, the repeal of the taxes on knowledge, the throwing open of
+the Civil Service to the people, the right of Nonconformists to be
+buried in their parish churchyard, the remission of long-standing and
+obviously unpayable Irish arrears, and the destruction of the property
+qualification for members of Parliament; whose sympathy for his fellows
+may be gathered from his insinuated comparison of the Irish to
+Hottentots, and his declaration that it is &ldquo;just&rdquo; that the children of
+those who have contracted marriage with their deceased wife&rsquo;s sister
+should be bastardized; whose taste for diplomacy was shown by his
+direction to a Viceroy to &ldquo;create&rdquo; a pretext for forcing a quarrel upon
+Afghanistan; whose regard for the strictness of truth was displayed in
+his denial of the authenticity of a well-remembered secret memorandum;
+whose love for liberty was evidenced by the lukewarmness with which he
+watched the struggles for freedom in Italy and Bulgaria, and the hearty
+and continuous support he gave to the slave-holding faction in America;
+and whose affection for the people may be judged from the fact that,
+throughout his political life, his name has never been identified with a
+single piece of constructive legislation for their welfare. &ldquo;By their
+fruits shall ye know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> them&rdquo; is applicable to politics, therefore; as
+Lord Salisbury, by so strenuously endeavouring to ignore the maxim,
+practically admits; and at the risk of putting aside the canon of
+criticism adopted by the noble marquis, let me show some of the fruits
+of modern Liberal policy.</p>
+
+<p>I rise in the morning and go to my breakfast; my tea, my coffee, my
+sugar, and my ham are all of easy price because of the reductions in
+import duties made by Liberal Governments. I take up my newspaper, and I
+have it so cheaply because Mr. Gladstone, despite the utmost efforts of
+the Conservatives, secured the repeal of the paper duty. I go to
+business, and, as I write my letter or my postcard, I cannot but reflect
+that a Liberal Ministry in 1840 allowed me to send the one for a penny,
+and a Liberal Ministry in 1870 to send the other for half that sum. I
+proceed to dinner, and find that bread, cheese, and much of my dessert
+are the more available because of Liberal remissions. And as in the
+evening I visit the theatre, the very opera glasses I hold in my hand
+are the cheaper because, in one of his Budgets, Mr. Gladstone included
+these among the hundreds of other articles from which he removed a small
+but galling tax.</p>
+
+<p>These are some, and only some, of the material benefits resulting from
+the Liberal policy. What of the political, what of the social, what of
+the moral benefits? If I am an Englishman, I am proud of the fact that
+no longer is the national flag allowed to float over a slave; if I am a
+Scotchman, I rejoice that my country has been freed from the
+extraordinary system of mis-representation which weighed upon it like a
+nightmare before 1832; if I am an Irishman, I am not forced at the point
+of the bayonet to pay tithes to an alien Church, to liquidate arrears
+for rack-rents owing from the time of the famine, or to give an
+exorbitant rent for the result of my own improvements; if I am a
+Churchman, my Church has been strengthened by the repeal of enactments
+which provoked opposition, while providing no good for the Establishment
+they professed to serve; if I am a Nonconformist, I am no longer liable
+to have my goods seized in support of a Church in which I do not
+believe, I have the right to be married in my own place of worship, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+to be buried by my own minister by the side of my fathers; if I am a
+Catholic, I have been liberated from certain restrictions upon my
+religion, which I resented as an insult and a wrong; if I am a Jew, I
+can sit with the peers, in the Commons, or on the judicial bench; if I
+belong to the army, and am an officer, my rise is made easy&mdash;if I am a
+private, my rise is made possible, by the abolition of purchase; if I am
+either soldier or sailor, I owe it mainly to Liberal exertions that
+discipline is no longer maintained by the lash; if I am a merchant
+seaman, my life is the better protected because of the efforts of a
+Liberal member of Parliament; if I am in the Civil Service, I have the
+greater chance of success because of the destruction of that system of
+nomination, which, however advantageous to the aristocracy, was fatal to
+modest merit; if I am a student, I can go to a University with the
+certainty that not now shall I be deprived of the reward of my exertions
+because my conscience prevents me from subscribing the Thirty-nine
+Articles; if I am a tradesman, my goods are freed from many a customs
+duty which formerly restricted their sale; if I am a farmer, I can vote
+without fear of my landlord, my lands have been to some extent saved
+from the depredations of hares and rabbits, and my tenure has been
+rendered more certain than ever before; if I am an artisan, the fruits
+of combination have been secured to me, my employer has been made liable
+for accidents arising from either his carelessness or his greed, my vote
+has been obtained, and by the ballot has been protected; if I am the
+child of the poorest, a school has been opened for me where a sound
+education can be procured at a small cost; in fact, in whatever station
+I may chance to be placed, I cannot but feel in my every-day life the
+beneficent influences of the policy advocated by leaders of advanced
+thought, and adopted by Liberal Ministries during the past fifty years.</p>
+
+<p>If, then, I am asked to justify the Liberal party by showing what it has
+done, I answer that, by timely reform, it has saved England from the
+continental curse of frequent revolution; that, in striving for the
+greatest happiness of the greatest number, it has in especial elevated
+and educated the masses, for whom it has provided cheap food for both
+body and mind; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> that it has struggled, and in the main successfully
+struggled, to secure civil and religious equality for all. And in the
+future as in the past, with perfect liberty as its fixed ideal, and with
+peace, retrenchment, and reform as the methods by which it wishes that
+ideal to be obtained, it will press onward and upward, and ever onward
+and upward, until England, now regarded as the mother of free nations,
+shall be but one of a gigantic brotherhood of freedom, embracing every
+civilized people that may then inhabit the globe.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VII.&mdash;WHAT ARE LIBERAL PRINCIPLES?</span></h2>
+
+<p>After this recital of Liberal deeds, it may fairly be asked, &ldquo;What are
+Liberal principles?&rdquo; and these it is not easy to define off-hand. There
+are certain general truths which are the commonplaces of both parties,
+and no serious attempt has yet been made to lay down a system of
+principles with which none except Liberals can agree. But there are
+differences that underlie the action of the two parties which are
+unmistakable, and are worth finding out.</p>
+
+<p>If one were to ask the first half-dozen Liberals he met for a definition
+of their principles, varying and perhaps vague replies would be
+received. For in politics, as in other matters that combine speculation
+with practical action, it is only the few who speculate, while the many
+are content to act. And even most of those who tried to answer would be
+apt to reply that Liberal principles could be summed up in the old party
+watch-word&mdash;&ldquo;Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform,&rdquo; thus confounding Liberal
+principles with Liberal aims.</p>
+
+<p>That these aims are well worth striving for has long been an accepted
+doctrine of the party; but, in trying to gain them, we have to adapt
+them to circumstances, and are not called upon in every single emergency
+to push them to their logical extent. Logic, after all, is only a pair
+of spectacles, not eyesight itself; and attempts to arrange human
+affairs upon too precise a basis frequently end, as France so often has
+shown, in failure. We long for peace, but not for peace at any price; we
+ask for retrenchment, but not an indiscriminate paring down of
+expenditure for the sake of showing a saving; and we struggle for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+reform, but not to cut all the branches off the trees on the chance of
+improving their appearance.</p>
+
+<p>Before, in fact, we have been able to struggle at all for these or any
+other points in politics, certain principles have had to be acted upon
+by generations of progressive thinkers, which have developed and
+strengthened our liberties. It is, perhaps, presumptuous to attempt to
+lay down in a few words a basis of Liberal principle, but I would submit
+that that basis may be found in the contention that</p>
+
+<p><i>All men should be equal before the law</i>;</p>
+
+<p>that, as a consequence,</p>
+
+<p><i>All should have freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of action</i>;</p>
+
+<p>and that, in order to secure and retain these liberties,</p>
+
+<p><i>The people should govern themselves</i>.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to the first point, I do not contend that all men are, or
+ever can be, equal. Differences of mental and physical strength, of
+energy and temperament, and of will to work, there must always be; and
+in the struggle for existence, which is likely to grow even keener as
+the world becomes more filled, the fittest must continue to come to the
+top, as they have done and deserve to do. A law-made equality would not
+last a week, but much law-made inequality has lasted for centuries, and
+it is against this that Liberals as Liberals must protest. We object to
+all law-made privilege, and we ask that men gifted with equal capacities
+shall have equal chances. We do not claim any new privilege for the
+poor, but we demand the abolition of the old privileges, express and
+un-express, of the rich. Something was done in the latter direction when
+the system of nomination in most departments of the civil service and
+that of purchase in the army were got rid of. But as long as in the
+higher departments of public affairs a man has a place in the
+legislature merely because he is the son of his father; as long as in
+the humbler branches no one unpossessed of a property qualification can
+sit on certain local boards; and as long as in daily life the facilities
+for frequent appeal, devised by lawyers within the House for the benefit
+of lawyers without, provide a power for wealth that is often used to
+defeat the ends of justice, so long,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> to take these alone out of many
+instances, shall we lack that equality of opportunity which we demand
+not as a favour but a right.</p>
+
+<p>But if every man is to be equal before the law, he must have the right
+to think as his reason directs; to discuss as freely as he thinks; and
+to act as he pleases, so long as his neighbour is not injured in the
+honest discharge of his duties, or the common weal put in jeopardy.
+&ldquo;Give me,&rdquo; said Milton, &ldquo;the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue
+according to conscience, above all liberties&rdquo;&mdash;for it is certain that
+with freedom of thought and discussion all other liberties will follow.
+John Mill carried this principle to the fullest extent when he argued
+that &ldquo;if all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion, and only one
+person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified
+in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be
+justified in silencing mankind.&rdquo; To all such sweeping generalizations
+there are, however, possible exceptions. No man would be much inclined
+to blame Cromwell for suppressing the pamphlet &ldquo;Killing no Murder,&rdquo;
+which directly advocated his own assassination; even the strongest lover
+of free discussion would not be prepared to allow the systematic
+circulation of exhortations to blow up our public buildings, and
+directions as to the best way of doing it; and instances may conceivably
+arise&mdash;and an invasion one of them&mdash;where absolute freedom of
+publication and debate would form a national danger. Our liberties,
+therefore, would be sufficiently protected if we recognized the right of
+every man to speak and to act as he pleases, &ldquo;so long as his neighbour
+is not injured in the honest discharge of his duties, or the common weal
+put in jeopardy.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>In order, however, that men may be able to think, speak, and do as they
+deem right, it is necessary that the people shall rule, and that the
+majority, when it has made up its mind, shall have the power to carry
+out its decree. Even the Tories of these days will not dispute this
+principle, and, therefore, Liberals cannot claim it as at this moment
+their own; and yet, broadly speaking, the root idea of the Tory party is
+the aristocratic theory that the few ought to govern the many, while
+that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> of the Liberal party is the democratic, that the many ought to
+govern the few.</p>
+
+<p>In the days before the mass of the people were a real power in the
+affairs of the State, this difference was very clearly marked, for the
+Tories then were under no necessity to conceal their belief that the
+&ldquo;common herd&rdquo; were not to be trusted in political concerns. And it is
+useful, as showing what the high Tory doctrine on this point really was,
+to recall the fact that a judge on the bench, less than a century ago,
+in summing up at a political trial, laid it down as a doctrine not to be
+questioned that &ldquo;a government in every country should be just like a
+corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed interest,
+which alone has a right to be represented. As for rabble, who have
+nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? What
+security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their
+property on their backs, and leave the country in the twinkle of an eye;
+but landed property cannot be removed.&rdquo; And another judge at a political
+trial within the present century went even further in denying to the
+people not merely the right of interference with public affairs, but
+even of comment upon them. &ldquo;It is said,&rdquo; he observed, &ldquo;that we have a
+right to discuss the acts of our legislature. This would be a large
+permission indeed. Is there to be a power in the people to counteract
+the acts of the Parliament; and is the libeller to come and make the
+people dissatisfied with the Government under which he lives? This is
+not to be permitted to any man,&mdash;it is unconstitutional and seditious.&rdquo;
+We have outgrown such doctrines as these; and, thanks to the efforts of
+generations of Liberals who have passed to their rest, the right of the
+&ldquo;rabble who have nothing but personal property&rdquo;&mdash;or, for the matter of
+that, no property at all&mdash;to take part in settling the affairs of the
+State, whether by criticism or active interference, is solidly established.</p>
+
+<p>It may be argued that as the Tories of to-day have accepted democracy,
+the Liberals have no right to claim the principles here laid down as if
+they were without exception their own. But this Tory acceptance of
+democratic ideas is only partial, and a party which mainly depends upon
+the aristocracy for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> support can never adopt them with consistency and
+enthusiasm. The very existence of an hereditary legislature violates the
+principle that all men should be equal before the law; the theory upon
+which a State-established Church rests is equally a violation of the
+right of every one to think, speak, and act as he chooses; and the
+continuous efforts of the Tories to limit the franchise, and to erect
+barriers against the majority having their will, are utterly opposed to
+the view that the people should govern, and harmonize with the old idea
+that the people should be governed.</p>
+
+<p>It must not be imagined that these differences between the parties mean
+nothing, or that we are beyond all danger of losing the advance we have
+made. The ease with which we might slip back into despotism is shown by
+the manner in which the Tories resort to coercion&mdash;or, as they prefer to
+term it, &ldquo;exceptional legislation&rdquo;&mdash;when a majority of the Irish people
+has to be cowed. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the abolition
+of trial by jury, the extinction of liberty of the press, and the denial
+of the right of public meeting have been frequently enacted against the
+majority of the people of Ireland, because their views on the political
+situation have not accorded with those of the majority of the people of
+England. And though they have all failed, and repeatedly failed, a
+variation of the same old plan is put in operation to-day as if it were
+a newly-discovered and infallible remedy for every popular ill.</p>
+
+<p>Easy-going folk are apt to reply that, as these things concern only
+Ireland, it is of no special moment to ourselves, and that England is
+safe from any revival of a despotic system. Even if this were true it
+would be false morality, and false morality makes bad politics. But it
+is not true. Despotism is a disease which spreads, and any development
+of it applied to one part of the body politic might, in conceivable
+circumstances, be used as a precedent to apply it to the whole. And if
+it be said that in these happy days the men of England have the
+undisputed right to think as they like and talk as they will, it can be
+answered that not one of the shackles upon freedom of thought and
+freedom of action has been voluntarily struck off by the Tories, and
+that it is only lately that they prevented a member<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> of Parliament for
+years from taking the seat to which he had been four times elected,
+because he avowed what he believed upon theological questions.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between the two parties, even in the present general
+acceptance of a democratic system, may be put in words once used by Mr.
+Chamberlain&mdash;&ldquo;It is the essential condition, the cardinal principle of
+Liberalism, that we should recognize rights, and not merely confer
+favours.&rdquo; With us, the suffrage is the right of every free citizen; with
+the Tories, it is a favour conferred upon the working by the moneyed
+classes. We demand religious equality; the Tories are willing to give
+toleration. But favours we do not ask, and toleration we will not have.</p>
+
+<p>Liberals, in fact, are prepared substantially to subscribe to the
+principles laid down more than a century since in the American
+Declaration of Independence&mdash;a document which sounded the knell of
+despotism on its own side of the Atlantic, and awoke echoes which shook
+down another despotism on ours. &ldquo;We hold,&rdquo; said that document, &ldquo;these
+truths to be self-evident&mdash;that all men are created equal; that they are
+endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among
+these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure
+these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just
+powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of
+government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the
+people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government,
+laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
+such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>These, broadly speaking, are Liberal principles; and when one has
+absorbed them thoroughly, there comes to him that Liberal sentiment,
+that enthusiasm for his fellows, which feels a blow struck at any man&rsquo;s
+freedom, in any part of the whole world, as keenly as if it were struck at his own.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VIII.&mdash;ARE LIBERALS AND RADICALS AGREED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>It may be thought that by dealing only with &ldquo;the fundamental principles
+of the Liberal party,&rdquo; the Radicals were put aside as if they had no
+separate existence; and to a large extent this is true, for Radicals are
+simply advanced Liberals. The principles just asserted are common to all
+members of the progressive party. There are differences as to the time
+at which certain measures directly flowing from them shall become a
+portion of the party&rsquo;s platform; and that is all.</p>
+
+<p>A great deal of the prejudice which used to exist against those called
+&ldquo;Radicals&rdquo; has died away, but traces of it linger still; and it will be
+well to see what Radicalism, as a phase of Liberalism, really is. It may
+sound strange to be told that the Whigs were the Radicals of an earlier
+day, and that they sometimes carried their Radicalism to the point of
+revolution. In these times it is becoming increasingly doubtful whether
+those who call themselves by what was once the honourable title of
+&ldquo;Whig&rdquo; have any claim to be considered members of the Liberal party; and
+there are many who consider that they are now more truly conservative
+than the Conservatives themselves. The Whigs tell us that they are only
+acting as the drag on the wheel; but this implies that we are always
+going down hill. That we do not believe. We hold that we are
+progressing; and a drag which would act upon the coach as it climbs the
+hill is a product neither of prudence nor common sense.</p>
+
+<p>The bulk of the party of progress in these days may be said to combine
+Liberal traditions with Radical instincts. The two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> can mingle with the
+utmost ease, and, though they may run side by side for some time before
+they join, the steady stream of the one and the rapid rush of the other
+always unite at last in one broad river of liberalizing sentiment, which
+fertilizes as it flows.</p>
+
+<p>From the time when Bolingbroke wrote of some measure that &ldquo;such a remedy
+might have wrought a <i>radical cure</i> of the evil that threatens our
+constitution&rdquo; to the date, a century later, when those who wished to
+introduce a &ldquo;radical reform&rdquo; into our representative system were called
+by the name, there were many Whigs who talked Radicalism without being
+aware of it; but when the title had been given to a section of the
+Liberal party, it became for a long period a term of reproach. Mr.
+Gladstone, once speaking at Birmingham, quoted a definition of the early
+Radicals which described them as men &ldquo;whose temper had been soured
+against the laws and institutions of their country;&rdquo; and he admitted
+that there was much justification for their having been so. But one can
+quite understand that men of a soured temper were not likely to be
+popular with the placid politician who stayed at home, or the
+place-hunter who went to the House of Commons; and the bad meaning, once
+attached to the name, remained affixed to it for a very long time.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gladstone, in the speech referred to, was the first great English
+statesman to try and remove the reproach; and this he did by defining a
+Radical as &ldquo;a man who is in earnest.&rdquo; This was flattering, but as a
+definition lacked precision, for Tories are often in desperate earnest.
+Many Radicals would assert that the very name&mdash;coming, as it of course
+does, from the Latin word for &ldquo;root&rdquo;&mdash;tells everything; that it
+signifies that they go to the root of all matters with which they deal,
+and that, where reform is needed, it is a root and branch reform they advocate.</p>
+
+<p>To this it may be replied that to go to the root of everything is not
+always practicable and is not necessarily judicious. If a tree be
+thoroughly rotten, if it be liable to be shaken to the ground by the
+first blast, and thereby to injure all its surroundings, it should
+certainly be cut down, and as soon as it conveniently can be. But if the
+tree has only two or three<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> rotten branches, there is no necessity to go
+to its root. If one does, it will very probably kill a good tree which,
+with only the decayed portions removed, might bear valuable fruit. As
+with trees, so with institutions; and what seems to be forgotten by many
+who call themselves Radical is that, in a highly-complex civilization
+such as ours, we have to bear with some things that are far from ideal,
+simply because of that force of do-nothingness which, powerful in
+mechanics, is as great in political life.</p>
+
+<p>A friend who has long worked in the Liberal cause once observed: &ldquo;The
+misfortune is that it is difficult to tell what a man&rsquo;s ideas of public
+policy are from the mere fact of his calling himself a Radical. If by
+Radical is meant Advanced Liberal&mdash;a Liberal determined to push forward
+with all practicable speed, a Liberal who is in earnest&mdash;then I can
+understand it, and I will readily take the name. But if by Radical is
+meant a somewhat hysterical creature, who is ready to fight for every
+fad that tickles his fancy, as he seems to be in some cases, or a
+cantankerous being whose crotchets compel him to sever himself from all
+other workers, as he is in others; if he is of the extreme Spencerian
+school, and demurs to most legislation on the ground that it is
+over-legislation, or of the extreme Socialist school, and demands that
+Government shall do everything, and individual effort be practically
+strangled by force of law, I am not a Radical, and hope never to be called one.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But the practical Radicalism which is one of the greatest factors in
+Liberal policy at the present day, is far removed from the schools just
+depicted. The reasonable Radical is not a believer in any of the
+schemes&mdash;as old as the hills and yet unblushingly preached
+to-day&mdash;which, by some legislative hocus-pocus, some supreme stroke of
+statecraft, will &ldquo;put a pot on every fire and a fowl in every pot;&rdquo; will
+endow each widow and give a portion to all unmarried girls; will feed
+the poor without burdening the community; and will make all the crooked
+paths straight without undue trouble to ourselves. He holds that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i8">Diseases desperate grown</div>
+<div>By desperate remedies are removed,</div>
+<div>Or not at all;</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p><p>but he does not consider all diseases to be of the character described;
+he does not refuse the half-loaf because for the moment the whole one is
+impossible of attainment; and he does not repudiate other honest workers
+in the cause of progress because their pace is not quite so swift, and
+their point of view somewhat different.</p>
+
+<p>In the constant striving after a high ideal, there is in the Radical&rsquo;s
+heart a resolute desire to emerge from any rut into which politics may
+have degenerated. For the very reason of his existence is that, if there
+be an abuse in Church or State which agitation and argument can remove,
+all honest endeavours must be made to remove it. He cannot forget that
+many abuses have been got rid of by these means, and he profits by the
+lesson to attack those which remain. It is their extinction at which he
+aims. Earnestness, enthusiasm, and devotion to principle are his
+weapons, and these he will not waste in fruitless longings after a
+perfect State, but will use them to make the State we possess as perfect
+as is possible. In all things he will aim at the practical; he will
+remember that compromise is not necessarily cowardly, and that it is
+possible for those who disagree with him to be as honest in their views
+and as pure in their aims as himself. And in striving for the greatest
+happiness of the greatest number, he will never forget that the greatest
+number is all.</p>
+
+<p>The answer may be made that this is an ideal Radical, and that the real
+article is very different. So many have been taught to think, but they
+are wrong. There are some rough diamonds in the Radical party, it is
+true; but, so long as they be diamonds, we can afford to wait a little
+for the polish. They are bigoted it may be said, and bigotry is hateful.
+But bigots are just as useful to a reform as backwoodsmen to a new
+community; they clear away obstacles from which gentler men would
+shrink; rough and occasionally awkward to deal with, they make the
+pathways along which others can move.</p>
+
+<p>But, it is sometimes asked, where are the old philosophical
+Radicals&mdash;men of the stamp of Bentham, and Grote, and James Mill? Dead,
+all of them, having done their life&rsquo;s work faithfully and well; and
+their successors have to look at politics from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> the standpoint of
+to-day, and not of half a century ago. And when the Tories say that
+these were especially admirable men, it must not be forgotten that their
+ideas were as strongly opposed and their persons as bitterly assailed by
+the Tories of their own day as are the ideas and the persons of the
+unphilosophical Radicals&mdash;if they are to be called so&mdash;of this present
+year of grace.</p>
+
+<p>The Radicals of to-day have their faults, and there shall be no attempt
+to conceal them. Many who call themselves by the name discredit it by
+impatience of opposition, readiness to attribute interested motives to
+those differing from them, and intolerance towards those who exercise in
+another direction what they emphatically claim for themselves&mdash;absolute
+freedom of thought, speech, and action. Some among them also are prone
+to be led aside by a catching phrase, without troubling to ask what it
+really means; and, in order to strengthen their forces, allow themselves
+to be connected with any movement that may for the moment be popular.
+And even more, but these of a much higher stamp, are carried away by the
+dangerous delusion that in any political system can be found perfect happiness.</p>
+
+<p>No honest Radical will deny the existence of these faults or be offended
+that they should be pointed out. But the essential purity of aim and
+depth of honest fervour possessed by the Radicals of this country
+deserves all recognition. At heavy sacrifice to themselves they have led
+the van in every great political movement, and their instinct has been
+proved to be right. They have held aloft the lamp of liberty in times of
+depression when Liberals of feebler soul would have hidden it beneath a
+bushel in the hope of brighter days. And, even were their failings more
+far-reaching than any that can be urged against them, their services as
+pioneers of freedom would entitle them to the heartiest thanks of all
+who have entered into their heritage because of the efforts the Radicals have made.</p>
+
+<p>Radicals and Liberals, then, are agreed as to principle though they
+differ in methods, for the Liberal is a very good lantern, but a lantern
+which requires lighting; and it is the Radical who strikes the match.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>IX.&mdash;WHAT ARE THE LIBERALS DOING?</span></h2>
+
+<p>There has now been told a great deal about the principles which the
+Liberals entertain, and a list has been given of the many glorious
+things the Liberals have done; but the question of greatest immediate
+interest is what the Liberals are doing, for we cannot live upon the
+exploits of the past, but upon the performances of the present and the
+promises of the future.</p>
+
+<p>Although the Liberals at this moment are concentrating their main
+attention upon the question of self-government for Ireland, there are
+other important matters affecting the remainder of the United Kingdom
+which occupy a place in their thoughts, and which will form their future party &ldquo;cry.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>It has, of course, often been remarked that men when in Opposition call
+out for a great deal which they fail to accomplish when in office; but
+discredit does not of necessity ensue. It certainly shows that in
+certain instances men do not come up to their ideal, but does that prove
+the ideal to be wrong? Does it not rather prove that those who adopted
+it, like mortal men everywhere and in all ages, were fallible? Despite
+every drawback and every backsliding&mdash;and such drawbacks and
+backslidings are admittedly many&mdash;it is better to have a high ideal and
+fail frequently to attain it, than to have no definiteness of purpose
+and take the chance of blundering into the right.</p>
+
+<p>None should think lightly of the power of a popular cry. It was with the
+shout of the leading tenet of their new creed that the Arabs fought
+their way from Mecca to Madrid; it was with the exclamation &ldquo;Jerusalem
+is lost!&rdquo; that the Crusaders marched across Europe to battle with the
+Saracen; it was with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> device &ldquo;For God and the Protestant Religion&rdquo;
+that William of Orange swept the Stuarts out of Britain; and it was with
+the burning words of the &ldquo;Marseillaise&rdquo; that the raw levies of France
+defied and defeated the trained armies of Europe. For the popular cry
+voices the popular emotion, and when the popular emotion is at its
+height its force is irresistible.</p>
+
+<p>To touch the heart of the people must, therefore, be one aim of any
+democratic party; and that is why the politician who makes no allowance
+for human passion, prejudice, or prepossession is a mere dreamer, who
+deserves and is bound to fail. The fashion of the German philosopher
+who, on being asked to describe a camel, evolved the animal from his
+inner consciousness, is that in which some of our political guides
+create their ideas of the world around them. They sit in the same
+armchair as of old, and do not perceive how the conditions have changed.
+They continue to imagine that the clique of some club-house controls
+public events, and that the whisper of the party whip is all-powerful
+with the constituencies. They do not recognize that voters are not now
+an appanage of the Reform or the Carlton, because the groove they have
+hollowed out for themselves is too deep to allow them to look over the
+edge. But in nothing more than in politics is it true that the proper
+study of mankind is man.</p>
+
+<p>And, if one moves among the masses of his fellows, he will find a
+growing desire to put to practical use the tools the State has given
+them. Household suffrage and the ballot were not an end but a means, and
+the question which politicians should ask themselves in this day of
+comparative quiet is to what end these means shall be put. Those who
+talk with working men know that there is a vague discontent with things
+as they are, which, if not directed into proper channels, may become
+dangerous, for in many quarters the old ignorant impatience of taxation
+is giving place to an ignorant impatience of the rich. No good will come
+of shutting our eyes to the existence of this feeling; the question is
+how in the fairest and fittest manner it can be eradicated.</p>
+
+<p>It must not be forgotten that the working classes have only recently
+obtained direct political power, and that there is still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> much
+uncertainty among them as to the best uses to which it can be put. There
+would be nothing immoral in their using that power to better their own
+interests. Men, after all, are but mortal; and, just as the upper
+classes before 1832 used the power of Parliament to further their own
+ends, and just as later the middle classes, when they were uppermost,
+attended carefully to themselves, so the working classes will do when
+they recognize their strength. And this is only saying that men being as
+they are, &ldquo;Number One&rdquo; will be the most prominent figure in their
+political calculations, whether that number represents a peer of the
+realm or a labourer on the roads.</p>
+
+<p>This is not the place to enter into the question of how far the State
+ought to interfere with social problems. The fact to be emphasized is
+that there is an increasing body of opinion, especially among the
+working classes, that certain social problems will have to be attended
+to. Any politician who attempts to forecast the future&mdash;more especially
+any Liberal who wishes to draw up a party programme&mdash;must recognize
+this, and act according to his convictions after fully considering it.</p>
+
+<p>The politics of the future will, therefore, have a distinctly social
+tinge, but they must include also many questions which are regarded
+to-day, and will continue to be regarded, as of a partisan character. It
+is requisite, then, to the right understanding of Liberal policy that a
+broad view should be taken of the matters which are likely within no
+distant date to become planks of the party platform. Calm discussion now
+may save misapprehension then, and if we can see exactly whither we are
+going, we shall be able with the more certainty to pursue our journey.
+And if, in the course of the discussion, what at the first blush appears
+an extreme view is taken, remember always the old truth that half a loaf
+is better than no bread&mdash;that is, if the half-loaf be good bread and
+honestly earned, and not to be accepted as an equivalent for the whole,
+if that be wished for and attainable.</p>
+
+<p>Subject to this condition, the Liberal party can do no better than
+consider what is likely to come within the scope of its future
+exertions; and although it is right to take up one thing at a time in
+order that that one thing may be done well, good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> will be effected by at
+once endeavouring to answer the main questions now before us. Upon the
+spirit in which these are discussed, and the manner in which they are
+replied to, much of the future of popular government in England will
+depend. The scientific naturalist of to-day tells us that it is an idle
+fable which states that the ostrich hides its head in the sand with the
+idea of escaping observation; but really so many of our leading
+politicians execute a variation of this man[oe]uvre in regard to the
+questions of the future, that the ostrich need not be ashamed to be
+stupid in such eminent company.</p>
+
+<p>A preliminary to the discussion in detail of questions which go to the
+root of many of the most important matters in politics is a resolution
+not to be led aside from any course one may think right by the fear of
+being called hard names, or by the use of certain venerable but
+weather-worn phrases. It is so easy to endeavour to damage political
+opponents by applying to them such names as Separatists or Socialists,
+Atheists or Revolutionaries, that one cannot wonder that the practice is
+frequently adopted by the Tory party. But hard words break no bones, and
+the politician who is frightened by a nickname may be a very estimable
+person, but he is no good in a fight.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly we can afford to despise certain of the phrases which with
+some politicians do duty for argument. No one should be turned back from
+doing what he thought to be right in the circumstances of to-day by
+being reminded of that mysterious entity &ldquo;the wisdom of our ancestors.&rdquo;
+What sane man would conduct a shop as it was conducted 500 years since?
+And where would science be if we still swore by the skill of the
+alchemists? Accumulated experience in the varied transactions of life is
+held to improve man&rsquo;s judgment and capacity; why should it not be
+similarly held to improve the judgment and capacity of States? Let any
+one who sighs after the wisdom of our ancestors apply in imagination the
+political maxims in vogue even a hundred years ago to the affairs of
+this present, and then let him say honestly whether he would wish by
+them to be governed.</p>
+
+<p>Another fine-crusted example of a worn-out phrase is that in praise of
+&ldquo;the good old times.&rdquo; We are invited to believe that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> in some unnamed
+age, England was better and brighter, and her people happier and richer,
+than to-day, and mainly because rulers were obeyed in all things and no
+questions asked. But particulars are lacking; and these sketches of the
+glories of &ldquo;the good old times&rdquo; are like nothing so much as Chinese
+pictures, displaying an abundance of colour but no perspective, an
+amazing imagination but an absence of exact likeness to anything ever
+seen by mortal man.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Dangerous innovations&rdquo; also is a phrase at which no one should be
+alarmed. No great good has ever been accomplished without many excellent
+persons considering it a &ldquo;dangerous innovation.&rdquo; The Scribes and the
+Pharisees, and, after them, the Roman Empire, denounced and persecuted
+the Christian religion upon this ground; the most powerful Church in
+Christendom, with similar belief and similar lack of success, used every
+engine at its command to suppress the Reformation. As in religious so in
+political affairs. King John would doubtless have described Magna Charta
+in just such terms; the partisans of Charles the First certainly held
+that opinion concerning the demand of Parliament to control the Church,
+the army, and the monarchy itself; the opponents of every measure of
+reform&mdash;political, social, or religious&mdash;have used the phrase. From the
+greatest to the smallest reform it has been the same. In the early years
+of this century a Parochial Schools Bill, because it did not give all
+power to the clergy, was opposed by the then Archbishop of Canterbury
+with the words, &ldquo;Their lordships&rsquo; prudence would, and must, guard
+against innovations that might shake the foundations of religion.&rdquo; When,
+in later times, gas was introduced, the aristocratic dwellers in western
+London protested with equal force against such an innovation as the new
+illuminant; and Lord Beaconsfield, in the opening chapters of the last
+of his novels, sketched with ironic pen the attempts of high-born ladies
+to prevent the spread of light. Thus, in things sublime and in things
+ridiculous, the cry of &ldquo;dangerous innovation&rdquo; has been raised until it
+has been rendered contemptible.</p>
+
+<p>Equally futile is the fear that the Liberals are about to propose &ldquo;the
+impossible.&rdquo; There is nothing in politics to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> which that word can be
+applied, as even the most cursory study of our history will show. When
+men say that certain measures can &ldquo;never&rdquo; be carried, they are more
+likely to be wrong than right. In 1687 it would have been deemed
+impossible to place the Crown upon a strictly parliamentary basis; in
+1689 this was accomplished. In 1830 the most sanguine reformer scarcely
+dared hope that borough-mongering would in his lifetime be destroyed,
+and the first popularly elected Parliament was chosen in 1832. In 1865,
+none could have dreamed that household suffrage in the boroughs was
+near; in 1867 it was adopted by a Tory Government. In 1867 he would have
+been a hardy prophet who would have foretold the speedy downfall of the
+Irish Episcopal Establishment; and the Act of Disestablishment was
+placed upon the statute book in 1869. Such instances should of a surety
+teach men to be modest in their forecasts of what is possible in politics.</p>
+
+<p>In, therefore, pursuing our search into the why and the wherefore of the
+politics of the future, we must put aside phrases and come to facts. The
+phrases will die, but the facts will remain; and the more closely we
+grasp these latter the more certain will those Liberal principles which
+have done so much for the past, do even more for the future.</p>
+
+<p>And, when we come to the facts, we must not forget that a political
+question is not necessarily unpractical because it cannot be immediately
+dealt with; for good is accomplished by the calm discussion of points
+which are bound some time to be raised, and which, if undebated now, may
+be settled in a gust of popular passion. As Mr. John Morley has well
+observed&mdash;&ldquo;The fact that leading statesmen are of necessity so absorbed
+in the tasks of the hour furnishes all the better reason why as many
+other people as possible should busy themselves in helping to prepare
+opinion for the practical application of unfamiliar but weighty and
+promising suggestions, by constant and ready discussion of them upon their merits.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>X.&mdash;SHOULD HOME RULE BE GRANTED TO IRELAND?</span></h2>
+
+<p>The question of Irish self-government is for the present the greatest
+that concerns the Liberal party, and in current politics, as Mr.
+Gladstone has truly and tersely put it, Ireland blocks the way. This, of
+course, is not so simply because Mr. Gladstone said it, and even less is
+it so because he wished it. The question stands in the path of all other
+great measures of legislative reform, for the sufficient reason that, at
+the first opportunity after the franchise was enjoyed by every
+householder, Ireland declared emphatically, and by a majority
+unparalleled in modern political history, in favour of freedom to manage
+her own domestic affairs.</p>
+
+<p>It must be obvious that, when all the popularly-elected members for
+three out of four provinces into which one of the countries which form
+this kingdom is divided, pronounce against the existing system of
+government, and when a majority of those for the other province side
+with them, that that system cannot continue to exist with the good will
+of those whom it most intimately affects, and can only be maintained by
+force. Such as have followed Mr. Gladstone in this matter do not believe
+in the maintenance of a government against the constitutionally declared
+will of the governed, and are agreed that the Irish demand for the
+management of purely domestic affairs ought to be granted on the grounds
+of justice, expediency, and sound Liberal principles.</p>
+
+<p>They hold that to grant the demand would be just, because under the
+present system the vast majority of Irishmen have no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> practical control
+over those by whom they are governed; that it would be expedient,
+because the kingdom is weakened by the continual disaffection of one of
+its component parts; and that it would accord with sound Liberal
+principles, in that the overwhelming majority of the Irish electorate
+have asked for Home Rule through the constitutional medium of the ballot-box.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The liberty of a people,&rdquo; says Cowley, &ldquo;consists in being governed by
+laws which they have made themselves, under whatever form it be of
+government.&rdquo; This definition, which applies strictly to England, applies
+not at all to Ireland. The English system of government has broken down
+there so completely that all parties profess to be agreed that something
+must be devised in its place. Liberals have always held that a people or
+a class knows better what is good for it than any other people or any
+other class, however enlightened or well-meaning. That has been one of
+the main reasons for giving the suffrage to the poor, the ignorant, and
+the helpless, because the experience of ages has taught that the rich,
+the educated, and the powerful, while well able to take care of
+themselves, are either too careless or have too little knowledge to take
+the same care of others. And as with the suffrage, so with
+self-government. Any extension must be granted upon broad principles:
+small concessions grudgingly given are always accepted without
+gratitude, and used to extort greater.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; it may be said, &ldquo;I am willing to give Ireland a large measure of
+self-government, but I won&rsquo;t yield to agitators.&rdquo; This is one of the
+oldest of all replies to demands for reform. How could anything be
+gained in politics without agitation? The Tories swear they will yield
+nothing until agitation has ceased; and if it ceases, if only for a
+moment, they declare it is evident there is no popular wish for reform.
+&ldquo;Proceed, my lords,&rdquo; said Lord Mansfield, when the American colonies
+revolted&mdash;&ldquo;proceed, my lords, with spirit and firmness; and when you
+shall have established your authority, it will then be time to show
+lenity.&rdquo; And their lordships proceeded; but the &ldquo;time to show lenity&rdquo;
+never came, for it was such counsels which lost the American colonies to
+the British Crown.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But,&rdquo; it will be added, &ldquo;this is not an ordinary agitation; it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> is a
+revolutionary one.&rdquo; In some of its phases that is true, and it is all
+the more reason why its cause should be closely examined. It is the
+English themselves who have taught the Irish that ordinary
+constitutional agitation gains them nothing. If it had not been for the
+organization of the Volunteers, Grattan&rsquo;s Parliament of 1782 would never
+have been granted; the Duke of Wellington in 1829 admitted that he
+yielded Catholic Emancipation to the threat of civil war; it needed the
+terrible crimes of the early &ldquo;thirties&rdquo; to arouse England to the
+necessity for abolishing an iniquitous system of levying tithe; the
+Fenian outbreaks, the attack on a prison van at Manchester, and the
+blowing up of a gaol in London, opened the eyes of the English to the
+need for disestablishing the Irish Church and clipping the claws of the
+Irish landlords; the fearful winter of 1880 led to the granting of still
+further protection to the tenants; and to the &ldquo;plan of campaign&rdquo; of the
+winter of 1886 was it owing that a Tory Government felt compelled to
+still further encroach upon the property and privileges of the landlords
+of Ireland. As long as Ireland has held to constitutional agitation&mdash;as
+witness that for Catholic Emancipation from 1801 to 1825, and that for
+tenant right from 1850 to 1868&mdash;so long has England refused to grant a
+single just demand; and this is exactly what the Tories are doing now.
+Is it any wonder that Irish agitation should have become revolutionary
+when that is the only kind we have rewarded? In the relations between
+the governing classes and popular movements there has all through been
+this difference&mdash;in England, revolution has been staved off by reform;
+in Ireland, reform has been staved off till there was revolution.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But,&rdquo; it may be continued, &ldquo;it is not so much that the agitation is
+revolutionary as that it is criminal which makes me object.&rdquo; But a
+movement ought not to be called criminal because of the excesses of a
+few of its extreme partisans. No great popular agitation has ever been
+free from lewd fellows of the baser sort, who have given occasion to the
+enemy to blaspheme. But did English Liberals hesitate to support Mazzini
+because he was accused of favouring assassination; to sympathize with
+the French Republicans because Orsini prepared bombs for the destruction
+of Napoleon III.; or to-day to wish well to those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> Russians who conspire
+for liberty because the wilder spirits among them have assassinated one
+Czar and attempted to assassinate another? In our own history, are the
+Covenanters to be condemned because some of them murdered Archbishop
+Sharpe; the early Radicals because Thistlewood and his fellows plotted
+to kill King and Cabinet; the Reformers of 1831 because of the Bristol
+riots and the destruction of Nottingham Castle; or those of 1866 because
+the Hyde Park railings were thrown down? When it is remembered that even
+such a man as Peel could, in the midst of a heated controversy, accuse
+such another as Cobden of conniving at assassination, we should be
+careful how we accept the testimony of any partisan concerning the
+criminality of an agitation to which he is opposed.</p>
+
+<p>These objections touch, after all, only the fringe of the matter, and
+another which is frequently urged&mdash;that the Irish agitation is a
+&ldquo;foreign conspiracy&rdquo; because it receives aid from the United
+States&mdash;does not go much closer to the root. But this, like the others,
+may be disposed of by English examples. Did not Englishmen aid, both by
+men and money, in liberating Greece and uniting Italy? Did they not help
+by subscriptions the insurrections in Hungary and Poland, and, when the
+former failed, did not many of them take the refugees into their homes?
+Did they not even raise a fund to assist the slave-holding States when
+in rebellion? And in all these cases, except in a remote degree the
+last, they had no tie in blood, but only one in sympathy, with those
+concerned. That the Nationalist movement has been largely aided from the
+United States is undoubted; but that aid has mainly come from those of
+Irish birth or parentage who have been driven across the Atlantic to
+seek a home. And when it is said that, because of this help, a
+self-governed Ireland would rely upon the United States to the detriment
+of England, may we not ask why it is that Italy does not rely upon
+France, though it was France that struck the first effective blow for
+Italian unity; or Bulgaria upon Russia, though without the
+blood-sacrifice of Russia that principality would never have occupied a
+place on the European map? However much it may be to be regretted,
+gratitude does not play any large part in international affairs.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p><p>When the more serious objections to the granting Home Rule are urged
+they are no more difficult to meet. &ldquo;Ireland is not a nation,&rdquo; it is
+said; &ldquo;its people are of different races.&rdquo; The argument has been used
+before by the Tories, and the value of it may be judged by an example.
+The late Lord Derby, as leader of the Tory party, addressed the House of
+Lords in 1860 in savage denunciation of the efforts then being made to
+secure the unity of Italy; and to the contention that all the
+inhabitants of that peninsula were Italians, he answered, in the words
+of <i>Macbeth</i> to his hired murderers,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i1">Aye, in the catalogue ye go for men;</div>
+<div>As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,</div>
+<div>Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are cleped</div>
+<div>All by the name of dogs.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And those who remember the unbridgeable differences which then appeared
+to exist between the Sardinian and the Sicilian, the Florentine and the
+Neapolitan, the dweller in Venice and the resident in Rome, will know
+that the perfect unity between them which now makes Italy one of the
+Great Powers would have been considered as unlikely as any between a
+Belfast man and an inhabitant of Cork to-day.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The Irish are not fit for self-government,&rdquo; is the next contention. If
+this be so, the shame is ours in not having given them the opportunity
+for being trained. We did not refuse to liberate the slaves until they
+were proved to be fit for freedom; we did not decline to give the
+labourers the suffrage until they were proved to be capable of rightly
+using it; for we knew in each case that no such proof could be afforded
+until the opportunity was offered. No proof that the Irish are not able
+to manage a Parliament is given by the corruption of the
+semi-independent body which they enjoyed from 1782 to 1799; for that
+consisted entirely of Protestants, mainly chosen by a band of
+borough-mongers, whom Pitt had to buy out at a high price. The same
+thing exactly was said by the Tories&mdash;sneers about the pigs and all&mdash;of
+the Bulgarians in 1876; and they have had good reason since to change
+their minds. What reason is there to believe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> that the Irish would be
+less able to manage their own affairs than the people of Bulgaria?</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But they are naturally lawless.&rdquo; Where is the proof? It is true that in
+certain mountainous districts of Kerry and Clare there have been
+outbursts of moonlighting, but these have been as nothing compared with
+the prevalence of brigandage in Greece before the Greeks were allowed to
+rule themselves, or in Italy before the Italians founded their united
+kingdom. Where there is little popular respect for the law, there
+lawlessness flourishes; where the people make their own laws, there
+lawlessness is put down with a strong hand.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If they had the power they would persecute the Protestants.&rdquo; This is a
+prophecy, and a prophet has the advantage of being able to soar above
+proofs. But the fact that every prominent defender of national rights in
+Ireland for the last century and a half, except O&rsquo;Connell, from Dean
+Swift down to Mr. Parnell, has been a Protestant, should count for
+something. The fact that Protestants have again and again been returned
+to the Corporations of the most Catholic cities should count for much.
+And the fact that, when for years not a single one of the 450 English
+members was a Roman Catholic, several of the 103 Irish members, even
+from the most Catholic districts, were Protestants, should count for
+more. Such religious persecution as exists in Ireland is certainly more
+at Belfast than at Cork.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Giving them a Parliament would break up the empire.&rdquo; Why should the
+empire be broken up because there was extended to Ireland the principle
+we have granted to Australia and Canada, New Zealand and the Cape? How
+is it that the German Empire continues united, though the Reichstag, its
+Imperial Parliament, is one body, and the Prussian Parliament, the Saxon
+Parliament, the W&uuml;rtemberg Parliament, and the Bavarian Parliament are
+quite others? Is there no union between Austria and Hungary, or between
+Sweden and Norway, though each has its Parliament, and are the United
+States disintegrated because every one of the States has its own Senate
+and House of Representatives? If one were asked to name two of the
+strongest nations outside our own, Germany and the United States would
+be the reply; and in each there is a system of Home Rule for the separate portions.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p><p>&ldquo;But did not the United States crush the Confederates when secession
+was demanded?&rdquo; Of course they did; the United States fought against the
+South separating from the North, as we should against Ireland separating
+from England. But every State which joined the Confederacy possessed as
+ample a measure of Home Rule as the Liberals now propose for Ireland;
+and, to the lasting honour of the Northern States, that measure was
+restored soon after the war. Home Rule the South had, and has still;
+separation the South asked for, and did not receive.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The Irish are ungrateful people; whatever you give them they ask for
+more.&rdquo; Would it not be well to first ask what the Irish have had to be
+grateful for? Granting that we yielded Catholic Emancipation, reformed
+the tithe system, disestablished the Church, and legalized tenant right;
+why, after all these things, should we expect gratitude? The old phrase
+that &ldquo;gratitude is a lively sense of favours to come&rdquo; may be unduly
+cynical; but is it not absurd to ask that recompense for the doing of
+acts of simple justice? Former generations of Englishmen deprived the
+Irish of their rights. To what thanks are later generations entitled for
+simply restoring to the Irish the rights of which they had been robbed?
+&ldquo;Be just and fear not,&rdquo; was said of ancient time: &ldquo;Be just and expect
+not gratitude,&rdquo; should be added to-day. And when it is stated that &ldquo;the
+Irish ought to accept what we choose to give them,&rdquo; it must be replied
+that this is the purely despotic argument which has already done England
+sufficient injury by losing her the United States.</p>
+
+<p>It is only in this, the briefest, fashion that an answer has been
+sketched to the various arguments and assumptions against Home Rule. In
+determining to grant it, the Liberals are acting strictly according to
+their old policy of favouring struggling nationalities. The support
+given by Burke to the cause of America; by Fox to Ireland; by Canning
+(in this, as in some other matters, truly Liberal) to Greece; by
+Palmerston to Italy; and by Mr. Gladstone to Bulgaria, indicates with
+sufficient clearness the traditional Liberal position. For a century we
+have been telling the whole world the advantages of autonomy;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> are we
+now to decline to adopt, in similar circumstances, the remedy for
+discontent we have all along preached to, and sometimes forced upon, others?</p>
+
+<p>The Liberals say with Landor, &ldquo;Let us try rather to remove the evils of
+Ireland than to persuade those who undergo them that there are none.&rdquo;
+They are utterly opposed to the idea that it is right to give a people
+free representation and then deliberately to ignore all that that
+representation asks. They are, it is true, in a minority at this moment,
+but they do not forget that all great causes have three stages&mdash;first to
+be laughed at, next to be looked at, and last to be loved. Home Rule has
+certainly reached the second stage; it will soon reach the third. The
+Liberals have been beaten before, but they have always won in the end.
+And it is well to be beaten sometimes. If life were all sunshine we
+should find it oppressive; an occasional cloud serves to temper the
+heat. To the Liberals, as to nature itself, a misty morning is often the
+prelude to the brightest day.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XI.&mdash;WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH THE LORDS?</span></h2>
+
+<p>In dealing with the other questions which the Liberals will have to
+consider, it will be well to take them in what may be called their
+constitutional order, and a beginning, therefore, may be made with the
+reform of the House of Lords. The theory upon which that House is upheld
+is that it is an assembly of our most notable men, called to rule either
+by descent from the great ones of the past, or by the proved capacity of
+themselves in the present, who discuss every question laid before them
+with impartiality, and who act as a check upon the hasty and
+ill-considered legislation of the House of Commons.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the theory: what of the fact? Those peers who are not
+creations of to-day mainly spring either from Pitt&rsquo;s plutocrats or from
+those who have been granted their patents because of having lavishly
+spent their money in electoral support of some party; those who can
+claim their peerage by direct descent from the great ones of the past
+can be numbered by tens, while the whole body is numbered by hundreds;
+and just as a sprinkling of successful lawyers, soldiers, and brewers
+adds nothing to its historical character, it in no sense brings the
+peerage into clear and close contact with the people. As to the
+impartiality displayed by the House of Lords, it is notorious that in
+these days it is little other than an appanage of the Carlton Club, and
+that, whatever the Tory whips desire it to do, it accomplishes without
+demur. And its power as a check upon hasty and ill-considered
+legislation may be judged from the fact that it never dares reject a
+measure which public opinion strongly demands and upon which the Commons insist.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p><p>When the history of the House of Lords is studied, it will be found
+that during the past century it has initiated no great measure for the
+public good, and a hundred times has wantonly mutilated or impotently
+opposed the reforms the people asked. The mischief it has done touches
+every department of public life. Whether it was to throw out a bill
+abolishing the penalty of death for stealing in a shop to the value of
+five shillings, on the ground stated by one of the bishops in the
+majority that it was &ldquo;too speculative to be safe;&rdquo; to again and again
+vote down every proposal to relieve Roman Catholics and Jews from civil
+disabilities; to pander to the will of George IV. in the prolonged
+persecution of his wife; or to defeat measures calculated to place the
+electoral power in the hands of the people&mdash;the House of Lords has
+always been one of the main forces in the army of darkness and
+oppression. Remember that every one of the reforms the Liberals have
+secured within the last 50 years has been distasteful to the House of
+Lords, and calculate the worth or wisdom of that institution.</p>
+
+<p>It does not add to the estimation of either the worth or the wisdom that
+the Lords have ultimately accepted what they have bitterly opposed, for
+if they have consistently been a stumbling-block in the path of every
+reform which the people now cherish their tardy repentance is of little
+avail as long as they pursue the same obstructive course. And it is not
+merely measures which they throw out, but measures which they mutilate,
+that render them a power for harm. For the Lords are like rabbits; it is
+not so much what they swallow as what they spoil which makes them so destructive.</p>
+
+<p>Those who defend the institution as it exists should, therefore, be
+called upon to point to some one definite case in recent history in
+which it can be said, &ldquo;Here has the House of Lords done good.&rdquo; Mere talk
+about the admirable administrators and the dexterous debaters it
+contains is no argument; for if the legislative functions of the peers
+were abolished to-morrow, those among them who were worthy a seat in the
+House of Commons would have no difficulty in securing it. What Liberals
+object to is the being subjected to the caprices, the passions, and the
+prejudices of some five hundred men, the majority of whom are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> not
+merely unskilled in legislative faculty and unqualified in
+administrative experience, but are drawn from a single class out of
+touch and sympathy with the mass of the people.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the least of the evils of the present system that the
+attendance at the sittings of the Lords is of so perfunctory a nature.
+Even during the discussion of important measures not more than sixty or
+seventy peers, out of over five hundred, are commonly present, while ten
+or twelve is not an unusual number to deal with Bills. As Erskine May
+has pointed out, &ldquo;Three peers may wield all the authority of the House.
+Nay, even less than that number are competent to pass or reject a law,
+if their unanimity should avert a division, on notice of their imperfect
+constitution.&rdquo; And he furnishes an instance where an Irish Land Bill,
+&ldquo;which had occupied weeks of discussion in the Commons, was nearly lost
+by a disagreement between the two Houses, the numbers, on a division,
+being seven and six.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Adding to their number does not improve the average attendance, and yet
+the pace at which that number is growing is a scandal. In 1885, the
+first time since 1832, the total membership of the House of Commons was
+enlarged, not without trepidation and despite the fact that every member
+would be directly responsible to a constituency. The increase was only
+twelve, and a Premier often creates within a year as many legislators on
+his own account, who, with their successors, are responsible to no one
+for their public conduct. Is it not an absurdity to speak of ourselves
+as freely governed and ruled only by our own consent when a Prime
+Minister can make as many legislators as he chooses, and there be none to gainsay him?</p>
+
+<p>If it were only that under the present system the drunken and the
+dissolute, the blackleg and the debauchee are allowed to sit in the
+Lords and make laws for us and our children, we should have a right to
+demand that the institution should be &ldquo;mended or ended.&rdquo; The former
+process has now distinctly been adopted as a plank in the Liberal
+platform, and the question of reform can, therefore, no longer be put on one side.</p>
+
+<p>There are many Radicals who say that as the House of Lords, if it agrees
+with the Commons, is useless, and if it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> disagrees is dangerous, its
+abolition as a legislative body should at once be made a plank in the
+party programme. They argue further, that to reform will be to
+strengthen it, and that, by the reasoning just given, this is
+undesirable. But the main point is to secure the best legislative
+machine we can, and there is much to be said for the improvement of the
+House of Lords into a Senate which shall be in fact what the present
+institution is in theory&mdash;a body of sage statesmen, experienced in
+affairs, and elected for a specified term, so as to be directly amenable
+to the people, and not removed from obedience to public opinion.</p>
+
+<p>As a first step to any reform, the creation of hereditary peerages,
+conferring a power to legislate, ought to be stopped. &ldquo;The tenth
+transmitter of a foolish face&rdquo; ought no longer to be able to transmit
+with the foolishness a power over the lives and liberties of his
+fellow-men. If there is any one who continues honestly to believe that
+because a man has secured a peerage by his brains (and the proportion of
+creations upon that ground is exceeding small) his successors are likely
+to prove good legislators, he would do well to procure a list of those
+peers who are descended from &ldquo;law lords;&rdquo; and he would find that while
+not one of them is distinguished for great political or administrative
+skill, there are various notorious instances, which will occur to every
+reader of the daily newspaper, of those distinguished for exactly the reverse.</p>
+
+<p>One minor reform in the constitution of the House of Lords ought to be
+pressed at once, and that is the removal of the bishops from their
+present place within it. Not only has no one section of religious
+persons the right to a State-created ascendency over others, but all
+parties are agreed in the most practical form that bishops as bishops
+have no inherent right to legislative power. In 1847, when the bishopric
+of Manchester was created, it was provided that the junior member of the
+episcopal bench for the time being should not have a seat in the Lords,
+and thirty years later, when the Government of Lord Beaconsfield made
+further new bishoprics, it similarly did not venture to add to the
+number of spiritual peers; there are consequently always four or five
+waiting outside the gilded chamber until the death of their seniors
+shall let them in.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span></p><p>What Liberals, therefore, demand is that the House of Lords shall be
+thoroughly reformed. The bishops must be excluded, no more hereditary
+legislators created, and a system devised by which the House shall
+become a Senate so chosen as to be directly responsible to the people,
+whose interests it is assumed to serve. A sprinkling of life peers would
+aggravate instead of lessen the difficulty. An hereditary legislator
+may, for the sake of his successors, be careful not too grievously to
+offend the people; an elected legislator, for his own sake, will be the
+same; but a legislator who was neither one nor the other would have no
+such check, and all experience has shown that corporations elected for
+life become cliquish or even corrupt, for want of the frequent and
+wholesome breeze of public opinion.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XII.&mdash;IS THE HOUSE OF COMMONS PERFECT?</span></h2>
+
+<p>There was a time, and that not far distant, when the question &ldquo;Is the
+House of Commons perfect?&rdquo; would have been considered by many
+well-intentioned and easy-going persons to be impertinent, even if not
+actually irreverent. But we live in days when every institution has to
+submit to the test of free discussion, and its usefulness and efficiency
+have to be proved, if it is to retain its place in the political system.
+And as there can be little doubt that, for many reasons, a feeling has
+been widely growing within the past few years that the House of Commons
+is neither as useful nor as efficient as it ought to be, the popular
+reverence for that great assembly has somewhat diminished; and it
+behoves all who wish to preserve parliamentary government in its fullest
+and freest form to examine the causes of apparent decay and to suggest
+methods of amelioration.</p>
+
+<p>The preservation intact of the powers and privileges of the House of
+Commons must be the desire of every lover of freedom; but the conduct of
+its business must be brought into harmony with modern methods, and the
+mechanical side of the assembly made as perfect as possible. Not from me
+will fall one word derogatory to the venerable &ldquo;mother of free
+parliaments.&rdquo; The House of Commons has done too much for England, its
+example has done too much for liberty the wide world through, to allow
+any but the ribald and the unthinking to speak lightly of its history or
+scornfully of its achievements. For the People&rsquo;s Chamber is not merely
+the most powerful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> portion of the High Court of Parliament; it is not
+alone the central force of the British Constitution, to which kings and
+nobles have had, and may again have, to bow; it is the directly elected
+body before whose gaze every wrong can be displayed, and to whose power
+even the humblest can look for redress. It deals forth justice to the
+myriad millions of India as to a solitary injured Englishman; it is a
+sounding board which echoes the claims of a single peasant or an entire
+people; and it practically commands the issues of peace and war,
+involving the fate of thousands, and of life and death, involving that
+of only one. No policy is vast beyond its conception, no person
+insignificant beyond its sight. It is a mighty engine of freedom,
+responsive to the heart-throbs and aspirations of a whole people, which
+has baffled tyrants, liberated slaves, and raised England to that
+position among the nations which our children and our children&rsquo;s
+children should be proud to maintain.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the assembly which needs reform. Often enough and with much
+success has there been raised a cry for &ldquo;parliamentary reform,&rdquo; but this
+has meant an amendment of the method of electing members, not of the
+manner of conducting business; and it is this latter which now is
+urgently required. The stately ship which has sailed the ocean of public
+affairs for six centuries has naturally attracted weeds and barnacles
+which cling to its hull and retard its progress. These must be swept
+away if the vessel is to pursue a safe and speedy course; and as little
+irreverence is involved in the process as in cleaning and repairing the
+old <i>Victory</i> herself.</p>
+
+<p>The cardinal defect of the existing system is that it strives to do
+modern work by ancient modes, an attempt which is as certain to fail in
+public concerns as it would be if any one were sufficiently ill-advised
+to try it in private. And when there is contemplated on the one side the
+vast and growing mass of affairs cast upon the consideration of
+Parliament, and on the other the rusty and creaking machinery employed
+to cope with it, little wonder can be felt that much needful work is
+left undone, and a deal of that which is accomplished is done badly.</p>
+
+<p>By granting to Ireland the right to manage her domestic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> affairs, and by
+providing some system by which England, Scotland, and Wales can in local
+assemblies each deal for herself with her own concerns, much will be
+accomplished in the way of real parliamentary reform. But even then more
+will remain to be done. The multiplied stages of each measure laid
+before the House of Commons must be lessened. It is possible to-day to
+have a debate and a division upon the motion for leave to introduce a
+bill, upon the first reading, the second reading, the proposal to go
+into committee, the report stage, the third reading, and the final
+proposition &ldquo;That the bill do pass,&rdquo; while financial bills have even
+more stages to go through; and although, of course, all these
+opportunities for almost unlimited obstruction are not often made use
+of, they exist and should be diminished.</p>
+
+<p>Another fruitful source of wasted parliamentary time is the provision
+that if a bill is dropped at the end of a session, however far it may
+have progressed short of actual passing, it has to be started afresh
+when the House re-assembles, and every stage has to be as laboriously
+again gone through as if the measure had never been heard of before. One
+can understand why a new Parliament should start with a clean sheet, for
+no decision of a previous one in favour of the principle of a certain
+measure can bind it to pass that measure into law. But within the limits
+of the same Parliament, a decision once given should be so far binding
+that it should not be necessary for a bill to pass the stage of second
+reading four or five years running, because effluxion of time had
+prevented it passing into law during any of the sessions.</p>
+
+<p>Against such waste of time as this&mdash;waste which is imposed by the very
+rules under which Parliament works&mdash;the closure is no remedy. It is a
+weapon with which it is right that the majority should be armed, but it
+requires great skill in the wielding lest the legitimate efforts of the
+minority be stifled. What is wanted is the better ordering of the whole
+machine. When private bills and purely local business are taken
+elsewhere, when the stages of each measure are lessened, and when bills
+which have passed their second reading are not killed at the session&rsquo;s
+end, but allowed to remain in a state of animated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> expectancy, even then
+other means will have to be sought to make the machine move more surely
+and with greater expedition.</p>
+
+<p>Something has been done to this end by the earlier hour of assembling
+and fixed hour of adjourning which the House has now adopted. But why
+should not the process be carried further, and the affairs of the
+country be settled by day instead of by night? The first answer is that
+it would not be possible for a legislative body to do its business
+during the day; and a sufficient answer should be that the French
+Assembly and the German Reichsrath do theirs during that period. The
+next is that Ministers could not get through their work if the hours of
+meeting were made earlier; the reply is to the same effect&mdash;that what
+French and German Ministers can accomplish, English Ministers must be
+taught to do. A further contention is that such barristers and business
+men as are members would not be able to attend sooner than at present;
+and the answer of many as to the barristers would be that it were well
+for the country if three-fourths of those in the House never attended at
+all, for it is largely owing to the number of lawyers in Parliament that
+the law is a complicated and costly process, often proving an engine of
+injustice in the hands of the rich, and a ruinous remedy for the injured
+poor; while as to the business men who cannot attend earlier than now,
+their number is so exceedingly limited that their convenience ought not
+to be consulted to the detriment of parliamentary institutions. There is
+one more argument which would be of greater weight than all the rest if
+present conditions were likely to continue, and that is, that it would
+be a serious hindrance to private bill legislation, because members
+would be loth to serve on committees during the time the House was
+deliberating; but it is obvious to all observers of the parliamentary
+machine that the greater portion of private business will have soon to
+be delegated to other bodies, and the main point of an undeniably strong
+argument will thus be destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>But even such a reform in the hours of work would not expedite matters
+to a sufficient extent, if the present power of unlimited talk be
+preserved. Every member has the right of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> speaking once at each stage of
+a bill, and as many times as he likes during committee. If the number of
+stages be lessened, as they are likely to be, there will not be much to
+be objected to in the continuance of this right; but its retention
+should be contingent upon the shortening of each speech. This is a
+proposal which can be justified on &ldquo;plain Whig principles,&rdquo; and has
+certainly a plain Whig precedent. For Lord John Russell, when Prime
+Minister, brought forward in 1849 a proposal to limit the duration of
+all speeches to one hour, except in the case of a member introducing an
+original motion, or a minister of the Crown speaking in reply. The
+proposal fell through, but that it was made by so cautious a Premier is
+a proof that there is much to be said in favour of compulsorily
+shortening speeches.</p>
+
+<p>The proposition that Parliaments should be chosen more frequently in
+order that they may preserve a closer touch with the people should be
+earnestly pressed forward. In the early days of the House of Commons
+annual Parliaments were practically the rule, an assembly being summoned
+to vote supplies and do certain necessary business and then dissolved.
+When matters were put upon a more certain footing, after the Great
+Rebellion, Parliaments elected for three years were ordained, and this
+term was extended to seven years shortly after the Hanoverian Accession,
+in order to guard against a Jacobite success at the hustings, which
+might seriously have endangered an unstable throne. The time has now
+come to ask that a term adopted in a panic, and for reasons which have
+long passed away, should be shortened. A four years&rsquo; Parliament has been
+found to be long enough for France, Germany, and the United States; and
+as the average of the last half-century has proved a seven years&rsquo; period
+to be unnecessarily long for England, the briefer should be enacted. Now
+that the suffrage is on so wide a basis, it is essential that members of
+Parliament should be in as close touch with the people as possible. Once
+elected, members frequently forget that they are not the masters of
+those who have chosen them, and that, though called in one sense to rule
+the country, there is another sense in which they are called to serve.
+It is necessary that this truth should be enforced upon such members<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> as
+are apt to ignore it, and shorter Parliaments would enforce it.</p>
+
+<p>There are some who believe that by payment of members a better
+representation of the people would be secured. The example of other
+countries can certainly be quoted in favour of such a proposition, but
+there appears no necessity for any general payment in England. As,
+however, it is in the highest degree desirable that representatives of
+every class in the community should appear at Westminster, some
+provision should be made by which members, upon making a statutory
+declaration of the necessity for such a course, would be able to claim a
+certain moderate allowance for their expenses during the session. There
+would be nothing revolutionary in this; the fact of members being paid
+would be merely a return to the practice which prevailed for close upon
+four centuries after the House of Commons was established upon its present basis.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XIII.&mdash;IS OUR ELECTORAL SYSTEM COMPLETE?</span></h2>
+
+<p>Many would be surprised if told that there remained serious deficiencies
+in our electoral system; and would ask, &ldquo;How can that be? We now have
+the ballot at elections, household suffrage in both counties and
+boroughs, and a nearer approach to equal electoral districts than the
+most sanguine Radical ten or even five years ago would have thought possible?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But has the suffrage really been extended to every householder? As a
+fact, it has not; it is largely a merely nominal extension; and tens of
+thousands of qualified citizens are disfranchised for years at a time by
+the needless restrictions and petty technicalities which now clog the
+electoral law. Registration should be so simplified that every qualified
+person would be certain of finding his name on the list; and the duty of
+compiling a correct register should be imposed upon some local public
+official, compelled under penalty to perform it.</p>
+
+<p>The common belief is that a twelvemonth&rsquo;s occupation qualifies for a
+vote, but all that it does is to qualify for a place on the register,
+which is an altogether different matter, the register being made up
+months before it comes into operation. At the very least, a man must
+have gone into a house a year and a half before he has a vote for it,
+and it often happens that he has to be in it for two years and a
+quarter, and even more, before he possesses the franchise. Let me state
+such a case. A man goes into a house at the half-quarter in August,
+1888; he will not be entitled to be placed on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> the register in the
+autumn of 1889, because he was not occupying on July 15 of the previous
+year; if he continues to occupy, he will, however, be placed there in
+the autumn of 1890; but it is not until January 1, 1891, that he will be
+able to exercise the suffrage. So that all taking houses from July 15,
+1888, are in the same position as those who take them up to July 15,
+1889, and will have to wait for a vote until 1891.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But,&rdquo; it may be said, &ldquo;when a man once has his vote he is able to
+retain it as long as he holds any dwelling by virtue of &lsquo;successive
+occupation.&rsquo;&rdquo; That is so only as long as he remains within the
+boundaries of the constituency wherein he possessed the original
+qualification. He may move from one division of Liverpool to another, or
+from one division of Manchester to another, or from one division of
+Birmingham to another, and retain his vote by successive occupation; but
+if he goes from Liverpool to Birkenhead, from Manchester to Salford, or
+from Birmingham to Aston, his vote is lost for the year and a half or
+the two years and a quarter before explained. The effect of this is most
+apparent in London, where thousands of working men are continually
+moving from one district to another, treating the whole metropolis as
+one great town, but by passing out of their original borough they are
+disfranchised. And this is the more a grievance because the
+Redistribution Act, though dividing the larger provincial towns into
+single-member districts, left them as boroughs intact; while the old
+constituencies in London were not merely divided, but split up into
+separate boroughs. Lambeth thus became three boroughs&mdash;Lambeth,
+Camberwell, and Newington&mdash;each with its own divisions; Hackney was
+severed into the boroughs of Hackney, Shoreditch, and Bethnal Green;
+Marylebone into the boroughs of Marylebone, Paddington, St. Pancras, and
+Hampstead; and so throughout the metropolis. And the consequence of the
+purely artificial nature of the boundary lines thus created is that many
+a man who merely moves from one side of the street to the other, or even
+from one house to another next door, is disfranchised for a couple of
+years. The obvious remedy for this peculiar evil is that London should
+be treated as one single borough, like Liverpool, Manchester, and
+Birmingham; but the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> remedy for the whole evil is that when a man has
+once qualified for a place on the register, proof of successive
+occupation in any part of the country should suffice to give him his
+vote in the constituency to which he moves.</p>
+
+<p>When we pass from the household to the lodger franchise, we are faced by
+one of the hugest shams in the electoral system. There are certain
+constituencies which contain hundreds of lodgers, and of these not more
+than tens are on the register. The reason is twofold: it is not merely a
+trouble to get a vote, but there is a yearly difficulty in retaining it.
+For a lodger, as for a household vote, a twelvemonth&rsquo;s occupation is
+necessary to qualify, and the purely nominal nature of this
+qualification is the same in both; but the lodger has the additional
+hardship of being deprived of even as much benefit as &ldquo;successive
+occupation&rdquo; gives the householder, for if he moves next door, though
+with the same landlord, he is disfranchised, while the landlord retains
+his vote. And, further, he has to make a formal claim for the suffrage
+every succeeding summer, an operation too troublesome for the vast
+majority of lodgers to undergo, and one from which the householder is
+spared. And thus this particular franchise is a mockery, and the
+proportion of lodger voters to qualified lodgers is absurdly small.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the term &ldquo;householder,&rdquo; equally with the term &ldquo;lodger,&rdquo;
+presupposes at present that the one who bears it is a man, and, equally
+of course, an agitation is on foot to give the franchise to women. This
+is a matter which is likely to be settled in favour of the other sex,
+and the only question is as to how far it should go. The extreme
+advocates of female suffrage would give it to married women, but what
+appears the growing opinion is that spinsters and widows, qualified for
+the suffrage as men are qualified, should receive it; and this is a
+settlement which will probably soon be reached.</p>
+
+<p>Much dissatisfaction would continue to be felt, even were these points
+granted, if &ldquo;faggot-voting&rdquo; were still suffered, or a single person
+allowed to possess a multitude of votes. The &ldquo;forty-shilling freehold&rdquo;
+is a prolific source of bogus qualifications: abolished in Ireland by
+the Tories because it gave the people too much power, it ought to be got
+rid of throughout the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> kingdom by the Liberals because it leaves the
+people too little. For it is largely by its means that some men are able
+to boast that they can exercise the franchise in six, or ten, or even a
+dozen constituencies. Men of this type occupy themselves at a general
+election by travelling around, dropping a vote here and a vote there,
+and they ought to be restrained. That this can be done without violating
+any right is evident even under the present system. However many
+qualifications a man obtains, he can vote for only one of them in any
+constituency; and more, if he has qualifications in every division of
+the same borough he has, when the register is made up, to state for
+which division he will vote, and in that division alone can he claim a
+ballot paper. If it is right to prevent him from having more than a
+single vote in any one division&mdash;or, which is a still stronger point, in
+any one borough&mdash;it must be equally right to limit him to a single vote
+throughout the country. &ldquo;One man, one vote,&rdquo; should be the rule in a
+democratic state. If a person possesses qualifications for various
+constituencies, let him be called upon to do what he is now compelled to
+do if he has qualifications for different parts of the same
+constituency&mdash;vote for only one of them; and that one should be the
+place in which he habitually resides.</p>
+
+<p>An indirect method of practically securing the &ldquo;one man, one vote,&rdquo;
+result would be to have all the elections throughout the country on the
+same day. Under the existing system, the polls drag on for weeks, and
+not only does this distract the attention of the nation and put a
+hindrance to business for a far longer period than is necessary, but it
+has the further evil effect of causing many voters in the constituencies
+which are later polled to waver until they see whither the majority
+elsewhere are tending, and then &ldquo;go with the stream.&rdquo; The only instance
+in recent electoral history when the later polls reversed the verdict of
+the earlier was at the general election of 1885, when the boroughs,
+speaking broadly, voted Tory and the counties Liberal; but that, owing
+to the recent extension of the county franchise, was an abnormal period,
+and the rule is that the stream gathers as it goes, and the waverers are
+swept into the torrent. That it is possible for a great country to be
+polled on the same day is evident from the examples of Germany and
+France, and it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> only adherence to worn-out forms which prevents its
+accomplishment here.</p>
+
+<p>The remedy, therefore, for the anomalies caused by the defective
+&ldquo;successive occupation,&rdquo; the presence of &ldquo;faggot voters,&rdquo; and the
+prolongation of the pollings, is simply to treat the kingdom as one vast
+constituency, in which a man once on the register remains as long as he
+has a qualification, in which no one has more than a single vote, and in
+all the divisions of which the poll is taken on the same day.</p>
+
+<p>This suggested single constituency would, of course, resemble the great
+county and borough constituencies of to-day in having divisions, but it
+would not be single in the sense proposed in Mr. Hare&rsquo;s original scheme
+of &ldquo;proportional representation,&rdquo; by which the possessor of a vote could
+cast it where and for whom he liked. Those who have adopted Mr. Hare&rsquo;s
+ideas, while modifying his methods, have not been successful in
+discovering any feasible plan for representing public opinion in the
+proportion in which it is held, the sort of Chinese puzzle proposed by
+Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Courtney having failed to commend itself to any
+practical politician. It is wrong, however, to imagine that the present
+system of single-member districts roughly secures that the minority
+shall be duly represented while the majority retains its due share of
+power; for it was proved in some striking instances, the very first time
+it was put in operation, that, so far from retaining, it often
+sacrifices the rights of the majority. At the general election of 1885
+the Liberals of Leeds cast 23,354 votes, and the Tories 19,605, and yet
+the latter gained three seats and the former only two; the Sheffield
+Liberals won but two seats with 19,636 votes, while the Tories secured
+three with 19,594; and the Hackney Liberals could win only one seat with
+9,203 votes, and the Tories two with 8,870; while, on the other side,
+the Southwark Tories, with 9,324 votes, returned one member, and the
+Liberals, with 9,120, returned two. The reason is obvious: a party with
+overwhelming majorities in one or two districts is liable to be beaten
+by narrow majorities in most of the divisions, and the minority thus
+elects a majority of members. The present system, therefore, is
+evidently imperfect. It was adopted in haste and without due<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+discussion; it has failed in France, Switzerland, and the United States;
+and in at least the divided boroughs it ought to give place to double or
+triple member districts.</p>
+
+<p>The question of having second ballots, so as to provide that, as in
+Germany and France, where there are several candidates and none secures
+an absolute majority of votes given, another ballot shall be held, is
+not an immediately pressing one, though much may be said in its favour;
+but that of the payment of election expenses out of the rates ought to
+be dealt with at once. It is highly unfair that a candidate should be
+fined heavily, by the enforced payment of the official expenses, for his
+desire to serve the country in Parliament; and it is the more unfair
+because the official expenses of elections for town councils, school
+boards, and boards of health and of guardians are paid by the public.</p>
+
+<p>This fine helps to keep men of moderate means out of the House, though
+their abilities might prove to be most useful there; and another method
+by which the wealthy have the advantage in parliamentary contests ought
+equally to be attended to. People are forbidden by law to hire
+conveyances for carrying voters to the poll, but they are allowed to
+borrow them, with the result that constituencies on an election day
+swarm with carriages of peers and other rich people, who have nothing
+whatever to do with the district, and who yet affect by this influence
+the voting. The use of carriages should not be prohibited, for the aged
+and infirm ought not to be disfranchised; but no importation of vehicles
+should be allowed, and while an elector, and an elector only, should be
+entitled to use his own, it should, as a means of identification, be
+driven by himself. Such a provision would largely diminish the present
+interference of peers in elections. They may address as many meetings as
+they like; but, as long as they have a legislative assembly of their
+own, they must not be allowed to use their wealth and position to
+interfere with the voters for the Commons House of Parliament.</p>
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XIV.&mdash;SHOULD THE CHURCH REMAIN ESTABLISHED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>From the great concerns of the State it is natural to come to the
+Church, and when that point is arrived at, the problem of
+disestablishment at once arises. &ldquo;<i>Can</i> the Church be disestablished?&rdquo;
+is a question sometimes put, and the answer is plain, for that answer is
+&ldquo;Most certainly,&rdquo; and a further question &ldquo;Where is the Act establishing
+the Church?&rdquo; as if the non-production of such an enactment would prevent
+Parliament from severing the link which binds Church and State, may be
+replied to by another. Supposing one asked, &ldquo;Where is the Act
+establishing the monarchy?&rdquo; would the non-production of that measure
+prove that it is not a parliamentary monarchy under which we live? By
+the Act of Succession, Parliament &ldquo;settled&rdquo; the monarchy; by various
+Acts in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Elizabeth, and Charles
+II., Parliament has &ldquo;settled&rdquo; the Church. There is no authority in this
+realm higher than Parliament; and if Parliament chooses to &ldquo;unsettle&rdquo;
+either monarchy or Church, it can do so.</p>
+
+<p>This is no new-fangled Radical idea; it is an old Whig principle.
+Charles Fox, in a debate just a century since, observed, while
+favourable to the principle of religious establishments, &ldquo;If the
+majority of the people of England should ever be for the abolition of
+the Established Church, in such a case the abolition ought immediately
+to follow.&rdquo; Macaulay, in his essay on Mr. Gladstone&rsquo;s youthful book on
+&ldquo;Church and State,&rdquo; was clearly of the same opinion. And Lord
+Hartington, in his declaration a few years ago that if the majority of
+the people of Scotland<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> desired disestablishment their desire ought to
+be satisfied, completed the chain of Whig traditional opinion.</p>
+
+<p>If upon such a matter one is not content to swear by the Whigs, the
+verdict of the bishops may be accepted. Dr. Magee, of Peterborough, has
+declared that &ldquo;Our Church is not only catholic and national: she is
+established by law&mdash;that is to say, she has entered into certain
+definite relations with the State, involving on the part of the State an
+amount of recognition and control, and on the part of the Church
+subjection to the State.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The very use of the common term &ldquo;The Church of England as by law
+established&rdquo; involves recognition of the fact that what the law has done
+the law can undo. And if any one doubts the power of Parliament in this
+matter, let him read a table of the statutes passed in the session of
+1869, and he will find that the most important of all of them was &ldquo;An
+Act to put an end to the Establishment of the Church of Ireland.&rdquo; Now,
+the legal position of the Irish Establishment and the English
+Establishment was identical. Is any further proof required that, if
+Parliament chooses, the latter can at any moment be severed from the State?</p>
+
+<p>It is sometimes said that Nonconformist bodies are equally established
+with the Church because they are subject to the law, as regards the
+construction of their trust-deeds, and other matters, of which the
+courts of justice have occasionally to take cognizance. But that is as
+if it were argued that all persons who come within the enactments
+affecting the relations between employer and employed should be
+considered servants of the Crown as well as those engaged in the
+government offices. The difference is plain: the law regulates all, the
+Government employs only some. The Crown appoints the Archbishop of
+Canterbury, but has no right to choose the President of the Wesleyan
+Conference; Parliament can deal with the salaries of the bishops, but
+cannot touch the stipend of a single Congregational minister.</p>
+
+<p>There being no doubt that, if the people will, the Church can be
+disestablished, a further question remains, &ldquo;Ought it to be so dealt
+with?&rdquo; and the reply in the affirmative is based upon the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> lessons of
+the past, the experiences of the present, and the possibilities of the future.</p>
+
+<p>The Church, though possessed of every advantage which high position and
+vast wealth could supply, has failed to be &ldquo;national&rdquo; in any true sense
+of the word. So far from embracing the whole people, it has gradually
+become but one of many sects; and, had it not been for the efforts of
+those who conscientiously dissented from its doctrines and its practice,
+a great portion of the religious life we see in England to-day would not
+have existed. Further, and from the time of its settlement on the
+present basis, it has been the consistent friend to the privileged
+classes, and foe to any extension of liberties to the mass of the
+people. In defence of its position and emoluments it has struck many a
+blow for despotism. The harassing and often bloody persecutions of
+Nonconformists and Roman Catholics in England and Wales, and of
+Covenanters and Cameronians in Scotland, were undertaken at its desire
+and in its defence; while the hardships and indignities inflicted for
+centuries upon the Catholics of Ireland were avowedly in support of &ldquo;the
+Protestant interest&rdquo;&mdash;a Protestantism of the Establishment, in which the
+Presbyterians were allowed little share. In its pulpits were found the
+most eloquent defenders of the English slave trade, which was from them
+declared to be &ldquo;in conformity with principles of natural and revealed
+religion;&rdquo; and when Romilly strove to lessen the horrors of the penal
+code, its bishops again and again came to the rescue of laws the
+disregard of which for the sanctity of human life can in these days
+scarcely be conceived. And when it was proposed to give to some extent
+the government of the country to the people whom it mainly concerned, it
+was the bishops who threw out the first Reform Bill.</p>
+
+<p>At this present the efforts of the better men within the Establishment
+are hampered by the State connection. It cannot bring its machinery into
+harmony with the growing needs of the time without appealing to a
+Parliament in which orthodox and heterodox, Catholic and Atheist, Jew
+and Quaker, Unitarian and Agnostic sit side by side, and to which a
+Hindoo has twice narrowly escaped election. By a Prime Minister
+dependent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> upon the will of this body its bishops are chosen; by a Lord
+Chancellor equally so dependent are many of its ministers appointed.
+Because of the necessity for going to Parliament for every improvement,
+little improvement is made. Private patronage is left untouched; the
+scandal of the sale of livings remains unchecked; criminous clerks are
+often allowed to escape punishment because of the cumbrous methods now
+provided; and disobedient clergymen defy their bishops and go to prison
+rather than conform to discipline, the law which permits persistent
+insubordination and provides an unfitting penalty remaining unaltered
+because Parliament has too much to do to attend to the Church.</p>
+
+<p>As to the future, things are likely to be worse instead of better. Then,
+as now, the connection between State and Church will injure both&mdash;the
+State because it is an injustice to all outside the Establishment that a
+single sect should be propertied and privileged by Parliament, and the
+Church because it is as a strong man in chains attempting to walk but
+only succeeding to painfully hobble.</p>
+
+<p>In how many ways disestablishment would benefit the Church, let Dr.
+Ryle, Bishop of Liverpool, declare:&mdash;&ldquo;(1) It would doubtless give us
+more liberty, and enable us to effect many useful reforms. (2) It would
+bring the laity forward into their rightful position, from sheer
+necessity. (3) It would give us a real and properly constituted
+Convocation. (4) It would lead to an increase of bishops, a division of
+dioceses, and a reconstruction of our cathedral bodies. (5) It would
+make an end of Crown jobs in the choice of bishops, and upset the whole
+system of patronage. (6) It would destroy all sinecure offices, and
+drive all drones out of the ecclesiastical hive. (7) It would enable us
+to make our worship more elastic, and our ritual better suited to the
+times.&rdquo; True, the bishop adds that the value of these gains must not be
+exaggerated; but if disestablishment can do even as much good as this to
+the Church, it cannot be the bad thing some of its opponents would have us believe.</p>
+
+<p>But it is sometimes urged that if the Church were disestablished, there
+would be no State recognition of religion, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> England would become
+un-Christian. Is not this a technical rather than a real argument? Would
+the number of Christians in this country be lessened by a single one if
+the Church were deprived of State support? Was not the same thing said
+when Jews were admitted to Parliament and Atheists claimed admission?
+And has England ceased to be Christian because Baron de Worms is sitting
+on one side of the Speaker and Mr. Bradlaugh on the other?</p>
+
+<p>A more real argument is that disestablishment would break up the
+parochial system; but those who use it impute a discreditable
+lukewarmness to their own community. Seeing what the Wesleyans, the
+Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the other dissenting denominations
+have done to spread religion in every village in England and Wales; what
+the Free Kirk has accomplished in Scotland; and what the Roman Catholic
+Church has effected in Ireland&mdash;and all without a penny of State
+endowment, and dependent alone for success upon the gifts of their
+members&mdash;is it to be believed that the adherents of the Episcopal
+Church, among whom are included the wealthiest men in the country, will
+permit that institution to perish for lack of aid? Is not experience all
+the other way? Is not that of Ireland in particular a striking testimony
+to the wisdom of substituting the voluntary system for State support?
+Upon this point the testimony of two Irish Protestant bishops is
+abundant proof. The Bishop of Ossory, Ferns, and Leighlin averred, in
+1882, that &ldquo;no one could look attentively upon our Church&rsquo;s history
+during the last ten or twelve years without perceiving that, by the good
+hand of God upon them, there had been a decided growth in all that was
+best and purest and most important. Never in his recollection had their
+Church been more clear or united in her testimony to Christian truth, or
+more faithful in every good word and work;&rdquo; and Lord Plunket, the
+Archbishop of Dublin, has congratulated his clergy that disestablishment
+saved the Church from being involved in the land agitation, adding, &ldquo;The
+very disaster which seemed most to threaten our downfall has been
+overruled for good.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The question is likely, however, to be considered a more immediately
+pressing one for Scotland and Wales than for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> England. In Scotland it is
+the Presbyterian and not the Episcopalian form of Christian government
+which is State supported; and the fact that forms so opposed in striking
+points of doctrine and practice should be established on the two sides
+of the Tweed, is an interesting commentary upon the system generally.
+When the majority of the members for Scotland demand disestablishment,
+and press that demand upon us, it will as assuredly be granted as was
+the like demand from Ireland just twenty years ago. And &ldquo;the Church of
+England in Wales&rdquo;&mdash;supported by a small minority, and never enjoying the
+confidence of the body of the people&mdash;should similarly be dealt with,
+according to the wish of the Welsh parliamentary representatives.</p>
+
+<p>The continued existence of the Church of England as an establishment is
+the largest question of all, and it is one which politicians will have
+to face, if not this year or next year, yet in the early years to come.
+It is only its continued existence &ldquo;as an establishment&rdquo; which is in
+dispute, for it would be a slanderous imputation upon its sons if it
+were said that a withdrawal of State support would cause its collapse as
+a religious body. The very strides it has made during the last few
+years, which are sometimes urged in its defence, have been made not by
+State help but by voluntary effort; and if that voluntary effort had
+free scope, the good effect would be greater and more lasting.</p>
+
+<p>What is wanted is that which Cavour asked, &ldquo;A Free Church in a Free
+State,&rdquo; for both would be benefited by the process, and particularly the
+former. When the late Lord Beaconsfield was asked why, in the height of
+Tory reaction, he made no effort to re-establish the Irish Church, he
+replied that there was a difference between cutting off a man&rsquo;s head and
+putting it on again. But the illustration was imperfect, for it is a
+strange kind of decapitation which strengthens the patient; and that was
+the effect in Ireland. And the Irish Church was not only disestablished
+but <i>disendowed</i>. In the mind of the practical politician the two
+processes are inseparable.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XV.&mdash;WOULD DISENDOWMENT BE JUST?</span></h2>
+
+<p>The question, &ldquo;Would disendowment be just?&rdquo; is admittedly a crucial
+point to determine when the whole subject comes up for settlement, for
+there are many defenders of the Establishment who exclaim, &ldquo;We are quite
+prepared for the severance of the Church from the State, but only upon
+condition that she retains her endowments.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But the two concerns cannot be separated. Supposing the Government
+engaged an officer to perform certain functions, and that, in process of
+time, finding these functions not fulfilled, it determined to sever the
+connection, would the officer be justified in demanding not only
+consideration for his long service and his life interests, but that his
+salary should be paid to himself and his descendants in perpetuity,
+though directly neither he nor they would again render service to the
+State? If it be contended that the illustration is not applicable,
+because the Church receives no aid from the State, issue can be joined at once.</p>
+
+<p>For what is the first question that naturally arises? It is as to the
+source from which the Church originally derived her revenues. &ldquo;Pious
+benefactors, stimulated by the wish to benefit their fellows and save
+themselves,&rdquo; is the reply of the average Church defender. But any
+attempt to prove this fails. Does a solitary person believe that every
+proprietor of land in each parish of England and Wales voluntarily and
+spontaneously imposed a tithe upon his possessions? Is it not an
+admitted fact that it was by royal ordinance such an impost was first
+levied, and by force of law that it has since been maintained?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p><p>This most ancient property of the Church in England, the tithe, is a
+law-created and law-extorted impost for the benefit of a particular
+sect. As far back as the Heptarchy, royal ordinances were given in
+various of the kingdoms of which England was composed directing the
+payment of tithes; and that the far greater portion of these were not
+voluntary offerings is indicated in Hume&rsquo;s account of the West Saxon
+grant in 854. &ldquo;Though parishes,&rdquo; he observes, &ldquo;had been instituted in
+England by Honorius, Archbishop of Canterbury, two centuries before, the
+ecclesiastics had never yet been able to get possession of the tithes;
+they therefore seized the present favourable opportunity of making that
+acquisition when a weak, superstitious prince filled the throne, and
+when the people, discouraged by their losses from the Danes and
+terrified with the fear of future invasions, were susceptible of any
+impression which bore the appearance of religion.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>When England became one kingdom, and tithes were extended by royal
+decree to the whole realm, penalties soon began to be provided for
+non-payment, Alfred ordaining &ldquo;that if any man shall withhold his
+tithes, and not faithfully and duly pay them to the Church, if he be a
+Dane he shall be fined in the sum of twenty shillings, and if an
+Englishman in the sum of thirty shillings;&rdquo; and William the Norman,
+speedily after the Conquest, directed that &ldquo;whosoever shall withhold
+this tenth part shall, by the justice of the bishop and the king, be
+forced to the payment of it, if need be.&rdquo; These provisions are part of
+the common law of England, and they effectually dispose of the idea that
+the tithe was a voluntary offering which the farmer to-day ought to pay
+because of the supposed piety of unknown ancestors.</p>
+
+<p>The proceeds of the tithe&mdash;which originally, according to Blackstone,
+were &ldquo;distributed in a fourfold division: one for the use of the bishop,
+one for maintaining the fabric of the church, a third for the poor, and
+a fourth to provide for the incumbent&rdquo;&mdash;were the first great source of
+revenue to the Church; but in the course of centuries that revenue was
+largely added to by gifts. It was not uncommon for a man to hand over
+his property to a monastery upon condition that he was allowed a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+sufficiency to keep him; while the money given for the provision of
+masses for the dead was a considerable aid to the Church in the Middle
+Ages. And as the monks were exceedingly keen traders, their wealth was
+increased by farming, buying, and selling to a degree that at length
+tempted the cupidity of a rapacious king. It was during that period that
+our great cathedrals and all our old parish churches were built; and
+when, because of a divorce dispute, the Eighth Henry resolved to cut the
+Church in England altogether adrift from the Church of Rome, he adopted
+a measure of Disendowment which, though not complete, was very sweeping,
+and proved in the most absolute form the right of the State to deal as
+it willed with the property of the Church.</p>
+
+<p>In the preamble of the Act dissolving the lesser monasteries, it is
+declared that &ldquo;the Lords and Commons, by a great deliberation, finally
+be resolved that it is and shall be much more to the pleasure of
+Almighty God, and for the honour of this His realm, that the possessions
+of such small religious houses, now being spent, spoiled, and wasted for
+increase and maintenance of sin, should be used and committed to better
+uses.&rdquo; The State in this asserted a right it had never forfeited, and
+which, by successive Acts of Parliament, has been specifically retained.
+No one to-day would defend the fashion in which Henry took property
+which had been devoted to certain public uses and lavished it upon
+favourites and friends. The main point, however, is not the manner of
+disposal, but the fact that it could be disposed of at all; and when any
+one doubts the power of the State regarding the property of the Church,
+a reference to what Parliament has done in the matter is sufficient to
+show constitutional precedent for Disendowment.</p>
+
+<p>But though much was taken from the Church at the Reformation period,
+much was left, and it was left to a body differing in many important
+particulars from that which had been despoiled. As Mr. Arthur Elliott,
+M.P., a Whig writer, observes in his book &ldquo;The State and the Church,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;It would be to give a very false notion of the position of the Church
+towards the State to omit all mention of the sources from which, as
+regards its edifices, the Church of England finds itself so
+magnificently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> endowed. In the main, the wealth of the Church in this
+respect was inherited, or rather acquired, at the time of the
+Reformation, from the Roman Catholics, who had created it. The Roman
+Catholics and the English nation had been formerly one and the same.
+When the nation, for the most part, ceased to be Catholic, these
+edifices, like other endowments devoted to the religious instruction of
+the people, became the property of the Protestant Church of England, as
+by law established.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The new Act of Parliament Church&mdash;for it had its doctrines and its
+discipline defined by statute&mdash;became possessed, therefore, of the
+cathedrals, the churches, much of the glebe, and a large portion of the
+tithe that had been given or granted to the Roman Catholic communion,
+which had held the ground for centuries. And succeeding monarchs, with
+the exception of Mary, so confirmed and added to these gifts that &ldquo;the
+Judicious Hooker&rdquo; was led to exclaim&mdash;&ldquo;It might deservedly be at this
+day the joyful song of innumerable multitudes, and (which must be
+eternally confessed, even with tears of thankfulness) the true
+inscription, style, or title of all churches as yet standing within this
+realm, &lsquo;By the goodness of Almighty God and His servant Elizabeth, we are.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>And it was not only &ldquo;His servant Elizabeth&rdquo; who, among monarchs since
+the Reformation, has assisted the Houses of the Legislature to
+pecuniarily aid the Church. Queen Anne surrendered the first fruits, or
+profits of one year, of all spiritual promotions, and the tithe of the
+revenue of all sees, in order to create a fund for increasing the
+incomes of the poor clergy; but Queen Anne&rsquo;s Bounty comes straight out
+of the national pocket, for, had our monarchs retained this source of
+income, it would have been taken into account when the Civil List was
+settled at the commencement of the reign, and at least &pound;100,000 a year
+saved to the Exchequer. And the nation has even more directly helped the
+fund, Parliament having, between 1809 and 1829, voted considerably over
+a million towards it.</p>
+
+<p>But this is not all. Dealing merely with national money appropriated to
+Church purposes during the present century, it may be added that in 1818
+Parliament voted a million sterling for the purpose of building
+churches, that in 1824 a further<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> sum of half a million was granted for
+the same purpose, and that a subsequent amount of close upon ninety
+thousand pounds has to be added to the total. And not only by large
+grants did Parliament help the Church. In the old days of Protection,
+when almost every conceivable article was taxed, the duty chargeable on
+the materials used in the building of churches was remitted, this
+amounting between 1817 and 1845 to over &pound;336,000. A drawback was also
+granted on the paper used in printing the Prayer Book, and this, while
+the paper duty was levied, could scarcely have averaged less than a
+thousand a year. In small things, as in great, Parliament helped the
+Church, for an Act of George IV. specifically exempted from toll the
+carriage and horses used by a clergyman when driving to visit a sick parishioner.</p>
+
+<p>I claim, therefore, that the State has a right to dispose of such
+property of the Church as was not given to it in recent times by private
+donors, knowing it would be appropriated to the purposes of a sect; and
+I claim it because the tithes were law-created, because the bulk of the
+possessions passed from one communion to another by force of law, and
+because the State has continued to pecuniarily aid the Church throughout
+the centuries during which she has existed. And, if constitutional
+precedent be demanded, they are to be found in abundance upon the
+statute book, notably in the measures affecting the monasteries, the
+Tithe Commutation Act, and the Act putting an end to the Established
+Church in Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>If it be urged, as it sometimes is, that, because the original royal
+ordinance enforcing tithes was granted before our regular parliamentary
+system was in existence, Parliament has no power to deal with it, it
+must be answered that in all matters within these realms, touching
+either life or property, Parliament is supreme. And, as bearing even
+more directly upon the point raised, it may be added that rights of toll
+and market, granted to boroughs by royal charter before Parliaments were
+chosen as at present, have been altered and abolished by Parliaments
+since; and that Magna Charta itself, signed many years before Simon de
+Montfort called the first House of Commons into being, has been
+modified, and often modified, since that event.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p><p>If further proof be wanted, not only of the power but of the will of
+Parliament to interfere directly in the monetary affairs of an
+Established Church, the Act disendowing the Irish Establishment eighteen
+years ago, and another passed fifty years since, chopping and changing
+the salaries of the English bishops, may be referred to. And, regarding
+a further measure of the last half-century, the words of such a sturdy
+Conservative as Lord Brabourne, used in a letter written in 1887, are
+eminently satisfactory:&mdash;&ldquo;The Tithe Commutation Act was nothing more nor
+less than the assertion by the State of its right to deal with tithes as
+national property.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But, it may be said, the property, whether contributed by private
+benefaction or royal grant, was distinctly given to the Church, and
+ought not, therefore, to be taken away. I dispute both points of the
+contention. The property was allotted to a Church which acknowledged the
+supremacy of the Pope, and it is used by one which abjures it; to a
+Church possessed of seven sacraments, and used by one with only two; to
+a Church believing in transubstantiation, and used by one holding that
+doctrine to be a dangerous heresy; to a Church with an unmarried clergy,
+and used by one in which the large families of the poorer parsons are
+their stumbling-block and reproach; to a Church which performed its most
+sacred mysteries in the Latin tongue, and used by one whose ceremonies
+are delivered in a language understanded of the people. If it be true
+that the Church to-day is the Church as it has always been, why, in the
+name of common reason, was Cranmer, the Protestant, burned by Mary, and
+Campion, the Jesuit, hanged by Elizabeth?</p>
+
+<p>From the fact that the Church of England is not a corporation&mdash;that is,
+it has not property in its own right, and what is possessed by its
+members is vested in them not as proprietors but as trustees&mdash;there
+flows the consequence that it is mainly the life interests of those
+engaged in clerical work which have to be considered. And those life
+interests will be considered and generously dealt with when the time for
+disendowment arrives.</p>
+
+<p>And then comes a question which many will deem of all-importance&mdash;&ldquo;How
+is the Church to exist afterwards?&rdquo; or, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> put the point in the
+extremest fashion, and in the words addressed to the clergy in the very
+first of the &ldquo;Tracts for the Times,&rdquo; &ldquo;Should the Government of the
+country so far forget their God as to cut off the Church, to deprive it
+of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claims
+to respect and attention which you make upon your flock?&rdquo; And the answer
+is that, if the Church be worthy to exist, it will be able, like other
+religious bodies, to stand upon the open and constant manifestation of
+its own excellences.</p>
+
+<p>Look around and see what the voluntary system has done. In England it
+has planted a place of worship in every corner of the kingdom; in Wales
+it has saved from spiritual starvation a populace neglected by the
+Establishment; in Scotland it has founded a Free Church by sacrifices
+which were the marvel and the pride of a preceding generation; and in
+Ireland it has secured to the mass of the people the ministrations of
+their own religion, despite every bribe, persecution, and lure. Is it in
+England, where the Episcopalian system has most that is wealthy and all
+that is socially influential on its side, that a State endowment is
+needed to provide for its professors what the miners of Cornwall and the
+labourers of Carmarthen, the hardy toilers in the Highlands, and the
+poverty-stricken peasants of Connemara provide for themselves? If this
+be so, then no greater indictment could be levelled against the process
+of Establishment, no more certain proof could be afforded of the evils
+which follow in its train, than that it produced such a mean coldness of
+soul. But the supposition is so dishonouring to the great body of
+church-goers that its use proves the straits in which the defenders of
+the existing system find themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Disendowment would undoubtedly reduce the larger salaries allotted to
+the clergy, and probably increase the smaller. A parson would then be
+paid according to his value to the parish, whether as preacher or
+administrator, and he would not draw a thousand a year for doing
+nothing, while his curate received eighty or a hundred for performing
+the work. The Church would no longer be a rich man&rsquo;s preserve, wherein
+younger sons could obtain comfortable family livings, while their duty
+was done by ill-paid deputies. We should no longer see an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> Archbishop of
+Canterbury, with a salary of &pound;15,000 a year, begging upon a public
+platform for worn-out garments for the poorer working clergy. A primate
+is conceivable at a third the cost, and the money thus saved to the
+Church alone would prevent the necessity for such a humiliating
+proceeding as openly asking for old clothes for toiling clergymen. With
+disendowment, in short, men would be paid according to their merits and
+not their family connections&mdash;according to their work and not their
+birth. And, further, the scandal of the sale of livings&mdash;the shame of
+the public advertisement of cures of souls as eligible according as they
+are in a hunting country, or near a fishing river, or close to &ldquo;good
+society&rdquo;&mdash;would be done away with. Would all these gains count as
+nothing to the Church, considered as a religious body?</p>
+
+<p>The process of disendowment, then, is the necessary accompaniment of
+disestablishment; it is possible; it is just; and its effects would make
+for good. It is necessary, because if the Church is to be severed from
+the State on the ground that it has failed in its mission, it would be
+obviously out of the question to leave it possessed of the property
+given to it to secure that mission&rsquo;s due performance. It is possible,
+because Parliament is not merely supreme in all such matters, but has
+shown within the past few years its capacity for disendowing a Church
+having precisely the same rights and privileges as the English
+Establishment. It is just, because no one sect has the right to property
+granted it on the ground that it represented the religious sentiment of
+the whole nation. And it would make for good in giving a more
+distinctively religious character to the clergy, in paying them
+according to their deserts and not according to the length of the purse
+that purchased them their livings, and in freeing a religious system
+from the ignoble associations of the auction mart.</p>
+
+<p>Upon these grounds it is demanded that, with disestablishment,
+disendowment shall come. Life interests will be respected; all modern
+gifts to the Episcopalians as a distinct sect will be fairly dealt with;
+further than this the Establishment is not entitled to demand, and
+further than this Liberals will not be prepared to go.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XVI.&mdash;OUGHT EDUCATION TO BE FREE?</span></h2>
+
+<p>A question which is intimately connected in many minds with the Church
+is that of national education. It stood next to it in order in that
+early programme of Mr. Chamberlain which demanded &ldquo;Free Church, free
+schools, free land, and free labour.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>This matter of free schools is not likely to create as much opposition
+as it would have done even a short time since, for no question awaiting
+settlement is ripening so rapidly. Experience is teaching in an
+ever-increasing ratio that certain defects exist in our system of
+national education which hinder its full development, some of which, at
+least, could be avoided by the abolition of fees.</p>
+
+<p>The progress which has been made in public opinion within only half a
+century regarding the amount of aid that should be given to elementary
+schools, encourages the hope that more will yet be given, and that very
+speedily. It is but a little more than fifty years ago that a Liberal
+Ministry led the way in devoting a portion of the national funds to this
+purpose; and no one unacquainted with the history of that period could
+guess the number and the weight of the obstacles thrown in the way of
+even such a modest proposal as that Ministry made. The Tories, while not
+particularly anxious that the mass of the people should be educated at
+all, were decidedly desirous that such teaching as was given should be
+under the direct control of the Church. Archbishops and bishops, Tories,
+high and low, joined to continually hamper the development of any system
+of national education which afforded the Nonconformists the least
+privilege; but despite their every effort the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> movement spread. The
+annual grant of &pound;20,000, which was commenced in 1834, grew by leaps and
+bounds. In a little more than twenty years it had become nearly half a
+million for Great Britain alone; in thirty years it had increased by
+close upon another quarter of a million; and in fifty years (and the
+growth in the meantime had been mainly the fruit of the Education Act,
+passed by the Liberal Ministry in 1870) it had touched three millions.
+And that sum, vast as it was, represented only the amount granted from
+the national exchequer, being supplemented by an even larger total
+raised by local rates.</p>
+
+<p>So far has the nation gone in the path of State-aided and rate-aided
+education, and the question is whether it is not worth while to go the
+comparatively little way further which is needed to make elementary
+education free. For the fees which are now paid do not represent a
+quarter of the amount which the teaching costs. And not only so, but the
+existence of these fees is a continual hindrance to the working of the
+Act. The effect of the fee is to keep out of the board schools thousands
+of children who ought to be in them; and the attempt to enforce its
+payment increases the odium which almost necessarily attends upon compulsion.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But,&rdquo; it will be said, &ldquo;where a parent is too poor to pay, the fee can
+be remitted.&rdquo; That is true, and the extent to which the system of such
+remission is carried in some districts is one of the strongest arguments
+in favour of free education. It is desirable to get the children into
+the schools, but it is highly undesirable to do this by practically
+pauperizing the parents. If elementary education were free to all, all
+could partake of it without any appearance of favour on the one hand or
+shame on the other. But the independent poor have now the choice of
+making themselves still poorer by paying the fee for the education they
+are bound to have administered, or of losing their independence by
+asking the school board or the poor-law guardians for relief. And the
+consequence, of course, is that many who have no independence to lose,
+and are the least deserving of help, receive the assistance they are
+never backward to ask.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p><p>&ldquo;What is worth having is worth paying for&rdquo; is a remark sometimes made
+in this connection, but is it not as applicable to the State as to the
+individual? For it is for no philanthropic but for a decidedly practical
+reason that the country assists education. All men in these days admit
+that the most cultivated people, like the most cultivated individual
+man, has the best chance of success. With educated Germany, and educated
+France, and educated America pressing us hard, it is a necessity of
+existence for England to be equally educated. And seeing that the school
+board rate and the Government grant mount higher and higher and the fees
+become lower and lower, the only practical question is whether the State
+had not better boldly step in, abolish fees which are a hindrance to
+educational progress, pay the whole amount instead of three-quarters,
+and provide free teaching for all.</p>
+
+<p>If such a consummation were secured, the status of what are now called
+voluntary schools would of necessity be materially altered. As at
+present applied, the name &ldquo;voluntary&rdquo; affixed to the schools of the
+National Society and similar bodies is very much a misnomer. It conveys
+that the schools are supported by voluntary subscriptions; but this is
+true in only a limited degree, for it is the Government grant&mdash;that is,
+money taken out of the pocket of every one who pays taxes, direct or
+indirect&mdash;which keeps them in existence. And, therefore, when Churchmen
+complain, as some of them are occasionally ill-advised enough to do,
+that they not only subscribe to their own schools but have to pay the
+rate as well, ought it not to be enough to remind them that their
+schools are supported not alone for educational but for sectarian
+purposes, and that, if they wish to proselytize, they must pay, in
+however inadequate a degree, for the privilege? The real hardship is
+that those who do not believe in the clerical system of education have
+to pay heavily by means of taxation to keep up establishments over which
+they have not the least control, and which are used by the clergy for
+denominational ends.</p>
+
+<p>One result, then, of free education would be, not to destroy the
+voluntary schools, but to put them under the control of those who really
+and not nominally pay for keeping them up.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> If Churchmen demand schools
+of their own, they must support them out of their own pocket and not out
+of other people&rsquo;s, though it may be well that, under a stringent
+&ldquo;conscience clause&rdquo; and with direct popular control, they should still
+share in the taxpayers&rsquo; grants. As matters stand, the national
+schoolmaster is too often treated as if he were a mere servant of the
+clergyman, an idea which, with free education and popular government of
+all State-aided schools, would be bound to cease.</p>
+
+<p>The cry raised by some clergymen when the Education Act was passed, that
+the undenominational system would be fruitful only in producing &ldquo;astute
+scoundrels and clever devils,&rdquo; has died away. It is doubtful whether
+anybody ever really believed it; it is certain that no man with a
+reputation to lose would now repeat it. And, that being the case, the
+excuse for keeping up at the public expense two rival sets of
+schools&mdash;one sectarian and the other undenominational&mdash;has so largely
+disappeared that the onus of proving its necessity lies upon its
+advocates, and the burden of paying for it should be shifted upon the right shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>Of course it is said that this proposal of free education is only
+another step towards Socialism, but no one should be frightened by
+phrases. Socialism has as many varieties as religion&mdash;some as bad and
+some as good&mdash;and from them must be selected those worth having. If,
+upon consideration of the whole case, free education be thought to be
+one of these, the fact that it is called Socialistic will not weigh to
+its disadvantage with a single sensible man.</p>
+
+<p>What, then, is it that is asked, and why is it demanded? It is asked
+that elementary schools shall be freed from fees, and entirely supported
+out of the public funds, local and imperial; that advanced and technical
+education shall be made cheap and accessible, in order that those who
+want to progress can do so with as few hindrances as possible; and that
+all schools supported by public money shall be placed under popular
+control, and the schoolrooms, out of educational hours, made available for public use.</p>
+
+<p>These things are demanded because by the present arrangements the
+progress of compulsion is hampered, the deserving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> and independent poor
+are inequitably dealt with, and the cost of collecting the fees is out
+of all proportion to their value when received. Already the public pay
+three-quarters of the cost of elementary education, and they do it for
+the benefit of the community; if payment of the remaining quarter would
+increase the efficiency of the system, even only to a corresponding
+degree, it would be worth making. &ldquo;Vested interests&rdquo; might object; but
+the national welfare must override them, though there is no intention of
+dealing with them otherwise than fairly. Due allowance would be made for
+the subscriptions which have been raised towards the erection and
+support of the voluntary schools; but the nation has rights as well as
+individuals, and, in considering any compensation which may be demanded
+by the managers of such institutions, if free education be adopted, the
+public money which has been expended upon them must be taken into
+account equally with the private.</p>
+
+<p>This much is certain: although England will not be able to hold her own
+simply with &ldquo;the three R&rsquo;s,&rdquo; and advanced and technical education
+should, therefore, be widely spread, it is our duty to make &ldquo;the three
+R&rsquo;s&rdquo; as widely known as we can. It is not a question of principle, but
+of policy. Opposition to any education at all for the masses has
+disappeared; the State and the parish already pay most of the cost; if
+the system can be made more perfect by the abolition of fees, fees will
+have to be abolished.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XVII.&mdash;DO THE LAND LAWS NEED REFORM?</span></h2>
+
+<p>Immediately the question of the land is touched, a whole host of
+opponents to progress are roused to fierce and continuous action,
+though, as all politicians in these days affect a belief in the
+necessity for land reform, the question appears at first to be more one
+of degree than of principle. But, at the very outset, it is necessary to
+face the fact that there is an active propaganda going on which denies
+that any reform, even the most sweeping, will be of avail, and asserts
+that it is the very existence of private property in land which must be
+done away with.</p>
+
+<p>In what is termed &ldquo;Land Nationalization&rdquo; a very dangerous fallacy
+exists. The first thing to be asked of any one who advocates it is to
+define the term. It is vague; it is high-sounding; but what does it
+mean? If it means that the State is to take into its keeping all the
+land without compensating the present holders, it proposes robbery; if
+it means that the process is to be accompanied by compensation, it would
+entail jobbery. There are thousands who, by working hard, have saved
+sufficient to buy a small plot on which to erect a house. Is that plot
+to be seized by the State without payment? And if fair payment be given,
+and the taint of theft thus removed, does a single soul imagine that a
+Government department would be able to manage the land better than it is
+managed at present? Are our Government departments such models of
+efficiency and economy that such a belief can be entertained for a
+moment? What may fairly be demanded of all advocates of the
+nationalization or municipalization of the land is that they shall
+clearly show that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> the process would be honest in itself, just to the
+present holders, and likely to benefit the whole community. Unless they
+can do all these things, generalities are of no avail.</p>
+
+<p>The land, it is sometimes urged, has been stolen from the people; but it
+cannot have been stolen from those who never directly possessed it: and,
+whatever may be said of the manner in which the large properties were
+secured centuries ago, much of the land has changed hands so often that
+most, at least, of the present holders have fairly paid for it. There is
+an old legal doctrine that the title of that which is bought in open
+market cannot afterwards be called in question, and that applies to the
+present case. And when we are told that there cannot exist private
+property in land because that commodity is a gift of God to all, is it
+not the fact that, in an old country like ours, land is worth little
+except it be highly cultivated; that the labour, the manure, and the
+seed are private property without the shadow of a doubt; and that it is
+these we largely have to pay for when agricultural commodities are
+bought? Upon the same ground it is sometimes contended that we should
+have our water free because it falls from the heavens; but nature did
+not provide reservoirs, or lay mains, or bring the pipes into our
+houses; and for the sake of obtaining water easily we must pay for the
+labour and appliances used in collecting and distributing it. And the
+value of these illustrations, both as to land and to water, is to teach
+an avoidance of sounding generalities and a resolve to look at all
+questions in a practical light.</p>
+
+<p>Recognizing, therefore, that private property in land has existed, is
+existing, and is not likely to be abolished, the duty of progressive
+politicians is to see how the laws affecting it can be so modified as to
+benefit a considerably larger portion of the community than at present.
+And three of the points which have been most discussed, and which now
+are nearest settlement, are the custom of primogeniture, the law of
+entail, and the enactments relating to transfer.</p>
+
+<p>After spurning for many years the Liberal demand for the abolition of
+the custom of primogeniture&mdash;by which the land of a man dying without a
+will passes to the eldest son, to the exclusion of the rest of the
+family&mdash;the Tories in 1887 themselves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> proposed it; and in the House of
+Lords only one peer had sufficient courage to stand up in defence of a
+custom which the whole peerage had sworn by until that time. It puzzles
+any one not a peer to understand how a distinctly dishonest practice
+could have existed so long, save for the utterly inadequate reason that
+its tendency was to prevent large estates from being broken up, and that
+there were those who imagined that large estates were a benefit to the
+country. In actual working, however, it did not affect the largest
+estates but the smallest, and primogeniture was thus a question touching
+much more closely those of moderate means than the possessors of great
+wealth. A large holder of land is an exceedingly unlikely person to die
+without a will; a small holder frequently does so, with the result of
+much injustice to and suffering among his family.</p>
+
+<p>A practical instance is worth a hundred theories upon a point like this,
+and here are some such which have come under my own notice within the
+past few months. A man possessed of a small landed property died
+intestate; his daughter, who had ministered to his wants for years, was
+left penniless, the whole of the property going to the eldest son.
+Another similarly circumstanced, whose stay and comfort during his old
+age had likewise been a daughter, shrank, with the foolish obstinacy of
+the superstitious, from making a will; his friends, recognizing that, if
+he failed in this obvious duty, the daughter would be thrown without a
+penny on the world, while the eldest son, who for various reasons had
+not the least claim upon his father, would take everything, besought the
+old man to act reasonably; and almost at the last moment he did. In a
+third case, a fisherman, who for eighteen years had been paying for a
+piece of land through a building society, was drowned in a squall; and
+his savings, designed for the support of himself and his wife, were
+swept straight into the pocket of his eldest son. Now in all these
+instances, had the money been invested in houses, ships, consols&mdash;in
+fact, anything but land&mdash;it would, in case of no will being made, have
+been divided among the whole family in fair proportion. The accident of
+it being put into land caused wrong and suffering in two cases, and
+wrong and suffering were very narrowly avoided in the third. The
+abolition of primogeniture,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> therefore, is much more needed by the
+working and the middle classes than by the rich, whose lawyers very
+seldom allow them to die without a will.</p>
+
+<p>The law of entail is on its last legs, as well as the custom of
+primogeniture, and the Tories, by Lord Cairns&rsquo; Settled Land Act, and a
+subsequent amending measure, have practically admitted that it is
+doomed. Entail affects the community by giving power to a man to fetter
+his land with a multitude of restrictions for an indefinite period; it
+makes the nominal owner only in reality a life tenant; and by cramping
+him upon the one side with conditions which may have become out of date,
+and tempting him on the other to limit his expenditure on that which is
+not wholly his own, the development of the land is impeded, and the
+progress of agriculture hampered by force of law. Entail, like
+primogeniture, has been defended on the ground that it tends to keep
+large estates intact; but it is now so generally believed that a more
+widespread diffusion of land is desirable, that it is only necessary
+here to state the argument.</p>
+
+<p>A more widespread diffusion of the land will not, however, be attained
+unless the process of transfer is at once cheapened and simplified. The
+lawyers reap too much advantage from the present system, and many a man
+refrains from buying a plot he would like because the cost of transfer
+unduly raises the price. If it were provided that all estates should be
+registered and their boundaries clearly defined, there would be no more
+difficulty and expense in transferring a piece of land than is now
+involved in selling a ship. In these days buyer and seller are parted by
+parchments; and many who would like a plot, but who do not see why they
+should pay, because of the lawyers, ten, or fifteen, or twenty per cent.
+more than its value, put their money into concerns in which
+meddlesomeness created by Act of Parliament does not mingle.</p>
+
+<p>Simpler and cheaper transfer would be a step towards the more general
+ownership of land by those who till it. Let all artificial aids to the
+holding together large estates by power of Parliament be abolished, let
+transfer be cheapened and simplified, and then let him who likes buy.
+Free trade in land is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> what we ask, and when it is attained land will be
+able to be dealt with the same as any other commodity, and those who
+want a piece can have it by paying for it.</p>
+
+<p>But although it may not be desirable for the State to interfere in
+England for the creation of a peasant proprietary, it is needful that
+Parliament should do something tangible in the direction of securing
+allotments for the labourers. Upon that point, as upon primogeniture and
+entail, the Tories profess to be converted; but as their Allotments Bill
+of 1887 appears in practice to be a sham, it is necessary that such
+amendments should be introduced as may render it a reality.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XVIII.&mdash;SHOULD WASTE LANDS BE TILLED AND THE GAME LAWS ABOLISHED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>A dozen or fourteen years ago the questions attempted now to be answered
+were put much more frequently than at present. In the last days of the
+first Gladstone Administration and the earliest of the second Government
+of Mr. Disraeli, Liberals were looking for other worlds to conquer; and
+many of them, not venturing upon such bold courses on the land question
+as have since been adopted by even moderate politicians, fastened their
+attention upon the waste lands and the game laws. No great results came
+from the movement; other and more striking questions forced themselves
+to the front; and we are almost as far from a legislative settlement of
+the two just mentioned as in the days of a more restricted suffrage.</p>
+
+<p>This is the more surprising because the points named are of practical
+importance to the agricultural labourer, and the agricultural labourer
+now holds the balance of political power. But it is not likely that this
+state of quietude upon two such burning topics will long continue, for
+the country voter is certain soon to profit by the example of his
+brethren in the towns, and to demand that his representatives shall
+attend to those concerns immediately affecting his interests.</p>
+
+<p>And first as to the question of waste lands. Town-bred theorists who
+have never walked over a mile of moorland are apt sometimes to talk as
+if all the uncultivated land in the country was in that condition
+because of the wicked will of those who own it, and to argue that, if
+only an Act of Parliament<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> could be secured, the waste lands would
+blossom like the rose. They have the same touching faith in the efficacy
+of legislation as had Lord Palmerston when he put aside some difficulty
+with the exclamation, &ldquo;Give me an Act of Parliament, and the thing will
+be done.&rdquo; But facts are often too strong for legislation, however well
+intentioned and skilfully devised, and those about much of our waste
+land come within the list.</p>
+
+<p>A large portion of uncultivated land is mountain and moor, the greater
+part of which it would be impossible to make productive at any price,
+and the remainder could not be turned to account under a sum which would
+never make a profitable return. Those who think it an easy matter to
+cultivate waste land should visit that portion of Dartmoor which is
+dominated by the convict establishment. There they would see many an
+acre reclaimed, but, if they were told the cost in money and labour,
+they would be convinced that, were it not for penal purposes, both money
+and labour might be put to better use elsewhere. And if it be argued
+that the State should step in and advance all that is required to
+cultivate such waste as can by any possibility be brought under the
+plough, it must be asked why the taxpayer (for in this connection the
+State and the taxpayer are one and the same) should add to his burdens
+for so small a return.</p>
+
+<p>But there is, without doubt, a large amount of land in this country
+which now produces nothing, and which could be made to produce a deal.
+That which is absorbed by huge private parks, scattered up and down the
+kingdom, forms a great portion of this; and though, for reasons which
+are mainly sentimental, one would not wish to see all such private parks
+turned into sheep-walks or turnip-fields, there is the consideration
+that property&mdash;and peculiarly property in land&mdash;has its duties as well
+as its rights, and that those who wish to derive pleasure from the
+contemplation of large spaces of cultivable but not cultivated land, and
+in this way prevent such from being of any direct value to the
+community, ought to pay for the privilege. The rating of property of
+this kind at the present moment is ridiculously low; it should at least
+be made as high as if the land were devoted to some distinctly useful end.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p><p>As with parks, so with sporting lands. The rating of the latter is
+utterly inadequate; and although it maybe true that much of the land,
+especially in England, devoted to sporting purposes, is of little value
+for anything else, it is equally true that a great deal of it,
+particularly in Scotland, is fit for cultivation, and that tenants have
+been cleared from it to make room for deer and grouse. In all cases
+where the land would have value if cultivated, the owner ought to be
+made pay as if that value were obtained, seeing that for his own
+pleasure he is depriving the community of the chance of obtaining
+increased food. It would be too drastic a measure to adopt the Chinese
+method of hanging proprietors who did not till cultivable land; but many
+a landowner, if made to feel his duty through his pocket, would do that
+duty rather than pay.</p>
+
+<p>From the question of sporting lands to that of the game laws is a very
+short step. It may be that we have heard less of the latter during the
+last few years, because the Hares and Rabbits Act, passed by the second
+Gladstone Government in the first flush of its power, has done much to
+reconcile the tenant-farmers to the present state of things, by removing
+the grievance they most keenly felt.</p>
+
+<p>The Act referred to provides (to quote Mr. Sydney Buxton&rsquo;s summary)
+&ldquo;that every occupier of land shall have an inalienable right to kill the
+ground game (hares and rabbits) concurrently with any other person who
+may be entitled to kill it on the same land; that the ground game may
+only be killed by the occupier himself or by persons duly authorized by
+him in writing; that the use of firearms is confined to himself and one
+other, and they may only be used during the day; that those authorized
+to kill the game in other ways (poison and traps, except in
+rabbit-holes, are prohibited) must be resident members of his household,
+persons in his ordinary service, and any one other person whom he
+employs for reward to kill the game; that tenants on lease do not come
+under the provisions of the Act until the termination of their lease.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>This was such a concession to the tenant-farmers that it is little
+wonder that those of them who had groaned under the ground game should
+have felt generally satisfied with it; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> although a wail has been
+going up from certain sportsmen that if the Act be not speedily amended
+the hare will become as extinct as the mastodon, it is not the least
+likely to be altered in the direction they wish. If amended at all, it
+will be so as to bring winged game within its provisions.</p>
+
+<p>No one acquainted with rural life can doubt that the game laws, as at
+present administered, are a fruitful source of demoralization and crime.
+They demoralize all round, for they pollute the seat of justice by
+allowing such game preservers as are county magistrates to wreak
+vengeance upon all who transgress upon their pleasures; they lower the
+moral standard of the gamekeepers, whose miserable employment turns them
+into spies of a peculiarly unpleasing description; they make the rural
+police a standing army for the preservation of game; and they consign to
+gaol many a man who, but for these laws, would be honest and free.</p>
+
+<p>Such as would see justice most openly travestied should sit in a country
+police court and hear game cases tried. Let them notice the ostentatious
+fashion in which some magistrate, while a summons in which his game is
+concerned is being heard, will (as is carefully noted in the local
+papers) &ldquo;withdraw from the bench&rdquo; by taking his chair a foot back from
+his fellows and friends. Let them hear evidence upon which no man
+charged with any other offence would ever be convicted. Let them see the
+vindictive sentences that are passed. And then let them go home and
+think over the fashion in which that which is nicknamed &ldquo;justice&rdquo; is
+administered to any man unlucky enough to have offended a gamekeeper or
+a policeman, and to be charged as a poacher.</p>
+
+<p>In the good old hanging days, a man was sentenced to death in a western
+county for sheep-stealing. The sentence was the usual one, but other
+sheep-stealers had been let off the capital penalty for so many years
+that it was greatly to the astonishment of the district that this one
+was hanged. Then people began to think, and, remembering that he had the
+reputation of being a clever poacher, they saw that he had been paid off
+for the new and the old. It is much the same in the rural districts
+to-day. In game cases the presumption of the English<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> law courts that a
+man shall be held to be innocent until he is proved guilty is
+systematically reversed. The unsupported word of a gamekeeper is
+considered to be worth that of half-a-dozen ordinary men; and it is not
+uncommon for a defendant convicted of some offence, totally unconnected
+with the game laws, to have his penalty increased because the
+superintendent of police has whispered to the justices&rsquo; clerk, and the
+clerk to the magistrates, the fatal word &ldquo;poacher.&rdquo; Those who live in a
+town can scarcely conceive the open fashion in which justice is degraded
+by the county magistrates when the game is in question. But, if any
+would bring it home to themselves&mdash;and the strongest words are too faint
+to picture the reality&mdash;let them go to some rural court, where the
+justices do not imagine that the light of public opinion can be brought
+to bear upon them, and see how poachers are tried.</p>
+
+<p>If it were only because of the widespread demoralization they cause, the
+game laws ought to be repealed. They are avowedly kept up for the
+benefit of the class which does little or no work, and they fill the
+prisons at our expense to preserve a sport in which we have no share and
+no wish to share. And, if they are to be retained on the statute book at
+all, their administration should, at the very least, be taken from those
+who are practically prosecutor, jury, and judge in one, and placed in impartial hands.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XIX.&mdash;OUGHT LEASEHOLDS TO BE ENFRANCHISED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>The proposal to enfranchise leaseholds&mdash;that is, to enable a
+leaseholder, upon paying a fair price, to claim that his tenure be
+turned into freehold&mdash;is a comparatively new one in the field of
+practical politics; but it has come to the front so rapidly that it is
+already far nearer solution than others which have agitated the public
+mind for many years. The grievance had for a long time been felt, and in
+some parts of the kingdom sorely felt; but a ready remedy had not
+suggested itself, and the subject slept.</p>
+
+<p>The grievance is this&mdash;that the present system of leases for lives or
+for a term of years causes frequent loss to the leaseholder and much
+injury to the community, benefiting only the owner of the soil. The
+remedy would be to empower a leaseholder to demand from the ground
+landlord that the land shall be transferred to him upon payment of its
+fair value, as appraised by some public tribunal.</p>
+
+<p>And first as to the results which flow from the present state of things.
+These vary with the circumstances, and some of the circumstances demand
+study. Leases, broadly speaking, are of two kinds&mdash;those which are
+granted on lives and those which are for a specified term of years. Of
+the two, the former are the more objectionable, as they frequently work
+gross injustice. A lease is granted which shall expire at the death of
+the third of three persons named in the deed. Under that lease a man
+builds a house; the first life expires, and the leaseholder has to pay a
+fine&mdash;or, as it is called, a heriot&mdash;of a specified sum; the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> second
+dies, and another fine has to be paid; and when the third passes away,
+the property and all upon it revert to the landlord. Is it not easy to
+see that no particular chapter of accidents is required to terminate any
+three given lives within a comparatively short period, while, if an
+epidemic occurred, ground landlords everywhere would reap a rich harvest
+from the ready falling in of leases for lives?</p>
+
+<p>One instance out of thousands may be quoted of how the system works. &ldquo;A
+piece of land which let for &pound;2 an acre as an agricultural rent was let
+for building purposes at &pound;9 an acre, and divided into eleven plots. On
+one of these a poor man built a cottage, at a cost of &pound;60, on a ground
+rent of 16s. 6d. The term was for three lives and one in reversion. The
+charge for the lease was &pound;5. On the expiration of each of the three
+lives &pound;1 was payable as a fine or heriot, and &pound;10 was to be paid on
+nominating the life in reversion. All the four lives expired in
+twenty-eight years. The landlord thereupon took possession of the house.
+He had thus received in twenty-eight years, besides the annual ground
+rent, the following sums:&mdash;&pound;5 for the lease, &pound;10 for nomination of life
+in reversion, &pound;3 as heriot on the expiration of the three lives&mdash;in all
+&pound;18; and, in addition, the house built at the expense of the victim,
+which he sold for &pound;58.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The reply may be made, &ldquo;But, granting that leases for lives often have
+cruel results, is not the remedy in the hands of those who want leases?
+Why do they take those for lives?&rdquo; For this reason&mdash;that in some parts
+of the country it is the only way by which a building plot can be
+obtained, and that, as long as the possibility of securing so good a
+bargain is legalized, so long will the more unscrupulous among the
+landlords force an intending tenant to accept that or nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Leases for long terms of years do not as readily lend themselves to the
+chance of legal robbery, but they have their own ill effects. Houses are
+built in flimsy fashion upon the express idea that they are intended to
+last only the specified term; and during the expiring years of the
+lease, repairs are grudged, and the dwellings rendered unhealthy to the
+occupier and unsafe to the passers-by. If a man has a house which is
+erected upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> leasehold land, and therein builds up, by his own skill
+and industry, a good business, he is absolutely at the mercy of the
+ground landlord when the lease expires. The rent is raised because of
+the success his own faculties have secured, onerous conditions in the
+way of repairs are imposed, and what can he do? &ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t like it,
+you can leave it,&rdquo; is the landlord&rsquo;s reply; but there is many a business
+which does not bear transplanting, and if the tenant be on a large
+estate it might happen that, if he did not accede to the owner&rsquo;s terms,
+he would have to move to a far-distant part of the town, or even&mdash;as at
+Devonport and Huddersfield among other places&mdash;out of the town
+altogether, and that would mean ruin. And thus he is practically
+compelled to struggle on in order to increase the wealth of the
+landlord, who has done nothing, at the expense of himself, who has done all.</p>
+
+<p>And this is not always the worst, for in many cases landlords for
+various reasons will not renew at any price, and the tenant has perforce
+to go the moment his lease expires. A certain Whig duke&mdash;and, of course,
+a zealous defender of &ldquo;the rights of property&rdquo;&mdash;conceived the idea, upon
+coming into his estates some years ago, that a village stood too near
+his park gates. Not brooking that herdsmen and traders should stand
+between the wind and his nobility, he directed that, as leases fell in,
+the tenants should be cleared out, graciously, however, offering them
+other plots some three miles away. And the tenants had to leave the
+homes in which they had been born and where their parents had lived
+before them, and to see them tumble down in utter ruin, in order that so
+mighty a person as a duke should not be shocked by the sight of the
+common herd. It was one of the thousand cases in life where a man had a
+right to do that which it was not right for him to perform.</p>
+
+<p>Another fashion in which grievous injustice to the leaseholder can be
+done is frequently illustrated. It has happened, and happened very
+recently, that a ground landlord has granted leases for a term of years;
+that, upon the strength of these agreements, houses have been built; and
+that upon the landlord&rsquo;s decease it has been discovered by some skilful
+lawyer that the dead man had had no power, under an entail or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>
+settlement, to grant such leases; whereupon the heir has invoked the law
+to cancel the whole, and has seized everything upon the land. This is
+legal, but is it commonly honest?</p>
+
+<p>In other ways the leasehold system is an injury not only to individuals
+but to the community. A west country town, where all the land is held by
+one man, has been crippled in every attempt to expand and improve by the
+impossibility of obtaining a freehold plot. What person in his senses
+would erect a substantial factory or a large concern of any kind upon a
+comparatively short lease? Men embark upon such enterprises in order
+that, as year follows year, their property may become more valuable, not
+that year by year it may become less so by the growing nearness of the
+time when it will pass to the landlord, who has never contributed a
+penny or a thought to the success of the concern, the building
+containing which, at the expiration of the lease, he can call his own.</p>
+
+<p>For all these unfairnesses to individuals, hindrances to trade, and
+injuries to the community, is proposed the remedy stated&mdash;that a
+leaseholder who has twenty (or, as some suggest, ten or fifteen) years
+to run, shall be empowered to demand that his land be made freehold upon
+the payment of its value, as assessed by some specified tribunal.</p>
+
+<p>The first objection is that this would be an undue interference with
+&ldquo;the rights of property.&rdquo; But it has already been laid down by
+Parliament that such &ldquo;rights&rdquo; can be set aside in the public interest
+upon the payment of fair compensation; and what has been done in regard
+to the making of railways can be done respecting the building or the
+preserving of houses. The existing system is an injury to the community;
+and as the price to be paid for its abolition, whether wholly or in
+part, would be assessed by a tribunal constituted by Parliament, the
+landlords would have no more reason to complain than they now have when
+compelled to sell a portion of their property to a railway company.</p>
+
+<p>The next plea is that it would interfere with &ldquo;freedom of contract.&rdquo;
+Upon the general question of what that freedom is, how far it now
+exists, and in how large a degree the State has a right to interfere
+with it, one need not speak, for in this matter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> of leases Parliament
+has already stepped in to &ldquo;interfere with freedom of contract.&rdquo; It
+having been found that some landlords were accustomed to insert in
+leases oppressive provisions for forfeiture in certain conditions, the
+Legislature empowered the courts to lift from the leaseholders covenants
+which unduly burdened them. And if a precedent is asked for the
+particular remedy proposed, the Acts enabling any copyholder to
+enfranchise his holding should be consulted.</p>
+
+<p>If it be said that, should such a power be granted by law, no one
+possessing land would let on a long lease, it may be answered that this
+would be no great evil, seeing how the leasehold system has worked. But
+as landowners will want in the future as in the past to let or to sell,
+and as it is not to be supposed that any man will take a lease of less
+than twenty years and build upon the land, the owners will accommodate
+themselves to circumstances, and dispose of their property as best they can.</p>
+
+<p>Owners in other countries do so, and why not here? Such a leasehold
+system as that of England is practically unknown elsewhere. In France,
+it is true, something of the kind exists, but we seek for it in vain in
+Germany and Austria, in Russia and Switzerland, or in Spain and
+Portugal; while in Italy, where no leases for over thirty years are
+permitted, a tenant can convert his property into freehold by redeeming the rent.</p>
+
+<p>The supporters of leasehold enfranchisement, therefore, have on their
+side not only the practical evils of the present system, but
+parliamentary precedent and continental custom. These should suffice to
+persuade all who study the matter that the time for a change has come,
+and that the way in which that change is proposed to be effected is just and equitable.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XX.&mdash;WHOSE SHOULD BE THE UNEARNED INCREMENT?</span></h2>
+
+<p>There is a school of politicians which reply to all such proposals as
+have been sketched for practical land reform: &ldquo;They do not go far
+enough, for they would merely transfer the unearned increment from the
+present freeholders to the present leaseholders, and we want it
+transferred to the community.&rdquo; This &ldquo;unearned increment&rdquo; is a matter of
+which we are likely to hear a deal in the immediate future, for since
+John Mill stated the theory it has been much talked of, and to-day more
+than ever. It is sometimes contended, in fact, that, supposing all the
+projected reforms carried and in full and untrammeled action, &ldquo;the
+absorption of the unearned increment by private individuals would
+perpetuate an evil which would swallow up whatever good those reforms
+might have a tendency to bring about.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>What then is the theory upon which so much may depend? It cannot be
+better stated than in the words of Mill:&mdash;&ldquo;Suppose that there is a kind
+of income which constantly tends to increase, without any exertion or
+sacrifice on the part of the owners: those owners constituting a class
+in the community, whom the natural course of things progressively
+enriches, consistently with complete passiveness on their own part. In
+such a case it would be no violation of the principles on which private
+property is grounded, if the State should appropriate this increase of
+wealth, or part of it, as it arises. This would not properly be taking
+anything from anybody; it would merely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> be applying an accession of
+wealth, created by circumstances, to the benefit of society, instead of
+allowing it to become an unearned appendage to the riches of a
+particular class. Now this is actually the case with rent.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>When Mill&rsquo;s &ldquo;Principles of Political Economy&rdquo; was published, this theory
+of the State absorbing, in whole or in part, the &ldquo;unearned increment&rdquo; of
+the land, was regarded by many as so utopian that it was put aside with
+a scoff, and was thought to have been settled with a sneer. But it has
+struck deep root into many a Radical mind, and those who believe in it
+ask it to be shown how it is either dishonest as a theory or would be
+impossible in practice.</p>
+
+<p>There need be no attempt to do either, for Mill himself made an
+important restriction in his definition of what should be done which
+relieves it from the stigma of dishonesty or impracticability. He
+believed that &ldquo;it would be no violation of the principles on which
+private property is grounded, if the State should appropriate this
+increase of wealth, <i>or part of it</i>, as it arises.&rdquo; It may be agreed
+that the State could fairly appropriate a part of this increment, and
+this might be done by means of taxation. But that is a very different
+matter from taking the whole.</p>
+
+<p>One who argues in favour of the latter plan, submits this
+contention:&mdash;&ldquo;The area of a county, for purposes of illustration, may be
+taken as a fixed quantity. Now, the demand for land will increase, and
+as a corollary the price of land will rise, exactly in proportion to the
+increase of population. This additional value is not brought about by
+either independent industry, ingenuity, or the outlay of capital on the
+part of any private individual: it is a growth entirely due to the
+increase of the community: it is of enormous value, is extracted from
+the dire necessities of the whole population, and goes into the pockets
+of private individuals who have never done anything to create it.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But does the illustration hold good whether applied to such a limited
+area as a county or to the country at large? It is not the case that the
+demand for land increases and its price rises exactly in proportion to
+population; and it is as little the case<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> that its increased value, if
+any, is &ldquo;extracted from the dire necessities of the whole population.&rdquo;
+For while the number of our inhabitants is increasing, the value of such
+land as ministers directly to their wants in the provision of food and
+clothing is decreasing. If all the bread that is eaten, beef that is
+killed, and wool that is worn, were raised within these shores, there
+would be a semblance of truth in the illustration; but we have left the
+days when we lived on our own produce far behind, and the British farmer
+would only be too happy if the picture thus presented were even
+approximately like reality.</p>
+
+<p>It may be replied that bread and beef and wool do not exhaust the
+catalogue of men&rsquo;s requirements from the land; and they do not, for we
+require plots upon which to build, and good houses are just as necessary
+as cheap food. But even where land is made more valuable by its becoming
+used for building purposes, is there any justice in either the State or
+a municipality taking the whole increased value? Let the case be that of
+a man who thinks that he sees a chance of a town expanding, and who
+purchases a piece of land which will be of little use to anybody unless
+his idea proves correct, but which will bring him a good profit if he
+has skilfully foreseen. Why should he not be as fairly paid for his
+skill and foresight as if he had bought a house on a similar belief? The
+reply is, &ldquo;The quantity of land is limited; that of houses is not;&rdquo; but
+that is only true up to a certain and very definite point; and with the
+reforms which have already been suggested, and with a fairer system of
+taxing the land, the community would gain all it could fairly ask.</p>
+
+<p>My contention, shortly put, is this&mdash;That the State has a right to share
+in the increased value of all property, landed or otherwise; and that,
+in the case of land, it has an additional, though limited, claim,
+because of the conditions upon which that commodity passed into private
+ownership. Those who work for wages have to pay income tax immediately
+those wages touch a certain point; as they rise, so does the payment
+increase; and, after a given amount, the tax is proportionately much
+heavier. Why should not the same principle be applied to income of every
+sort from land as to income of every sort from wages, profits, or invested capital?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p><p>It is not so at present, as a study of the land tax will show.
+Nominally that tax is four shillings in the pound on the full annual
+value, but actually what does it stand at? It was fixed by Parliament in
+the seventeenth century, the semi-owners of the land, who had held their
+property under certain weighty conditions of contributing military
+strength to the King, and who had managed by degrees to slip through
+their obligations, agreeing thus to tax themselves as a compensation for
+the burden that had been lifted from them. But in 1798 it was
+enacted&mdash;by a Parliament in which practically only landowners were
+represented&mdash;that the valuation upon which the tax was to be paid should
+be that of 1692, when on its then conditions it was first levied. And
+the consequence is that, although this later Act directed that it should
+be assessed and collected with impartiality, in parts of the country
+which have stood still the tax now is not far from the original sum,
+while it amounts in the immediate neighbourhood of such a city as
+Liverpool to about a fifth of a farthing in the pound. It may not be
+feasible, because of the manner in which much of the impost has been
+&ldquo;redeemed,&rdquo; and it might in some cases be unjust, to raise the land tax
+at once to four shillings in the pound on the valuation of 1888 instead
+of 1692; but the same Parliament which put the clock back has the power
+to bring it up to the proper time; and, at least, something could be
+done to lessen the loss the State is now made to suffer.</p>
+
+<p>There is another way in which landowners could justly be called upon to
+pay a portion of the unearned increment to the State, and that is
+through the taxation of ground-rents. This is a point which keenly
+touches the towns, and deserves the early attention of Parliament. At
+present the great ground landlords escape their fair share of the
+burdens which fall heavily upon those who take their leases. And, so
+certain are some of them that the taxing time will soon come, that they
+are already selling a portion of their town estates, so as to &ldquo;get out
+from under&rdquo; before that period arrives.</p>
+
+<p>It may therefore be submitted that, with a fairer land tax and the
+taxation of ground rents, we should secure to the State the proportion
+of the &ldquo;unearned increment&rdquo; to which she is justly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> entitled. Those who
+would go further must be prepared to prove that property in land is so
+different in every essential from all other kinds that it would be
+honest for the State to absorb the whole unearned increment of the one,
+and to levy only an income and property tax on the other.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXI.&mdash;HOW SHOULD LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT BE EXTENDED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>It is always consolatory to find amid the welter of party politics some
+topic upon which all say they agree, and such a topic certainly is that
+of the reform of local government. Politicians of every shade have long
+professed their desire for such a reform, and it ought now to be within
+measurable distance of accomplishment.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the great question of the extension of self-government to Ireland I
+have already spoken; and in regard to the purely domestic affairs of all
+the four divisions of the kingdom&mdash;England, Scotland, and Wales, as well
+as Ireland&mdash;it need only here be added that the solution of much of the
+difficulty which springs from an overburdened Parliament will be found
+in devolving upon a special authority for each the right of dealing with
+its own local concerns. But, as to three of the four divisions, it is
+not so pressing a question as that which is commonly known as the reform
+of local government, and the main proposition touching which is summed
+up in the demand for county councils.</p>
+
+<p>This is a matter which more intimately touches the country districts
+than the towns, for in all the latter of any size there are popularly
+elected municipal councils, which exercise much power over local
+affairs. The only exception is the greatest town of all, for London was
+specifically exempted (by the action of the House of Lords) from the
+reform effected in all other cities and boroughs by the Municipal
+Corporations Act of 1835. There is a Corporation of the City of London;
+but this body,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> against which a very great deal can be said, has
+authority only over one square mile of ground, the remaining 119 square
+miles upon which the metropolis stands being governed by vestries,
+trustee boards, and district boards of works, all connected with and
+subject to the Metropolitan Board of Works&mdash;or Board of Words, as it was
+once irreverently but truly called&mdash;which is not chosen directly by the
+ratepayers, but is selected by the vestries, who themselves are elected
+by handfuls of people, the general public paying them no heed. And thus
+it comes to pass that the greatest and wealthiest city in the world is
+worse governed than the smallest of our municipal boroughs, for nine out
+of ten ratepayers take not the least interest in electing the vestries,
+and not one ratepayer in a hundred could tell the name of his district
+representative on the Metropolitan Board of Works, now proposed, by even
+a Conservative Administration, to be abolished.</p>
+
+<p>It is not a small concern, this of reforming the government of London,
+for it affects four millions of people&mdash;a number not far short of the
+population of Ireland; but politicians in the mass, as even the keenest
+metropolitan municipal reformer will admit, are more interested in the
+general question of local government.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking broadly, the defects of the system proposed to be reformed are
+that of the popularly elected bodies there are too many, and that the
+great governing body is not elected at all. In a certain town of 3000
+inhabitants, there are at this moment a Town Council, a School Board, a
+Burial Board, and (because under the Public Health Act an adjoining
+parish was tacked on) a Local Board of Health; while, notwithstanding
+that it sends representatives to a Board of Guardians for the whole
+Union, it had until recently, and in addition to the other bodies, a
+Local Board of Guardians, chosen under a special Act. And, beyond all
+these, a Highway Board meets within its borders, which has to be
+consulted and negotiated with whenever a road leading into the town
+needs to be re-metalled or an additional brick is required for a
+neighbouring bridge.</p>
+
+<p>As if all these boards were not sufficient to keep the district in good
+order, there is the Court of Quarter Sessions, which has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> jurisdiction
+in various details that the multitude of small bodies cannot touch.
+These latter have one justification, however, that the former cannot
+claim, and that is that, despite there being magistrates who are members
+of the boards of guardians by virtue of their office, and although the
+more property one possesses the more votes one can give for certain of
+the local bodies, these in the main are popularly elected, and are,
+therefore, directly responsible to the ratepayers for the manner in
+which their trust is used.</p>
+
+<p>It is quite otherwise with the Court of Quarter Sessions. This consists
+only of magistrates, such magistrates being appointed by the
+Lords-Lieutenant of counties, and the appointments being made mainly on
+political grounds. As a rule, the holders of that distinguished position
+are Tories, and they take good care that the magistrates shall be Tories
+also. It is not long since it would have been impossible to find a
+single Liberal on the commission of the peace for Huntingdonshire; and
+when comparatively recently it was pointed out to the Lord-Lieutenant of
+Essex that an almost exactly similar state of things prevailed in that
+shire, he replied he did not consider there was a Liberal in the whole
+county who was socially qualified for the magisterial bench. The idea of
+making a banker or a merchant a justice of the peace was too shocking;
+and thus the commercial classes and a good half of the population
+(giving the other half to the Tories) were completely unrepresented, not
+merely on the bench, but in the Court of Quarter Sessions, which
+governed the affairs and spent the money of the county.</p>
+
+<p>There is no necessity to prove that these courts have spent the county
+monies wantonly or with conscious impropriety in order to show this
+condition of things to be wrong. In imperial affairs, the doctrine that
+taxation without representation is tyranny has been asserted to the
+full; in municipal matters, since the Act of 1835, the same has
+prevailed; but in county concerns it has been non-existent. The
+magistrates represent no one but themselves, their party, and their own
+class; they are necessarily swayed by the passions and prejudices that
+party and class possess; and, seeing that the English people long ago
+refused power over the national purse to an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> unrepresentative body like
+the House of Lords, it is surprising they have until now allowed power
+over the local purse to be in the hands of such equally unrepresentative
+bodies as the courts of quarter sessions.</p>
+
+<p>The line which the immediate reform of local government must take is,
+therefore, the creation of a directly-elected body to deal with county
+affairs, and the federation of such of the smaller boards as have to do
+with the more purely district concerns, both of which points the Cabinet
+of Lord Salisbury appear disposed to concede. But upon the former point
+Liberals will claim that the whole&mdash;and not merely three-fourths&mdash;of the
+County Councils shall be directly elected, for the system of aldermen,
+included in the Municipal Reform Act by the House of Lords, has been
+used for partisan purposes, as it was intended to be, and the same
+effect will follow in the case of the counties if the same cause is provided.</p>
+
+<p>Any system, in fact, which involves &ldquo;double election&rdquo; tends to make the
+body concerned hidebound and cliquish. A county alderman once chosen,
+especially if he were a squire, as he most likely would be, would have
+to behave himself in most outrageous fashion ever to lose his post. The
+ratepayers might grumble, but it would be difficult in the extreme to
+dislodge him, for he would be removed from their direct control, and the
+Council would consider it ungracious to get rid of an &ldquo;old servant.&rdquo; If
+one wants to know how this double election operates, let him ask some
+clear-sighted Londoner who is acquainted with the manner in which his
+own city is ruled. He will be answered that for scandalous and wanton
+expenditure not many bodies can equal the Metropolitan Asylums Board,
+the members of which are mainly chosen by the various boards of
+guardians; while for jobbery and general mismanagement it is even beaten
+by the Metropolitan Board of Works, which is elected by the several
+vestries. And he will add that this chiefly arises from the fact that
+the ratepayers have no direct control over either of these bodies, and
+that the good result of such direct control was shown by this fact&mdash;that
+when the metropolitan ratepayers considered that the School Board, which
+is directly elected, was practising extravagance, they placed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> at the
+bottom of the poll those responsible for the policy, with the effect
+that considerable savings were speedily effected.</p>
+
+<p>And therefore now, when County Councils are being established, all
+Liberals will have very carefully to watch the points upon which the
+Tories and Whigs may combine in an attempt to give the country a
+semblance without the reality of representative local self-government.
+What must be insisted upon is&mdash;(1) That the Councils shall be entirely
+elective; (2) that the ratepayers shall directly elect; (3) that there
+shall be no property qualification for membership; (4) that the voting
+shall be by household suffrage&mdash;one householder one vote; and (5) that
+women ratepayers shall have the same right of voting for county as for town councils.</p>
+
+<p>With such a Council in each county, or, in the case of Lancashire and
+Yorkshire, in each great division of a county, we should have a central
+local organization, to which highway boards, local boards of health,
+village school boards, and other small bodies could be affiliated; and
+it is not impossible that, as a development of the system, the various
+bodies controlling the destinies of our lesser towns could be federated
+to save friction, trouble, and expense; while, above all, it must be
+insisted that the representatives of the ratepayers shall have full
+control over the police.</p>
+
+<p>It is a truism that without good citizens the best of governments must
+fail; but our experience of the House of Commons and of the many town
+councils has shown that the improvement of the machinery and the handing
+over of control to the great body of the people have brought
+public-spirited men to the front to do the duties required. As it has
+been at Westminster and in the towns, so will it be in the counties.
+England has become greater and freer, our towns have expanded and
+benefited, owing to the whole of the inhabitants having a direct voice
+in the rule; and the counties will correspondingly improve when the same is applied.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXII.&mdash;HOW IS LOCAL OPTION TO BE EFFECTED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>Intimately connected with the question of county government is that of
+local option; and the problem of transferring the licensing power from
+an irresponsible bench of magistrates to a specially elected body, or to
+a direct vote of the ratepayers, has ripened towards settlement in a
+remarkable degree since the day&mdash;just twenty years since&mdash;when Mr.
+Gladstone wrote to the United Kingdom Alliance that his disposition was
+&ldquo;to let in the principle of local option wherever it is likely to be
+found satisfactory,&rdquo; and thus used in relation to this question for the
+first time, as far as is known, a phrase which has become famous.</p>
+
+<p>No leading politician to-day disputes that some form of local option
+must speedily be provided; but, as a body, they have been shy of
+touching a problem that presents a host of difficulties, and the attempt
+to settle which could not fail to arouse a number of enemies. What
+those, therefore, who wished for local option have had to do was to show
+the body of electors that it was reasonable and just, and to trust that
+their appreciation of these two qualities would lead them to its support.</p>
+
+<p>As to its being reasonable, the very fact that the granting of licences
+even now is in the hands of the magistrates, and not in those of a
+Government department, indicates that it is intended that local feeling
+shall be consulted. This, in fact, was specifically stated in an Act of
+1729, which, after reciting that &ldquo;inconveniences have arisen in
+consequence of licences being granted to alehouse-keepers by justices
+living at a distance, and, therefore, not truly informed of the occasion
+or want of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> ale-houses in the neighbourhood, or the character of those
+who apply for licences,&rdquo; enacted that &ldquo;no licences shall in future be
+granted but at a general meeting of the magistrates acting in the
+division in which the applicant dwells.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Just a hundred years later, Parliament thought fit to withdraw from the
+magistrates&mdash;who, at the least, knew something of &ldquo;the occasion or want
+of alehouses in the neighbourhood, or the characters of those who apply
+for licences&rdquo;&mdash;the power over applications for beerhouse licences; and
+the result showed that even the most modified form of local option was
+better than none. The Act of 1830, &ldquo;to permit the general sale of beer
+and cider by retail in England,&rdquo; provided that &ldquo;any householder desirous
+of selling malt liquor by retail in any house&rdquo; might obtain a licence
+from the Excise without leave from the magistrates. Within five years
+another Act had to be passed demanding better guarantees for the
+character of those applying for such licences, the preamble declaring
+this to be necessary because &ldquo;much evil had arisen from the management
+of houses&rdquo; created by the previous statute. Other amending Acts
+followed, and in 1882 the magistrates were once more given complete
+jurisdiction over beer off-licences, with the result that in the borough
+of Over Darwen alone the renewal was at once refused of 34 out of 72
+licences of the kind, a decision which, it is important to note as
+bearing upon a point yet to be raised, was upheld by the Queen&rsquo;s Bench on appeal.</p>
+
+<p>It is not merely a matter of historical interest, but it has very
+distinctly to do with the argument in favour of local option, to show
+that the magistrates for four centuries have had committed to them the
+duty of seeing that the needs of the district were no more than
+satisfied. In 1496, a statute directed &ldquo;against vacabounds and beggers&rdquo;
+empowered two justices of the peace &ldquo;to rejecte and put awey comen
+ale-selling in tounes and places where they shall think convenyent;&rdquo; and
+in 1552 another Act confirmed this exercise of authority. In 1622, the
+Privy Council peremptorily directed the local justices to suppress
+&ldquo;unnecessary alehouses;&rdquo; and in 1635 the Lord Keeper, in his charge to
+the judges in the Star Chamber previous to their going circuit,
+denounced alehouses as &ldquo;the greatest pests in the kingdom,&rdquo;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> and added
+this significant hint: &ldquo;In many places they swarm by default of the
+justices of the peace, that set up too many; but if the justices will
+not obey your charge therein, certify their default and names, and I
+assure you they shall be discharged. I once did discharge two justices
+for setting up one alehouse, and shall be glad to do the like again upon
+the same occasion.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>These facts show that the theory upon which our licensing system has
+grown up is that the wants of a locality shall be strictly borne in
+mind, and of late years the wishes of a locality have more and more been
+considered. No one would deny that magistrates as a whole pay greater
+attention to those wishes to-day than they were accustomed to do even as
+recently as fifteen years ago; and when new licences are applied for
+memorials against their grant, signed by the inhabitants, are allowed to
+have considerable weight with the bench. But that, after all, is only
+the result of indirect and irregular pressure. What Local Optionists
+desire is that the pressure shall be made direct and customary.</p>
+
+<p>The reasonableness of demanding that local wishes shall control the
+issue of licences is proved by the facts adduced, and the justice is
+equally capable of being shown. If a locality determines that no fresh
+licences shall be granted, or that certain old ones shall be taken away,
+no more injustice will be done than if the magistrates under the present
+system did the like. No compensation has ever been granted to the holder
+of a licence the renewal of which a bench has refused; and although the
+majority of such refusals has been because of ill-conduct, there have
+been many cases (and those at Over Darwen were among them) where the
+magistrates have not renewed because they did not think the house was
+required. The fact stands that a publican&rsquo;s tenure is in its nature
+precarious; he holds his licence from year to year at the pleasure of
+the magistrates; he would hold it in the same fashion were Local Option
+secured. And the fact that the power of refusal to renew a licence would
+pass from an irresponsible bench to either the whole of the ratepayers
+or a body specially elected by them for the duty, would not entitle him
+to demand a compensation then that does not exist for him now.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p><p>A great difficulty of the problem lies in consideration of the manner
+in which the popular power shall be exercised. &ldquo;Local Option&rdquo; is a
+somewhat elastic phrase, adopted by many who have never troubled to
+think what it may involve. Broadly speaking, there are three methods by
+which it might be carried into effect: (1) By placing the power of
+licensing in the hands of the Town Councils or the proposed County
+Councils; (2) in those of specially-elected licensing boards; or (3) in
+those of the ratepayers, who would exercise by ballot a &ldquo;direct veto.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>It is the first plan that finds favour with most of our statesmen. It
+was prepared to be adopted by the last Liberal Ministry, and is by no
+means so novel as many suppose. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835,
+as originally drawn, contained a clause giving the Town Councils the
+power of granting alehouse licences, but the proposition was abandoned.
+The Local Government Bill of Lord Salisbury&rsquo;s Administration has a
+similar provision, giving the licensing to the County Councils; but to
+this has been urged the objection that these bodies will have sufficient
+business to attend to without having the public-houses placed on their
+shoulders. When our system of popular education was fixed upon its
+present basis, it was resolved that the work should be done by specially
+chosen school boards. Mr. Forster at first proposed that these boards
+should in the towns be selected by the Municipal Councils; but it was
+felt by the House of Commons that so special a function demanded direct
+election, and direct election was provided, with the best results. And
+if the licensing power is to be vested in a representative assembly and
+local option is to be anything but a sham, it must be placed in the
+hands of those elected by the ratepayers for that special purpose, so
+that no bye-issues of waterworks, or paving, or the increase of rates
+shall affect the one distinct question of the public-house.</p>
+
+<p>The extreme temperance section argue that even such Licensing
+Boards&mdash;directly elected by the ratepayers for the specific
+purpose&mdash;would not meet the requirements of the case, and that nothing
+short of a popular vote can be accepted. But why should the
+representative system be abolished and a direct vote established in this
+case, any more than in the equally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> burning questions settled every day
+by Parliament, and the lesser but still important matters decided by
+town councils and school boards? We in England long ago made up our
+minds that the most excellent way to get public work done is to choose
+the best men, give them the requisite authority, and then allow them to
+do the duty to which they are called. And if we can disestablish a
+church, revolutionize the land system, or reform our institutions from
+top to bottom through our representatives, without a direct vote of the
+people, the question of renewing public-house licences can scarcely
+demand so exceptional a process as is by some suggested.</p>
+
+<p>My answer, therefore, to the question, &ldquo;How is Local Option to be
+worked?&rdquo; as well as to the kindred temperance question, &ldquo;How is Sunday
+closing to be settled?&rdquo; is, &ldquo;By means of licensing boards, directly
+elected by the ratepayers.&rdquo; And if this solution be adopted, our
+licensing system will be placed upon a basis at once more safe and more
+free from friction or the likelihood of injustice than any other that has been proposed.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXIII.&mdash;WHY AND HOW ARE WE TAXED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>Taxes are the price we pay for being governed: they defray interest upon
+money borrowed and wages for protection and service. The fact that they
+are called by a name which is to many obnoxious, or that they are handed
+to the State instead of to an individual, ought not to blind us to their
+real nature&mdash;that they are the price of services rendered. The name is
+nothing. In churches the money we pay is called a pew-rent or an
+offertory; in clubs it is a subscription; to doctors or lawyers a fee;
+to tradesmen a price; to railway companies a fare; for personal services
+wages; for the loan of a house rent; for life or fire insurance a
+premium; and for water a rate. All are in a measure taxes; and if it be
+answered that the difference is that these payments are voluntary, may
+not the same be said of much that is called &ldquo;indirect taxation&rdquo;?</p>
+
+<p>When the subject is considered, there are three questions which
+naturally demand reply.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. Why are we taxed?<br />2. How are we taxed? and<br />
+3. How ought we to be taxed?<br /></p></blockquote>
+
+<p>To the first question some answer has already been given. Put in the
+simplest fashion, the reply would be that it is cheaper to pay taxes and
+be taken care of than not to pay them and have to take care of
+ourselves. As members of an organized society, we have to provide for
+external protection and internal service&mdash;for the army and navy as a
+safeguard against enemies from without, for the officers of the law as a
+safeguard against depredators within, for the means of government, for
+education,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> and for a large number of other matters designed for the
+security of our persons and property and for the welfare and advancement
+of the community. We have further to pay the interest upon the National
+Debt&mdash;money borrowed by the State at times of emergency to prosecute
+such wars as Parliament had sanctioned.</p>
+
+<p>In point of fact, taxes are a substitution for personal service. The
+State in England once compelled this as a means of raising an army; and,
+though this form of personal service was long ago commuted by the
+payment of a sufficient sum through taxation for the maintenance of a
+standing force, the State has only waived, not abrogated, the right.
+Even as lately as the last century people in our country districts had
+to give six days in the year to the repair of such highways as were
+under the management of the justices of the peace. In the one case the
+personal service has been commuted into a tax, in the other into a
+rate&mdash;the difference being that a tax is imperially and a rate locally
+levied&mdash;it being found that forced labour of the kind indicated is more
+wasteful and less efficacious than hired labour; and, if any want to
+know how wasteful and how inefficient, they can find abundant
+illustrations in the history of the old <i>r&eacute;gime</i> in France, or that of
+the Egyptian fellaheen.</p>
+
+<p>There has been indicated the difference between imperial and local
+taxation&mdash;the one being a tax imposed by the State and the other a rate
+levied by a local authority. The object in each case is similar; but,
+while the cost of the central administration, the army and navy, and the
+superior courts of justice, with the interest on the National Debt, is
+paid by taxes, that of lighting, draining, and other purely local
+matters is defrayed by rates, and that of the police, the poor, the
+highways, and education comes out of taxes and rates combined.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the <i>why</i> of being taxed; let us now consider the <i>how</i>. At
+present the receipts of the State are derived from direct and indirect
+taxation, together with a form which may be said to come under both
+these heads. The most familiar mode of direct taxation is the Income
+Tax; of indirect, the Customs and Excise; and of that which savours of
+both, the stamp duties and the profits from the Post Office.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p><p>These methods of taxation are, as far as England is concerned,
+comparatively modern. In the earlier days of settled government in this
+country, the mode of taxing was different and somewhat fitful, causing
+much trouble in the collection, and sometimes forming the pretext for
+revolt. &ldquo;Aids&rdquo; to the King were a frequent means of oppression long ago;
+and as far back as the time of John they were felt as a grievance, Magna
+Charta providing that the King should take no aids without the consent
+of Parliament, except those for knighting the lord&rsquo;s eldest son, for
+marrying his eldest daughter, and for ransoming the lord from captivity
+(the lord, it being remembered, holding at that time his land direct
+from the sovereign). &ldquo;Benevolences&rdquo;&mdash;a charming name for an unpleasing
+idea&mdash;were also in vogue in the Middle Ages, and, although specifically
+declared by an Act of Richard III. to be illegal, were levied in a
+fashion which caused much discontent. &ldquo;Loans&rdquo; were another form of
+raising money which the nation resented, as Charles I. found to his
+cost; while a &ldquo;Poll Tax,&rdquo; as all men know, drove Wat Tyler into
+rebellion. &ldquo;Subsidies&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tenths&rdquo; and other taxing devices equally
+failed in the long run to answer the desired purpose of filling the
+National Exchequer; and after the Restoration all such gave place to a
+system by which the Customs, the Excise, and the Land Tax provided most
+of the money required.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually the proceeds of the Land Tax dwindled, and direct taxation was
+almost extinct when, in the throes of the great war with France, which
+lasted, with slight intervals, for twenty-two years, the younger Pitt
+revived it in an Income Tax, the form in which it is now mainly known.
+With the end of the war this ceased, and the proceeds of indirect
+taxation were again chiefly those upon which the State relied. What the
+result was, how in every direction trade was hampered and public comfort
+destroyed, has been summed up for all time in one of Sydney Smith&rsquo;s
+essays; and the quotation is worth re-perusal by everybody interested in
+the subject, and especially by those who to-day are wishing to get rid
+of the main form of direct taxation we possess&mdash;the Income Tax, as
+revived by Sir Robert Peel.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p><p>Uttering, in 1820, a warning to the United States to avoid that spirit
+which we now call &ldquo;Jingoism,&rdquo; Sydney Smith wrote&mdash;&ldquo;We can inform
+Jonathan what are the inevitable consequences of being too fond of
+glory&mdash;<span class="smcap">Taxes</span> upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers
+the back, or is placed under the foot; taxes upon everything which it is
+pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; taxes upon warmth, light,
+and locomotion; taxes on everything on earth and the waters under the
+earth&mdash;on everything that comes from abroad or is grown at home; taxes
+on the raw material; taxes on every fresh value that is added to it by
+the industry of man; taxes on the sauce which pampers man&rsquo;s appetite,
+and the drug that restores him to health; on the ermine which decorates
+the judge, and the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man&rsquo;s
+salt, and the rich man&rsquo;s spice; on the brass nails of the coffin, and
+the ribands of the bride&mdash;at bed or board, couchant or levant, we must
+pay. The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his
+taxed horse, with a taxed bridle, on a taxed road; and the dying
+Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid 7 per cent., into a
+spoon that has paid 15 per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz
+bed, which has paid 22 per cent., and expires in the arms of an
+apothecary who has paid a licence of a hundred pounds for the privilege
+of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed
+from 2 to 10 per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for
+burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on
+taxed marble; and he is then gathered to his fathers&mdash;to be taxed no more.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Ludicrous as the picture seems, it was correctly painted for the time it
+depicted; and it is first to Sir Robert Peel and next to his greatest
+pupil, Mr. Gladstone, that we owe the change from the harassing indirect
+taxation of the past to the comparatively innocuous forms of it we have
+to-day. But it is still from indirect taxation that most of our revenue
+is derived. The heads of that revenue, as given officially, are&mdash;(1)
+Customs, (2) Excise, (3) Stamps, (4) Land Tax, (5) House Duty, (6)
+Income Tax, (7) Post Office, (8) Telegraph Service, (9) Crown Lands,
+(10) Interest on Advances for Local Works and Purchase<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> Money of Suez
+Canal shares, and (11) Miscellaneous. Of all these, Excise stands first
+by several millions, while Customs are far ahead of any of the rest,
+Stamps and Income Tax being the next best paying sources of revenue.
+And, in some form or other, every one among us&mdash;the peer who smokes a
+cigarette, the peasant who drinks a pint of beer, and the very pauper
+who sends a letter to a friend&mdash;has indirectly to contribute his quota
+to the Exchequer, while all who earn more than &pound;150 a year have to pay
+Income Tax; and those who inherit property, probate, legacy, or succession duty.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXIV.&mdash;HOW OUGHT WE TO BE TAXED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>It being certain that, as long as we are citizens of any sort of State,
+we shall be called upon to pay for its maintenance, the question &ldquo;How
+ought we to be taxed?&rdquo; is one of considerable moment to all. Grumble we
+may, but pay we must.</p>
+
+<p>Some think they would solve the problem at a stroke by substituting
+direct for indirect taxation. They argue that people should know exactly
+what they are paying for the service of the State; and that direct
+taxation is not only a more logical but a more economic method of
+raising the revenue. They show that the consumer of duty-bearing
+articles pays not only the duty but a percentage upon it as interest to
+the middleman; and a striking instance of this was afforded in the fact
+that when, in 1865, Mr. Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, took
+sixpence a pound off the tax on tea, the retail price of that article
+immediately fell eightpence.</p>
+
+<p>But it may be feared that those who argue in favour of entirely direct
+taxation make small allowance for the weaknesses of human nature. I may
+prove to demonstration to the first person I meet that he is paying more
+than he ought to do because of the working of the indirect system, and
+that to this wastefulness is added the sin of ignorance as to what he
+actually does pay; but the chances are ten to one that he will reply
+that, hating all taxation as the natural man does, he would rather not
+know to what extent he was being mulcted, and that, if the whole amount
+were annually and in a lump sum presented to his view, he would never
+find it in his heart or his pocket to pay it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p><p>To the sternly logical this attitude will appear sad, if not absolutely
+sinful; but we have to take man as we find him, and it is of little use
+attempting to run straight athwart his deepest prepossessions for so
+small a result as even the substitution of direct for indirect taxation
+would attain. But there is a further point, which even the political
+logician must bear in mind, and that is what the practical effect would
+be of sweeping away all duties of Customs and Excise.</p>
+
+<p>If we could secure a &ldquo;free breakfast table&rdquo; by liberating from toll tea,
+coffee, cocoa, currants, raisins, and other articles of domestic
+consumption, all would rejoice&mdash;though, in the present state of our
+finances, no Chancellor of the Exchequer is likely to sacrifice the five
+millions of revenue now raised from those commodities. But the English
+people will think a good many times before striking tobacco, spirits,
+and wine off the Customs list, with the more than 13 millions they
+produce, or spirits and beer off the list of the Excise, with the 13
+millions in the one case and the 8&frac12; millions in the other that we now
+receive from them. Even if any one can imagine for a moment that the 27
+millions here involved could be made up by some new direct tax, it does
+not need an extensive acquaintance with our social history to be aware
+that the result of removing the duties from the various intoxicants
+would be widespread national demoralization.</p>
+
+<p>The taxation of the future, therefore, as of the past, will certainly
+include Customs and Excise. Some items may be struck off both; that a
+free breakfast table can be secured should be no dream; and it may be
+fairly hoped that the hindrances to trade involved in such licences as
+those for auctioneers and hawkers&mdash;who ought no more to be fined by the
+Government for practising their employment than butchers, bakers, or
+other traders&mdash;will soon be swept away. But upon beer, wine, spirits,
+and tobacco&mdash;their importation, manufacture, and sale&mdash;the tax-gatherer
+will continue, and rightly continue, to lay his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, there will be no disposition to abolish the probate, legacy,
+and succession duties, but every disposition to strengthen them, and
+especially the last of them. The &ldquo;Death duties&rdquo; at present are
+inequitably levied; great fortunes do not pay as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> large a proportion as,
+relatively to small ones, they ought to do: and landed property is
+lightly let off compared with other forms.</p>
+
+<p>But it is a comparative few who will be touched even by this much-needed
+reform; and taxation, to be fair, must touch all round. The Income Tax,
+obnoxious as from some aspects all will admit it to be, has almost
+infinite capacities of being made useful to the State; and the question
+which practical statesmen will soon have to consider is the direction in
+which that usefulness can best be developed.</p>
+
+<p>As at present levied, this tax does not affect those whose incomes are
+below &pound;150; if their incomes are between that sum and &pound;400, the tax is
+paid upon &pound;120 less than the correct figure; while if they exceed &pound;400
+the full tax is levied.</p>
+
+<p>Now these regulations act unfairly in various directions. In the first
+place, the tax starts at too high a figure. Until a few years ago it
+began at an income of &pound;100&mdash;a deduction of &pound;80 being allowed&mdash;and there
+is no reason why it should not begin at &pound;50, so that every man earning a
+pound a week in wages should be made to see as by a barometer how the
+national expenditure was rising or falling&mdash;though it never falls. And,
+however little he might be called upon to pay, there would be a distinct
+gain in so many additional capable citizens knowing from experience what
+an extra penny on the Income Tax means, for they would thereby be taught
+more closely to watch how the national money is got rid of, and their
+pockets consequently made the lighter.</p>
+
+<p>In the next place, the regulations now in force make no distinction
+between a precarious and a settled income, causing the tradesman or
+professional man, whose revenue dies with him, to pay as heavily as his
+neighbour who has inherited or acquired property, of which those
+dependent upon him will not be deprived by his decease. As the point was
+put in a motion made many years ago in the House of Commons by Mr.
+Hubbard (now Lord Addington), &ldquo;the incidence of an Income Tax touching
+the products of invested property should fall upon net income, and the
+net amounts of industrial earnings should, previous to assessment, be
+subject to such an abatement as may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> equitably adjust the burden thrown
+upon intelligence and skill as compared with property.&rdquo; Upon this point,
+it is true, Mr. Gladstone has been antagonistic to the view here held;
+he opposed this very motion, and years before it was introduced he
+declared that it was not possible for him to conceive a plan which would
+secure the desired end. But it is also true that more than thirty years
+ago, and in his very first Budget speech, he intimated that &ldquo;the public
+feeling that relief should be given to intelligence and skill as
+compared with property ought to be met, and may be met&rdquo;; and that as
+plans he could not conceive in 1853 have become realized achievements
+with him before 1888, this concerning a differentiated Income Tax may
+yet be added to the number.</p>
+
+<p>The words of Cobden upon the point are as true to-day as when they were
+uttered. Speaking upon the Budget of 1848, he dwelt upon the
+inequalities of the Income Tax, which was then still talked of by
+Chancellors of the Exchequer as a temporary measure. &ldquo;Make your tax
+just,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;in order that it may be permanent. It is ridiculous to
+deny the broad distinction that exists between incomes derived from
+trades and professions, and those drawn from land. Take the case of a
+tradesman with &pound;10,000 of capital; he gets &pound;500 a year interest, and
+&pound;500 more for his skill and industry. Is this man&rsquo;s &pound;1000 a year to be
+mulcted in the same amount with &pound;1000 a year derived from a real
+property capital of &pound;25,000? So with the cases of professional men, who
+literally live by the waste of their brains. The plain fair dealing of
+the country revolts at an equal levy on such different sorts of
+property. Professional men and men in business put in motion the wheels
+of the social system. It is their industry and enterprise that mainly
+give to realized property the value that it bears; to them, therefore,
+the State first owes sympathy and support.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>There is a further injustice under the present system, and that is that,
+when a man has passed the &pound;400 limit, he has to pay as heavy a
+percentage upon his income, precarious or permanent, as the wealthiest
+millionaire among us. The struggling tradesman, the hardly-pressed
+professional man, every one who depends upon his brains for his living,
+has to pay as heavily<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> as the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Westminster,
+and the Duke of Portland, to whom the brains they possess makes no
+difference to their income, and whose property has been secured not by
+efforts of their own, but of others.</p>
+
+<p>Is it any wonder, then, that the demand should be growing for a
+graduated Income Tax? It is one upon which Mr. Chamberlain has spoken
+plainly. At Ipswich, in January, 1885, he said&mdash;&ldquo;Is it really certain
+that the precarious income of a struggling professional man ought to pay
+in the same proportion as the income of a man who derives it from
+invested securities? Is it altogether such an unfair thing that we
+should, as in the United States, tax all incomes according to their
+amount?... Prince Bismarck some time ago proposed to the Reichstag an
+Income Tax, to be graduated according to the amount of the income, and
+to vary according to the character of the income. We already have done
+something in that direction in exempting the very smallest incomes from
+taxation. But I submit that it is well worthy of careful consideration
+whether the principle should not be carried a little further.&rdquo; And at
+Warrington, eight months later, he observed&mdash;&ldquo;I think that taxation
+ought to involve equality of sacrifice, and I do not see how this result
+is to be obtained except by some form of graduated taxation&mdash;that is,
+taxation which is proportionate to the superfluities of the taxpayer.
+When I am told that this is a new-fangled and a revolutionary doctrine,
+I wonder if my critics have read any elementary book on the subject;
+because if they had, they must have seen that a graduated Income Tax is
+not a novelty in this country. It existed in the Middle Ages, when those
+who exercised authority and power did so with harshness to their equals,
+but they knew nevertheless how to show consideration for the necessities
+of those beneath them.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The first answer to the demand for a graduated Income Tax will, of
+course, be that it would be &ldquo;confiscation&rdquo;&mdash;a word by which the rich are
+ever striving to frighten others from making them pay their proper share
+to the State; and one may be content to rest in this matter upon the
+apparent paradox of Disraeli: &ldquo;Confiscation is a blunder that destroys
+public credit; taxation, on the contrary, improves it; and both come to
+the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> thing.&rdquo; The fact, as has before been stated, is that taxation
+is the price we pay for protection; and the more we have to protect, the
+more we ought to pay.</p>
+
+<p>And, as Mr. Chamberlain observed, this suggestion of a graduated tax is
+no new-fangled or revolutionary idea: it is one for instances of which
+it is not even necessary to go back with him to some vague reminiscences
+of the Middle Ages, for it exists in various degrees at the present
+time. It is only dwellings of over the annual value of &pound;20 that are
+liable to inhabited house duty; houses of less than &pound;30 rateable value
+have in various districts certain water privileges for nothing which
+those of greater value have to pay for; and the difference in the death
+duties, according to the degree of relationship of the legatee,
+indicates that the law recognizes the reasonableness of graduating the
+burden according to the shoulders which have to bear it. And when we
+come to the Income Tax itself, we find not merely that incomes under
+&pound;150 are exempt, while those between that sum and &pound;400 are subject to
+reductions which lessen the percentage of the tax to be paid compared
+with those above the last given figure, but that no other a Chancellor
+of the Exchequer than Mr. Gladstone has acknowledged the principle of
+graduation, and that in the most practical way; for in his Budget of
+1859, when the rate of the tax stood at 5d. and he proposed to add
+another 4d., he coupled with it the proviso that incomes from &pound;100 to
+&pound;150 (&pound;100 being the then initial point) should pay only 1&frac12;d. extra.</p>
+
+<p>The argument sometimes used that the heavier taxation of large incomes
+would tend to discourage thrift by putting a penalty upon its results is
+disposed of by every-day experience. Does a man cease to wish to earn
+&pound;150 because that sum will make him liable to Income Tax, or &pound;400
+because that will bring him fully within its scope? We know such a man
+does not exist, and why should the conditions be changed if the
+graduation went further than at present?</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, is the claim for a graduated Income Tax, and, after the
+examples which have been given, it cannot honestly be argued that such a
+system is either immoral in design or impossible of execution. What is
+wanted is that the burden of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> taxation shall be equalized by fixing the
+greater weight upon the shoulders that ought most to bear it. No single
+citizen should be exempt from a share, and by preserving indirect
+taxation upon luxuries and starting a direct tax at the lowest
+reasonable point, every one will have to pay something. But by
+rearranging the death duties and graduating the Income Tax we shall
+secure that those who have most to lose, and, therefore, who demand most
+from the State, shall pay the State in proportion to their demand.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXV.&mdash;HOW IS TAXATION TO BE REDUCED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>At no moment in recent years was it more desirable to urge a demand for
+retrenchment in the national expenditure, and probably at no moment
+could such a demand be urged with more chance of good result. For the
+recent revelations made upon the highest authority as to the
+wastefulness which characterizes our Government departments have aroused
+in the public mind not merely indignation at the spendthrifts who rule
+us but determination to put an end to much of their extravagance.</p>
+
+<p>The only way in which taxation can be reduced is to lessen the need for
+taxes, and that can be done in no other fashion than by reducing the
+expenditure. Ministry after Ministry has entered Downing Street with the
+announced determination to exercise retrenchment, and Ministry after
+Ministry has left that haven for office-seekers with the expenditure
+higher than ever. The stock excuse for this state of things is, that as
+the national needs increase, the national expenditure must increase with
+them; but, allowing that this will justify a rise upon certain items,
+the question which will have to be pressed home to every Minister and
+would-be Minister, to every member of Parliament and would-be member, is
+this&mdash;&ldquo;Is the money that is disposed of spent in economical fashion and
+to the best advantage?&rdquo; And he will have to be a very thick-skinned
+specimen of officialdom who will venture to reply &ldquo;Yes&rdquo; to the question.</p>
+
+<p>In the estimates for the navy, the army, and the Civil Service, there is
+abundant room for the pruning knife, while to the principle which
+underlies the granting of many of the pensions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> there ought to be
+applied the axe. Of course, as long as we possess an empire which
+exceeds any the world has ever seen for the vastness of its extent and
+its resources, so long must an army and navy be maintained; and even if,
+by a reverse of fortune, every one of our colonies were cut off from us,
+an army and navy would still be needed for our own protection. They are
+as necessary to a nation, situated like our own, as a fire-brigade to a
+town; and it would be folly, and worse, to starve them into
+inefficiency. What money is needed, therefore, to place the defences of
+the country&mdash;whether those defences be men, ships, forts, or coaling
+stations&mdash;in such a state of efficiency as shall avoid the chance of
+national disaster should war burst upon us, ought to be definitely
+ascertained and cheerfully granted.</p>
+
+<p>But is the money now voted for the army and navy expended to the best
+advantage, or is not a large portion of it wasted in useless and
+ornamental adjuncts? We have not yet reached the point attained by that
+Mexican force which is traditionally stated to have contained
+twenty-five thousand officers and twenty thousand men: but the number of
+superior officers of both services is altogether out of proportion to
+the size of the force. In order to stimulate what is called the &ldquo;flow of
+promotion,&rdquo; officers are placed on the retired list at a ridiculously
+early age, and the country is deprived of, while having to pay for, the
+services of those who are in the prime of life, and still capable of
+doing their full duty, in order that room may be made for their juniors
+to climb into their places, those juniors themselves being soon
+supplanted, and the &ldquo;flow of promotion&rdquo; going merrily on&mdash;at our
+expense. And the hollowness of the pretension that all this is for the
+country&rsquo;s good is shown by the fact that, while a determined effort was
+made by the Horse Guards to compulsorily retire Sir Edward Hamley, the
+finest tactician England possesses, the Duke of Cambridge is suffered to
+remain commander-in-chief long after the age at which any other officer
+would have been shifted. This is only one example of how all rules,
+salutary and otherwise, are put aside when courtiership demands, for
+there is a distinct danger, to which the country should be awakened, of
+our services being royalty-ridden.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span></p><p>Royalty, it is true, has not yet invaded the Civil Service, though the
+scions of the reigning house are so rapidly increasing in number that
+the prizes even of this department are likely, at no distant date, to be
+snatched from the skilled and deserving; but this particular Government
+department has plenty to be purged of, notwithstanding. Put in the
+shortest fashion, the complaint the public have a right to bring against
+the Civil Service is that it is over-manned and over-paid. A large
+section of its members&mdash;and those located at the various offices in
+Whitehall afford a glaring instance&mdash;commence work too late, leave off
+too early, and even when on their stools have not enough to do. Their
+number should be lessened, and their hours increased. Ten to four, with
+an interval for lunch, is a working period so scandalous in its
+inadequacy that even the Salisbury Ministry has condemned it, and has in
+some fashion, but at the country&rsquo;s expense, been striving to make it
+longer. No private business could possibly pay if it adopted such a
+system; and what must be done is to treat the Government service upon
+the same lines as a flourishing private concern. The old notion that a
+State should provide a maximum of pay for a minimum of work, and that a
+Government office should be a paradise for the idle and incompetent,
+must be swept away. It is nothing less than a scandal that taxes should
+be wrung in an ever-increasing amount from the toilers of the country to
+pay for work which, under efficient management, could be better done at a less price.</p>
+
+<p>With this question of pay there is linked that of pensions. It is often
+urged that men join the public service at a less rate of pay than the
+same abilities could obtain in other walks of business life, not merely
+because of the security of tenure, but because they know there is a
+pension to follow the work. This is exceedingly to be doubted; and
+although it would be unjust to deprive of pensions those who have
+entered Government employment under present conditions, the question
+ought very seriously to be considered whether it would not be wise for
+the State to pay, as private firms do, for the services actually
+rendered, and for individual thrift to be allowed to provide for illness
+or old age. Or, if it be thought desirable to maintain the pension
+system, the Government servants should be called upon, like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> the police,
+to contribute out of their wages to a superannuation fund. The system of
+pensions, as at present in operation, is indefensible upon sound
+business principles, and taxpayers have something better to do with
+their money than continue to spend it for sentimental reasons.</p>
+
+<p>As to hereditary pensions, there is no need to say much. Thanks to Mr.
+Bradlaugh these are in a fair way to be disposed of; but it will still
+need that a keen watch be kept, to prevent the State being further
+robbed by any fanciful scheme of commutation. It may be taken as settled
+that no further pensions will be granted for more than one life; but
+pensions for a single life, as now arranged, often prove an intolerable
+burden upon the revenue. A favourite device of the Government offices is
+to &ldquo;reorganize&rdquo; departments, with the result of placing a new set of
+officials upon the pay sheet and an old set upon the pension list. Many
+of the latter will be comparatively young men, capable of doing service
+in other departments; and, if they are not wanted in one, they ought to
+work for their pay in another. But that is not the way in which the
+State does its business. They are pensioned off with such astounding
+results as was seen in the case of one official, whose place was
+abolished in 1842, who was pensioned at the rate of nearly &pound;2500 a year,
+and who lived until 1880; or of another, whose office was abolished in
+1847, who was pensioned in &pound;3100, and who, up to this date (for he is
+believed still to be living), has drawn over &pound;120,000 from our pockets
+without having done a single day&rsquo;s work for the money. And not only is
+the &ldquo;reorganization&rdquo; system a means of lightening the national pocket
+without good result, but the &ldquo;ill-health&rdquo; device has the same effect.
+Annuitants live long, as all insurance offices will tell you, and it is
+proved by the fact that there are pensioners still on the list who
+retired from the Government service between forty and fifty years ago
+because of &ldquo;ill-health.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, are some of the fashions in which the country is defrauded;
+they could be multiplied, but the samples should suffice to arouse the
+attention of all who bewail the continual increase of taxation. The
+State is evidently regarded by a large section of the population as a
+huge milch-cow, which shall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> provide an ever-flowing stream; and this
+view will continue to be held as long as our legislators are not forced
+by the constituencies to give due heed to economy. Nothing practical in
+that direction can be done until the House of Commons has a thorough
+control over the national expenditure. At present the control it
+exercises partakes so largely of the nature of a sham that it is not
+worth considering; its scrutiny must become active and persistent, and
+it should be directed to the pickings secured in high places as well as
+in low&mdash;to the receivers of heavy salaries as well as of light wages.
+The tendency has too long been to exhibit economy in regard to the small
+people and to pass over the extravagances which feed the large, and that
+is a tendency which will have to be stopped.</p>
+
+<p>No one desires to lessen the efficiency of the public service; but as no
+one would seriously dream of saying that that quality is at this moment
+its most distinguishing feature, good rather than harm would be done by
+the exercise of sound economy. It is only by lopping off the
+extravagances which have grown up like weeds in our Government
+departments, and which are now choking much of their power for good,
+that the taxes can ever be reduced. And so it is the bounden duty of the
+Liberals to raise their old banner of Retrenchment once again.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXVI.&mdash;IS FREE TRADE TO BE PERMANENT?</span></h2>
+
+<p>Before leaving the consideration of taxes, the question of Free Trade
+must be dealt with. A very few years ago it would have been thought as
+unnecessary to discuss the wisdom of continuing our system of Free Trade
+as of lengthening the existence of the House of Commons; but we are
+to-day threatened with the revival of a Protectionist agitation, and it
+is necessary to be argumentatively prepared for it.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible within my limits to say all that can be said in favour
+of Free Trade or all that ought to be said against Protection; but it
+should be the less necessary to do the former, because the proof that it
+is working evil to the country must rest with those who assert it, and
+that proof they do not afford.</p>
+
+<p>The main contention of the Protectionists&mdash;Fair Traders some of them
+call themselves, but the old distinctive name is preferable&mdash;is that the
+free importation of corn has ruined agriculture, and of other goods has
+crippled manufactures. And, having assumed this to be correct, their
+remedy is to place such a duty upon all imported articles which compete
+with our own productions as to &ldquo;protect British industry.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>First for the complaint. Is it true that the system of free imports has
+ruined agriculture and crippled manufactures? There is no doubt that the
+farming interest has been very seriously hit by a series of inadequate
+harvests and the growth of foreign competition; and there is as little
+doubt that, if such a duty were placed upon imported grain as would make
+its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> culture in England profitable under the present conditions, the
+farmers would thrive, even if the poorer among us starved. No one can
+deny that, if there is to be Protection at all, the agricultural
+interest demands it the most, but we will see directly whether such a
+tariff as would make profitable the growth of wheat is practicable. As
+to the crippling of manufactures, there is something to be said which is
+as true as it may be unpalatable. Without denying that the free
+importation of foreign goods, coupled with the heavy duties levied by
+other countries upon our exported articles, has seriously diminished the
+profits of certain of our manufacturers, and has thereby injured the
+persons by them employed, those who have watched the recent course of
+British trade are compelled to see that other causes have been at work
+to account for much of the depression.</p>
+
+<p>Making haste to be rich has had more to do with that depression than the
+weight of foreign competition. Manufacturers who scamp and merchants who
+swindle; folks who endow churches or build chapels to compromise with
+their conscience for robbing their customers and blasting the honour of
+the English name&mdash;these are the men who deserve to be pilloried when we
+talk of depression. We <i>do</i> want fair trade in the sense of honest
+trade, for it is the burning desire for gain, the resolve to practise
+any device that leads to money-making, which is injuring the British
+manufacturing industry far more than the foreigner. The sick man who
+disliked a wash was at last, in desperation, recommended by his doctor
+to try soap; the manufacturers who size their cottons to the rotting
+point, and the merchants who have been accustomed to sell German cutlery
+with a Sheffield label, should be told, when they cry out upon
+depression, to try honesty. And when they whine, as they sometimes do,
+that it is the demand for cheap goods that makes such a supply, they
+must be reminded that the butcher who sells bad meat, or the baker who
+adulterates his bread, pleads the same excuse, but it does not save
+either from being branded as a cheat.</p>
+
+<p>There is a further point which will account for the loss of British
+trade in foreign markets, and that is the lack of adaptability to new
+circumstances shown by English traders. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> this is displayed all
+round. Our farmers ought to know by this time that they cannot compete
+by wheat-growing with the United States, Canada, or India; but they will
+not comprehend that they can compete with foreign countries in the
+matter of butter, eggs, cheese, fruit, and poultry. And the consequence
+is that we are paying many millions yearly to France, Holland, Belgium,
+and America for articles that our own farmers ought to supply; and that
+the largest cheesemongers in London find it cheaper, easier, and quicker
+to import all their butter from Normandy than to buy a single pound in
+England. It is the same with our manufacturers. An American firm had a
+large order to give for cutlery; they asked terms which the English
+manufacturer rejected because they were novel; and a German at once
+seized the chance, and kept the trade. In New Zealand there was wanted a
+light spade for agricultural purposes; the English manufacturer would
+not alter his pattern to suit his customers; and the whole order went to
+the United States. In China the people wish for a cotton cloth which
+will not vanish at the first shower of rain; Manchester is so accustomed
+to heavily size its goods that it cannot change; and the China trade in
+that commodity is going elsewhere. Before, then, we complain of foreign
+competition&mdash;a complaint which is bitterly heard to-day as against
+England in France, Germany, Austria, and the United States&mdash;let us be
+certain that we are doing all we honestly can to cope with it.</p>
+
+<p>Some there are who say that they are in favour of Free Trade in the
+abstract, but that they will not support it as long as it is not
+accepted by other nations. This is about as sensible as a decision to
+cheat in business as long as some of our neighbours cheat would be
+honest, and is exactly on a level with the old death-bed injunction of
+the miserly parent&mdash;&ldquo;My son, make money&mdash;honestly if you can, but make
+money.&rdquo; And when it is stated, as it sometimes is, that Free Trade was
+adopted by this country only on the understanding that it would be
+universally agreed to, it is a sufficient answer that Sir Robert Peel,
+in introducing his measure for the repeal of the Corn Laws,
+observed:&mdash;&ldquo;I fairly avow to you that in making this great reduction
+upon the import of articles, the produce and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> manufacture of foreign
+countries, I have no guarantee to give you that other countries will
+immediately follow our example.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>When the Protectionists, call themselves by what name they will and use
+what arguments they may, ask us to change our present system, we first
+then deny their assumption that England is going to the dogs, and next
+we ask what they propose to put in its place. Upon a plan they find it
+impossible to agree. Some would tax corn lightly, others as heavily as
+would be required to make its growth certainly profitable to the farmer;
+some would fix a duty only upon manufactured articles, others upon
+everything which is imported that can be raised here; some would admit
+goods from our colonies at a lighter rate than from foreign countries,
+others would put them all on the same level. Out of this chaos of
+contradictions no definite plan has yet been evolved, and none is likely to be.</p>
+
+<p>The corn question is the first difficulty, and will long remain so.
+Wheat, in the autumn of 1887, was selling at 28s. a quarter; on the
+average it cannot be grown to pay at less than 45s.; yet it is only a
+5s. duty which is being dangled before the farmer. But if he is to lose
+12s. a quarter he will be little farther removed from ruin than if he
+loses 17s.; he will as much as ever resemble the traditional refreshment
+contractor who lost a little upon every customer, but thought to make
+his profit by the number he served; and the agricultural interest in its
+wildest dreams cannot imagine that Englishmen are likely to impose a
+duty raising the price of wheat 60 per cent. A rise of 10 per cent. in
+the price of bread means a rise of 1 per cent. in the death-rate, and if
+a duty of 17s. were imposed, that rise would be 6 per cent. What would
+this mean? That where 100 persons die now, 106 would die then, and the
+added number would perish from that most awful of all forms of
+death&mdash;death from lack of food. And those extra six would not be drawn
+from the well-to-do, from the trading classes, or from the ranks of
+skilled labour, but from those who even now are struggling their hardest
+for bread, and to whom the rise in price of a loaf from threepence to
+fourpence three-farthings would mean starvation. For let it never be
+forgotten that it is upon the poorest that a corn-tax would fall most
+heavily. The peer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> eats no more bread&mdash;probably he eats less&mdash;than the
+peasant; even when all his family and servants are reckoned, the
+quantity of bread consumed is comparatively little more than in an
+artisan&rsquo;s household; but while the peasant and the artisan would be made
+to feel with every mouthful that they were being starved in order that
+others might thrive, the few shillings a week that the peer would have
+to pay would be but a drop spilt from a full bucket, the loss of which
+no one could perceive.</p>
+
+<p>Arising out of the proposal for the re-imposition of a corn-tax is a
+consideration which bears upon the idea of levying a duty upon other
+imports. India is rapidly becoming more and more a corn-growing country;
+if it were decided to admit its wheat free, the British farmer would
+continue handicapped; if it were resolved to tax it, India would
+necessarily retaliate by protecting its own cotton industries: and what
+would Lancashire say to that?</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that, when the proposal to protect industries all round is
+considered, the difficulties of securing a feasible plan are found to be
+insurmountable. The simplest way, of course, would be to place a duty
+upon everything that entered our ports, and to follow that American
+tariff which commenced with a tax upon acorns, and was so jealous of
+interference with native industries that it fixed a duty upon skeletons.
+And if it be replied that the line should be drawn at manufactured
+articles, the question must be asked at once how these are to be
+defined. One can understand shoemakers desiring to place a duty upon
+foreign-made boots, but they would object to have the price of leather
+increased by a tax upon the imports of that material. The tanner and
+currier would strongly favour a tax upon leather, while perfectly
+willing that hides should be admitted free. But the free importation of
+hides would affect the farmer, who would have as much right to
+protection as either tanner or bootmaker. And so the price of boots from
+the beginning would be raised to everybody, less boots would be bought,
+and the whole community, as well as the particular trades concerned,
+would suffer. Take the woollen industries again. Manufacturers might
+like cloths to be taxed, but would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> be willing to see yarns admitted
+free. Spinners would place a duty upon yarns, but would let wool alone.
+But the farmer would again step in and demand that the price of his wool
+should not be lowered by free importation. If Protection is started
+there is no stopping it; no line can fairly be drawn between the
+importation of raw material and manufactured articles; every trade will
+want to be taken care of. And we shall be driven back to the time when,
+in order to protect the farmer, all bodies had to be buried in woollen
+shrouds; and, to protect the buckle maker, the use of shoestrings was by
+law prohibited. More; we shall be driven back to the period when the
+artisan and the labourer saw wheaten bread but once a year, when it was
+barley alone they could afford to eat, and when the rent of the landlord
+was the one consideration for which Parliament cared, and the welfare of
+the poor the last thing of which Parliament dreamed.</p>
+
+<p>One can understand why the Protectionist movement should have supporters
+in high places. There are landlords who are tired of seeing their rents
+continuously fall, and are as anxious as ever their fathers were to make
+the community pay the difference between what the land can honestly
+yield and the return its possessor desires; and there are manufacturers
+who are disgusted to find that the days when colossal fortunes could be
+rapidly made are departing.</p>
+
+<p>It is the duty, therefore, of every Liberal to resist the least approach
+to a reversal of the present fiscal policy. For it is not a mere
+question of taxation; it is not even a question only of money; it is a
+question of life and death to the poor. And every man who knows to what
+a depth of misery Protection brought this country less than fifty years
+since, and who feels for those who are hardly pressed, will strive to
+the uttermost against any renewal of the system which, while enriching a
+few, impoverishes the many, and, to add bitterness to its injustice,
+involves death by starvation.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXVII.&mdash;IS FOREIGN LABOUR TO BE EXCLUDED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>Another of the remedies suggested by political quacks for depression in
+trade is the revival of the system of &ldquo;protecting British labour&rdquo; by
+preventing the immigration of foreigners&mdash;a process which, by the good
+sense of all Englishmen, has been abolished for centuries.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy, of course, to take what at first sight may seem the
+&ldquo;popular&rdquo; side upon this question. There would be no difficulty in
+summoning a meeting of English bakers in London, and telling them that
+they were being ruined because German bakers are overrunning their
+trade; or gathering a small army of clerks, and informing them that but
+for foreign, and particularly German, competition, the native article
+would have a better chance; or assembling a serried array of
+costermongers, and persuading them that, if it were not for Russian,
+Polish, and German Jews, who swarm the metropolitan thoroughfares with
+their handcarts, their own barrows would attract more customers. But the
+whole idea of excluding foreigners because they become competitors is
+not merely a confession of weakness and incapacity which Englishmen
+ought never to make, but it is so contrary to the spirit of freedom
+which has been cherished in this country for ages that no Liberal ought
+for a moment to give it countenance.</p>
+
+<p>And, to put it on the most sordid ground, where would England and
+English trade have been had such a principle been acted upon by other
+countries? No people in the world has so much benefited by freedom of
+movement in foreign lands as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> ourselves. Go where one may, he will find
+Englishmen to the fore&mdash;not only as traders but as workers. What they
+have done in the colonies and in the United States is patent to all men,
+but it is not alone in Saxon-speaking lands that they have flourished.
+If one visits Italy to-day, he will find Englishmen working in the
+Government dockyards; when Russia wanted railways it was Brassey and his
+navvies who made them, and when she needed telegraphs it was English
+linesmen who stretched the wires; while in Brazil on every hand
+Englishmen are pushing to the front. And there is a lesson to be learned
+from that passage in the diary of Macaulay, which records how, on a
+visit to France, he met some English navvies, with the leader of whom he
+entered into talk: &ldquo;He told me, to my comfort, that they did very well,
+being, as he said, sober men; that the wages were good, and that they
+were well treated, and had no quarrels with their French fellow-labourers.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>China for a long series of ages acted upon the principle of keeping out
+the foreigner, and upon various pretexts we fought her again and again
+to secure our own admission. Japan was equally exclusive, and for a
+longer time; but even Japan has found out the mistake of trying to live
+in &ldquo;a garden walled around.&rdquo; As far back as the date when Magna Charta
+was signed, the right of foreign merchants to reside and to possess
+personal effects in England was recognized; and although the blindness
+and bigotry of succeeding times banished the Jews in one age and the
+Flemings in another, we long ago established the right of free entry. It
+is true that, in the fit of reaction provoked by the French Terror,
+Alien Acts were passed conferring upon the Crown the power of banishing
+foreigners, but these were superseded half a hundred years ago, and
+their revival is not to be looked for.</p>
+
+<p>It may be retorted that the United States Congress has taken a different
+view, for, in addition to various measures adopted in recent years to
+prevent the immigration of Chinamen, an Act was passed in 1885 &ldquo;to
+prohibit the importation and migration of foreigners and aliens, under
+contract or agreement to perform labour in the United States, its
+territories, and the district of Columbia.&rdquo; The effect of that measure,
+coupled with an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> amending Act adopted two years later, according to
+English official authority, is &ldquo;to subject to heavy penalties any person
+who prepays the transportation, or in any way assists the importation or
+migration of any alien or foreigner into the said countries under
+agreement of any kind whatsoever made previously to such importation, to
+perform there labour or service of any description (with a few
+exceptions). Masters of vessels knowingly conveying such aliens render
+themselves liable to fine or imprisonment, and the aliens themselves are
+not allowed to land, but are returned to the country whence they came.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>This law, even if it had not been rendered ridiculous by an attempt to
+bring ministers of religion within its scope, and even also if it had
+not proved practically a dead letter, does not, however, go far in the
+direction of excluding foreign labour. For men of all nations are as
+free to proceed to the United States to-day as ever they were, the only
+condition being that they shall not, before landing, have made
+themselves secure of finding work. If the same law were applied in
+England, and even if not a single person evaded (as it would be
+remarkably easy to evade) its provisions, it would not affect one in a
+hundred of the foreigners who come hither to compete with our own
+people. Does any one imagine that the German bakers and clerks and
+costermongers, who are now so much in evidence, have before landing
+entered into a contract of service?</p>
+
+<p>If they have not, what further measure could be taken? Ought we to pass
+a law prohibiting every foreigner from landing? Should we add to it the
+condition that, if he will swear he is a <i>bon&acirc; fide</i> traveller, he may
+be allowed to remain a few weeks under strict surveillance of the
+police, who will not only watch very carefully that he does no stroke of
+work while in England, but will see to it that he is promptly expelled
+when his time is up? Are our customs officers to search incoming ships
+for aliens as they do for tobacco, and is the penalty for smuggling
+foreigners to be the same as for smuggling snuff? The project of totally
+excluding foreign labour would be as impossible of accomplishment as it
+would be repellent to attempt.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;But,&rdquo; some will answer, &ldquo;is it right that we should be deluged with
+foreign paupers, who come upon our rates without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> paying a penny towards
+them?&rdquo; That is quite another matter, and does not affect the question of
+foreign labour in any but an indirect way. It certainly is not right
+that we should be burdened by foreign paupers; and England would be
+acting in perfect consistence with the principles of liberty and justice
+if she did as the United States and the Continental countries have done,
+in prohibiting the landing of paupers, and insisting upon sending them
+back to the place whence they came. This is a matter of municipal rather
+than international law; and a repetition of such a scandal as that of
+the Greek gipsies, who were excluded from various European ports, and
+were yet suffered to land here and to become a nuisance and a burden,
+ought not to be allowed.</p>
+
+<p>What is being argued against is not the enactment of a law to exclude
+foreign paupers, but of one to exclude foreign workers. But even if the
+former were to be proposed, it would have to be narrowly watched, lest
+it should be so drafted as to deprive England by a sidewind of the title
+of an asylum for the oppressed which she has so long and proudly worn.
+For it is at the right of asylum that some of the advocates of exclusion
+wish to strike. In the United States there is being formed a party to
+strengthen the &ldquo;Contract to Labour&rdquo; Law, which avowedly wishes &ldquo;to stop
+the import of lawless elements&rdquo;&mdash;an elastic phrase which might cover any
+body of persons who wished for reform. And in England, Mr. Vincent, the
+proposer of the Protectionist resolution adopted by the Tory conference
+at Oxford in 1887, stated that &ldquo;the indiscriminate asylum afforded here
+has long been regarded by continental Governments as an outrage on good
+order and civilization.&rdquo; He may rely upon it, however, that the English
+love for the right of asylum is not to be destroyed by the wish or the
+opinion of any despotic Government on earth, and that a right which
+shook down the strong Administration of Lord Palmerston, when in an evil
+hour he menaced it at the bidding of Louis Napoleon 30 years since, will
+withstand the threatenings even of a conclave of chosen Conservatives.</p>
+
+<p>Many things are possible to a Tory Government, and it may be that, in
+the endeavour to secure some puff of a popular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> breeze to fill its
+sails, it will pander to the section which demands the exclusion of
+foreigners. But how could such a measure be proposed by a Ministry which
+has among its members the Duke of Portland, whose family name, Bentinck,
+proclaims his Dutch descent; Mr. Goschen and Baron Henry de Worms, whose
+names no less emphatically announce them to have sprung from German
+Jews; and Mr. Bartlett, who, though he tells the world by means of
+reference-books that he was born at Plymouth, forgets to add that this
+is not the town in England but one in the United States?</p>
+
+<p>But it is not to be believed that England will in this matter forget her
+traditions. We, who are descended from Briton and Saxon, from Norman and
+Dane, have had reason to be proud of our faculty of absorbing all the
+foreign elements that have reached these shores, and turning them to
+good account. When our Puritan fathers were hunted down in England, it
+was in a foreign clime they made their home; when other Englishmen have
+lacked employment, it is to foreign lands they have gone; and the
+hospitality extended to them by the foreigner we have returned. Go into
+Canterbury Cathedral to-day, and there see the chapel set apart for the
+French refugees, driven from their country for conscience&rsquo; sake;
+remember how, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the unhappy
+Huguenots fled to England to do good service to their adopted country by
+establishing here the manufacture of silk. Never forget how advantageous
+it has been for Englishmen to have the whole world open to their
+endeavours; and hesitate long before attempting to deny to others that
+right of free movement in labour which has been and is of such immense
+advantage to ourselves.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXVIII.&mdash;HOW SHOULD WE GUIDE OUR FOREIGN POLICY?</span></h2>
+
+<p>By a natural process of thought, the consideration of the proposed
+exclusion of foreign labour leads to that of foreign policy generally;
+and although the vast questions involved in our external relations are
+not to be solved in a few lines, an attempt to lay down some general
+principles upon the matter can hardly be wasted, for of all things
+connected with public affairs, foreign policy is that of which the
+average voter knows the least, and for which he pays the most. The
+yearly twenty-seven millions as interest on the National Debt is a
+perpetual legacy from the foreign policy of the past; while an equally
+turbulent one in the present would increase the already heavy
+expenditure on the navy and army to an alarming extent. But as all
+questions covered by the phrase cannot be put in the simple form &ldquo;Shall
+we go to war?&rdquo; there is a necessity for the leading principles which
+should govern them to be considered.</p>
+
+<p>A good guide to the future is experience of the past, and our English
+history will have taught us little if it has not shown that many a war
+has been waged which patience and wisdom might have avoided. And
+although we have never avowedly gone to war &ldquo;for an idea,&rdquo; as Louis
+Napoleon said that France did concerning the expedition in which he
+stole two Italian provinces, it has been because of the devotion of our
+statesmen to certain pet theories that much shedding of blood is due.</p>
+
+<p>One of these theories is that some nation or other is &ldquo;our natural
+enemy.&rdquo; France for several centuries held that position, and it was as
+obvious to one generation that the word<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> &ldquo;Frenchman&rdquo; was synonymous with
+&ldquo;fiend&rdquo; as it was for another to link &ldquo;Spaniard&rdquo; with &ldquo;devil&rdquo; and for a
+nearer still to consider that the Emperor Nicholas of Russia and &ldquo;Old
+Nick&rdquo; were one and the same. Just now the &ldquo;natural enemy&rdquo; idea is
+happily dormant, if not dead; but its evil effect upon our foreign
+policy has been all too plainly marked in many a page of history.</p>
+
+<p>Another theory, and one which has had a more far-reaching extent, is
+that it is incumbent upon the nations of Europe to maintain &ldquo;the balance
+of power.&rdquo; This, again, is a phrase which has lost much of its old
+force; but a Continental struggle might cause it to bloom once more with
+all its baleful effects. Speaking about a quarter of a century ago, Mr.
+Bright, considering the theory to be &ldquo;pretty nearly dead and buried,&rdquo;
+observed of it to his constituents: &ldquo;You cannot comprehend at a thought
+what is meant by that balance of power. If the record could be brought
+before you&mdash;but it is not possible to the eye of humanity to scan the
+scroll upon which are recorded the sufferings which the theory of the
+balance of power has entailed upon this country. It rises up before me,
+when I think of it, as a ghastly phantom which during 170 years, whilst
+it has been worshipped in this country, has loaded the nation with debt
+and with taxes, has sacrificed the lives of hundreds of thousands of
+Englishmen, has desolated the homes of millions of families, and has
+left us, as the great result of the profligate expenditure which it has
+caused, a doubled peerage at one end of the social scale and far more
+than a doubled pauperism at the other. I am very glad to be here
+to-night, amongst other things, to be able to say that we may rejoice
+that this foul idol&mdash;fouler than any heathen tribe ever worshipped&mdash;has
+at last been thrown down, and that there is one superstition less which
+has its hold upon the minds of English statesmen and of the English people.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The theory which was thus unsparingly denounced held that we, as a
+nation, have a right to interfere to prevent any other nation from
+becoming stronger than it now is, lest its increased strength should
+threaten our interests. Politicians of the old school were accustomed to
+assure us that, although the name might not have been known to the
+ancients, the idea was; and, with that almost superstitious regard which
+used to be paid to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> Greek and Roman precedents, Hume, in one of his
+&ldquo;Essays,&rdquo; related that &ldquo;in all the politics of Greece, the anxiety with
+regard to the balance of power is apparent, and is expressly pointed out
+to us even by the ancient historians;&rdquo; he was of opinion that &ldquo;whoever
+will read Demosthenes&rsquo; oration for the Megalopolitans may see the utmost
+refinements on this principle that ever entered into the head of a
+Venetian or English speculatist;&rdquo; and, having quoted a passage from
+Polybius in support of the theory, he observed: &ldquo;There is the aim of
+modern politics pointed out in express terms.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But &ldquo;the aim of modern politics&rdquo; has been changed within the past
+century. Since the era which closed with Waterloo in 1815, England,
+Austria, Russia, France, and Germany have held in turn the dominant
+power in the councils of Europe, and the balance has been so frequently
+disturbed that the mapmakers have scarcely been able to keep pace with
+the changes of the frontiers. Look back only thirty years, and see what
+has occurred. Instead of Italy being &ldquo;a fortuitous concourse of atoms,&rdquo;
+or merely &ldquo;a geographical expression,&rdquo; she is the sixth great Power, the
+kingdom of Sardinia, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Papal States,
+the grand duchies of Lucca, Parma, Tuscany, Modena, and the rest, with
+Venetia (in 1858 an Austrian possession) thrown in, having been combined
+to form that old dream of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and their
+fellow-revolutionaries, &ldquo;United Italy, with Rome for its capital.&rdquo; In
+the place of a congeries of petty kingdoms and states, always jarring,
+and with Austria and Prussia ever struggling for the mastery, we see a
+German Empire, formed by the kingdom of Hanover being swept out of
+existence, and those of Bavaria, Saxony, and Wurtemburg, with various
+grand duchies, placed under the domination of Prussia. In the same
+period Russia has gained and France has lost territory; the Ottoman
+Empire has been &ldquo;consolidated&rdquo; into feebleness; and the kingdoms of
+Roumania and Servia, with the principality of Bulgaria, have been called
+in their present shape into being. All this has seriously disturbed the
+&ldquo;balance of power;&rdquo; but what could England have done to hinder the
+process if she had wished, and what right would she have had to attempt
+it if she had dared?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p><p>And in addition to the disturbance of the &ldquo;balance of power&rdquo; by process
+of war and revolution, there is that which comes from physical,
+educational, industrial, and moral causes. Some nations have a greater
+faculty than others of securing success in the markets of the world, and
+these develop their natural resources in such fashion as to outstrip
+their neighbours. If we ought to be continually fighting to prevent
+other countries from aggrandizing themselves in point of territory, we
+ought equally to do so to hinder them from becoming disproportionately
+powerful in point of wealth. But as there is no man among us so insane
+as to suggest the latter, so, it may be hoped, will there soon be none
+to instigate the former. It is now over twenty years since even a Tory
+Administration felt constrained to omit from the preamble of the Mutiny
+Bill some words relating to the preservation of the &ldquo;balance of power&rdquo;;
+and if anything had been needed to cast undying ridicule upon the theory
+it was the plea of King Milan that he went to war with Prince Alexander
+in 1885, because the union of Bulgaria with Eastern Roumelia had
+disturbed the &ldquo;balance of power&rdquo; in the Balkan States.</p>
+
+<p>Another idea upon which it is often sought to provoke war is &ldquo;regard for
+the sanctity of treaties.&rdquo; There is an honest sound about this which has
+caused it to deceive many worthy folk, but who in his heart believes
+that there is any &ldquo;sanctity&rdquo; about treaties? Nations, as a fact, abide
+by treaties just as long as it suits their purpose, and not a day
+longer. Take the Treaty of Vienna, which after 1815 was to settle the
+affairs of Europe for ever. The disruption of Belgium from Holland was
+the first great blow at its provisions, and one after another of these
+subsequently became a dead letter. The Treaty of Paris, concluded after
+the Crimean War, Russia deliberately set aside in a most important part
+as soon as she conveniently could. The Treaty of Frankfort, between
+Germany and France, will last only as long as the French do not feel
+themselves equal to the task of wresting back Alsace-Lorraine. And the
+Treaty of Berlin, the latest great European compact of all, entered into
+after the Russo-Turkish War, has already been violated in various
+directions, and is daily threatened with being violated in more. A
+treaty, in fact, is not like an agreement between equal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> parties, in
+which one gives something to the other for value received; it is
+customarily a bargain hardly driven by a conqueror as regards the
+conquered, and one from which the latter intends to free himself as soon
+as he has the chance. And so, whenever any one talks about the &ldquo;sanctity
+of treaties,&rdquo; let us first see what the treaties are, and under what
+circumstances they were obtained. It will then be sufficient time to
+consider the amount of reverence which is their due.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a further theory upon which war is made, and that is the
+most sordid of all, for, discarding all notions of honour and glory, it
+simply avers that we ought to physically fight for commercial
+advancement. A recent writer who seeks to tell us all about &ldquo;Our
+Colonies and India; how we got them, and why we keep them,&rdquo; devotes his
+first chapter to attempting to prove that nothing but desire for gain
+actuated our forefathers in every one of their great wars, or, to use
+his own illustration, &ldquo;we were afraid that our estate was going to be
+broken up; we had a large family; and we spent money and borrowed money
+to keep the property together, and to extend it. From our point of view,
+as a nation, we have to set one side of our account against the other
+and see whether our transaction paid. It is,&rdquo; he adds, &ldquo;very often said
+that England has very little to show for her National Debt. Nothing to
+show for the National Debt! It is the price we pay for the largest
+Colonial Empire the world has ever seen.&rdquo; This is probably the most
+naked exposition of the worst side of the saying that &ldquo;Trade follows the
+flag&rdquo; which has in late years been published; but that the idea which
+underlies it still actuates a certain school of statesmen is shown by
+the fact that Lord Randolph Churchill justified the expedition to Upper
+Burmah&mdash;as long, tedious, and destructive a business as it was promised
+to be short, easy, and dangerless&mdash;on the ground that the new territory
+would &ldquo;pay.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Now here are certain principles which have guided the foreign policy of
+the past, and which stand as beacons to warn us against dangers in the
+future. That we shall escape war for all time to come is not to be hoped
+for, but, by considering the crimes and blunders and bloodshed which
+have flowed from previous methods, something may be done to avoid it.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXIX.&mdash;IS A PEACE POLICY PRACTICABLE?</span></h2>
+
+<p>The question whether a settled adherence to the principles of
+non-intervention is compatible at once with our interests and our honour
+is one upon which much of the future of England may depend. The answer
+is not to be found in sneers at a &ldquo;peace-at-any-price policy,&rdquo; which has
+never been adopted by any section of our countrymen, or in panegyrics
+upon the virtues evolved by war, made by men who sit comfortably in
+their arm-chairs while they hound others on to bloodshed. It is a
+question which of necessity can only be answered in certain cases as the
+circumstances arise, but there is nothing either cowardly or
+dishonourable in considering the general principles involved in a reply.</p>
+
+<p>Looking at the world as it stands, it seems almost beyond hope that war
+will ever cease. It is true that we have got rid of blood-letting in
+surgery and that we have got rid of blood-letting in society, and it
+may, therefore, seem to some that there is a chance of getting rid of
+blood-letting between States. A century since, the doctor&rsquo;s lancet and
+the duellist&rsquo;s pistol were rivals in slaughter, and all but fanatics
+thought their abolition impossible. What will be said of war in the time to come?</p>
+
+<p>Whatever may be said of it then, we know what can be said of it now. It
+is a grievous curse to the nations engaged, and a calamitous hindrance
+to civilization. It is a barbarous and illogical method of settling
+international disputes, which decides only that one side is the
+stronger, and never shows which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> side is the right. The cynical saying
+that God is on the side of the big battalions is true at bottom. We
+laugh to-day at the old custom of &ldquo;Trial by battle,&rdquo; recognizing that
+the innocent combatant was often the weaker or less skilful, and that
+the guilty consequently triumphed. But &ldquo;Trial by battle,&rdquo; as between
+nations, is equally absurd, if any one imagines that it shows which is
+the righteous. Who would contend that France was in the right when
+Napoleon Bonaparte, in his early career, by his superior skill in
+tactics, swept the nations of Europe before him at Arcola and Marengo,
+Austerlitz and Jena, and that he was in the wrong when, in the waning of
+his powers, he was irretrievably ruined at Waterloo? That Denmark was in
+the wrong because the combined forces of Austria and Prussia crushed her
+in the struggle over Schleswig-Holstein, and that Prussia was in the
+right when, after she and her neighbour had quarrelled like a couple of
+thieves over their booty, she placed the needle-gun against the
+muzzle-loader and overwhelmed Austria? The spirit which impels each
+combatant to call upon the Almighty as of right for assistance, and
+which leads the victor to sing a <i>Te Deum</i> at the struggle&rsquo;s close, is a
+blasphemous one, which should not blind us to the criminality of most
+wars. To hurl thousands of men into conflict in order to extend trade or
+acquire territory is an iniquity, disguise it by what phrases we will.
+In private life the man who steals is called a thief, the man who kills
+is called a murderer; why in public life should the nation which steals,
+and which kills in order to steal, be differently treated? If there be
+retributive justice beyond the grave, Frederick the Great and Napoleon
+Bonaparte, who in cold blood and for selfish motives sacrificed tens of
+thousands of lives, will stand at the murderers&rsquo; bar side by side with
+those lesser criminals who have gone to the gallows for a single slaughter.</p>
+
+<p>Let us look at war, therefore, as it is&mdash;a direful necessity, even when
+justified by self-preservation, a flagrant crime when entered upon for
+the extension of territory or trade. It is easy to raise the cry of
+patriotism whenever a war is undertaken, but the patriotism that pays
+others to fight is a cheap article which deserves no praise. As for the
+bloodthirsty bray<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> of the music halls, which even English statesmen have
+not disdained to stimulate in favour of their policy, it is abhorrent to
+cleanly-minded men; the ethics of the taproom and the patriotism of the
+pewter-pot are not to their taste; and when it is seen that the most
+sanguinary writers and the most blatant talkers are the last to put
+their own bodies in peril, it cannot but be concluded that their theory
+is that patriotism is a virtue to be preached by themselves and
+practised by their neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>But though a reckless or merely aggressive war is not only the greatest
+of human ills but the gravest of national crimes, an armed struggle is
+in certain instances a necessity. Self-preservation is the first law of
+nature; and as no man would condemn another for slaying, if no milder
+measure would do, one who attempted to kill him, and the law would
+regard such a course as justifiable homicide, so a nation is right to
+fight against invasion, and would deserve to be extinguished or enslaved
+if it did not. &ldquo;Defence, not defiance,&rdquo; the motto of our volunteers,
+should be the motto of our statesmen; and then, if an enemy attacked us,
+we should be able to give a good account of ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>In order to act up to this motto, we must dabble as little as possible
+with affairs that do not directly concern us. We should cease to think
+that we are the arbiters of the world&rsquo;s quarrels&mdash;we have enough to do
+to look after our colonies and ourselves&mdash;and we should withdraw from
+such entangling engagements as we have, and enter upon no fresh ones.
+When, for instance, we are urged to formally join the Triple Alliance,
+we must ask why we should bind ourselves to fight France and Russia
+because Germany would like to pay off old scores, Austria wishes to get
+to Salonica, and Italy is eager to assert her position as the
+latest-created &ldquo;Great Power.&rdquo; As it is, a Continental struggle, such as
+is bound to come in the near future, may sufficiently involve us. No one
+seems quite to know whether we are or are not bound by treaty to defend
+the territorial independence of Belgium; but as it is through &ldquo;the
+cockpit of Europe&rdquo; that Germany may next attempt to assail France, or
+France try to reach Germany, the question is a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> very important one.
+Would it not be better to settle that before we proceed to bind
+ourselves with the chains of an alliance which could do us little good,
+but might easily effect considerable harm?</p>
+
+<p>Non-intervention has again and again been proved to be an honourable and
+beneficent policy. There has been scarcely a great war within the last
+thirty years in which we have not been urged by some section in this
+country to interfere. The Franco-Austrian conflict in 1859, the civil
+war in America, the Austro-Prussian attack upon Denmark, the
+Franco-German war, and the Russo-Turkish struggle&mdash;in every one of these
+we were urged to interfere on behalf of our interests or our honour, or
+both. In none did we do so, and who to-day will argue that abstention
+was wrong? There are some politicians who appear wishful to see
+England&rsquo;s finger in every international pie, and the same old arguments,
+the same vehement appeals, are used whenever there is a struggle abroad.
+And when the next occurs, and these weather-beaten arguments and appeals
+are again brought to the fore, let those who may be swayed by them turn
+to the files of the newspapers which instigated intervention in all of
+the cases named; and let them reflect that non-intervention proved the
+best course in every one, and that what did so well before is most
+likely to do well again.</p>
+
+<p>But, even if we sedulously pursue this policy, there are occasions when
+differences arise with other States, and the question is how these can
+be composed. In the large majority of cases the remedy will be found in
+arbitration. Here, again, we shall be confronted with assertions about
+honour and patriotism, which experience has proved to be worthless. Two
+striking instances have been afforded of the value of international
+arbitration. The greater is that which solved the difficulty between
+ourselves and the United States concerning the Alabama claims. Here was
+a matter in which England was distinctly in the wrong, and, as long as
+the sore remained open, so long was there danger of war ensuing between
+the two great English-speaking nations of the earth. When Mr.
+Gladstone&rsquo;s first Government resolved to submit it to arbitration, no
+language was too vehement for some of our Tories to apply to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+process. It was dishonourable, unpatriotic, and pusillanimous; but Mr.
+Gladstone persevered, and with what result? The dispute was settled, the
+sore was healed; and is there a solitary man among us who will contend
+that the better plan would have been to send into their graves thousands
+of unoffending men, and to perpetuate, perhaps for generations, a
+quarrel which has been so happily decided as now to have almost faded
+out of mind? The other instance is afforded by the resolve, in the
+spring of 1885, to refer the dispute with Russia concerning the Penjdeh
+conflict to arbitration. There were threatenings of slaughter on every
+hand, for weeks there appeared a danger of our being launched into war
+for a strip of Afghan territory, worthless alike to Russians, Afghans,
+and ourselves, and upon a conflict of testimony as to the original
+aggression, which even yet has not been composed. The agreement to
+submit the matter to the King of Denmark, though his arbitrament
+ultimately was dispensed with, gave a breathing time to Russia and
+England both; and who now would argue that we ought to have gone to war
+because of Penjdeh?</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, if we adhere to a policy of non-intervention in disputes that
+do not directly concern us, and of arbitration in those in which we
+become involved, we shall be following a course which the immediate past
+has proved to be not only peaceful but honourable and agreeable to our
+interests. &ldquo;The greatest of British interests is peace,&rdquo; once observed
+the present Lord Derby; and the truth of the saying is unimpeachable.
+And when we are told that, strive as we will, war sometimes must come,
+one is reminded of the saying of a far greater statesman than Lord
+Derby, and one upon whose patriotism none has been able to cast a slur.
+It was Canning who, when told that a war in certain circumstances was
+bound to come sooner or later, replied, &ldquo;Then let it be later.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>If, however, we wish England to pursue a peaceful policy, we must teach
+the people to believe that it is as honourable as it is practicable, and
+as truly patriotic as both. It is a mistake to think that the masses
+will oppose war merely because of the suffering and loss it entails;
+there are considerations beyond<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> these which the artisan feels as keenly
+as the aristocrat, the peasant as the peer. The sentiment which resents,
+even to blood-shedding, an insult to the national flag, may be often to
+be deprecated but never to be despised; for when the people shall care
+nothing for the country&rsquo;s honour, the days of independent national
+existence will be drawing to a close. And, therefore, when it is argued
+that a peace policy is practicable, it is held to be so only because it
+is honourable, patriotic, and just.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXX.&mdash;HOW SHOULD WE DEAL WITH THE COLONIES?</span></h2>
+
+<p>The foreign relations of England are necessarily complicated by her
+colonial concerns; and these deserve the most careful consideration,
+because at any moment they may arouse the hottest political dispute of
+the day. In considering the colonies we have to ask three questions: (1)
+How and why did we get them; (2) How and why do we keep them; and (3)
+Ought we to force them to stay?</p>
+
+<p>At the history of the why and how we acquired our colonies, it is
+impossible here to do more than glance. By settlement as in the case of
+Australasia, by conquest as in that of Canada, and by treaty cession as
+in that of the Cape, have been obtained within the past three centuries
+practically all that we have. The wish for expansion has continually
+made itself felt, and the frequent result of war as well as of peaceful
+discovery has been to gratify it. And the consequence of both conquest
+and discovery has been the acquisition of a colonial empire vaster in
+extent and resources than the world has ever seen.</p>
+
+<p>Having got our colonies, there are various reasons for retaining them.
+The imperial spirit, which is elated by expansion and would be deeply
+wounded by contraction, has been a prominent factor in causing England
+to take a leading position in the world&rsquo;s affairs; and it is one which
+none interested in her prosperity will despise. Even if there were no
+material reasons for keeping our colonies, this sentiment would cause
+many Englishmen, and probably the majority, to regard with the deepest
+distrust any movement having a tendency to separate the colonies from
+the mother country.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p><p>But there are material reasons for binding the colonies to us which
+none will ignore. They form not only an outlet for our surplus labour
+and enterprise, but give us markets of high importance to our trade.
+Emigrants who go to Canada or Australia not merely remain attached by
+obvious considerations to the English connection, but continue to be our
+customers in a very much larger degree than if they went to the United
+States or any other foreign country. Those who study the statistics of
+our export trade will recognize that if we lost the custom of our
+colonies&mdash;and this we should be likely to do if we lost the colonies
+themselves&mdash;the consequences to our commerce would be very serious.</p>
+
+<p>Thus there are reasons of the highest sentiment, as well as of
+commercial expediency, for retaining the possessions the hard fighting
+and determined enterprise of many generations of Englishmen have
+acquired; but the question which is needed to be answered in much more
+fulness than either of the others is that which may affect the politics
+of the near future: Ought we, if any of our self-governing colonies
+desire to secede, to force them to stay?</p>
+
+<p>A distinct difference has been made in the form of this question between
+the self-governing colonies and the dependencies&mdash;a distinction arising
+from the very nature of things. There is a chasm between the
+consideration of letting Australia or letting India go, which is too
+wide to be bridged. Australia consists of various colonies, peopled by
+Englishmen or the descendants of Englishmen, who have the fullest means
+of constitutionally expressing their desires. India has a vast concourse
+of deeply-divided peoples, who have no bond of union, whether of race,
+religion, or common descent, and who are in no sense self-governed. In
+the argument about to be set forward, therefore, it is to be understood
+that only the colonies, and not the dependencies, are in consideration.</p>
+
+<p>Broadly speaking, it may be submitted with regard to our self-governing
+colonies that we are bound in honour to keep them as long as they will
+stay, and in conscience not to detain them when they are able and
+willing to go. Having acquired them, and given the most practical
+guarantees to protect them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> we ought to hold to our implied bargain at
+any cost, and to defend them with as much energy as our native soil.
+But, just as a parent&rsquo;s duty to a child is to do everything to protect
+and assist him in his period of growth, so is it equally his duty, when
+the training-time has been accomplished, to set no hindrance in the path
+of his acquiring an independent position. And the relation of parent to
+child has a true likeness to that of England to her self-governing colonies.</p>
+
+<p>If it be asked whether this question of what should be done in case of a
+proposed separation ought to be raised at the present moment, the reply
+is that events are forcing the matter forward, and that it is well to
+consider in a time of comparative quiet a problem which may convulse the
+nation from end to end if urged upon us in a storm.</p>
+
+<p>For rumblings of the storm have already been heard from the three great
+self-governing portions of our colonial empire. Sir Henry Parkes, the
+Premier of New South Wales, in an article published no long time since,
+and in the very act of proposing a scheme by which he imagined the
+mother country and the colonies might be knit more closely together,
+uttered a warning that separation might within the next generation be
+pushed to the front, for &ldquo;there are persons in Australia, and in most of
+the Australian Legislatures, who avowedly or tacitly favour the idea.&rdquo;
+And he added: &ldquo;In regard to the large mass of the English people in
+Australia, there can be no doubt of their genuine loyalty to the present
+State, and their affectionate admiration for the present illustrious
+occupant of the throne. But this loyalty is nourished at a great
+distance, and by tens of thousands, daily increasing, who have never
+known any land but the one dear land where they dwell. It is the growth
+of a semitropical soil, alike tender and luxuriant, and a slight thing
+may bruise, even snap asunder, its young tendrils.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>When we turn from Australia to Canada, the same warning is in the air.
+In the autumn of 1887, the remarks of Mr. Chamberlain at Belfast,
+repudiating the principle of commercial union between Canada and the
+United States, evoked strong protests from some leading newspapers in
+the Dominion against the idea of England interfering if such a union
+were agreed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> upon. The Toronto <i>Mail</i> put the matter in a nutshell when
+it observed&mdash;&ldquo;Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. Canadians
+have not ceased to love and venerate England, but have simply reached
+that stage of development when their choice of what is best for
+themselves, be it what it may, must prevail over all other
+considerations.&rdquo; Should it be said that this is only an utterance of our
+old friend &ldquo;the irresponsible journalist,&rdquo; it may be added that the
+practice of Canadian statesmen appears to be in accordance with the
+principles of Canadian writers. This was certainly the opinion of our
+own <i>Standard</i>, which, in an article in 1887 upon the increases in the
+Canadian tariff directed against imported iron and steel, wrote&mdash;&ldquo;The
+obvious truth of the matter is that Canada has given no thought to our
+interests at all, but only to her own.... Of course these Canadians are
+a most &lsquo;loyal&rsquo; people for all that, and if they can get us to lend them
+our money they will flatter us and heap sweet-sounding phrases upon us,
+till the most voracious appetite for such is cloyed to sickness. It is
+only when we expect them to pay us our money back, or at least to put up
+no barriers against our trade with them, that we find out how hollow
+these phrases are. No federation of the empire can take place under any
+guise while its leading colonies, which love us so exceedingly, strive
+their utmost to injure our trade.... Why should we waste a drop of our
+blood or spend a shilling of our means to shelter countries whose
+selfishness is so great that they never give a thought to any interest
+of ours? That is the question the Protectionist colonies are forcing
+Englishmen to ask themselves, and it is as well that it should be
+bluntly put to them now.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Cape Colony is as ready as Australia or Canada to resent the least
+interference from the mother country. Sir Gordon Sprigg, its Premier,
+referring at a public meeting late in 1887 to a Bill which the Imperial
+Ministry had been asked to disallow, observed that, if it should be
+disallowed, it was not a question of this particular Bill, but whether
+the colony was to have a free government, or whether necessary
+legislation in South Africa was to be checked by irresponsible persons
+at home, and they were to go back to the old Constitution, and be
+governed by a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> people six thousand miles away, knowing little of the
+requirements of the inhabitants of the Cape.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, we have to face a growing opinion among the self-governing
+colonies that they will allow England no controlling voice in their
+internal affairs; and the question will present itself to many
+Englishmen whether it is right that we should be saddled with the
+responsibility of defending colonies which resent any interference, and
+use their tariffs to lessen our trade. As long as they require help we
+are bound in honour to give it; but when they demand, as at some time
+they will demand, separation, the conviction they are now impressing
+upon us that they can do without England, will materially strengthen the
+desire to say to them, &ldquo;Go in peace.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Even if such a consideration did not exist, one might hope that England
+would never repeat the enterprise once attempted against what are now
+the United States, and try to crush a growing nation of our own children
+when wishing to take its own place in the economy of the world. Some
+will answer that all danger of such a contingency would be avoided by
+the adoption of a sound plan of imperial federation; but where is that
+sound plan to be looked for? Even the most ardent advocates of the
+principle do not venture upon a plan. They are content to talk of
+sympathy rather than develop a system; but sympathy does not go far when
+practical considerations are concerned. It may be argued that sympathy
+went a long way when a detachment from New South Wales assisted our
+military operations in the Soudan; but the experiment was a dangerous
+one which ought not to be often repeated. Franklin in his autobiography
+tells us that it was the defeat of Braddock&rsquo;s force which first taught
+the American colonists that it was possible to hope for independence;
+and the lesson needs remembering.</p>
+
+<p>What those who advocate imperial federation have to prove is that it is
+practicable to persuade each portion of this vast empire to pay and to
+fight for every other portion. As long as England does both the paying
+and the fighting, things may go smoothly. But if England went to war
+with France over the New Hebrides, in order to protect the interests of
+Australia, what would Newfoundland say on being asked to share the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+bill? Similarly, if England engaged France over the bait question, so as
+to preserve the fishing trade of Newfoundland, how would Australia like
+to be taxed for the fray? And if we fought the United States on the
+fisheries dispute in order to please Canada, does any one imagine that
+Australia or Cape Colony would agree to additional imposts for the
+lessening of our National Debt? It is when considerations like these are
+discussed that imperial federation appears a pleasing dream rather than
+a probable reality.</p>
+
+<p>And, therefore, when we discuss our future dealings with the colonies,
+we ought to know how far we intend to go. As long as they remain with
+us, we ought to do our utmost to preserve the most friendly relations;
+but, having given them self-government, we ought to impress upon them
+the necessity for self-preservation. And if, when they can not only rule
+but protect themselves, they should ask to be freed from even the
+nominal allegiance to the English Crown which is all they now give, they
+should be suffered to go, in the hope and belief that they would prosper.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXXI.&mdash;SHOULD THE STATE SOLVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS?</span></h2>
+
+<p>Though we have been discussing at this length our foreign and colonial
+relations, we must never forget that there is a &ldquo;condition of England
+question&rdquo; which claims the closest attention. The politics of the future
+will be largely coloured by considerations arising from our social
+developments; and it is important to decide whether the State ought to
+attempt to solve social problems, and how far it ought to interfere in
+the relations between man and man.</p>
+
+<p>There is just now so much talk about Socialism that it is desirable to
+examine the principles which underlie State-interference with private
+affairs. Those who like to divide men into strictly defined parties are
+accustomed to describe their fellows as Socialists and Individualists;
+and, although there is no Socialist who would prevent all liberty of
+personal action, and no Individualist who would protest against every
+form of State-interference, the distinction is fair enough if it be
+understood that the Socialist believes that the State should do as much
+as possible, and the Individualist that it should do as little as
+possible, for those who dwell within its limits.</p>
+
+<p>The view of the former is concisely stated in the programme of the
+Social Democratic Federation, in which are urged the immediate
+compulsory construction of healthy artisans&rsquo; and agricultural labourers&rsquo;
+dwellings, free compulsory education for all classes, with at least one
+wholesome meal a day in each school, an eight hours&rsquo; working day,
+cumulative taxation upon all incomes above a fixed minimum, State
+appropriation of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> railways with or without compensation, the
+establishment of national banks absorbing all others, rapid extinction
+of the National Debt, nationalization of the land, and organization of
+agricultural and industrial armies under State control on co-operative
+principles. These are merely claimed to be palliative measures, which
+should be followed by others more drastic; but they suffice to show the
+present-day Socialistic idea.</p>
+
+<p>Against this extreme Socialist view must be set the extreme
+Individualist, which has been expressed by Mr. Spencer, who says&mdash;&ldquo;There
+is reason to believe that the ultimate political condition must be one
+in which personal freedom is the greatest possible, and governmental
+power the least possible; that, namely, in which the freedom of each has
+no limit but the like freedom of all; while the sole governmental duty
+is the maintenance of this limit.&rdquo; And the main idea of this statement
+had been anticipated in the remark, a couple of thousand years ago, by
+one of the greatest of Greek philosophers&mdash;&ldquo;The truth is that the State
+in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is the best and most
+quietly governed, and the State in which they are most willing is the worst.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The real question, of course, is not between any such extreme views, for
+Mr. Spencer would not deny that the State sometimes must interfere, and
+Mr. George would be the last to plead against the use of all individual
+effort. But though the limits of State-interference are what we have to
+determine, it is necessary first to consider whether the State should interfere at all.</p>
+
+<p>An obvious answer is that the State interferes already in many a social
+problem, and that no one seriously proposes to do away with that
+interference. But even those who would thus reply may not be aware of
+the extent to which the State makes its influence felt in social
+affairs. The administration of justice and the protection of the
+commonwealth are necessarily, in all civilized communities, the affair
+of the State. But beyond these limits, the ruling authority, whether
+exercised through imperial or local officials, wanders at many a point.</p>
+
+<p>The Poor-law is a striking instance of this fact, for it is a piece of
+legislation the Socialistic tendency of which none can gainsay, the
+State practically asserting that no one need starve,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> and providing food
+and shelter, under certain conditions, for all who are unable, or even
+unwilling, to work. The system of national education is another instance
+of Socialistic legislation; it makes me pay towards the education of my
+neighbour&rsquo;s child, not for any immediate benefit to myself, but for my
+ultimate benefit as a citizen of an improved State. And the ruling
+authority goes further even than compelling me to feed the poor and
+educate the young, for it interferes, presumably for my good, with my
+liberty in many a detail.</p>
+
+<p>From birth to death the State, even under present conditions, steps in
+at point after point to direct one&rsquo;s path. Within forty days of being
+born I am compelled by the State to be registered; within three months I
+am equally constrained to be vaccinated; from five years old to
+thirteen, with certain limitations, I have to be sent to school; and,
+should my parents be so sensible as to apprentice me to a trade, a fee
+has to be paid to the State for the indentures. When I marry it is at a
+State-licensed institution; when I die it is by a State-appointed
+officer that my decease is certified. And in the interval, the State
+prevents me from obtaining intoxicating liquor except from certain
+individuals and within specified hours; it compels me, if I am a
+house-owner, to effect my sanitary arrangements in a given way; and if I
+am a house-holder, to keep my pavement free from snow. From the highest
+details to the lowest, then, the State even now interferes; whether I
+fail to have my child vaccinated or my chimney swept, it steps in; and
+those who argue that Individualism is a theory so true that
+State-interference should be abolished, have a number of fruits of that
+State-interference to get rid of before they can claim the victory.</p>
+
+<p>But probably even those who imagine that they are extreme Individualists
+would not wish to remove from the Statute Book such specimens of
+State-interference as are now upon it. If they did, the clearance would
+indeed be great. For imagine what the effect would be if, in addition to
+the other measures indicated, we got rid of all the enactments affecting
+labour, and again allowed the employment of climbing boys as
+chimney-sweeps, of women and small children in mines, of men and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> women
+in white-lead works without precaution of any kind, of sailors in the
+merchant service without the protection of lime-juice against scurvy and
+of survey against sinking; picture what the population of our
+manufacturing districts would by this time have become without the
+protection afforded by the Factory Acts; remember what an improvement
+has been made in the way of guarding dangerous machinery, owing to the
+penalties inflicted upon careless owners by the Employers&rsquo; Liability
+Act; and then answer whether State-interference is necessarily a bad thing.</p>
+
+<p>Within the limits which experience has shown to be desirable, it is a
+good thing; and it is no answer to this assumption that it has sometimes
+failed to secure the object aimed at. As long as nothing in this world
+is perfect, we cannot expect the action of the State to be; the only
+test in every case is an average test. If such State-interference as we
+see has on the whole done well, the balance must be struck in its
+favour; and in human affairs a favourable balance is all we have a right to anticipate.</p>
+
+<p>The Individualistic ideal may be a good one, but it is the
+Individualistic real we have to examine. And what would become of the
+poor, the weak, and the helpless if the State stood aside from all
+interference with the affairs of men? That the rich and the powerful
+would grind them to powder in their struggles for more riches and
+greater power. The days of universal brotherhood have never
+existed&mdash;and, what is more, never will exist&mdash;and that State which
+protects the weak against the strong and the poor against the rich is
+the best worth striving for.</p>
+
+<p>An ideal condition of society would be that in which every able-bodied
+person would have to work for a living with body, brains, or both; but
+birth and bullion play so large a part under present circumstances that,
+while we may sigh for the ideal, we must recognize the real. And this
+applies to all thinkers on our social affairs&mdash;to the extreme Socialist
+as to the extreme Individualist. The mystery of life cannot be solved by
+logic, and the pain, the poverty, and the crime which that mystery
+involves dissipated by law.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p><p>It must constantly also be borne in mind that mankind is not governed
+by material considerations alone, but is largely swayed by sentiment;
+and any system which ignores this and treats men simply as calculating
+machines is bound to fail. Thus it is that, while men accept the latest
+doctrines of social science, they do not act upon them. They sympathize
+with Mr. Spencer&rsquo;s account of an ideal State in which the governmental
+power is the least possible, but they pay the education rate, support
+compulsory vaccination, and express not the slightest wish to see
+public-houses open all night. It is in this as in other theoretical
+affairs&mdash;our minds agree, but our hearts arbitrate. A parent may accept
+most thoroughly the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, but he will
+strive his utmost to preserve life to a crippled or lunatic child. And a
+trader may indicate assent when he hears that the employed ought to be
+paid only the amount which would secure similar services in the labour
+market; but, if he is even commonly honest in his dealings with his
+fellows, he will not discharge an old servant because he can obtain
+another for something less.</p>
+
+<p>But no sooner do some men secure a fact than it begets a theory, and
+truth thus becomes the father of many lies. It is well enough that every
+one should strive to be independent of external help, but it is not
+within the bounds of the possible that every one can be perfectly so;
+and that being the case, the State, as the protector of all, is bound to
+interfere. What has to be decided is the limit of such interference; and
+although upon that point no precise line can be drawn, for as conditions
+vary so must the limit change, discussion may serve to show that all the
+truth lies in neither of the contending theories, but in a judicious use of both.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXXII.&mdash;HOW FAR SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE?</span></h2>
+
+<p>To precisely limit the interference of the State in private affairs has
+been urged to be impossible, for the boundaries of such interference are
+ever changing, and will continue ever to change as the circumstances
+vary. In some respects the State has more to say about our domestic
+concerns, in others less, than it formerly had; but there never was a
+time when it left us altogether alone, and there is never likely to be.</p>
+
+<p>When people groan about &ldquo;grandmotherly government,&rdquo; and talk hazily of
+&ldquo;good old times&rdquo; when such was unknown, they speak with little knowledge
+of the social history of England. They forget that there was a day when
+under penalty men had to put out their fires at a given hour; that later
+they were directed to dress in a fashion presumed to be becoming to
+their several ranks; that at one period they had to profess Catholicism
+under fear of the fagot, and at another Protestantism under penalty of
+the rope; that in later days they had to go to church to escape being
+fined, and even until this century had to take the Sacrament in order to
+qualify for office; that in other times they were allowed to bury their
+dead only in certain clothing; that a section of them had to give six
+days in the year to the repair of the highways; and that in divers
+further ways their individual liberty was fettered in a fashion which
+would not now be tolerated for a day.</p>
+
+<p>The State, in fact, has always claimed to be all-powerful, and has never
+assigned set limits to its demands. It has asserted,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> and still asserts,
+rights over that which is intangible, which it has not created, and
+which in its origin is superhuman. If a man has used a stream for his
+own purposes for a given period, the State secures him a right of use,
+protecting him from interference in or providing him compensation for
+that which neither he nor the State made or purchased. If another has a
+window which is threatened with being darkened by a newer building
+adjacent, the State steps in to assure him of the retention of his
+&ldquo;ancient light.&rdquo; And when people have for a series of years walked
+without hindrance across land belonging to others, the State gives to
+the commonalty a right of way, which, however seemingly intangible,
+often seriously deteriorates the value of the property over which it is exercised.</p>
+
+<p>In the gravest concerns of man as well as in those which merely affect
+his comfort or his purse, the State intervenes. It used to assert by
+means of the press-gang its right to seize men for service in war; and
+it could at this day order a conscription which would compel all in the
+prime of life to pass under the military yoke. It can and does direct
+property to be seized for public purposes, upon compensation paid, from
+an unwilling owner; and it can and does take out of our pockets a
+proportion of our income, which proportion it has the power to largely
+increase, in order to pay its way.</p>
+
+<p>That which does all these things is for convenience called &ldquo;the State,&rdquo;
+but in present circumstances it is really ourselves. The nation is
+simply the aggregate of the citizens who compose it, and each one of
+us&mdash;especially each possessor of a vote&mdash;is a distinct portion of the
+State. The misfortune which attends upon the frequent use of the word is
+that many persons seem to think that there is some mystic power called
+&ldquo;the State&rdquo; or &ldquo;the Government,&rdquo; which can dispense favours, spend
+money, and do great things&mdash;all from within itself. But neither State
+nor Government has any money save that which we give it, and no power
+except that which is accorded by the constituencies. And, therefore,
+when people cry out for &ldquo;the State&rdquo; to do this or &ldquo;the Government&rdquo; to do
+that, they should remember that <i>they</i> are portions of the force they
+beseech, and that if what is to be done costs money they will have to
+pay their share; and this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> much it is highly useful to recollect when
+appeals are more and more being made to the State for help.</p>
+
+<p>Let us start, therefore, with the conviction that the State, which is
+simply ourselves and others like us, has no power beyond what the people
+give it, and no money but what the people pay; that it has throughout
+our history attempted to solve social problems, and is doing so still;
+and that it is as sure as anything human can be that if it did not
+interfere in certain cases to aid the struggling, to put a curb upon the
+tyrannous, and to regulate divers specified affairs, the poor and the
+helpless would be the principal sufferers, and greed of gain and lust of
+power would be in the ascendant.</p>
+
+<p>But it would be easy to push this interference too far. Admitted that
+the State has done certain things for us, and, in the main, done them
+well, this affords no argument that it should do everything in the hope
+that equal success would follow. There is an assumption dear to pedants
+and schoolboys that because one does <i>this</i> he is bound to do <i>that</i>,
+but neither our daily lives nor our State concerns are or ought to be so
+governed. They are largely regulated by circumstances, with the idea of
+doing the best possible under existing conditions. For there is no
+infallible scheme of government or of society, and the system must be
+made to suit the people and not the people to suit the system.</p>
+
+<p>And although the State, in certain departments of its interference, has
+done well, it has not brilliantly succeeded where it has entered into
+competition with private enterprise. Just as public companies are worked
+at a greater cost than the same concerns in the hands of individual
+proprietors, so Government enterprises are always highly expensive and
+often disastrous failures. It did not need the recent revelations
+concerning the waste, the jobbery, and the wanton extravagance of
+certain of our departments to inform those who knew anything of the
+public offices or the Government dockyards, that such things were the
+customary results of the system. Stroll through a private dockyard and
+then through a public one; visit a large mercantile office and then a
+Government department in Whitehall; and decide whether the State is a
+model master. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> may be said that it is simply the system that is to
+blame, but surely the universality of evil result from the same cause
+should teach a lesson.</p>
+
+<p>There may be asserted the possible exception of the Post-office to the
+charge that the State fails where it competes with private enterprise;
+and no one would deny that that department does good work, and that, if
+all others were like it, there would be less reason to complain. But it
+must not be forgotten that the Post-office, as far as the main portion
+of its business&mdash;letter-carrying&mdash;is concerned, does not compete with
+private enterprise, for it possesses by law the monopoly of the work;
+and that the cheapness of postage, upon which it prides itself, is
+largely secured by making the people of London pay at least twice as
+much as they would if competition existed for the letters they send
+among themselves, in order that they and others may, for the same money,
+forward letters to Perth or Penzance. As to the Government monopoly of
+the telegraphs, the result, while beneficial in a certain degree, has
+had this effect&mdash;it has partially strangled the telephone system; and
+that will hardly be claimed as a triumph.</p>
+
+<p>Any suggestion, therefore, for making the State interfere still further
+with private enterprise ought to be most carefully weighed. The question
+really is whether it has not already done as much in this direction as
+it ought, and whether, generally speaking, the limits now laid down are
+not sufficiently broad.</p>
+
+<p>What it does is this: it undertakes by means of an army and navy our
+external defence; secures by the police our internal safety; makes
+provision by which no person need starve; enforces upon all a certain
+amount of education; and enjoins a set of sanitary regulations for the
+protection of the community from infectious or contagious disease. These
+are the main items of its work, but beyond them it provides the means of
+communication by post and telegraph; fixes in certain degree the fares
+on railways and the price of gas; encourages thrift by the institution
+of savings banks; and gives us all an opportunity for religious exercise
+by the provision of an Established Church.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p><p>The objectionable part of this is that which directly interferes with
+personal opinion or private enterprise. The noble saying of
+Cromwell&mdash;&ldquo;The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of
+their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that
+satisfies&rdquo;&mdash;spoken before its time, as even some of the Protector&rsquo;s
+friends may have considered, must now be extended to the contention that
+the State has no concern whatever with the opinions of its citizens, and
+that it ought not to endow any sect at the expense of the rest.
+Concerning the competition with private enterprise, the State, in
+providing a system of national education and a postal and telegraph
+service, has gone to the verge of what it should do in such a direction.</p>
+
+<p>While, therefore, the State should not abandon any function it now
+exercises, the severest caution ought to be used before another is
+undertaken. All attempts of the ruling power to interfere too closely
+with the private concerns of men&mdash;as witness the sumptuary laws and
+those against usury&mdash;have defeated themselves, and it is not for us to
+revive systems of interference which, even in the Middle Ages, broke
+down. It is no answer that some things are going so badly that
+State-interference may be considered absolutely necessary, and that it
+is merely the extremity of nervousness that hinders the experiment being
+tried. Caution is not cowardice, and no man is called upon to be
+foolhardy to prove his freedom from fear.</p>
+
+<p>When it is said that, in certain directions, matters have come to such a
+pass that the State must more actively interfere, let us note that
+extremes meet upon this as upon so many other matters; for the cry that
+&ldquo;the country is going to the dogs&rdquo; is nowadays raised as lustily by some
+friends of the working man as ever it has been by the retired colonels
+and superannuated admirals whose exclusive possession it was so long.
+And the remedy suggested is that the State should do this, that, and the
+other, with an utter ignoring of the fact, which all history proves,
+that the creation of an additional army of officials would strangle
+enterprise and stifle invention. Thus from the general, it will be
+necessary to go to the particular, and to ask how far the proposed
+remedy would be effectual. The principle here argued is that the State
+should concern itself simply with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> external defence, internal safety,
+the protection of those unable to guard themselves, and the undertaking
+of such work for the general good as cannot be better done by private
+enterprise; and this principle holds good against many a nostrum now put
+forward as an infallible remedy for social ills.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXXIII.&mdash;SHOULD THE STATE REGULATE LABOUR OR WAGES?</span></h2>
+
+<p>Among the many social questions which the pressure of circumstances may
+soon make political is that of the State regulation of the hours of
+labour. The president of the Trades Union Congress for 1887 advocated,
+for instance, the passing of an Eight Hours Bill; and it is desirable to
+consider whether this would in any respect be a step in a right direction.</p>
+
+<p>The argument for such a measure appears in principle to be this: that
+the classes dependent upon manual labour for their livelihood have too
+many hands for the work there is to do; that those who do get work toil
+too long; and that both evils would be remedied by restricting the hours
+of labour, more men thus finding employment and all working well within their strength.</p>
+
+<p>Against these points may be set others: that England has already been
+severely affected by competition with countries where the hours are
+longer and the pay less; that any further restriction of hours without a
+corresponding reduction of pay would be ruinous to our trade; and that
+it is highly probable that the majority of workmen would prefer to
+labour for nine hours at their present wages than for eight hours at
+less. The last contention, of course, might be answered by an enactment
+fixing not only the hours to be worked but the wages to be paid. If this
+is wished for, it should be clearly put; but before any step is taken
+towards either such measure, several points concerning each, which now
+appear more than doubtful, should be made clear.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p><p>A fallacy underlying much of the contention in favour of any such
+enactment is the idea that the community is divided into two distinct
+classes&mdash;the producing and the consuming. As a fact, there are no
+producers who do not consume, though there are some consumers who do not
+produce. But is even that an unmixed evil? There is a further fallacy
+which arbitrarily divides us into capitalists and labourers; but every
+man who can purchase the result of another&rsquo;s labour is a capitalist, and
+that much-denounced person will never be got rid of as long as it is
+easier to buy than to make.</p>
+
+<p>A third class which secures the condemnation of many is &ldquo;the
+middle-man.&rdquo; It is easy to denounce him, but he is a necessity at once
+of commerce and of comfort. If one wants some coffee at breakfast, he
+cannot go to Java for the berry, the West Indies for the sugar, the
+dairy-farm for the milk, and the Potteries for the cup from which to
+drink. So far from the middle-man unduly increasing the price of those
+articles, he lessens it by dealing in bulk with what it would pay
+neither the producer nor the purchaser to deal with in small quantities;
+and not only lessens the price but, in regard to the commodities of a
+distant land, renders it practically possible for us to have them at all.</p>
+
+<p>It is equally useless to rail at competition as if it were inherently
+evil, for there will be competition as long as men exist to struggle for
+supremacy. And competition keeps the world alive, as the tide prevents
+the sea from stagnating. Occasionally the waves break their bounds, and
+loss and tribulation result; but the power for good must not be ignored,
+because the power for evil is sometimes prominent.</p>
+
+<p>To talk of the working classes as if they thought and acted in a body is
+another delusion. Not only this. The frequent assumption that somebody
+or other can speak on behalf of &ldquo;the people&rdquo; is a mistake. When it is
+done, one is entitled to ask what the phrase means? &ldquo;The people&rdquo; are the
+whole body of the population, and no one section, even if a majority has
+a right to exclusively claim the title. In legislating, regard must be
+had to the interests of all and not to those of a part, however
+numerous; and this brings us straight to the question<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> of interfering by
+enactment with the price or the amount of labour.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious to note that the demand which is now being raised by some
+Trade Unionists on behalf of labour is similar in principle to that
+which was used for centuries by the propertied classes against labour.
+The Statute of Labourers, passed in the reign of Edward III., fixed
+wages in most precise fashion, settling that of a master mason, for
+instance, at fourpence and of journeymen masons at threepence a day. And
+as lately as only eight years after George III. came to the throne, all
+master tailors in London and for five miles round were forbidden under
+heavy penalties from giving, and their workmen from accepting, more than
+2s. 7&frac12;d. a day&mdash;except in the case of a general mourning.
+Subsequently, statesmen grew more wise, and, in the closing years of
+last century, the younger Pitt refused to support a bill to regulate the
+wages of labourers in husbandry. But it is singular that, whereas Adam
+Smith could say that &ldquo;whenever the Legislature attempts to regulate the
+difference between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always
+the masters,&rdquo; to-day it is the workmen who promise to become so.</p>
+
+<p>If it be replied that it is State interference with the hours alone and
+not with the wages that is demanded, it may be submitted that if the one
+is done it will be a hardship to the worker rather than a boon if the
+other be not attempted. For, if a man, by working nine hours a day,
+could earn, say, 27s. a week, it is obvious that for eight hours a day
+he would not earn more in the same period than 24s., unless Parliament
+insisted that he should receive the higher sum for the less work. But is
+Parliament likely to do anything of the kind; if it did do it, would it
+be found to be practicable; and, if it were found to be practicable,
+would it be just?</p>
+
+<p>Parliament is not likely to do anything of the kind, because the
+experience of centuries has taught us that it is impossible to fix wages
+by statute. It was tried over and over again, first by enactments
+applying to the whole country, and then by regulations for each county,
+settled by the local justices of the peace; but, though the experiment
+was backed by all the forces of law, it broke down so utterly that in
+time it had to be got rid of.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p><p>Even if the return could be secured of a majority to Parliament pledged
+to the proposal, would it be likely to be any more practicable to-day
+than it was in olden times? We are now an open market for the world. If
+hours were lessened and wages not reduced, imported articles from
+foreign countries would become much cheaper than our own goods, and
+would be bought to the detriment of English workers. Is it proposed by
+the promoters of a compulsory eight-hours working day that we should
+have Protection once more, and a prohibitory tariff placed upon all
+manufactured goods brought from abroad in order to keep up the price of English articles?</p>
+
+<p>And, further, if it were practicable, would it be just? It would be
+unjust to the employers, who would have to pay present prices for
+lessened work; it would be unjust to the toilers, in that it would
+prevent them from making a higher income by working more; and it would
+be unjust to the consumers, in making them give a greater price for the
+commodities they required. Those who propose the compulsory eight hours
+would presumably wish wages to be maintained at the present standard; it
+would hardly be a popular cry if it would have the effect of bringing wages down.</p>
+
+<p>If the Legislature is to interfere at all in this direction, the old
+proposal had better be put forward at once&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Eight hours&rsquo; work, eight hours&rsquo; play,</div>
+<div>Eight hours&rsquo; sleep, and eight shillings a day.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This, at least, would have the merit of simplicity, and the more
+comprehensive proposal is as just and as practicable as the limited one
+now put forward. But even as to the limited one, it would be well to
+know how far and to what persons it would be applied. If the answer is
+&ldquo;The working classes,&rdquo; the further question is &ldquo;How are these to be
+defined?&rdquo; Sailors, for instance, are working men, but no one would
+seriously propose to apply the eight hours&rsquo; system to them. Granting
+they form an extreme exception, how are we to deal with shopkeepers and
+all whom they employ? The shopkeepers may be put aside as &ldquo;capitalists&rdquo;
+or &ldquo;middle men,&rdquo; and, therefore, undeserving of sympathy or
+consideration; but those behind their counters are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> distinctly workers.
+Are they all to be included in the eight hours&rsquo; proposal? If so, either
+one of two things: the shops will be shut sixteen hours out of the
+twenty-four, or their keepers will have to employ half as many hands
+again as they now do. &ldquo;Good for the unemployed&rdquo; may be replied, but who
+would have to pay for the additional labour? The consumers, of course,
+for no law is going to be passed keeping tea and sugar, hats and coats
+at their present price; and it would be those that live by weekly wages
+who would thereby suffer the most. And if, in order to obviate such
+consequences, all who work in shops were to be excluded from the
+benefits of an Eight Hours Act, it would be grossly unjust that tens of
+thousands of toilers, as much entitled to consideration as those
+employed in any factory or mill, should be kept at work in order to
+minister to the convenience of their fellows, set free from a portion of
+their labour by the action of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>And this leads to a consideration of the proposal that all shops, with
+certain limited exceptions, shall be closed at a given hour. For the
+general reasons applicable to other employments, any such proposition
+ought to be strongly opposed. It would be a grievous hardship to the
+smaller tradesmen, with many of whom the best chance of making a living
+is after the great establishments have closed, and an intolerable
+nuisance to the working classes who can only shop at what a legislator
+might consider a late hour. If attempted to be put in operation, it
+would necessitate the creation of an army of informers and inspectors to
+see that it was not evaded, and it would create an amount of annoyance
+to honest and hard-working traders for which no expected benefits from
+it could compensate. The small tradesman, threatened by the co-operative
+society on the one side and the &ldquo;monster emporium&rdquo; on the other, has
+enough to do to live, without being harassed by a law which he would be
+tempted constantly to evade, and which, if not evaded, might prove his ruin.</p>
+
+<p>Much the same argument may be used concerning a point which, if the
+State interferes with the hours of labour, is certain to be raised, for
+it would have to be plainly stated whether all men would be forbidden
+under penalty to work <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>overtime. If any such proposal is to be made, how
+is it to be carried out? Are we to have an additional body of
+inspectors, prying into every man&rsquo;s house to see whether extra work was
+being done; or is the hateful system of &ldquo;the common informer&rdquo; to be
+revived for the special benefit of working men?</p>
+
+<p>The argument is not weakened by the fact that, in various directions,
+not only has the Legislature passed enactments interfering with the
+amount and the price of labour, but that some of these continue in
+active operation. By means of the Factory Acts, for instance, it has
+directly intervened for the protection of women and children, and in so
+doing has been acting within that part of its duty which demands that it
+shall stand between the unprotected and overwhelming power. But there is
+no strict parallel between the case of the adult males of the working
+classes and that of those women and children who have to toil. The
+former have again and again shown their power of preserving their own
+interests by combination; and the evils of State interference where it
+can possibly be avoided appear sufficient to induce the belief that it
+is to combination that the working classes ought still to trust. If they
+cannot by this means put down overtime&mdash;and as yet they have not been
+able to do so&mdash;they cannot expect their countrymen to raise prices and
+run the risk of commercial ruin by doing for them what they ought to be
+able to do for themselves.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXXIV.&mdash;SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE WITH PROPERTY?</span></h2>
+
+<p>Having dealt with the manner in which the State interferes with labour,
+which to most is their only property, it is necessary to consider how it
+deals with capital, which is the fruit of labour, and how it thus
+interferes with some of what are termed &ldquo;the rights of property.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>This has been done in order to avoid greater ills, as in the case of the
+fixing of fair rents by judicial courts in Ireland and certain districts
+of the Highlands of Scotland; in others to prevent endless dispute and
+loss, as in the disposal, in specified proportions, of the personal
+property of those who die without a will; in a further series to prevent
+a virtual monopoly from becoming tyrannous, as in the compulsion of
+railway companies to run certain third-class trains, and not to charge
+beyond a stated fare, or the restriction of the profits of gas companies
+to 10 per cent. unless a specified reduction in price is made to the
+consumers; in others, yet, for the supposed advantage of a class, as in
+the custom of primogeniture, which gives all real property (that is,
+land) to the eldest son of a father who dies intestate; and, in others,
+for the presumed benefit of the community, at the expense of individual
+efforts, as in the limitation of the duration of patents for inventions
+to seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years, and of copyright in books to
+forty-two years from the date of publication, or for the author&rsquo;s life
+and seven years after, whichever of these terms may be the longer.</p>
+
+<p>As to the first three points&mdash;the fixing of fair rents in Ireland and
+the Highlands, the due division of the personal property of those who
+die without a will, and the limitation of the power of virtual
+monopolies&mdash;there is no need at this day to argue, for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> all are
+irrevocable. As to the fourth, there is no practical disagreement among
+leading politicians on both sides regarding the desirability of doing
+away with the custom of primogeniture, as enforced by law. But as to the
+fifth, it may be submitted that the State goes too far or not far enough.</p>
+
+<p>Our legislators have been exceedingly tender towards every description
+of property except that created by certain of the highest phases of
+brain-power. If a man invents a machine which may save millions to the
+community, he loses all specific property in his invention after a given
+period of years; if he writes a book which may elevate mankind, his
+family are similarly condemned after a certain period to forfeit all
+claim upon the fruits of his labour. But if, instead of putting his
+brain to such uses, he merely makes a machine or lends a book for hire,
+there is no law to step in and deprive him of the profits if either
+machine or book lasts a century.</p>
+
+<p>Why this difference? The theory appears to be that the community is
+entitled to profit after a certain period by the brains of its members,
+when used in the creative or inventive direction; but if the claim be
+good, has not the State an equal right to profit after a similar period
+by the brains of its members when used in trading ways? Why should
+brains exercised in one direction be handicapped in comparison with
+those exercised in another? The answer may be that the inventor or
+author employs no capital, that the trader does, and that, therefore,
+whatever profit the former is allowed to make is a profit upon nothing,
+while in the latter case the profit is directly upon the capital
+employed, which ought not to be interfered with.</p>
+
+<p>But this is to adopt the fallacy that capital is necessarily the same
+thing as money. The capital of an inventor or an author is his brains,
+which he expends upon his invention or his book; and the community has
+exactly the same right to deprive the widow and the orphan of a fortune
+because it was made by a lucky speculation, for instance, forty-two
+years before, as of their property in a book because it was published
+that length of time previous. It is true that the State does not fully
+exercise this right, and protects the family of the mere money-maker
+while it despoils that of the brain-worker; but the principle is one
+which contains larger possibilities than the former have yet realized.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p><p>The argument that it is for the benefit of the community that only a
+certain amount of time should be given to the inventor or the author in
+which to make a profit is dangerous, because it can so easily be applied
+to other species of property. Why not to the body of the machine as well
+as to its principle, why not to the pages of the book as well as to what
+they contain? And even if it is never pushed so far, there are certain
+species of property now protected by the law which will not improbably
+be attacked upon this same ground of &ldquo;the benefit of the community&rdquo;
+before very long; and it is difficult to see how they can be defended as
+long as the statutes affecting copyright and patents exist.</p>
+
+<p>The most striking of such kinds of property is that in minerals. A man
+buys an estate for farming, grazing, or, it may be, purposes of
+pleasure. Some time afterwards minerals are found beneath it, and,
+though he has neither placed them there nor may assist to get them out,
+he is privileged to charge &ldquo;mining royalties&rdquo; upon every ton that is
+raised as long as there is any to be obtained. Why should not his power
+in this direction be limited? He takes everything and gives nothing; the
+author or inventor gives everything and takes little. It would be as
+much for &ldquo;the benefit of the community&rdquo; to have the former&rsquo;s minerals
+after a given period, with no reward to himself, as to have the latter&rsquo;s
+books or machines. Why, then, should bullion be carefully protected and
+brains despoiled? If it be replied that when a man has bought a plot of
+ground it is his to the centre of the earth at one side and to the sky
+on the other, may it not be submitted that the former portion of the
+right ought to be restricted, while the latter certainly does not exist,
+for the law steps in at point after point to control his use of the land
+between the surface and the sky?</p>
+
+<p>The State, therefore, interferes with property, as it is, in a most
+material degree: instances of such interference have been scattered
+through these pages, and the tendency of the future is likely to be
+towards more than less interference. And there is hardly any that can be
+proposed, even of the extremest kind, for which it would not be possible
+to find a precedent.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXXV.&mdash;OUGHT THE STATE TO FIND FOOD AND WORK FOR ALL?</span></h2>
+
+<p>The State thus interfering with both capital and labour, it is sometimes
+contended that its duties ought to be so extended as to find food and
+work for all. There is a captivating sound about the proposition which
+has commended it to many without a due weighing of the probable results.
+It is a matter upon which a hasty generalization, though springing from
+the purest motives, may do vast harm, and is one, therefore, which all
+ought most carefully to consider before expressing an opinion upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Cardinal Manning, in an article published in the winter of 1887, carried
+the theory of the public duty of feeding the hungry to its extremest
+point in these words&mdash;&ldquo;All men are bound by natural obligations, if they
+can, to feed the hungry. But it may be said that granting the obligation
+in the giver does not prove a right in the receiver. To which I answer
+that the obligation to feed the hungry springs from the natural right of
+every man to life, and to the food necessary for the sustenance of life.
+So strict is this natural right that it prevails over all positive laws
+of property. Necessity has no law, and a starving man has a natural
+right to his neighbour&rsquo;s bread.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>With all deference, the last sentence must be stated to be false, both
+in logic and morals. If it were true, it would justify immediate raids
+by the starving upon the nearest baker&rsquo;s shop, and one wonders what the
+Cardinal would say if he happened to be the baker. Granting that every
+one has a right to live, there is no equivalent right to live at other
+people&rsquo;s expense.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> It is true that, by our Poor Law, a system has been
+created by which no one need starve, but that does not justify the theft
+of bread. There is a preliminary question to be put even in the case of
+the starving, and that is as to why they are in that condition. If it be
+because they have been idle, or drunken, or generally worthless, as in
+many cases it is, the mere fact that they are starving does not entitle
+them to sack a baker&rsquo;s shop. They will be fed by the Poor Law if they
+take the necessary steps, but if they are able-bodied they will have to
+work for their food; and as most human beings have to do the same, where is the hardship?</p>
+
+<p>It will be replied by some that the Poor Law works harshly towards the
+deserving poor, but that is an argument for amendment, not for abolition
+or indiscriminate extension. And if it be further said that the food
+supplied is meagre and the lodgings rough, it must be remembered that
+the poor-rate is paid by a very large number whose food is no more
+plentiful and whose lodgings are certainly worse. As for the argument
+that some people starve rather than &ldquo;enter the house,&rdquo; it is not easy to
+see what relief could be given by the State without infringing that spirit.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a question most intimately affecting this matter which,
+though of the highest importance, cannot be discussed here as it
+deserves, and that is the question of population, concerning which Mill
+truly says, &ldquo;Every one has a right to live. We will suppose this
+granted. But no one has a right to bring creatures into life, to be
+supported by other people. Whoever means to stand upon the first of
+these rights must renounce all pretension to the last. If a man cannot
+support even himself unless others help him, those others are entitled
+to say that they do not also undertake the support of any offspring
+which it is physically possible for him to summon into the world.... It
+would be possible for the State to guarantee employment at ample wages
+to all who are born. But if it does this, it is bound in
+self-protection, and for the sake of every purpose for which government
+exists, to provide that no person shall be born without its consent....
+It cannot, with impunity, take the feeding upon itself and leave the
+multiplying free.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p><p>And so, while the Poor Law ought to be carried out in the humanest and
+most liberal fashion compatible with the interests of the poor who pay
+the rates as well as the poor who benefit by them, any movement for so
+extending it as to bring more persons under its operation, and thus to
+further pauperize the community, would be dangerous. We had enough of
+that under the system swept away by the Act of 1834, the hideous
+demoralization caused by which should be studied to-day by those who are
+eager for a freer dispensation of State relief.</p>
+
+<p>The arguments against the State going further than at present in the
+direction of giving food to all are equally good as against providing
+work for all. Relief works have ever been centres of corruption and
+waste of the worst type, while &ldquo;national workshops&rdquo; have not been so
+brilliant a success in the form of dockyards and arsenals as to warrant
+an extension of the system to all the trades we practise.</p>
+
+<p>The theory that the State is bound to provide work for all was never
+more concisely put than in the original draft of the French Republican
+Constitution after the Revolution of 1848, the seventh article of which
+ran thus: &ldquo;The right of labour is the right which every man has to live
+by his labour. It is the duty of Society, through the channels of
+production and other means at its command, hereafter to be organized, to
+provide work for such able-bodied men as cannot find it for themselves.&rdquo;
+But even a Government imbued with Socialistic tendencies found this to
+be much too strong, and modified it thus: &ldquo;It is the duty of Society by
+fraternal assistance to protect the lives of necessitous citizens,
+either by finding them work as far as possible, or by providing for
+those who are incapacitated for work and who have no families to support
+them.&rdquo; Yet the modified form was not found to work well in actual
+practice, and the history of the failure of the French National
+Workshops of 1848 remains as an eloquent testimony to the fact that the
+State ought to interfere as little as possible with industrial
+enterprises and private concerns.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXXVI.&mdash;HOW OUGHT WE TO DEAL WITH SOCIALISM?</span></h2>
+
+<p>Even the considerations already put forward do not exhaust the social
+question, for only in the briefest fashion have been touched the
+important points which that question involves. And there is yet left to
+be discussed the attitude which ought to be adopted towards that body of
+opinions upon public affairs vaguely known as &ldquo;Socialism.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The attitude of some is simply denunciatory, for there is a class of
+politician which always imputes base motives to those with whom it
+disagrees, and which is so proficient in abuse that it apparently thinks
+it a waste of time to argue. That class has been painfully in evidence
+in regard to the Socialists. It is considered that&mdash;so true is the old
+proverb that if you give a dog a bad name you may as well hang
+him&mdash;nothing more need be done respecting a new and therefore unpopular
+doctrine than to so label it as to ensure its repudiation by honest but
+unthinking men. And thus the name &ldquo;Socialist&rdquo; is applied as equivalent
+to thief; and men utterly ignorant of what the words imply link
+Socialist to Nihilist, Communist to Anarchist, as if each were equal to
+each, and all therefore equal to one another.</p>
+
+<p>This has been the favourite device of the opponents of all new
+doctrines, political or social, philosophical or religious. To be
+ridiculed, to be persecuted, even to be slain has been the fate of the
+would-be elevators of their kind, as the roll of fame, which includes
+the names of Socrates and Galileo, Luther and Savonarola, Voltaire and
+Roger Bacon, Mazzini and Darwin will testify. The Socialists now are
+hardly called worse names than were applied to geologists fifty years
+ago, and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> Evolutionists but the other day. Atheists, of course, they
+have been named, for Atheist is the epithet customarily applied by
+ignorant and bigoted men, who have made God in their own image, to those
+more zealous in endeavouring to raise humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Against any such method of dealing with public questions all fair-minded
+men should strongly, and without ceasing, protest. And as Socialism is
+spreading among the masses, it is in the highest degree important that
+the fact should be studied calmly and without prejudice. Hard words
+break no bones, and contumely tends to strengthen any cause in which
+there is an atom of good.</p>
+
+<p>Socialism, therefore, should be dealt with in an inquiring and not an
+abusive spirit, and with the determination to accept from it whatever of
+good to the community we may find it to contain. There is another method
+which Prince Bismarck has been trying for years, and with the signal
+lack of success that always comes from trying to stamp out an opinion by
+force of law. In presumed defence of &ldquo;society&rdquo; and &ldquo;order&rdquo;&mdash;two
+excellent things, but often the excuse for despots to perpetrate cruel
+injustice upon the liberty-loving and the poor&mdash;he has secured law after
+law for the purpose of &ldquo;putting down Socialism;&rdquo; men have been torn from
+their homes because of their opinions; the right of public meeting has
+been placed at the mercy of the police; the press has been gagged, and
+every means taken to stamp out a body of opinions some of which even the
+German Chancellor himself cannot help sharing. And with what result?
+That, after ten years of this wretched work, the Socialists&mdash;though
+prevented from public meeting, speaking, or writing&mdash;are multiplying in
+Germany in an ever-growing proportion; that in Berlin, the capital of
+the empire, they number tens of thousands of electors as their
+adherents; and that Prince Bismarck is ever asking for extended powers
+to crush a force which, in its free state, as yielding to the touch as
+water, is mighty when compressed.</p>
+
+<p>With an even greater power of police, and no restriction at all from the
+laws, the Czar has failed as signally to extirpate Nihilism. Ideas
+cannot be killed in this fashion, though their holders can be and are
+rendered more dangerous. Mill certainly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> considered that &ldquo;the dictum
+that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant
+falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into
+commonplaces, but which all experience refutes;&rdquo; and he was of opinion
+that &ldquo;no reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been
+extirpated in the Roman Empire.&rdquo; But it may be submitted that, when
+arguing about the persecution of ideas to-day, we must not forget the
+immense additional force given to them by means of printing. The secret
+presses of Germany and Russia &ldquo;spread the light;&rdquo; and there is nothing
+so certain as that the very charm which comes from the possession of
+that which is prohibited aids in strengthening a movement which is under
+the ban of the law.</p>
+
+<p>But, it may be said, the efforts of those who would attempt to put down
+Socialism are not to be considered in the light of political
+persecution, and are not to be compared with religious persecution, for
+they are directed solely to the suppression of &ldquo;anti-social&rdquo; doctrines,
+the adoption of which would be fatal not only to States as they now
+exist, but to society itself. A more precise definition must be asked,
+however, of the doctrines thus described. Though opposed to an eight
+hours&rsquo; bill, to land nationalization, and to national workshops, leading
+points in the Socialist programme, I cannot conceive how, if they were
+all adopted within the next year, such dire results could from them flow.</p>
+
+<p>Every new body of doctrine which gives hope to the masses and threatens
+the domination of the privileged among men has been described with equal
+virulence by its antagonists. Read the charges upon which Christians
+were condemned under the Roman Empire; read those brought against Luther
+and his co-reformers when first Protestantism threatened the Church of
+Rome; remember those thrown at the Puritans when they tried to secure
+for Englishmen liberty of thought and action. They were in every case
+that the doctrines were anti-social; that if adopted they would wreck
+the then condition of society; and that they were in the highest degree
+perilous to the State. For it is the fate of all preachers of a new
+doctrine to be treated as rogues until their persecutors are proved to be fools.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p><p>Admittedly there are some theories advanced by men calling themselves
+Socialists which, if adopted, would seriously conflict with the existing
+order of society; but to condemn every proposal put forward as Socialist
+because there are Socialists who have said strange, and sometimes
+stupid, things would be monstrous. It is a controversial trick of a
+peculiarly poor order to attempt to hold the leaders of any movement
+responsible for the hare-brained ideas of some of their followers. Not
+to repudiate them is not to signify agreement, or our party leaders
+would possess some of the most extravagant doctrines ever conceived by man.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, one must always sever the conventional beliefs from the real.
+No sensible person considers Christianity untrue because even the
+churches would regard him as a madman who literally adopted the
+injunction to sell all that he had to give to the poor. In any body of
+doctrines there are always some which its adherents hold, but do not stand by.</p>
+
+<p>And, therefore, charity as well as common sense demands that the tall
+talk on both sides&mdash;for there is not a great deal to choose between them
+in this respect&mdash;should cease; but the trick is too easily learned to be
+quickly dropped. The idea of the well-to-do that all would go smoothly
+if it were not for &ldquo;agitators&rdquo; and &ldquo;mob-orators&rdquo; is as absurd as the
+contention of the Socialist that most of our ills are due to the
+&ldquo;profit-monger.&rdquo; Your &ldquo;agitator&rdquo; or your &ldquo;mob-orator&rdquo; would have not the
+least influence if he did not voice the feelings, the longings, and the
+hopes of his silent friends. And as for the &ldquo;profit-monger,&rdquo; is not the
+workman who is better off than the poorest among his fellows deserving the name?</p>
+
+<p>Let us have fair play all round to ideas as well as to men. If, in the
+supposed interests of society, every movement designed to upraise the
+poor is suppressed, the tendency must be to force men towards Anarchism
+and Nihilism, by causing them to wish to destroy that order of things
+which to them acts so unjustly. Despair is a fatal counsellor, and those
+who would identify the welfare of the State with that of the mere
+money-getter are its frequent cause. It is easier to raise the devil
+than to lay him, and appeals to the merely animal instinct in
+man&mdash;whether to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> protect his own property or to take that of others,
+with a complete ignoring of his duties as well as his rights&mdash;must end
+in ruin and shame.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;There is among the English working classes,&rdquo; once observed Sir Robert
+Peel, &ldquo;too much suffering and too much perplexity. It is a disgrace and
+a danger to our civilization. It is absolutely necessary that we should
+render the condition of the manual labourer less hard and less
+precarious. We cannot do everything, but something may be effected, and
+something ought to be done.&rdquo; Though nearly forty years have passed since
+that statesman&rsquo;s death, we are still groping blindly for the something
+which ought to be done for the poor; and such strength as Socialism
+possesses is derived from the general spread of the feeling which Peel
+put into words, and which no politician&mdash;much more no statesman&mdash;can
+afford to neglect.</p>
+
+<p>And that is why the politics of the future will be largely affected by
+the social questions now coming to the front. From the opinions of many
+who are pressing them forward one may profoundly differ, but justice
+demands that all they advance should be examined without prejudice, and
+with the determination to accept that which is good, from whatever
+quarter it may come.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXXVII.&mdash;WHAT SHOULD BE THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME?</span></h2>
+
+<p>While the social problem, however, is developing, we have the political
+problem to face; and, therefore, the immediate programme of the Liberal
+party now demands consideration. In some detail have been presented the
+arguments from a Liberal point upon all the great public questions which
+are either ripe or ripening for settlement. It has not been possible to
+go minutely into every point involved; a broad outline of each subject
+has had to suffice; but it may be trusted that each has been
+sufficiently explained for us now to consider which should occupy the
+forefront in the Liberal platform.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bright observed, in days not long since, when he was honoured by
+every man in the party as one of its most trusted leaders, that he
+disliked programmes. What he preferred, it was evident, was that when
+some great question&mdash;such as the repeal of the Corn Laws or the
+extension of the suffrage, with both of which his name will be ever
+identified&mdash;should thrust itself to the front by force of circumstances,
+it should be faced by the Liberal party and dealt with on its merits;
+and what he opposed, it was equally evident, was the formulation of any
+cut-and-dried programme, containing a number of points to be accepted as
+a shibboleth by every man calling himself Liberal or Radical, and by its
+hide-bound propensity tending to retard real progress.</p>
+
+<p>The Irish question is one of those great matters which has thrust itself
+to the front by force of circumstances, which should be faced by the
+Liberal party and dealt with on its merits, and which, until it is so
+faced and dealt with, will stand in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> path of any real reforms. The
+evil effects of the discontent of four millions of people at our very
+doors are not to be got rid of by shutting our eyes to them; and the
+intensification of those evil effects which is to-day going on is a
+matter which must engage the attention of every Liberal.</p>
+
+<p>But, out of dislike for any cut-and-dried programme of several measures
+to be accepted wholesale and without question, the party must not be
+allowed to drift into aimlessness. As long as it exists it must exist
+for work, and its fruit must not be phrases but facts. Liberalism can
+never return to the days when it munched the dry remainder biscuit of
+worn-out Whiggery. A hide-bound programme may be a bad thing, but
+nothing worse can be imagined than the string of airy nothings which
+used to do duty for a policy among the latter-day Whigs. Take the
+addresses issued by them at the general election of 1852 as an instance,
+and which have been effectively summarized thus:&mdash;&ldquo;They promised (in the
+words of Sir James Graham) &lsquo;cautious but progressive reform,&rsquo; and (in
+those of Sir Charles Wood) &lsquo;well-advised but certain progress.&rsquo; Lord
+Palmerston said he trusted the new Liberal Government would answer &lsquo;the
+just expectation of the country,&rsquo; and Lord John Russell pledged it to
+&lsquo;rational and enlightened progress.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Now, in these days, we want something decidedly more definite than that,
+and, if our leaders could offer us nothing better, we should have either
+to find other leaders or abandon our aims. Happily we need do neither,
+for the Liberal chiefs, with Mr. Gladstone at their head, are prepared
+to advance with the needs of the times, and to advocate those measures
+which the circumstances demand and their principles justify.</p>
+
+<p>In the forefront of our efforts at this moment stands, and must continue
+to stand until it is settled, the question of self-government for
+Ireland. Stripped of all quarrel upon point of detail, the Liberal party
+is pledged, while upholding the unity of the Empire and the supremacy of
+the Imperial Parliament, to give the sister country a representative
+body sitting in Dublin to deal with exclusively Irish affairs. The day
+cannot be long delayed when an attempt must be made to place the local
+government of Ireland upon a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> sounder and broader basis than at present.
+When it arrives, the Liberal party has its idea ready. Details can be
+compromised; the principle cannot be touched. For Liberals are convinced
+that, by whatever name it may be called, and by whatever party it may be
+introduced, Home Rule must come, and that, for the sake of all the
+interests involved, Imperial and Irish, it will be in the highest degree
+desirable to grant it frankly and fully, with due regard to the
+interests concerned.</p>
+
+<p>Linked with this point is another regarding Ireland upon which the
+Liberal party will entertain not the smallest doubt. The Coercion Act
+has been used for partisan purposes by dependent and often incompetent
+magistrates, and it must be repealed. Upon this point there can be no
+compromise. Every man hoping to be returned by Liberal votes at the next
+election must pledge himself to the immediate, total, and unconditional
+repeal of the Crimes Act of 1887.</p>
+
+<p>The next item in the accepted Liberal programme is the disestablishment
+of the Church in Wales, as well as of the Scottish Kirk. Each is a
+purely domestic matter which ought to be settled according to the wishes
+of the majority of the people affected. As to the wishes of Wales, no
+one can have a doubt; and though the declaration of Scotland, through
+its representatives, is not so emphatic, it is sufficiently clear for
+Liberals to support the demand.</p>
+
+<p>But, after all, these points touch only Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.
+England is the largest portion of this kingdom, and its claims must not
+be ignored. A great Parisian editor used to say that the description of
+a woman run over on the Boulevards was of more interest to his readers
+than that of a battle on the Nile. It would be well if politicians would
+take this idea to heart. Little use is it to talk of the despotism
+practised in Ireland, of the hardships endured by the crofters in
+Scotland, and of the injustice done to the tithepayers in Wales, if we
+are not prepared to apply the same principles to London as to Limerick,
+to Chester as to Cardigan, and to Liverpool as to the Lews. The average
+man will not be satisfied of the sincerity of those who keep their eyes
+fixed upon distant places, and are full of sympathy for the oppressed
+who are afar off,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> but can spare no time for the grievances existing at
+their doors.</p>
+
+<p>And as, therefore, if Liberalism is to be again in the ascendant in the
+councils of the Empire, England must be won, it is well to emphasize the
+contention that England will never be won by a party which ignores her
+wants. Home Rule for Ireland, disestablishment for Scotland and Wales,
+are good things, and they will have to be granted when our majority
+comes; but what will that majority do for England?</p>
+
+<p>Without attempting to lay down a programme, it may be said that there is
+one English problem to which Liberalism will have at once to apply
+itself, and that is the problem of the land. The time is past for
+talking comfortable platitudes upon this matter, for we find that Tories
+can do that as glibly as Liberals, and with the same lack of good
+result. The very least that can be demanded&mdash;in addition to the
+abolition of the custom of primogeniture and an extensive simplification
+of the process of transfer&mdash;is a thorough reform of the laws affecting
+settlement, the taxing of land at death in the same proportion as other
+descriptions of property, the placing of the land tax upon a basis more
+remunerative to the Exchequer, and a large measure of leasehold
+enfranchisement. And when candidates talk in future of being in favour
+of &ldquo;land reform,&rdquo; they must be definitely pinned down as to their views
+upon such points as these.</p>
+
+<p>That Free Trade will remain a plank in the Liberal platform, not to be
+dropped or tampered with, goes without saying. It is a point as much
+beyond question as the existence of Parliament itself, and concerning it
+as much cannot be observed as regarding the latter. For, while our trade
+system must remain free, both Houses stand in need of reform. The Lords,
+in Mr. John Morley&rsquo;s phrase, must be mended or ended, and the path of
+legislative progress in the Commons made more smooth. The laws in every
+way affecting the return of members to the latter likewise stand sorely
+in need of reform, and that reform cannot be ignored by the Liberal party.</p>
+
+<p>Further, Liberals are agreed that localities shall have greater power in
+various directions, and upon the liquor traffic in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> especial, of
+deciding upon their own affairs. The tendency of recent days has been to
+take these out of the hands of those most intimately concerned, and to
+vest supreme power in a body of Government clerks at Whitehall. That is
+a tendency which must be reversed. We are advocating decentralization in
+regard to Ireland; we are being led to advocate it in regard to Wales
+and Scotland; England must similarly be benefited, and the red-tape of
+Whitehall unwound from our purely local concerns.</p>
+
+<p>Peace and Retrenchment must continue to be inscribed on the Liberal
+banner as well as Reform. Preference for international arbitration over
+war must distinguish our party; a determination to be as free as
+possible from all entangling engagements with foreign powers must always
+be with us. And there must ever be displayed a resolve to place the
+Government service upon the same business-like and efficient basis as
+private concerns, to get rid of the notion that it is work to be lightly
+undertaken and highly paid, and to emphasize the contention that the
+taxbearer shall have full value from every one of his servants for the
+wages he pays.</p>
+
+<p>Above all, the greatest care must be taken by every Liberal to
+preserve&mdash;aye, and to extend&mdash;individual liberty. Men cannot dance in
+fetters, and all enactments which unnecessarily hinder the development
+of private enterprise, and all traditions which interfere with the
+fullest enjoyment of the rights of speech and action, must be swept away.</p>
+
+<p>While thus giving our attention to the more purely political questions
+as they arise, Liberals must never forget that the poor we always have
+with us. Ours is a gospel of hope for the oppressed; it must equally be
+a gospel of hope for the hard-working. We want our working men to be
+civil, not servile; our working women to use courtesy, and not a
+curtsey. We wish to see the end of a system by which a bow is rewarded
+with a blanket and a curtsey with coal. The man who too frequently bends
+his back is likely to become permanently affected with a stoop, and the
+old order of hat-touching, bowing, and scraping must disappear. We do
+not deny that it is right that men should respect others, but it is
+often forgotten that it is equally right that they should respect themselves.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p><p>In dealing with things social, as well as things political, we must
+always remember that it is flesh and blood with which in the result we
+have to deal. Some thinkers ignore sentiment, do not believe in
+kindness, and treat men like machines, forgetting that even machines
+require oil. It is not for philosophers with homes and armchairs and a
+settled income to ask whether life is worth living; that question is for
+the poor and the lowly and the down-trodden, to whom the struggle for
+existence is not a matter for theorizing or moral-drawing, but is a
+never-ending, heart-breaking, soul-destroying reality.</p>
+
+<p>So, if Liberalism is to live, it must be liberal in fact as well as in
+name. A Liberal who talks of equal rights on the platform and swears at
+his servants at home, who waxes wroth against a national oppressor and
+treats those poorer than himself like serfs, is as little deserving of
+respect as a Liberal policy which solely considers the externals of
+either liberty or life. A programme based upon such a policy must fail,
+and deserves to fail; and if we are to have a platform at all, it must
+be one upon which the rich man and the son of toil can stand side by side.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXXVIII.&mdash;HOW IS THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME TO BE ATTAINED?</span></h2>
+
+<p>It is natural to ask how, when the Liberal programme has been framed, it
+is to be attained. Measures no more come with wishing than winds with
+whistling; and if our principles are to be put into practice, it will
+only be by our joining those of similar mind.</p>
+
+<p>Not every politician, even if his ideas be sound, is a practical man.
+The disposition to insist that no bread is better than half a loaf is
+one that commends itself to me neither in business nor in daily life,
+but it is one upon which many a man of Liberal leanings acts, to the
+detriment of the principles he professes to hold dear. Insistence upon
+the one point to the exclusion of the ninety-nine, and readiness to join
+enemies who disagree on the whole hundred rather than friends who
+disagree on only the one, are qualities unpleasantly prominent in many
+otherwise worthy men. It cannot too often be urged that politics, like
+business or married life, can only be carried on by occasional
+give-and-take. The partner who persists in always having his own way;
+the husband who is ever asserting authority over his wife; and the
+politician who will never yield an iota to his friends&mdash;all are alike
+objectionable, and deserve no particle of consideration from those around them.</p>
+
+<p>A spurious independence is another hindrance in the path of progress.
+Faith without works is occasionally worth commendation in public life;
+but one must be certain that the faith is genuine, and for most
+political &ldquo;independence,&rdquo; that cannot be claimed. Diseased vanity,
+disappointed ambition, and deliberate place-hunting have more to do with
+that kind of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> thing than devotion to principle. &ldquo;The fact is that
+individualism is very often a mere cloak for selfishness; it is the name
+with which pedants justify the pragmatic intolerance which will not
+yield one jot of personal claim or unsatisfied vanity to secure the
+triumph of the noblest cause and the highest principles.&rdquo; When Mr.
+Chamberlain wrote those words he was undoubtedly right.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever, therefore, one is called upon to admire some outburst of
+independence which splits a political party or hinders the progress of a
+cause, he should look very closely at the history of those concerned. He
+should not forget that, just as there are people who are much too
+independent to touch their hats for civility, though they would for a
+sixpence, there are politicians who are far too spirited to stick to
+their party but not to bid for place. Happily these latter seem never
+able to avoid using certain stock phrases, which should put others on
+their guard. When a man says he prefers country to party, or vaunts that
+his motto is &ldquo;measures not men,&rdquo; he lays himself open to just suspicion,
+because he talks as political impostors have long been accustomed to
+talk; when he proclaims his readiness to recognize the virtues of his
+enemies, you may be certain that he will speedily show himself keenly
+alive to the failings of his friends; and a politician never begins to
+boast that he is a representative and not a delegate until he has ceased
+to represent the opinions of those who sent him to Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>More estimable than these, but still people who must not be allowed to
+hamper the operations of the Liberal party, are the constitutional
+pedant and the rigid doctrinaire. Nothing is more lamentable than the
+endeavours of the former to prove by precedent that nothing ought to be
+done in the nineteenth century differently to how it was done in the
+seventeenth; and nothing more filled with the promise of disappointment
+than the theorizings of the latter as to what measures would secure us a
+perfect State.</p>
+
+<p>It is with persons as well as with principles that we have to deal, and
+in politics we must not despise the humblest instruments. History, like
+the coral reef, is made grain by grain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> and day by day, and often by
+agents as comparatively insignificant. The old idea that the people&rsquo;s
+leaders must come from &ldquo;the governing classes,&rdquo; or, better still, &ldquo;the
+governing families,&rdquo; does not harmonize with democratic institutions. As
+to &ldquo;the governing families&rdquo; part of it, that may be brushed aside at
+once as being as absurd in theory as it is untrue to all recent English
+history; for who have been our most brilliant and successful statesmen
+since the present fashion of constitutional government was established?
+Who were Walpole, Pitt, Burke, Fox, Canning, Peel, Cobden, Gladstone,
+and Disraeli? Even as this book is written the Tories in the House of
+Commons are nominally led by Mr. Smith, and practically by Mr. Goschen.
+The instinct of the people has taught them the best leaders, as it has
+taught them the best principles.</p>
+
+<p>A clear-headed working man is a better political counsellor than a
+muddle-minded peer. There are plenty of working men who are not
+clear-headed, as there are plenty of peers who are not muddled of mind;
+but the instinct of the mass is far more likely to be sound than that of
+the class. In the course of English history the masses have usually been
+right and the classes wrong. The former have been less selfish, more
+ready to redress injuries, and keener to oppose tyranny. And even where
+the masses have been in the wrong, it has often been because their
+instinctive sense of right has led them to sympathize with a man or a
+cause, undeserving of regard, but apparently exposed to the persecutions
+of the great.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, in order to make the Liberal cause succeed, zeal must be combined
+with unity and toleration with courage, and our energies must be so
+concentrated by organization as to make them most effective when battle
+is joined. For the private soldiers in the great army of progress, there
+is no advice so sedulously to be rejected as that of Talleyrand, &ldquo;Above
+all, no zeal.&rdquo; If there is not within Liberals a burning desire to
+forward their principles, they have no right to complain if those
+principles stand still. A Liberal who is lukewarm is like a joint
+half-cooked&mdash;of no practical service until possessed of more heat; and
+it is the duty of every earnest man among us to keep the political oven
+at baking point.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p><p>But with zeal there must be unity. Differences on details must not be
+allowed to separate friends. There is not always a sufficiency of
+tolerance displayed towards those who do not see eye to eye with the
+others. Agreement in principle is the pass-key which should open to all
+Liberals the door to unity with their brethren; divergence on detail
+should be settled inside. &ldquo;Take heed,&rdquo; said Cromwell, &ldquo;of being sharp,
+or too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object
+little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning
+matters of religion.&rdquo; To no modern Liberal can his principles be dearer
+than was his religion to Cromwell, and the great champion of liberty&rsquo;s
+words ought to be laid to heart by each one of us.</p>
+
+<p>With all toleration, there must be no lack of courage. It is not asked
+of most to make sacrifices in the Liberal cause, far less to become
+martyrs in its behalf; but unless the martyr-spirit remains to the
+party, ready for action should occasion arise, Liberalism will wither
+into wastedness. But even courage will fail of its result without
+concentration, for the undisciplined mass is no match for the
+disciplined army. To succeed, there must be organization; and if
+Liberals will not associate for common purposes they will deserve to be
+beaten. All holders of progressive principles ought to attach themselves
+to the Liberal Association of their own constituency; if there is a
+Radical Club as well, they cannot do better than join it; for the more
+links that exist between all sections of the party, the stronger will be
+the bond uniting them. Personal likes or dislikes ought not to affect
+men in the matter. A Liberal is not worthy the name who, because he is
+not asked to the house of the president of the local association,
+declines to join; and equally unworthy of it is he who, because he does
+not ask the president of the Radical Club to his own house, objects to
+put up for membership. Personal and social considerations of this kind
+are out of place in politics, and a man&rsquo;s freedom from them may almost
+be taken as a test of the reality of his Liberalism.</p>
+
+<p>There are many ready to criticize those who do a party&rsquo;s work, but who
+never lift a finger to assist their efforts. These<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> are the beings who,
+at election times, hinder the helpers by carpings, who are never slow to
+assume a share of credit in case of victory, and are ever eager to throw
+the blame upon others in event of defeat. Battles are not won by such as
+these. Every Liberal to whom his principles are dear should show it by
+joining with his fellows, striving his hardest in his own constituency,
+and never ceasing to display in his life and by his works that
+Liberalism to him is not a name but a principle, increasingly dear as it
+is hampered by desertion, threatened with danger, or in peril of defeat.
+If he did that, there would be needed no further answer to the question,
+&ldquo;How is the Liberal Programme to be attained?&rdquo; for what was required
+would have been accomplished.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XXXIX.&mdash;IS PERFECTION IN POLITICS POSSIBLE?</span></h2>
+
+<p>It is sometimes asked whether, after all the struggling of public life,
+perfection in politics is possible. But in what department of human
+affairs <i>is</i> perfection possible? Is it in medicine? Mark the proportion
+of those born who die before they are five years old. Is it in science?
+The scientist is still engaged, as Newton was, in picking up shells on
+the shore of a vast ocean of knowledge which he is unable yet to
+navigate. Is it in religion? Ask the Christian and the Confucian, the
+Mahommedan and the Buddhist to define the word, before giving an answer.
+When medicine, and science, and religion have reached universally
+acknowledged perfection, politics may be hoped to follow in their wake;
+but until that period it is needless to expect it.</p>
+
+<p>The very idea that it is possible has been the cause of many delusions,
+and delusions are dangerous. Read Plato&rsquo;s &ldquo;Republic,&rdquo; More&rsquo;s &ldquo;Utopia,&rdquo;
+and Harington&rsquo;s &ldquo;Oceana,&rdquo; and you will perceive how far the ideal is
+removed from any conceivable real. It may be that from these works good
+has flowed, since the evident impossibility of making the whole plan of
+use has not prevented political thinkers taking from them such ideas as
+were practicable, and grafting these upon existing institutions, with
+benefit to the State. But the dreamy schemes of the eighteenth century,
+the influence of which has not yet died away, were of a different order.
+For, in the endeavour to change society at a stroke, blunders were made
+which have caused lasting injury; and these should teach us that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> the
+true ideal in politics is that which does not attempt to bend men, or
+break them if necessary, to suit the machine, but makes the machine to
+fit the men. The philosopher is a useful personage, but the attempt to
+rule men from a library customarily results in disaster. The problem of
+life cannot be solved like a proposition in Euclid; there, squares
+always are squares and circles never anything else; but in every-day
+existence the square is often forced to be circular by the rubbing off
+of the angles. And too often it will be found that the philosopher,
+because of his lack of practical acquaintance with his fellow men,
+exaggerates both what he knows and what he does: he blows a bubble and
+calls it the globe; lighting a candle, he thinks it the sun.</p>
+
+<p>All history teaches that the road to heaven does not lie through Acts of
+Parliament, and that under the best laws the saints would not be many
+and the sinners would be far from few. No more pernicious nonsense is
+talked than that all our social misery, crime, and degradation is due to
+bad laws. The political student cannot doubt that much misery may be
+mitigated, crime prevented, and degradation made impossible by good
+laws, and it is that knowledge which should stimulate every Liberal to
+lose no opportunity of improving the conditions under which we live. But
+it is to display an ignorance of human nature that is really lamentable,
+or a desire to flatter human weakness that is beneath contempt, to tell
+the people that, if only certain changes were made in the constitution
+of the State or of society, all would be well, none would suffer, and
+crime and poverty would be known only as traditions of the past.</p>
+
+<p>It is not necessary to assert the old theological dogma that, left to
+himself, man is irredeemably bad, in order to believe that a great many
+bearing the name are very far from good. There is, unhappily, hardly a
+family in the country that has not one black sheep&mdash;or, at the best, one
+speckled specimen&mdash;to deplore. Do we not all know the idle worthless son
+of good and hard-working parents, a curse to his own and to all with
+whom he comes in contact? The laws affecting him are the same as those
+which affect his brothers: they prosper, he fails.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> Why? Because they
+are worthy, he is worthless; and there is no conceivable state of
+society in which he could be, or ought to be, served as well as they.
+Certainly there are bad men who flourish, and good who wither away; but
+the political system which should prevent the possibility of this has
+not yet been invented&mdash;and never will be.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore it is one of the most dangerous of political delusions to
+believe that any possible reform can make all men prosperous and
+contented. It is just as likely as that this would be brought about by
+the universal practice of the old distich&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Early to bed and early to rise</div>
+<div>Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>as if chimney sweeps, milkmen, and market gardeners had a monopoly of
+those excellent qualities. The possession of an ideal is a good thing,
+as long as it is not allowed to overshadow the real; and those whose
+ideal causes them to ignore the indolence and vice of their fellows are
+blind guides who would lead us into a ditch.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, while perfection in politics will never be realized, and the
+belief that it can be is fraught with danger, it should be urged upon
+all to think out the possibilities of the future, and to have a
+political ideal at which to aim. Mine is a State in which all men shall
+be equal before the law, every one have a fair chance according to his
+virtues, his talents, and his industry, and none be advanced because of
+hereditary or legalized privilege. A State in which all men are free,
+and wherein there is a fair field and no favour, is that for which
+Liberals should strive. Even when it is secured we shall still have with
+us the idle and the vicious, for those specimens of humanity will never
+perish from out the land; but the workful and the sober-minded will have
+a better chance of success than they have to-day, and the State will be
+benefited thereby.</p>
+
+<p>Extension of individual liberty, abolition of inherited or other
+privilege&mdash;those points really sum up the Liberal ideal. If it be said
+that it does not promise to fill the people&rsquo;s stomachs, it must be
+replied that stomach-filling is not the special concern<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> of political
+life. That is a matter for the people to accomplish; let us remove every
+legalized hindrance to their doing it by their own capacities, but when
+we have done that they must do the stomach-filling for themselves. The
+State may and does feed the unfortunate, but, if it is to feed the idle,
+it will have to make the idle work for their food. There is no necessity
+either in law or in morals to tax those who work for the advantage of
+those who do not; and the most perfect State will be that in which the
+lazy and worthless will be made to labour, and the toilers be protected
+from being by them despoiled.</p>
+
+<p>What we ask is equality of opportunity, and we have much to do before
+that can be obtained. There are some who say that they do not believe in
+elevating the working classes, because it would leave the ground floor
+of the social edifice untenanted. But the tenants are tired of being on
+the ground, and wish to see how the upper story justifies its existence,
+and in that they are right. With equality of opportunity, many to whom
+we are now called upon by convention to bow will sink to their proper
+level, while the men who work by brain or hands will acquire their
+rightful position in the social state. But without the fullest political
+liberty, this will never be attained, and we must strive jointly for both.</p>
+
+<p>The political ideal at which we should aim is embraced in the words of
+Lincoln&mdash;&ldquo;that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
+shall not perish from the earth,&rdquo; and to that may be added that equality
+of opportunity shall be conceded to each one of us. Let us gain this,
+and as perfect a State as imperfect human nature can design or deserve will be ours.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>XL.&mdash;WHERE SHALL WE STOP?</span></h2>
+
+<p>When the late Lord Shaftesbury was in the House of Commons, and was
+engaged in the apparently endless task of attempting to reform the
+factory laws, he brought in a bill to regulate the labour of children in
+calico-print works. He had already done much, but he wished to do more,
+and on being asked by his opponents, &ldquo;Where will you stop?&rdquo; he replied,
+&ldquo;Nowhere, so long as any portion of this gigantic evil remains to be remedied.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>In the same spirit may be answered the question sometimes asked as to
+where Liberals will be prepared to stay the reforming hand. A period
+cannot be put to progress any more than a limit to literature, or to
+science a stopping-place. True, we have got rid of the greater
+tyrannies: divine right of kings, personal rule, borough-mongering&mdash;all
+are dead. We have got rid of the greater inequalities: purchase in the
+army, nomination in the civil service, have gone the way of the separate
+form at school, the distinctive tuft at the University, for the sons of
+peers. We have got rid of the old Tory idea that the people have nothing
+to do with the laws except to obey them; we now possess household, we
+may soon possess adult, suffrage. But are we, therefore, to do no more?
+Because we travel faster than our fathers, do we frown upon all
+improvements in locomotion? Because we no longer suffer from the Plague,
+the Sweating Sickness, and the Black Death, do the doctors sit with
+folded arms? No; for the motto of the race is progress, and until every
+tyranny, every iniquity, and every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> inequality which trouble us in
+public life are vanquished, we cannot in our conscience cease from attack.</p>
+
+<p>Remember always the saying of Turgot, the great French economist, &ldquo;It is
+not error which opposes the progress of truth: it is indolence,
+obstinacy, the spirit of routine, everything that favours inaction.&rdquo;
+Much that hinders our advance comes from forgetfulness of what
+Liberalism has done, and what, therefore, it is still capable of doing.
+A politician once remarked, &ldquo;Suppose that for but a month after the
+passing of any great measure of reform, such as the repeal of the Corn
+Laws, the extension of the suffrage, or the establishment of a national
+system of education, only the Liberals could have gained the benefit and
+the Tories been left outside, wouldn&rsquo;t the Tories have joined us in a
+hurry to help reap the advantage the Liberals had secured?&rdquo; There is no
+doubt as to the answer; but even as the sun shines upon the unjust as
+well as upon the just, so the beneficent stream of Liberal legislation
+fertilizes the waste lands of Toryism equally with the possessions of
+those who have prepared its course.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is this forgetfulness against which we have mainly to contend.
+The age in which we live is so distinguished for progressive sentiment,
+so noteworthy for the number and the magnitude of its reforms, that even
+Liberals are occasionally in danger of letting slip some of the good
+effects which struggle has won by nodding contentedly at the strides
+that have been taken, heedless of the enemy ever anxious to push back
+the shadow on the dial. Fortunately for the preservation of our
+liberties, the drowsiness is seldom allowed to glide into sleep, for an
+awakening is furnished by the premature shouts of triumph of those whose
+highest interest would be to remain silent, for it is only thus that
+success to them is possible.</p>
+
+<p>But while in the calm of supposed security, while, for instance,
+enjoying the belief that the Crown, as a governing power, is now in
+England non-existent, we are suddenly aroused by the argument that the
+possible feelings of the Sovereign with regard to a probable Irish
+Ministry are to be considered in antagonism to Home Rule; while we are
+indulging the hope that Free Trade rests upon as firm a basis as
+parliamentary government,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> we see the Conservative party coquetting with
+Protection; while we regard equality before the law as practically
+admitted by all, we have constantly brought to our notice the belief of
+the county magistrate that that which done by his son would be food for
+laughter, done by his hind deserves hard labour; while sunning ourselves
+with the thought that religious liberty has been absolutely secured, we
+have witnessed a member of Parliament, thrice elected by a free
+constituency, thrice rejected by the House of Commons, and even thrown
+by the police from its doors, upon theological grounds and theological
+grounds alone; and while imagining that freedom of speech, of action,
+and of the press was beyond challenge even by the Tories, men in London
+have been wounded and imprisoned for asserting the right of public
+meeting, and many sent to gaol in Ireland for doing that which in
+England, Wales, and Scotland would be as perfectly legal as it was
+perfectly right: when we see such things we are brought to recognize
+that our liberties, after all, hang by a thread.</p>
+
+<p>It is well, however, that we should have these rude awakenings in order
+to teach us that Toryism is not dead, that it is as ready as ever to
+seize every opportunity for depriving the people of their liberty, to
+rivet the yoke of ascendency upon their shoulders, and to subvert that
+freedom which only slowly and by prolonged struggle has been wrested
+from the great. The adherents of proscription and privilege do not in
+these days talk of the divine right of kings&mdash;though even that doctrine
+peeps out when they have occasion to flatter a monarch or an
+heir-apparent; but the equally false doctrine of the divine right of
+Parliaments is persistently put forward, and with the audacious pretence
+that to dispute it is treason to the democracy. We are told that a House
+of Commons once chosen can do as it likes for seven years, and no one
+dare say it &ldquo;nay;&rdquo; that its majority may break the pledges upon which it
+was elected, may practise coercion where it promised conciliation, may
+deprive us of every single liberty it was returned to support and
+extend, and that it is the duty of every good subject to sit with folded
+arms, to quietly submit to be despoiled of his rights, and to wait with
+patience until such time as the Prime Minister is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> sufficiently gracious
+to permit a dissolution, or the Septennial Act closes the Parliament&rsquo;s
+life. The doctrine is fatal to liberty, disguise it by what pretence of
+love for the democracy its upholders may. And is the danger which lurks
+beneath it imaginary? Read the promises upon which the present majority
+in the House of Commons obtained its power; study the fashion in which
+these have been broken; and then consider whether a denial of the divine
+right of Parliaments is, as the Tories contend, treason to the democracy.</p>
+
+<p>Liberalism, at all events, will have neither act nor part in any denial
+of popular rights; rather it will be ever on the move towards a fuller
+extension of them. When it is said that the Tories of to-day are to be
+trusted because they go farther than the Liberals of twenty years ago,
+it can be fairly replied, &ldquo;Even if true (which, if the spirit of things
+be examined, is doubtful), what does it prove? Words change their
+meaning as the world grows older; what yesterday was revolution is
+to-day reform, and to-morrow will be called reaction.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Onward, and ever onward,&rdquo; must be the motto of the Liberal party. As
+the conditions change, so must our institutions be changed to fit them.
+It cannot be too strongly repeated that in these days we have so much of
+liberty, compared with our forefathers, that some of us are tempted to
+fold our hands, to rest, and to be thankful, and to lose by sloth that
+which has been gained by struggle. The tendency to think that we possess
+all the freedom that the heart of man can desire is one that may act
+upon us as the wish for repose does upon those toiling through the
+snowdrifts, and, in the guise of slumber, may bring death. The heights
+of liberty are not yet scaled; much remains to be done before perfect
+freedom is attained. Let each be able to say with Erskine, &ldquo;I shall
+never cease to struggle in support of liberty. In no situation will I
+desert the cause. I was born a free man, and I will never die a slave.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The very reason of a Liberal&rsquo;s existence is that, if there is an abuse
+in Church or State which argument and agitation can remove, all honest
+endeavours shall be made to remove it. Many abuses have been abolished
+by these means, but many remain, and it is at the extinction of these
+that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> Liberals should aim. Let them not lose themselves in fruitless
+longing after a perfect State; let them use their best endeavours to
+make the State we possess as perfect as is possible. In all things let
+them aim at the practical, and let them remember that compromise is not
+necessarily cowardly, and that minor differences should count for little
+when great ends are to be achieved.</p>
+
+<p>The task I allotted myself has now been accomplished. Something has been
+told of the beneficent results of Liberalism, but with the qualification
+that Macaulay added to his description of what has been effected by the
+Baconian system&mdash;&ldquo;These are but a part of its fruits, and of its
+first-fruits; for it is a philosophy which never rests, by which
+finality is never attained, which is never perfect. Its law is progress.
+A point which yesterday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be
+its starting-point to-morrow.&rdquo; The future also has been attempted to be
+sketched&mdash;how imperfectly no one knows better than the author. But as
+clearly and concisely as was possible have been stated the principles
+and the aims of the Liberal party. It is to that party that modern
+England owes its liberties, and it is to that party alone that it can
+look for their preservation and extension. Clouds may overshadow its
+immediate future, old friends may drop away, the enemy may be pressing
+at the gate, but Liberalism will live, will thrive, and will make the
+hearts of our descendants glad that there are those who remain faithful
+to it to-day in the midst of dangers and discouragements, which cause
+sinking of heart only to the faint of spirit, and doubt only to the weak
+of soul. Resolved to broaden and strengthen the bounds of freedom, we
+who continue attached to the principles of our party will never swerve
+from the straight course, will never be daunted by the virulence or the
+violence of our opponents, will never forget to strive for that ideal of
+Liberalism&mdash;liberty of thought, equality of opportunity, and fraternity of aim.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p class="center">UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism
+of To-day, by Alfred Farthing Robbins
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of
+To-day, by Alfred Farthing Robbins
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of To-day
+
+Author: Alfred Farthing Robbins
+
+Release Date: April 17, 2011 [EBook #35894]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRACTICAL POLITICS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PRACTICAL POLITICS
+
+or the
+
+LIBERALISM OF TO-DAY
+
+
+BY
+
+ALFRED F. ROBBINS
+
+AUTHOR OF
+
+_"Five Years of Tory Rule;" "William Edward Forster, the Man and
+his Policy;" "The Marquis of Salisbury, a Personal and
+Political Sketch," &c._
+
+_REPRINTED FROM THE "HALFPENNY WEEKLY"_
+
+
+London
+T. FISHER UNWIN
+26 PATERNOSTER SQUARE
+1888
+
+
+TO
+My Father,
+WHOSE DEVOTION TO LIBERAL PRINCIPLES
+HAS FOR SIXTY YEARS
+NEVER WAVERED,
+THIS WORK,
+THE OUTCOME OF HIS EXCELLENT TEACHING AND
+CONSISTENT EXAMPLE,
+IS
+AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+The Articles here republished are from the columns of the _Halfpenny
+Weekly_, to the Proprietors of which the Author is indebted for much
+courtesy and consideration. They were written originally in the form of
+letters to a friend, but, though they stand substantially as first
+printed, various alterations have been made consequent upon the
+necessities of a permanent rather than a serial form. The Author does
+not profess to have exhaustively discussed every political question
+which is of practical importance to-day--for that, within the limits
+assigned, would have been impossible; but he has attempted to furnish a
+body of information regarding the principles and aims of present-day
+Liberalism, not easily accessible elsewhere, which may be useful to
+those whose ideas upon public affairs are yet unformed, and helpful to
+the political cause he holds dear.
+
+_May, 1888._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+      I. WHAT IS THE USE OF A VOTE?                                  11
+
+     II. IS THERE ANYTHING PRACTICAL IN POLITICS?                    16
+
+    III. WHY NOT LET THINGS ALONE?                                   21
+
+     IV. OUGHT ONE TO BE A PARTISAN?                                 25
+
+      V. WHY NOT HAVE A "NATIONAL" PARTY?                            31
+
+     VI. IS ONE PARTY BETTER THAN THE OTHER?                         35
+
+    VII. WHAT ARE LIBERAL PRINCIPLES?                                41
+
+   VIII. ARE LIBERALS AND RADICALS AGREED?                           47
+
+     IX. WHAT ARE THE LIBERALS DOING?                                52
+
+      X. SHOULD HOME RULE BE GRANTED TO IRELAND?                     58
+
+     XI. WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH THE LORDS?                         66
+
+    XII. IS THE HOUSE OF COMMONS PERFECT?                            71
+
+   XIII. IS OUR ELECTORAL SYSTEM COMPLETE?                           77
+
+    XIV. SHOULD THE CHURCH REMAIN ESTABLISHED?                       83
+
+     XV. WOULD DISENDOWMENT BE JUST?                                 89
+
+    XVI. OUGHT EDUCATION TO BE FREE?                                 97
+
+   XVII. DO THE LAND LAWS NEED REFORM?                              102
+
+  XVIII. SHOULD WASTE LANDS BE TILLED AND THE GAME LAWS ABOLISHED?  107
+
+    XIX. OUGHT LEASEHOLDS TO BE ENFRANCHISED?                       112
+
+     XX. WHOSE SHOULD BE THE UNEARNED INCREMENT?                    117
+
+    XXI. HOW SHOULD LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT BE EXTENDED?              122
+
+   XXII. HOW IS LOCAL OPTION TO BE EFFECTED?                        127
+
+  XXIII. WHY AND HOW ARE WE TAXED?                                  132
+
+   XXIV. HOW OUGHT WE TO BE TAXED?                                  137
+
+    XXV. HOW IS TAXATION TO BE REDUCED?                             144
+
+   XXVI. IS FREE TRADE TO BE PERMANENT?                             149
+
+  XXVII. IS FOREIGN LABOUR TO BE EXCLUDED?                          155
+
+ XXVIII. HOW SHOULD WE GUIDE OUR FOREIGN POLICY?                    160
+
+   XXIX. IS A PEACE POLICY PRACTICABLE?                             165
+
+    XXX. HOW SHOULD WE DEAL WITH THE COLONIES?                      171
+
+   XXXI. SHOULD THE STATE SOLVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS?                    177
+
+  XXXII. HOW FAR SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE?                        182
+
+ XXXIII. SHOULD THE STATE REGULATE LABOUR OR WAGES?                 188
+
+  XXXIV. SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE WITH PROPERTY?                  194
+
+   XXXV. OUGHT THE STATE TO FIND FOOD AND WORK FOR ALL?             197
+
+  XXXVI. HOW OUGHT WE TO DEAL WITH SOCIALISM?                       200
+
+ XXXVII. WHAT SHOULD BE THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME?                      205
+
+XXXVIII. HOW IS THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME TO BE ATTAINED?               211
+
+  XXXIX. IS PERFECTION IN POLITICS POSSIBLE?                        216
+
+     XL. WHERE SHALL WE STOP?                                       220
+
+
+
+
+PRACTICAL POLITICS.
+
+
+
+
+I.--WHAT IS THE USE OF A VOTE?
+
+
+There are many persons, who, though possessing the suffrage, often put
+the question, "What is the use of a vote?" Giving small heed to
+political affairs, the issue of elections has as little interest for
+them as the debates in Parliament; and they imagine that the process of
+governing the country is mainly a self-acting one, upon which their
+individual effort could have the least possible effect.
+
+This idea is wrong at the root, and the cause of much mischief in
+politics. We are governed by majorities, and every vote counts. Even the
+heaviest polls are sometimes decided by a majority of a single figure.
+In the history of English elections, many instances could be found
+wherein a member was returned by the narrowest majority of all--the
+majority of one; and when a member so elected has been taunted with its
+slenderness, he has had a right to reply, as some have replied, in
+well-known words: "'Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church
+door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve." And not only in the
+constituencies, but in Parliament itself, decisions have been arrived at
+by a solitary vote. The great principle animating the first Reform Bill
+was thus adopted by the House of Commons; and the measure shortly
+afterwards was taken to the country with the advantage thus given it.
+As, therefore, everything of importance in England is decided first in
+the constituencies, and then in Parliament, by single votes, it is
+obvious that in each possessor of the franchise is vested a power which,
+however apparently small when compared with the enormous number of
+similar possessors elsewhere, may have a direct bearing in turning an
+election, the result of which may affect the fate of some important
+bill.
+
+So far most will doubtless agree without demur; but, in their
+indifference to political questions, may think that it is only those
+interested in them who have any real concern with elections. This is
+another mistake, for political questions are so intimately bound up with
+the comfort, the fortune, and even the fate of every citizen of a free
+country, that, although he may shut his eyes to them, they press upon
+him at every turn. It would be a very good world if each could do as he
+liked and none be the worse; but the world is not so constituted, and it
+is politics that lessen the consequent friction. For the whole system of
+government is covered by the term; and there is not an hour of the day
+in which one is free from the influence of government.
+
+It is not necessary for one to be conscious of this in order to be
+certain that it is so. When he is in perfect health he is not conscious
+that every part of his body is in active exercise, but, if he stumble
+over a chair, he is made painfully aware of the possession of shins. And
+so with the actions of government. As long as things work smoothly the
+majority of people give them little heed, but, if an additional tax be
+levied, they are immediately interested in politics. And although taxes
+are not the least unpleasant evidence that there is such a thing as a
+government, it is far from the most unpleasant that could be afforded.
+The issues of peace and war lie in the hands of Parliament, although
+nominally resting with the Executive, for Parliament can speedily end a
+war by stopping the supplies; and it is not necessary to show how the
+progress and result of an armed struggle might affect each one of us.
+The State has a right to call upon every citizen for help in time of
+need, and that time of need might come very quickly at the heels of a
+disastrous campaign. It is easy enough in times of peace to imagine that
+such a call upon every grown man will never be made; but it is a
+possible call, and one to be taken into account when the value of a vote
+is considered.
+
+Those who are sent to Parliament have thus the power of embarking in
+enterprises which may diminish one's revenue by increased taxation and
+imperil his life by enforced service. And in matters of less importance,
+but of considerable effect upon both pocket and comfort, they wield
+extensive powers. They can extend or they can lessen our liberties; they
+can interfere largely with our social concerns; their powers are nowhere
+strictly defined, and are so wide as to be almost illimitable. And for
+the manner in which they exercise those powers, each man who possesses a
+vote is in his degree responsible.
+
+There are persons who affect, from the height of a serene indifference,
+to look down upon all political struggles as the mere diversions of a
+lower mental order. That kind of being, or any approach to its attitude
+of mind, should be avoided by all who wish well to the government of the
+country. To sit on the fence, and rail at the ploughman, because his
+boots are muddy and his hands unwashed, is at once useless and
+impertinent; and to stand outside the political field, and endeavour to
+hinder those who are doing their best within, deserves the same
+epithets. When it is said that hypocrites, and humbugs, and self-seekers
+abound in politics, and that there is no place there for honest men,
+does not the indictment appear too sweeping? Has not the same argument
+been used against religion; and is it not one of the poorest in the
+whole armoury of controversy? If there are hypocrites, and humbugs, and
+self-seekers in politics--and no candid person would deny it, any more
+than that there are such in religion, in business, in science, and in
+art--is it not the more necessary that every honest man should try and
+root them out? If every honest man abstained from politics, with what
+right could he complain that all politicians were rogues? But no sober
+person believes that all politicians are rogues, and those superior
+beings who talk as if they are deserve condemnation for doing nothing to
+purify the political atmosphere.
+
+Some who would not go so far as those who are thus condemned, still
+labour under the idea that politics are more or less a game, to the
+issue of which they can afford to be indifferent. This, it may be
+feared, is the notion of many, and it is one to be earnestly combatted.
+Every man owes the duty to the State to assist, as far as he can, those
+whom he considers the best and wisest of its would-be governors. There
+is nobility in the idea that every elector can do something for the
+national welfare by thoughtfully and straightforwardly exercising the
+franchise, and aiding the cause he deems best. Young men especially
+should entertain this feeling, for youth is the time for burning
+thoughts, and it is not until a man is old that he can afford to
+smoulder. The future is in the hands of the young of to-day; and if
+these are indifferent to the great issues of State, and are prepared to
+let things drift, a rude awakening awaits them.
+
+The details of political work need not here be entered upon. All that is
+now wanted is to show that that work is of very real importance to every
+one; and that, unless taken in hand by the honest and capable, it will
+fall to the dishonest and incapable for accomplishment. And as the vote
+is a right to which every free Englishman is entitled, and a trust each
+possessor of which should be called upon to exercise, there ought not to
+remain men on the registers who persistently decline to use it. Absentee
+landlords have been the curse of Ireland, and they will have to be got
+rid of. Abstentionist voters might, in easily conceivable circumstances,
+be the curse of England, and they would have to be got rid of likewise.
+
+The value of a vote may be judged from the fact that it saves the
+country from a periodical necessity for revolution. Everything in our
+Constitution that wants altering can be altered at the ballot-box; and
+whereas the vote-less man has no direct influence upon those affairs of
+State which affect him as they affect every other citizen, the possessor
+of the franchise can make his power directly felt. We are within sight
+of manhood, it may be of adult, suffrage; and if the vote were of no
+value it would be folly--almost criminal folly--to extend its use. Those
+who deem it folly are of a practically extinct school in English
+politics. For better or worse, the few are now governed by the many,
+and the many will never again be governed by the few.
+
+Those who are of the many may be tempted to urge that that very fact
+lessens the worth of the vote in that every elector has the same value
+at the polling booth, and that, however intelligent may be the interest
+he takes in politics, his ignorant neighbour's vote counts the same as
+his own. But that is to forget what every one who mixes with his
+fellow-men must soon learn--that the intelligent have a weight of
+legitimate influence upon their less-informed fellows which is
+exceedingly great. Our vote counts for no more than that of the man who
+has sold his suffrage for beer; but our influence may have brought
+twenty waverers to the poll, while that of our beer-drinking
+acquaintance has brought none.
+
+A cynic has observed that "politics are a salad, in which office is the
+oil, opposition the vinegar, and the people the thing to be devoured."
+But to approach public affairs from that point, and to judge them solely
+on that principle, is as reasonable as to use green spectacles and
+complain of the colour of the sky. Politics should be looked at without
+prejudice, but with the recollection that in them are concerned many of
+our best and wisest men. If that be done, and the mind kept open for the
+reception of facts, there is little doubt of the admission that there is
+a deep reality in politics, and a reality in which every one is
+concerned.
+
+
+
+
+II.--IS THERE ANYTHING PRACTICAL IN POLITICS?
+
+
+All will possibly admit that, in conceivable circumstances, a vote may
+be useful, but many will not be prepared to allow that politics are an
+important factor in our daily life. War, they would urge, is a remote
+contingency, and a conscription is, of all unlikely things, the most
+unlikely; our liberties have been won, and there is no chance of a
+despot sitting on the throne; and, even if taxes are high, what can any
+one member of Parliament, much less any one elector, do to bring them
+down? From which questions, and from the answers they think must be made
+to them, they would draw the conclusion that, whatever might have been
+the case formerly, there is nothing practical in the politics of to-day.
+
+It would not be hard to show that a conscription is by no means an
+impossibility; that our liberties demand constant vigilance; and that
+individual effort may greatly affect taxation. But even if the answer
+desired were given to each question, the points raised, except the last,
+are admittedly remote from daily life; and, if politics are to be
+considered practical, they must concern affairs nearer to us. This they
+do; and if they affected only the greater issues of State, they would
+not be practical in the sense they now are. It is the small troubles,
+whether public or private, which worry us most. The dust in one's eye
+may be only a speck, but, measured by misery, it is colossal.
+
+The law touches us upon every side, and the law is the outcome of
+politics in having been enacted by Parliament. From the smallest things
+to the greatest, the Legislature interferes. A man cannot go into a
+public-house after a certain hour because of one Act of Parliament; he
+cannot deal with a bank upon specified days because of another. One Act
+of Parliament orders him, if a householder, to clean his pavement;
+another prohibits him from building a house above a given height in
+streets of a certain width. And while the law takes care of one's
+neighbour by affixing a well-known penalty to murder, it is so regardful
+of oneself that it absolutely prohibits suicide. We are surrounded, in
+fact, by a network of regulations provided by Parliament. We are no
+sooner born than the law insists upon our being registered; we cannot
+marry without the interference of the same august power; and when we
+die, those who are left behind must comply with the formalities the law
+demands.
+
+It may be answered that this does not sound like politics; that there is
+nothing of Liberal or Tory in all this; but there is. Liberals, for
+instance, have been mainly identified with the demand for the better
+regulation of public-houses; it is to the Liberals that we owe a
+long-called-for reform in the burial laws; and it is due to the Liberals
+that a change in the marriage regulations, particularly affecting
+Nonconformists, is on the eve of being adopted. Social questions are not
+necessarily divorced from party concerns, and the moment Parliament
+touches them they become political. If one looks down a list of the
+measures presented to the House of Commons he will see that from the
+purity of beer to the protection of trade-marks, from the enactment of a
+close-time for hares to the provision of harbours of refuge, from a
+declaration of the size of saleable crabs to the disestablishment of a
+Church--every subject which concerns a man's external affairs,
+political, social, or religious, is dealt with by Parliament.
+
+Even if only those political matters are regarded which have a
+distinctly partisan aspect, there is more that is practical in them than
+would at first be perceived. "What," it may be asked, "is local option,
+or county councils, or 'three acres and a cow' to me? I have no
+particular liking for drink; I have not the least ambition to become a
+combination of guardian and town councillor; and I am in no way
+interested in agricultural concerns. When you require me to take an
+active part in promoting the measures here indicated, how, I want to
+know, am I concerned in any one of them?"
+
+The answer is that any and all of them should concern the questioner a
+great deal. He imagines he is not directly interested because of the
+reasons put forward. Is he certain those reasons cover the whole case?
+He has "no particular liking for drink," and, therefore, would not
+trouble himself to obtain local option. But has he not been a
+sufficiently frequent witness of the crime and misery caused by drink to
+be persuaded that it is the duty of every good citizen to do all that in
+him lies to lessen the evil effects? And as such good results have
+flowed from the stricter regulation of the sale of intoxicating liquors,
+ought it not to be his endeavour to place a further power of regulation
+in the hands of those most interested--the people themselves?
+
+Establishing county councils may not touch the individual citizen so
+nearly, though it is in that direction that a solution of the local
+option problem is being attempted to be found; and the supposed
+questioner has "not the least ambition to become a combination of
+guardian and town councillor." Perhaps not; other people have, and it is
+a legitimate ambition that does them honour. The work performed by town
+councillors, and guardians, and members of school boards is excellent
+service, not only to the locality but the State. The freedom which
+England enjoys to-day is largely owing to the habits of self-government
+fostered by local institutions, the origin of which is as old as our
+civilization, and the roots of which have sunk deeply into the soil. And
+seeing how our towns have thriven since their government was taken from
+a privileged few and given to the whole body of their inhabitants, is
+there not fair reason to hope that the county districts will similarly
+be benefitted by institutions equally representative and equally free?
+And, as the improvement of a part has good effect upon the whole, even
+those who may never have a direct connection with the suggested county
+councils, will profit by their establishment.
+
+With equal certainty it may be asserted that the condition of the
+labourer is of practical importance to every citizen. "I am in no way
+interested in agricultural concerns," it is said; and if by that is
+simply meant that the objector does not work upon a farm, has no direct
+dealings with agricultural produce, and no money invested in land, he,
+of course, would be right. But even these conditions do not exhaust the
+possibilities of connection with agriculture, which is the greatest
+single commercial interest this country possesses; and, so
+inter-dependent are the various interests, if the largest of all is not
+in a satisfactory state the others are bound to suffer. It is those
+others in which most of us may be specially concerned, but we are
+generally concerned in agriculture; and as the latter cannot be at its
+best as long as the labourers are in their present condition, is it not
+obvious that all are interested in every honest endeavour to get that
+condition improved? This is not the moment to argue the details of any
+plan; but the principle is plain--the condition of the agricultural
+labourer has passed into the region of practical politics.
+
+There is a school among us, and perhaps a growing one, which, affecting
+to despise such matters as these, wishes to make the State a huge
+wage-settling and food-providing machine. If one talks to its members of
+public affairs, they reply that the only practical politics is to give
+bread-and-cheese to the working classes. But fact is wanted instead of
+theory, demonstration rather than declamation, and, in place of a
+platitude, a plan. For it is easy to talk of a State, in which there
+shall be no misery, no poverty, and no crime; but the practical
+politician will want to know how this is to be secured; and while
+waiting for a plain answer, will decline to be drawn from the questions
+of the immediate present.
+
+No one need sigh for other political worlds to conquer while even such
+problems as have just been noted ask for settlement; and there are
+further departments of public affairs which demand attention, and which
+are pressing to the front. Most would admit that a vote may be useful
+sometimes. I say it is useful always. All would own that the greater
+matters of law and liberty may fairly be called practical politics. I
+add that the lesser matters with which Parliament has to deal, and which
+affect us daily, are equally worthy the name. Let one look around and
+say if "everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."
+If he cannot, he ought to strive for the reform of that which is not for
+the best. And as long as he has to strive for that reform, so long will
+there be something practical in politics.
+
+
+
+
+III.--WHY NOT LET THINGS ALONE?
+
+
+"Why can't you let things alone?" is a question which has often been put
+by those who either care little for politics or who wish to stave off
+reform. It was the favourite exclamation of a Whig Prime Minister, Lord
+Melbourne, and it is still used by many worthy persons as if it were
+really applicable to matters of government. "Things"--that is public
+affairs--can no more be let alone than one can let himself alone, or his
+machinery alone, or his business alone. The secret of perpetual motion
+has not been discovered in the State any more than in science. If one is
+a workman and leaves things alone, he will be dismissed; if a tradesman
+or manufacturer, he will become bankrupt; if a property-owner, ruin will
+equally follow. A man would not leave his face alone because it had been
+washed yesterday; he would not argue that as a face it was a very good
+face, and that one thorough cleansing should last it a lifetime. And the
+Constitution needs as careful looking after as one's business or his
+body.
+
+A sound Radical of a couple of centuries ago--and though the name
+Radical had not then been invented, the man Radical was frequently to
+the fore--put this point in plain words. "All governments and societies
+of men," said Andrew Marvell, "do, in process of time, gather an
+irregularity and wear away. And, therefore, the true wisdom of all ages
+hath been to review at fit periods those errors, defects, or excesses
+that have crept into the public administration; to brush the dust off
+the wheels and oil them again, or, if it be found necessary, to choose a
+set of new ones." And if Marvell be objected to as an authority, one can
+be given which should satisfy even the staunchest Conservative. "There
+was never anything by the wit of man so well devised or so sure
+established which in the continuance of time hath not been corrupted."
+That expression of opinion is not taken from any Whig, Liberal, or
+Radical source, but from the preface to the Book of Common Prayer.
+
+There is an older authority still, and that is the proverb which says "A
+stitch in time saves nine." One can scarcely read a page of English
+constitutional history without seeing the advances made in the comfort,
+prosperity, and liberty of the people by timely reform; and no man would
+seriously urge our going back to the old standpoints. Yet every reform,
+though we may now all agree that it was for the greatest good of the
+greatest number, was opposed by hosts of people, who talked about "the
+wisdom of our ancestors," and asked, "Why can't you let things alone?"
+It may be said that the grievances under which men labour to-day are
+nothing like as great as those against which our fathers fought.
+Happily--and thanks to the enthusiasts of old--that is so; but if they
+are grievances, whether small or large, they ought to be removed. There
+are some who think that a man with a grievance is a man to be
+pitied--and put on one side. But, even if those so afflicted are apt to
+prove bores, such complaints as are well founded should be attended to.
+
+It is a fact beyond question that there is no finality in politics, and,
+to take two examples from the present century--the Reform Act of 1832,
+which was thought by its authors to be a "final" measure, and at the Act
+of Union with Ireland, which the first Salisbury Administration
+described in their Queen's Speech as "a fundamental law"--it will be
+seen that the dream of finality in each case has been and is being
+roughly dispelled. What man has done, man can do--and can undo.
+
+The instances mentioned deserve a closer examination, because they so
+perfectly show the impossibility of standing still in political affairs.
+If ever there was a measure which statesmen of both parties held to be
+final, the Reform Act was that one. During the discussions upon it, the
+word "finality" was more than once used; Sir Robert Peel two years later
+declared that he considered it "a final and irrevocable settlement of a
+great constitutional question;" and in 1837, as in 1832, its author,
+Lord John Russell, spoke of it as "a final measure." Final it was in the
+sense that England would never go back to the days of borough-mongering,
+but there the finality ended. As early as the year after it passed, a
+Liberal member declared in his place in the House that "he for one had
+never conceded the monstrous principle that any legislative measure was
+to be final; still less had he ever conceded the yet more monstrous
+principle that the members of that House were entitled by any sort of
+compromise to barter away the rights and privileges of the people." The
+views thus plainly laid down have been put in practice by men of both
+parties; the ten-pound franchise of 1832 gave place in 1867 to household
+suffrage for the boroughs, and this in 1884 was extended to the
+counties. So much for the "finality" of the one great Act of this
+century to which the word has been applied.
+
+The so-called "fundamental law" of the Union with Ireland is threatened
+with alteration and amendment in the same fashion as the "final" Reform
+Act. Already, by the disestablishment of the Irish Church, a large hole
+has been made in it; and a larger will be made when Home Rule is gained.
+There is in England no law of so "fundamental" a nature that it cannot
+be mended or ended just as the people wish. No generation has power to
+bind its successors; and if the Parliament of 1800 was able to make the
+Legislative Union, the Parliament of to-day is able to unmake it. Upon
+this point--and it affects not only the general question now being
+argued, but a particular question yet to be discussed--one of the most
+distinguished "Liberal Unionists" may be quoted. Mr. Bright, speaking at
+Liverpool in the summer of 1868, observed--"I have never said that
+Irishmen are not at liberty to ask for and, if they could accomplish it,
+to obtain the repeal of the Union. I say that we have no right whatever
+to insist upon a union between Ireland and Great Britain upon our terms
+only.... I am one of those who admit--as every sensible man must
+admit--that an Act which the Parliament of the United Kingdom has
+passed, the Parliament of the United Kingdom can repeal. And further, I
+am willing to admit what everybody in England allows with regard to
+every foreign country, that any nation, believing it to be its
+interest, has a right both to ask for and to strive for national
+independence." If, then, even a "fundamental law" can be got rid of, if
+occasion demands and the people wish, what hope can the most lukewarm
+have that things will be let alone?
+
+Politics, in fact, may fairly be called a sort of see-saw: we are
+constantly going up and down, and can never be still. As long as a
+public grievance remains unremedied, so long will there be a call for
+reform; and one may be sure that, though he may come to a ripe old age,
+he will not live enough years to see every wrong made right. Some may
+hide behind the question put and answered eighteen centuries ago; may
+ask, as was then asked, "Who is my neighbour?" and may seek to avoid
+doing as they would be done by. But, as citizens of a free State, they
+have no right to shirk their duty to those around them. No man who looks
+at society with open eyes can doubt that much can be done by the
+Legislature to better the conditions of daily life. We do wrong if we
+allow others to suffer when efforts of ours can remove at least some of
+their pain.
+
+Therefore, things cannot be let alone in politics any more than in daily
+life; and even if they could, it would not be right to let them. It does
+not need that one should give all his leisure moments to politics, and
+all the energies he can spare from business to public life. But it does
+need that he should pay some heed to that which concerns his fellow-man
+and the society in which he lives; and all should be politicians in
+their degree, not for love of place, or power, or excitement, but
+because politics really mean much to the happiness and welfare of the
+State.
+
+
+
+
+IV.--OUGHT ONE TO BE A PARTISAN?
+
+
+When we come from "first principles" to the more immediate topics of the
+day, party considerations at once enter in; and to the question, "Ought
+one to be a partisan?" I answer "Certainly." On the political barometer
+a man ought distinctly to indicate the side he takes--not stand in the
+middle and point to "change."
+
+There is a great deal talked of the beauty of non-partisanship, of the
+necessity for looking at public matters in a clear white light, and of
+the exceeding glory of those who put country before party. Such of this
+as is not commonplace is cant, and in politics Johnson's advice to
+"clear your mind of cant" is especially to be taken. When a public man
+talks of putting his country before his party, he surely implies that he
+has been in the habit of putting his party before his country, and that
+man's record should be carefully scanned. For it will very often be
+found that those who boast of placing country before party place
+themselves before either.
+
+"Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours
+the national interest upon some particular in which they are all
+agreed." That is Burke's definition, and it holds good to-day. Superfine
+folk speak as if there were something derogatory in the fact of
+belonging to a party, some lessening of liberty of judgment, some
+forfeiting of conscience. That need not be. There must be give-and-take
+among members of the same party, just as there must be among those of
+the same household, of the same religious connection, and often of the
+same business concern. The necessity to bear and to forbear is as
+obvious in politics as in other matters of daily life, which is only
+saying in a different fashion that in politics, as in everything, a
+man's angles have to be rubbed off if he is to work in company with
+anybody else. But he gives up a portion of his opinions only to retain
+or strengthen those he considers essential. A Churchman is still a
+Churchman whether he is labelled High, Low, or Broad; he may believe
+with Canon Knox-Little, with Bishop Ryle, or with Archdeacon Farrar, and
+continue a member of the Established Church; and it is only when
+conscience compels him to differ from them all upon some essential point
+of doctrine or practice that he becomes a Protestant Dissenter, a
+Unitarian, a Roman Catholic, or, it may be, an Atheist.
+
+As with religion, so with politics. A Conservative is still a
+Conservative, whether he be called a Constitutionalist, a Tory Democrat,
+a Tory, or, as Mr. William Henry Smith was accustomed to describe
+himself, an Independent-Liberal-Conservative. He may be of the school of
+the late Mr. Newdegate, of Lord Salisbury, or of Lord Randolph
+Churchill, and the party bond is elastic enough to embrace him. And when
+it is remembered that the name "Liberal" covers all sorts and conditions
+of friends of progress, from Lord Hartington to Mr. Labouchere, it will
+be seen that a man must be querulous indeed who cannot find rest for the
+sole of his foot in one or other of the great parties of the State.
+
+No doubt it is easy to quote opinions from some eminent persons in
+condemnation of the party system. There is a saying of Dr. Arnold that a
+Liberal is "one who gets up every morning in the full belief that
+everything is an open question;" and with this may be coupled a chance
+expression of Carlyle, that "an English Whig politician means generally
+a man of altogether mechanical intellect, looking to Elegance,
+Excitement, and a certain refined Utility as the Highest; a man halting
+between two Opinions, and calling it Tolerance;" while there may be
+added the quotation, better known than either, "Conservatism discards
+Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected
+all respect for Antiquity, it offers no redress for the Present, and
+makes no preparation for the Future." It was the author of these last
+words who uttered also the caustic remark, "It seems to me a barren
+thing, this Conservatism, an unhappy cross-breed; the mule of politics,
+that engenders nothing." And that author was Benjamin Disraeli,
+afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield.
+
+Of course, this merely shows that hard things have been and can be said
+of all parties, but if they have been as bad as thus represented, is it
+not strange that England has done so well under their rule? It may be
+replied that, whatever has been the case, the fact now is that the old
+parties are dead, and the idea may be echoed of those who wish to keep
+the Tories in power, that only "Unionists" and "Separatists" are left;
+but, setting aside the circumstance that the Liberals emphatically
+disclaim the latter title, the facts are against the original
+assumption.
+
+The history of our Constitution will show that parties bring the best
+men to the front, groups the worst--the most pushing, pertinacious, and
+impudent of those among them. And when men talk, as some are talking
+to-day, of new combinations--combinations of persons rather than of
+principles--to take the place of the old parties, they should be watched
+carefully to see whether they do not degenerate, as other men in similar
+circumstances have done, into mere hungry scramblers for place.
+
+Much of the flabby feeling which pervades some minds in antagonism to
+partisanship has been nourished by the cry of "measures, not men." "To
+attack vices in the abstract, without touching persons, may be safe
+fighting indeed, but it is fighting with shadows." These words of Pope
+were taken by Junius to enforce his opinion that "'measures and not men'
+is the common cant of affected moderation--a base counterfeit language,
+fabricated by knaves and made current among fools." "What does it
+avail," he asked, "to expose the absurd contrivance or pernicious
+tendency of measures if the man who advises or executes shall be
+suffered not only to escape with impunity, but even to preserve his
+power?" If this opinion be put aside as being only that of a clever but
+venomous pamphleteer, an equally strong condemnation of the old
+cuckoo-cry can be quoted from the greatest philosopher who ever
+practically dealt with English politics. "It is an advantage," said
+Burke, "to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals, that their maxims have a
+plausible air, and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles.
+They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin, and
+about as valuable. They serve equally the first capacities and the
+lowest; and they are at least as useful to the worst men as the best. Of
+this stamp is the cant of 'not men, but measures'; a sort of charm by
+which many people get loose from every honourable engagement." And, if
+we go to the gaiety of Goldsmith from the gravity of Burke, it is
+significant that the author of "The Good-Natured Man" puts in the mouth
+of a bragging political liar and cheat the expression, "Measures, not
+men, have always been my mark."
+
+But, it is sometimes said, the very fact of not being a partisan argues
+freedom from prejudice. Does it not equally argue freedom from
+principle? If a man holds a principle strongly, he can hardly avoid
+being what the unthinking call prejudiced. It is surely better to be
+fast anchored to a principle, even at the risk of being called
+prejudiced, than to be swayed hither and thither by every passing
+breeze, like the "independent" politician--defined by the late Lord
+Derby as "a politician not to be depended upon"--with the liability of
+being wrecked by some more than usually stirring gust.
+
+We have only to look at the political history of the past half-century
+to find that it is the "prejudiced" men who have done good work, and the
+"independent" politicians who have made shipwreck of their public lives.
+The former held their principles firmly; they lost no opportunity of
+pushing them to the front; and success attended their efforts. As for
+the politicians who were too proud, or too unstable, or too quarrelsome
+to work in harness with their fellows, the shores of our public life
+have been strewn with their wrecks. The glorious opportunities for good
+that were missed by Lord Brougham, the wasted career of the once popular
+Roebuck are matters of history. And in our own day we can point to Earl
+Grey and Mr. Cowen--and the narrow escape from a similar fate of Mr.
+Goschen--as striking instances of the fact that no good thing in
+politics can be done by men who cannot or will not join with a great
+party to secure the ends for which they strive. The independent
+politician, in fact, must of necessity appear an incomplete sort of
+man--always leading up to something and never getting it; everlastingly
+striking the quarters, but never quite reaching the finished hour.
+
+It is not only, however, the crotchety man, or the quarrelsome man, or
+the tactless man, who, because he cannot work with anybody else, poses
+as "independent." There are also "men of no decided character, without
+judgment to choose, and without courage to profess any principle
+whatever--such men can serve no cause for this plain reason, they have
+no cause at heart." Burke here clearly describes a large section of
+"armchair politicians," who turn many an election without a distinct
+idea of what will be the ultimate result of their action. They are of
+the kind even more forcibly characterized by Dryden a century before--
+
+
+     Damn'd neuters, in their middle way of steering,
+     Are neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring;
+     Nor Whigs, nor Tories they; nor this, nor that;
+     Nor birds, nor beasts; but just a kind of bat;
+     A twilight animal; true to neither cause,
+     With Tory wings, but Whiggish teeth and claws.
+
+
+Trimmers of this type live and flourish to-day as they lived and
+flourished in the age of Dryden and of Burke, and the airs they give
+themselves of superiority over the ordinary run of politicians deserve
+all the ridicule men of more practical tendencies can pour upon them.
+One would fancy that it must sometimes occur even to them that, as in
+warfare the efforts of two opposing mobs, led by generals who
+perpetually differed among themselves, would cause more rapine and
+confusion, and ensure an even less satisfactory result, than those of
+two armies captained by men accustomed to discipline, and striking blows
+only where blows could be effective; so in the constant movement of
+public affairs a multitude of wrangling counsellors would bring ruin
+upon the State, where a struggle between two opposing parties,
+representing distinct principles, would clear a path in which it could
+safely tread.
+
+No one, therefore, should be frightened out of taking part in politics
+by the idea that there is anything wrong in being a partisan. A working
+man joins a trade union, in order that by strengthening his fellows he
+may strengthen himself; a religious man becomes a member of a Christian
+church, so as to assist in spreading the truth he cherishes; and any one
+who dearly holds a political principle ought to attach himself to a
+party, that he may secure for that principle the success which, if it is
+worth believing in, is worth striving for.
+
+
+
+
+V.--WHY NOT HAVE A "NATIONAL" PARTY?
+
+
+It is sometimes asked, even by those who would agree generally that
+partisanship is not unworthy, whether all the old distinctions of
+Liberal and Conservative, Tory and Radical, are not out of date, and
+whether it is not possible to form a "National" party. The idea of such
+a formation has been "in the air" for a long time, and has been put
+forward with more frequency since the breach in the Liberal ranks upon
+the Irish question. But although politicians as eminent as Mr.
+Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill have given countenance to the
+idea, it has as yet resulted in nothing of practical value.
+
+Mr. Chamberlain has argued that "our old party names have lost their
+force and meaning," but, even if they had, the suggested appellation
+must be held to be a misnomer. It is a contradiction in terms. If the
+whole nation be agreed upon a certain course, it is not a national
+"party" which advocates it; if it be not agreed, no section, no
+half-plus-one, has the right to arrogate to itself the adjective. The
+last time any faction did so was at the general election of 1880, when
+the supporters of Lord Beaconsfield attempted to claim the title even
+when they were being swept out of their seats wholesale by the flowing
+tide of national indignation. All honest politicians work for what they
+consider the benefit of the nation, and no portion of them has a title
+to assume that it alone is righteous.
+
+The inappropriateness of the name, moreover, is not only general but
+particular. The proposed combination, according to the statesman already
+quoted, is to "exclude only the extreme sections of the party of
+reaction on the one hand, and the party of anarchy on the other." But
+who is to define how far a reactionary may go without being considered
+"extreme," and who in the English Parliament is "an anarchist"?
+
+Further, a "national party" must be presumed to represent the
+nation--that is the whole of the United Kingdom. But the projected body,
+if it opposed Home Rule, would ignore the wishes of 85 out of the 101
+popularly elected representatives of Ireland; 44 out of the 70 popularly
+elected representatives of Scotland; and 26 out of the 30 popularly
+elected representatives of Wales; as well as the whole body of the
+Gladstonian Liberals in England. At the last general election, 1,423,765
+persons in this kingdom cast their votes on the "Unionist," and
+1,341,131 on the Liberal side; and the latter number could scarcely be
+ignored when a "national" party is being formed.
+
+In accordance with the words of the immortal Mr. Taper--"A sound
+Conservative Government, I understand; Tory men and Whig measures"--the
+Tories have promised to bring in Liberal Bills; but the process will be
+regarded by many with the same feelings as those of Mr. Disraeli when he
+charged Sir Robert Peel with the petty larceny of Whig ideas, as did
+Lord Cranborne (now Lord Salisbury) when he denounced Mr. Disraeli's
+political legerdemain in perpetrating a similar offence, and as did
+another prominent politician when he said, "The consistency of our
+public life, the honour of political controversy, the patriotism of
+statesmen, which should be set above all party considerations--these are
+things which have been profaned, desecrated, and trampled in the mire by
+this crowd of hungry office-seekers who are now doing Radical work in
+the uniform of Tory Ministers.... I will say frankly that I do not like
+to win with such instruments as these. A democratic revolution is not to
+be accomplished by aristocratic perverts; and I believe that what the
+people desire will be best carried into effect by those who can do so
+conscientiously and honestly, and not by those who yield their assent
+from purely personal or party motives." These words were spoken in 1885;
+and the speaker was Mr. Chamberlain.
+
+The new party to exist must have organization, and as by its very
+constitution all Liberal and Radical associations would have to be
+excluded, the Primrose League alone would be ready to hand. But he who
+pays the piper calls the tune, and what that tune would be can easily be
+guessed. Liberals and Radicals would necessarily be kept out of the
+combination, for men who consider themselves entitled to twenty
+shillings in the pound, and who might be content to accept ten as an
+instalment, would not take ten as payment in full of some of their
+bills, and a "first and final dividend" of nothing on others they hold
+of value. And the Radicals and other Gladstonian Liberals being left
+out, the remaining party must be overwhelmingly Conservative, and the
+fighting opinion of a party is that of its majority.
+
+It is thus not an enticing prospect for any thoroughgoing lover of
+progress. What hope is there of a sound reform of the House of Lords
+from a party closely wedded to the aristocracy? Of disestablishment in
+Scotland and Wales, to say nothing of England, from a party relying for
+much of its power upon the clergy? Of a drastic change in the land or
+the game laws from a party propped up by landlords and game preservers?
+Of an improved magistracy from a party deriving great influence from the
+country squires? Of a popular veto upon licensing from a party to which
+belong nine-tenths of the publicans? Of a progressive income tax or the
+more equitable arrangement of the death duties from a party which has
+become increasingly attractive to the large capitalists? Of, in fact,
+any great reform whatsoever from a party which places "vested interests"
+in the forefront to the frequent exclusion of justice?
+
+A party formed in the fashion thus projected would be simply a house of
+cards, carefully built, as such houses usually are, by those who have
+nothing better to do--pretty to look at, but turned over by the first
+breeze. Lobby combinations such as this are hothouse plants; brought
+into the open they die. In Carlyle's "French Revolution," much ridicule
+is poured upon the wondrous paper constitutions of the Abbe Sieyes,
+which somehow would not "march." Within the last few years the Duc de
+Broglie was famous throughout Europe for the clockwork arrangements he
+made for France, and the constant failure that awaited them. The
+"national party" recalls the works of both duke and abbe, and, like
+them, would resemble nothing so much as a flying machine, constructed
+upon the most approved principles by really skilled workmen, and
+scientifically certain to succeed, but having, when tested, only one
+defect--it will not fly.
+
+
+
+
+VI.--IS ONE PARTY BETTER THAN THE OTHER?
+
+
+It is perfectly natural to be asked, after trying to prove that
+partisanship is praiseworthy, and that a "national" party is out of the
+question, whether one party is so much better than the other that it
+deserves strenuous and continued support. For the purposes of the
+argument, it is necessary to consider only the two great parties in the
+State--the Liberal and the Tory. These represent the main tendencies
+which actuate mankind in public affairs--the go-ahead and the
+stand-still. Differences in the expression of these tendencies there are
+bound to be, according as circumstances vary; but, generally speaking,
+the Tory is the party of those who, being satisfied with things as they
+are, are content to stand still, while the Liberal is the party of those
+who, thinking there is ample room for improvement, desire to go ahead.
+
+The recent history of our country is all in favour of the Liberal
+contention. If two men ride on a horse one must ride behind, and if two
+parties take opposite views of the same measure one must be wrong. The
+best testimony to the fact that, as a whole, the Liberal policy pursued
+by this country for more than half a century has been right, is,
+therefore, that even when the Tories have been in the majority they have
+not attempted to reverse it. Every great question that has been agitated
+for by the Liberals as a body, except Home Rule, which has yet to be
+settled, has been settled in the way they wished; and has more than once
+been carried to the last point of success by the Tories themselves. Not
+even the staunchest Conservative would urge a return to the system of
+rotten boroughs, would repeal the Education Act, re-establish the Irish
+Church, or renew open voting; and the Tories who would re-enact the Corn
+Laws continue few.
+
+Lord Salisbury has contended that, even if the Liberals have always been
+right and the Tories wrong, it should make no difference to the
+present-day voter; and, speaking at Reading in the autumn of 1883, he
+asked--"Would any of you go to an apothecary's shop because the previous
+tenant was a very good man at curing rheumatism? You would say, 'It
+matters little to me whether the former tenant was a skilful man or not;
+all that concerns me is the skill of the present tenant of the
+establishment.'" But supposing, to carry on Lord Salisbury's
+illustration, this new tenant could say, "I have in my possession a
+recipe of my predecessor which proved itself an infallible cure for
+rheumatism; I prepare it in the same fashion; it will have the same
+result." Would one not reply, "I will rather trust the recipe which has
+always done good, even though in the course of nature it has changed
+owners, than put myself in the hands of the opposition chemist, who,
+though exceedingly old and eminently respectable, never effects a cure,
+but whenever he is called in leaves the patient worse than he finds
+him?"
+
+And when Lord Salisbury strove to make his point more clear, he did not
+mend matters much. "It is only the existing party, whether Liberal or
+Conservative," he said, "that really concerns you; success, wisdom, and
+justice do not stick to organizations or buildings--they are the
+attributes of men. It is by their present acts and their present
+principles that the two parties must be judged." Even if this be
+allowed--and, carried to its logical extent, it would justify every
+piece of "political legerdemain" (the phrase applied by Lord Salisbury
+himself to Mr. Disraeli's Reform Bill) the Tory party has ever
+perpetrated, or may ever attempt--Liberals need not shrink from the
+test. For the Tories, as they have ever done, are now shrinkingly and
+fearsomely following in the paths the Liberals years ago laid down, with
+just sufficient deviation to prove that the old Adam of reaction is not
+dead. Whether it be free trade, or parliamentary reform, or the
+closure, they initiate nothing; but when the Liberals have cleared the
+way, they are eager to adopt all that they have previously denounced,
+and to claim as their own principles they have throughout professed to
+abhor. Seeing that the Liberals borrow nothing from the Tories, while
+the Tories borrow a very great deal from the Liberals, we can judge the
+two parties, as Lord Salisbury wished, by their present acts and their
+present principles, and show that the Liberal is the more worthy of
+popular support.
+
+It is, of course, not to be wondered at that such a desire to ignore the
+past should be expressed by a politician who, from his maiden speech to
+his most recent efforts, has denounced Liberal ideas; who, at various
+stages of his parliamentary career, has opposed the spread of popular
+education, the extension of the suffrage, the creation of the ballot,
+the emancipation of the Jews, the extinction of Church rates, the full
+admission of Dissenters to the Universities, the abolition of purchase
+in the army, the repeal of the taxes on knowledge, the throwing open of
+the Civil Service to the people, the right of Nonconformists to be
+buried in their parish churchyard, the remission of long-standing and
+obviously unpayable Irish arrears, and the destruction of the property
+qualification for members of Parliament; whose sympathy for his fellows
+may be gathered from his insinuated comparison of the Irish to
+Hottentots, and his declaration that it is "just" that the children of
+those who have contracted marriage with their deceased wife's sister
+should be bastardized; whose taste for diplomacy was shown by his
+direction to a Viceroy to "create" a pretext for forcing a quarrel upon
+Afghanistan; whose regard for the strictness of truth was displayed in
+his denial of the authenticity of a well-remembered secret memorandum;
+whose love for liberty was evidenced by the lukewarmness with which he
+watched the struggles for freedom in Italy and Bulgaria, and the hearty
+and continuous support he gave to the slave-holding faction in America;
+and whose affection for the people may be judged from the fact that,
+throughout his political life, his name has never been identified with a
+single piece of constructive legislation for their welfare. "By their
+fruits shall ye know them" is applicable to politics, therefore; as
+Lord Salisbury, by so strenuously endeavouring to ignore the maxim,
+practically admits; and at the risk of putting aside the canon of
+criticism adopted by the noble marquis, let me show some of the fruits
+of modern Liberal policy.
+
+I rise in the morning and go to my breakfast; my tea, my coffee, my
+sugar, and my ham are all of easy price because of the reductions in
+import duties made by Liberal Governments. I take up my newspaper, and I
+have it so cheaply because Mr. Gladstone, despite the utmost efforts of
+the Conservatives, secured the repeal of the paper duty. I go to
+business, and, as I write my letter or my postcard, I cannot but reflect
+that a Liberal Ministry in 1840 allowed me to send the one for a penny,
+and a Liberal Ministry in 1870 to send the other for half that sum. I
+proceed to dinner, and find that bread, cheese, and much of my dessert
+are the more available because of Liberal remissions. And as in the
+evening I visit the theatre, the very opera glasses I hold in my hand
+are the cheaper because, in one of his Budgets, Mr. Gladstone included
+these among the hundreds of other articles from which he removed a small
+but galling tax.
+
+These are some, and only some, of the material benefits resulting from
+the Liberal policy. What of the political, what of the social, what of
+the moral benefits? If I am an Englishman, I am proud of the fact that
+no longer is the national flag allowed to float over a slave; if I am a
+Scotchman, I rejoice that my country has been freed from the
+extraordinary system of mis-representation which weighed upon it like a
+nightmare before 1832; if I am an Irishman, I am not forced at the point
+of the bayonet to pay tithes to an alien Church, to liquidate arrears
+for rack-rents owing from the time of the famine, or to give an
+exorbitant rent for the result of my own improvements; if I am a
+Churchman, my Church has been strengthened by the repeal of enactments
+which provoked opposition, while providing no good for the Establishment
+they professed to serve; if I am a Nonconformist, I am no longer liable
+to have my goods seized in support of a Church in which I do not
+believe, I have the right to be married in my own place of worship, and
+to be buried by my own minister by the side of my fathers; if I am a
+Catholic, I have been liberated from certain restrictions upon my
+religion, which I resented as an insult and a wrong; if I am a Jew, I
+can sit with the peers, in the Commons, or on the judicial bench; if I
+belong to the army, and am an officer, my rise is made easy--if I am a
+private, my rise is made possible, by the abolition of purchase; if I am
+either soldier or sailor, I owe it mainly to Liberal exertions that
+discipline is no longer maintained by the lash; if I am a merchant
+seaman, my life is the better protected because of the efforts of a
+Liberal member of Parliament; if I am in the Civil Service, I have the
+greater chance of success because of the destruction of that system of
+nomination, which, however advantageous to the aristocracy, was fatal to
+modest merit; if I am a student, I can go to a University with the
+certainty that not now shall I be deprived of the reward of my exertions
+because my conscience prevents me from subscribing the Thirty-nine
+Articles; if I am a tradesman, my goods are freed from many a customs
+duty which formerly restricted their sale; if I am a farmer, I can vote
+without fear of my landlord, my lands have been to some extent saved
+from the depredations of hares and rabbits, and my tenure has been
+rendered more certain than ever before; if I am an artisan, the fruits
+of combination have been secured to me, my employer has been made liable
+for accidents arising from either his carelessness or his greed, my vote
+has been obtained, and by the ballot has been protected; if I am the
+child of the poorest, a school has been opened for me where a sound
+education can be procured at a small cost; in fact, in whatever station
+I may chance to be placed, I cannot but feel in my every-day life the
+beneficent influences of the policy advocated by leaders of advanced
+thought, and adopted by Liberal Ministries during the past fifty years.
+
+If, then, I am asked to justify the Liberal party by showing what it has
+done, I answer that, by timely reform, it has saved England from the
+continental curse of frequent revolution; that, in striving for the
+greatest happiness of the greatest number, it has in especial elevated
+and educated the masses, for whom it has provided cheap food for both
+body and mind; and that it has struggled, and in the main successfully
+struggled, to secure civil and religious equality for all. And in the
+future as in the past, with perfect liberty as its fixed ideal, and with
+peace, retrenchment, and reform as the methods by which it wishes that
+ideal to be obtained, it will press onward and upward, and ever onward
+and upward, until England, now regarded as the mother of free nations,
+shall be but one of a gigantic brotherhood of freedom, embracing every
+civilized people that may then inhabit the globe.
+
+
+
+
+VII.--WHAT ARE LIBERAL PRINCIPLES?
+
+
+After this recital of Liberal deeds, it may fairly be asked, "What are
+Liberal principles?" and these it is not easy to define off-hand. There
+are certain general truths which are the commonplaces of both parties,
+and no serious attempt has yet been made to lay down a system of
+principles with which none except Liberals can agree. But there are
+differences that underlie the action of the two parties which are
+unmistakable, and are worth finding out.
+
+If one were to ask the first half-dozen Liberals he met for a definition
+of their principles, varying and perhaps vague replies would be
+received. For in politics, as in other matters that combine speculation
+with practical action, it is only the few who speculate, while the many
+are content to act. And even most of those who tried to answer would be
+apt to reply that Liberal principles could be summed up in the old party
+watch-word--"Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform," thus confounding Liberal
+principles with Liberal aims.
+
+That these aims are well worth striving for has long been an accepted
+doctrine of the party; but, in trying to gain them, we have to adapt
+them to circumstances, and are not called upon in every single emergency
+to push them to their logical extent. Logic, after all, is only a pair
+of spectacles, not eyesight itself; and attempts to arrange human
+affairs upon too precise a basis frequently end, as France so often has
+shown, in failure. We long for peace, but not for peace at any price; we
+ask for retrenchment, but not an indiscriminate paring down of
+expenditure for the sake of showing a saving; and we struggle for
+reform, but not to cut all the branches off the trees on the chance of
+improving their appearance.
+
+Before, in fact, we have been able to struggle at all for these or any
+other points in politics, certain principles have had to be acted upon
+by generations of progressive thinkers, which have developed and
+strengthened our liberties. It is, perhaps, presumptuous to attempt to
+lay down in a few words a basis of Liberal principle, but I would submit
+that that basis may be found in the contention that
+
+_All men should be equal before the law_;
+
+that, as a consequence,
+
+_All should have freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of
+action_;
+
+and that, in order to secure and retain these liberties,
+
+_The people should govern themselves_.
+
+With regard to the first point, I do not contend that all men are, or
+ever can be, equal. Differences of mental and physical strength, of
+energy and temperament, and of will to work, there must always be; and
+in the struggle for existence, which is likely to grow even keener as
+the world becomes more filled, the fittest must continue to come to the
+top, as they have done and deserve to do. A law-made equality would not
+last a week, but much law-made inequality has lasted for centuries, and
+it is against this that Liberals as Liberals must protest. We object to
+all law-made privilege, and we ask that men gifted with equal capacities
+shall have equal chances. We do not claim any new privilege for the
+poor, but we demand the abolition of the old privileges, express and
+un-express, of the rich. Something was done in the latter direction when
+the system of nomination in most departments of the civil service and
+that of purchase in the army were got rid of. But as long as in the
+higher departments of public affairs a man has a place in the
+legislature merely because he is the son of his father; as long as in
+the humbler branches no one unpossessed of a property qualification can
+sit on certain local boards; and as long as in daily life the facilities
+for frequent appeal, devised by lawyers within the House for the benefit
+of lawyers without, provide a power for wealth that is often used to
+defeat the ends of justice, so long, to take these alone out of many
+instances, shall we lack that equality of opportunity which we demand
+not as a favour but a right.
+
+But if every man is to be equal before the law, he must have the right
+to think as his reason directs; to discuss as freely as he thinks; and
+to act as he pleases, so long as his neighbour is not injured in the
+honest discharge of his duties, or the common weal put in jeopardy.
+"Give me," said Milton, "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue
+according to conscience, above all liberties"--for it is certain that
+with freedom of thought and discussion all other liberties will follow.
+John Mill carried this principle to the fullest extent when he argued
+that "if all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion, and only one
+person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified
+in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be
+justified in silencing mankind." To all such sweeping generalizations
+there are, however, possible exceptions. No man would be much inclined
+to blame Cromwell for suppressing the pamphlet "Killing no Murder,"
+which directly advocated his own assassination; even the strongest lover
+of free discussion would not be prepared to allow the systematic
+circulation of exhortations to blow up our public buildings, and
+directions as to the best way of doing it; and instances may conceivably
+arise--and an invasion one of them--where absolute freedom of
+publication and debate would form a national danger. Our liberties,
+therefore, would be sufficiently protected if we recognized the right of
+every man to speak and to act as he pleases, "so long as his neighbour
+is not injured in the honest discharge of his duties, or the common weal
+put in jeopardy."
+
+In order, however, that men may be able to think, speak, and do as they
+deem right, it is necessary that the people shall rule, and that the
+majority, when it has made up its mind, shall have the power to carry
+out its decree. Even the Tories of these days will not dispute this
+principle, and, therefore, Liberals cannot claim it as at this moment
+their own; and yet, broadly speaking, the root idea of the Tory party is
+the aristocratic theory that the few ought to govern the many, while
+that of the Liberal party is the democratic, that the many ought to
+govern the few.
+
+In the days before the mass of the people were a real power in the
+affairs of the State, this difference was very clearly marked, for the
+Tories then were under no necessity to conceal their belief that the
+"common herd" were not to be trusted in political concerns. And it is
+useful, as showing what the high Tory doctrine on this point really was,
+to recall the fact that a judge on the bench, less than a century ago,
+in summing up at a political trial, laid it down as a doctrine not to be
+questioned that "a government in every country should be just like a
+corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed interest,
+which alone has a right to be represented. As for rabble, who have
+nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? What
+security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their
+property on their backs, and leave the country in the twinkle of an eye;
+but landed property cannot be removed." And another judge at a political
+trial within the present century went even further in denying to the
+people not merely the right of interference with public affairs, but
+even of comment upon them. "It is said," he observed, "that we have a
+right to discuss the acts of our legislature. This would be a large
+permission indeed. Is there to be a power in the people to counteract
+the acts of the Parliament; and is the libeller to come and make the
+people dissatisfied with the Government under which he lives? This is
+not to be permitted to any man,--it is unconstitutional and seditious."
+We have outgrown such doctrines as these; and, thanks to the efforts of
+generations of Liberals who have passed to their rest, the right of the
+"rabble who have nothing but personal property"--or, for the matter of
+that, no property at all--to take part in settling the affairs of the
+State, whether by criticism or active interference, is solidly
+established.
+
+It may be argued that as the Tories of to-day have accepted democracy,
+the Liberals have no right to claim the principles here laid down as if
+they were without exception their own. But this Tory acceptance of
+democratic ideas is only partial, and a party which mainly depends upon
+the aristocracy for support can never adopt them with consistency and
+enthusiasm. The very existence of an hereditary legislature violates the
+principle that all men should be equal before the law; the theory upon
+which a State-established Church rests is equally a violation of the
+right of every one to think, speak, and act as he chooses; and the
+continuous efforts of the Tories to limit the franchise, and to erect
+barriers against the majority having their will, are utterly opposed to
+the view that the people should govern, and harmonize with the old idea
+that the people should be governed.
+
+It must not be imagined that these differences between the parties mean
+nothing, or that we are beyond all danger of losing the advance we have
+made. The ease with which we might slip back into despotism is shown by
+the manner in which the Tories resort to coercion--or, as they prefer to
+term it, "exceptional legislation"--when a majority of the Irish people
+has to be cowed. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the abolition
+of trial by jury, the extinction of liberty of the press, and the denial
+of the right of public meeting have been frequently enacted against the
+majority of the people of Ireland, because their views on the political
+situation have not accorded with those of the majority of the people of
+England. And though they have all failed, and repeatedly failed, a
+variation of the same old plan is put in operation to-day as if it were
+a newly-discovered and infallible remedy for every popular ill.
+
+Easy-going folk are apt to reply that, as these things concern only
+Ireland, it is of no special moment to ourselves, and that England is
+safe from any revival of a despotic system. Even if this were true it
+would be false morality, and false morality makes bad politics. But it
+is not true. Despotism is a disease which spreads, and any development
+of it applied to one part of the body politic might, in conceivable
+circumstances, be used as a precedent to apply it to the whole. And if
+it be said that in these happy days the men of England have the
+undisputed right to think as they like and talk as they will, it can be
+answered that not one of the shackles upon freedom of thought and
+freedom of action has been voluntarily struck off by the Tories, and
+that it is only lately that they prevented a member of Parliament for
+years from taking the seat to which he had been four times elected,
+because he avowed what he believed upon theological questions.
+
+The difference between the two parties, even in the present general
+acceptance of a democratic system, may be put in words once used by Mr.
+Chamberlain--"It is the essential condition, the cardinal principle of
+Liberalism, that we should recognize rights, and not merely confer
+favours." With us, the suffrage is the right of every free citizen; with
+the Tories, it is a favour conferred upon the working by the moneyed
+classes. We demand religious equality; the Tories are willing to give
+toleration. But favours we do not ask, and toleration we will not have.
+
+Liberals, in fact, are prepared substantially to subscribe to the
+principles laid down more than a century since in the American
+Declaration of Independence--a document which sounded the knell of
+despotism on its own side of the Atlantic, and awoke echoes which shook
+down another despotism on ours. "We hold," said that document, "these
+truths to be self-evident--that all men are created equal; that they are
+endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among
+these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure
+these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just
+powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of
+government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the
+people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government,
+laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
+such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and
+happiness."
+
+These, broadly speaking, are Liberal principles; and when one has
+absorbed them thoroughly, there comes to him that Liberal sentiment,
+that enthusiasm for his fellows, which feels a blow struck at any man's
+freedom, in any part of the whole world, as keenly as if it were struck
+at his own.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.--ARE LIBERALS AND RADICALS AGREED?
+
+
+It may be thought that by dealing only with "the fundamental principles
+of the Liberal party," the Radicals were put aside as if they had no
+separate existence; and to a large extent this is true, for Radicals are
+simply advanced Liberals. The principles just asserted are common to all
+members of the progressive party. There are differences as to the time
+at which certain measures directly flowing from them shall become a
+portion of the party's platform; and that is all.
+
+A great deal of the prejudice which used to exist against those called
+"Radicals" has died away, but traces of it linger still; and it will be
+well to see what Radicalism, as a phase of Liberalism, really is. It may
+sound strange to be told that the Whigs were the Radicals of an earlier
+day, and that they sometimes carried their Radicalism to the point of
+revolution. In these times it is becoming increasingly doubtful whether
+those who call themselves by what was once the honourable title of
+"Whig" have any claim to be considered members of the Liberal party; and
+there are many who consider that they are now more truly conservative
+than the Conservatives themselves. The Whigs tell us that they are only
+acting as the drag on the wheel; but this implies that we are always
+going down hill. That we do not believe. We hold that we are
+progressing; and a drag which would act upon the coach as it climbs the
+hill is a product neither of prudence nor common sense.
+
+The bulk of the party of progress in these days may be said to combine
+Liberal traditions with Radical instincts. The two can mingle with the
+utmost ease, and, though they may run side by side for some time before
+they join, the steady stream of the one and the rapid rush of the other
+always unite at last in one broad river of liberalizing sentiment, which
+fertilizes as it flows.
+
+From the time when Bolingbroke wrote of some measure that "such a remedy
+might have wrought a _radical cure_ of the evil that threatens our
+constitution" to the date, a century later, when those who wished to
+introduce a "radical reform" into our representative system were called
+by the name, there were many Whigs who talked Radicalism without being
+aware of it; but when the title had been given to a section of the
+Liberal party, it became for a long period a term of reproach. Mr.
+Gladstone, once speaking at Birmingham, quoted a definition of the early
+Radicals which described them as men "whose temper had been soured
+against the laws and institutions of their country;" and he admitted
+that there was much justification for their having been so. But one can
+quite understand that men of a soured temper were not likely to be
+popular with the placid politician who stayed at home, or the
+place-hunter who went to the House of Commons; and the bad meaning, once
+attached to the name, remained affixed to it for a very long time.
+
+Mr. Gladstone, in the speech referred to, was the first great English
+statesman to try and remove the reproach; and this he did by defining a
+Radical as "a man who is in earnest." This was flattering, but as a
+definition lacked precision, for Tories are often in desperate earnest.
+Many Radicals would assert that the very name--coming, as it of course
+does, from the Latin word for "root"--tells everything; that it
+signifies that they go to the root of all matters with which they deal,
+and that, where reform is needed, it is a root and branch reform they
+advocate.
+
+To this it may be replied that to go to the root of everything is not
+always practicable and is not necessarily judicious. If a tree be
+thoroughly rotten, if it be liable to be shaken to the ground by the
+first blast, and thereby to injure all its surroundings, it should
+certainly be cut down, and as soon as it conveniently can be. But if the
+tree has only two or three rotten branches, there is no necessity to go
+to its root. If one does, it will very probably kill a good tree which,
+with only the decayed portions removed, might bear valuable fruit. As
+with trees, so with institutions; and what seems to be forgotten by many
+who call themselves Radical is that, in a highly-complex civilization
+such as ours, we have to bear with some things that are far from ideal,
+simply because of that force of do-nothingness which, powerful in
+mechanics, is as great in political life.
+
+A friend who has long worked in the Liberal cause once observed: "The
+misfortune is that it is difficult to tell what a man's ideas of public
+policy are from the mere fact of his calling himself a Radical. If by
+Radical is meant Advanced Liberal--a Liberal determined to push forward
+with all practicable speed, a Liberal who is in earnest--then I can
+understand it, and I will readily take the name. But if by Radical is
+meant a somewhat hysterical creature, who is ready to fight for every
+fad that tickles his fancy, as he seems to be in some cases, or a
+cantankerous being whose crotchets compel him to sever himself from all
+other workers, as he is in others; if he is of the extreme Spencerian
+school, and demurs to most legislation on the ground that it is
+over-legislation, or of the extreme Socialist school, and demands that
+Government shall do everything, and individual effort be practically
+strangled by force of law, I am not a Radical, and hope never to be
+called one."
+
+But the practical Radicalism which is one of the greatest factors in
+Liberal policy at the present day, is far removed from the schools just
+depicted. The reasonable Radical is not a believer in any of the
+schemes--as old as the hills and yet unblushingly preached
+to-day--which, by some legislative hocus-pocus, some supreme stroke of
+statecraft, will "put a pot on every fire and a fowl in every pot;" will
+endow each widow and give a portion to all unmarried girls; will feed
+the poor without burdening the community; and will make all the crooked
+paths straight without undue trouble to ourselves. He holds that
+
+
+                     Diseases desperate grown
+     By desperate remedies are removed,
+     Or not at all;
+
+
+but he does not consider all diseases to be of the character described;
+he does not refuse the half-loaf because for the moment the whole one is
+impossible of attainment; and he does not repudiate other honest workers
+in the cause of progress because their pace is not quite so swift, and
+their point of view somewhat different.
+
+In the constant striving after a high ideal, there is in the Radical's
+heart a resolute desire to emerge from any rut into which politics may
+have degenerated. For the very reason of his existence is that, if there
+be an abuse in Church or State which agitation and argument can remove,
+all honest endeavours must be made to remove it. He cannot forget that
+many abuses have been got rid of by these means, and he profits by the
+lesson to attack those which remain. It is their extinction at which he
+aims. Earnestness, enthusiasm, and devotion to principle are his
+weapons, and these he will not waste in fruitless longings after a
+perfect State, but will use them to make the State we possess as perfect
+as is possible. In all things he will aim at the practical; he will
+remember that compromise is not necessarily cowardly, and that it is
+possible for those who disagree with him to be as honest in their views
+and as pure in their aims as himself. And in striving for the greatest
+happiness of the greatest number, he will never forget that the greatest
+number is all.
+
+The answer may be made that this is an ideal Radical, and that the real
+article is very different. So many have been taught to think, but they
+are wrong. There are some rough diamonds in the Radical party, it is
+true; but, so long as they be diamonds, we can afford to wait a little
+for the polish. They are bigoted it may be said, and bigotry is hateful.
+But bigots are just as useful to a reform as backwoodsmen to a new
+community; they clear away obstacles from which gentler men would
+shrink; rough and occasionally awkward to deal with, they make the
+pathways along which others can move.
+
+But, it is sometimes asked, where are the old philosophical
+Radicals--men of the stamp of Bentham, and Grote, and James Mill? Dead,
+all of them, having done their life's work faithfully and well; and
+their successors have to look at politics from the standpoint of
+to-day, and not of half a century ago. And when the Tories say that
+these were especially admirable men, it must not be forgotten that their
+ideas were as strongly opposed and their persons as bitterly assailed by
+the Tories of their own day as are the ideas and the persons of the
+unphilosophical Radicals--if they are to be called so--of this present
+year of grace.
+
+The Radicals of to-day have their faults, and there shall be no attempt
+to conceal them. Many who call themselves by the name discredit it by
+impatience of opposition, readiness to attribute interested motives to
+those differing from them, and intolerance towards those who exercise in
+another direction what they emphatically claim for themselves--absolute
+freedom of thought, speech, and action. Some among them also are prone
+to be led aside by a catching phrase, without troubling to ask what it
+really means; and, in order to strengthen their forces, allow themselves
+to be connected with any movement that may for the moment be popular.
+And even more, but these of a much higher stamp, are carried away by the
+dangerous delusion that in any political system can be found perfect
+happiness.
+
+No honest Radical will deny the existence of these faults or be offended
+that they should be pointed out. But the essential purity of aim and
+depth of honest fervour possessed by the Radicals of this country
+deserves all recognition. At heavy sacrifice to themselves they have led
+the van in every great political movement, and their instinct has been
+proved to be right. They have held aloft the lamp of liberty in times of
+depression when Liberals of feebler soul would have hidden it beneath a
+bushel in the hope of brighter days. And, even were their failings more
+far-reaching than any that can be urged against them, their services as
+pioneers of freedom would entitle them to the heartiest thanks of all
+who have entered into their heritage because of the efforts the Radicals
+have made.
+
+Radicals and Liberals, then, are agreed as to principle though they
+differ in methods, for the Liberal is a very good lantern, but a lantern
+which requires lighting; and it is the Radical who strikes the match.
+
+
+
+
+IX.--WHAT ARE THE LIBERALS DOING?
+
+
+There has now been told a great deal about the principles which the
+Liberals entertain, and a list has been given of the many glorious
+things the Liberals have done; but the question of greatest immediate
+interest is what the Liberals are doing, for we cannot live upon the
+exploits of the past, but upon the performances of the present and the
+promises of the future.
+
+Although the Liberals at this moment are concentrating their main
+attention upon the question of self-government for Ireland, there are
+other important matters affecting the remainder of the United Kingdom
+which occupy a place in their thoughts, and which will form their future
+party "cry."
+
+It has, of course, often been remarked that men when in Opposition call
+out for a great deal which they fail to accomplish when in office; but
+discredit does not of necessity ensue. It certainly shows that in
+certain instances men do not come up to their ideal, but does that prove
+the ideal to be wrong? Does it not rather prove that those who adopted
+it, like mortal men everywhere and in all ages, were fallible? Despite
+every drawback and every backsliding--and such drawbacks and
+backslidings are admittedly many--it is better to have a high ideal and
+fail frequently to attain it, than to have no definiteness of purpose
+and take the chance of blundering into the right.
+
+None should think lightly of the power of a popular cry. It was with the
+shout of the leading tenet of their new creed that the Arabs fought
+their way from Mecca to Madrid; it was with the exclamation "Jerusalem
+is lost!" that the Crusaders marched across Europe to battle with the
+Saracen; it was with the device "For God and the Protestant Religion"
+that William of Orange swept the Stuarts out of Britain; and it was with
+the burning words of the "Marseillaise" that the raw levies of France
+defied and defeated the trained armies of Europe. For the popular cry
+voices the popular emotion, and when the popular emotion is at its
+height its force is irresistible.
+
+To touch the heart of the people must, therefore, be one aim of any
+democratic party; and that is why the politician who makes no allowance
+for human passion, prejudice, or prepossession is a mere dreamer, who
+deserves and is bound to fail. The fashion of the German philosopher
+who, on being asked to describe a camel, evolved the animal from his
+inner consciousness, is that in which some of our political guides
+create their ideas of the world around them. They sit in the same
+armchair as of old, and do not perceive how the conditions have changed.
+They continue to imagine that the clique of some club-house controls
+public events, and that the whisper of the party whip is all-powerful
+with the constituencies. They do not recognize that voters are not now
+an appanage of the Reform or the Carlton, because the groove they have
+hollowed out for themselves is too deep to allow them to look over the
+edge. But in nothing more than in politics is it true that the proper
+study of mankind is man.
+
+And, if one moves among the masses of his fellows, he will find a
+growing desire to put to practical use the tools the State has given
+them. Household suffrage and the ballot were not an end but a means, and
+the question which politicians should ask themselves in this day of
+comparative quiet is to what end these means shall be put. Those who
+talk with working men know that there is a vague discontent with things
+as they are, which, if not directed into proper channels, may become
+dangerous, for in many quarters the old ignorant impatience of taxation
+is giving place to an ignorant impatience of the rich. No good will come
+of shutting our eyes to the existence of this feeling; the question is
+how in the fairest and fittest manner it can be eradicated.
+
+It must not be forgotten that the working classes have only recently
+obtained direct political power, and that there is still much
+uncertainty among them as to the best uses to which it can be put. There
+would be nothing immoral in their using that power to better their own
+interests. Men, after all, are but mortal; and, just as the upper
+classes before 1832 used the power of Parliament to further their own
+ends, and just as later the middle classes, when they were uppermost,
+attended carefully to themselves, so the working classes will do when
+they recognize their strength. And this is only saying that men being as
+they are, "Number One" will be the most prominent figure in their
+political calculations, whether that number represents a peer of the
+realm or a labourer on the roads.
+
+This is not the place to enter into the question of how far the State
+ought to interfere with social problems. The fact to be emphasized is
+that there is an increasing body of opinion, especially among the
+working classes, that certain social problems will have to be attended
+to. Any politician who attempts to forecast the future--more especially
+any Liberal who wishes to draw up a party programme--must recognize
+this, and act according to his convictions after fully considering it.
+
+The politics of the future will, therefore, have a distinctly social
+tinge, but they must include also many questions which are regarded
+to-day, and will continue to be regarded, as of a partisan character. It
+is requisite, then, to the right understanding of Liberal policy that a
+broad view should be taken of the matters which are likely within no
+distant date to become planks of the party platform. Calm discussion now
+may save misapprehension then, and if we can see exactly whither we are
+going, we shall be able with the more certainty to pursue our journey.
+And if, in the course of the discussion, what at the first blush appears
+an extreme view is taken, remember always the old truth that half a loaf
+is better than no bread--that is, if the half-loaf be good bread and
+honestly earned, and not to be accepted as an equivalent for the whole,
+if that be wished for and attainable.
+
+Subject to this condition, the Liberal party can do no better than
+consider what is likely to come within the scope of its future
+exertions; and although it is right to take up one thing at a time in
+order that that one thing may be done well, good will be effected by at
+once endeavouring to answer the main questions now before us. Upon the
+spirit in which these are discussed, and the manner in which they are
+replied to, much of the future of popular government in England will
+depend. The scientific naturalist of to-day tells us that it is an idle
+fable which states that the ostrich hides its head in the sand with the
+idea of escaping observation; but really so many of our leading
+politicians execute a variation of this manoeuvre in regard to the
+questions of the future, that the ostrich need not be ashamed to be
+stupid in such eminent company.
+
+A preliminary to the discussion in detail of questions which go to the
+root of many of the most important matters in politics is a resolution
+not to be led aside from any course one may think right by the fear of
+being called hard names, or by the use of certain venerable but
+weather-worn phrases. It is so easy to endeavour to damage political
+opponents by applying to them such names as Separatists or Socialists,
+Atheists or Revolutionaries, that one cannot wonder that the practice is
+frequently adopted by the Tory party. But hard words break no bones, and
+the politician who is frightened by a nickname may be a very estimable
+person, but he is no good in a fight.
+
+Similarly we can afford to despise certain of the phrases which with
+some politicians do duty for argument. No one should be turned back from
+doing what he thought to be right in the circumstances of to-day by
+being reminded of that mysterious entity "the wisdom of our ancestors."
+What sane man would conduct a shop as it was conducted 500 years since?
+And where would science be if we still swore by the skill of the
+alchemists? Accumulated experience in the varied transactions of life is
+held to improve man's judgment and capacity; why should it not be
+similarly held to improve the judgment and capacity of States? Let any
+one who sighs after the wisdom of our ancestors apply in imagination the
+political maxims in vogue even a hundred years ago to the affairs of
+this present, and then let him say honestly whether he would wish by
+them to be governed.
+
+Another fine-crusted example of a worn-out phrase is that in praise of
+"the good old times." We are invited to believe that in some unnamed
+age, England was better and brighter, and her people happier and richer,
+than to-day, and mainly because rulers were obeyed in all things and no
+questions asked. But particulars are lacking; and these sketches of the
+glories of "the good old times" are like nothing so much as Chinese
+pictures, displaying an abundance of colour but no perspective, an
+amazing imagination but an absence of exact likeness to anything ever
+seen by mortal man.
+
+"Dangerous innovations" also is a phrase at which no one should be
+alarmed. No great good has ever been accomplished without many excellent
+persons considering it a "dangerous innovation." The Scribes and the
+Pharisees, and, after them, the Roman Empire, denounced and persecuted
+the Christian religion upon this ground; the most powerful Church in
+Christendom, with similar belief and similar lack of success, used every
+engine at its command to suppress the Reformation. As in religious so in
+political affairs. King John would doubtless have described Magna Charta
+in just such terms; the partisans of Charles the First certainly held
+that opinion concerning the demand of Parliament to control the Church,
+the army, and the monarchy itself; the opponents of every measure of
+reform--political, social, or religious--have used the phrase. From the
+greatest to the smallest reform it has been the same. In the early years
+of this century a Parochial Schools Bill, because it did not give all
+power to the clergy, was opposed by the then Archbishop of Canterbury
+with the words, "Their lordships' prudence would, and must, guard
+against innovations that might shake the foundations of religion." When,
+in later times, gas was introduced, the aristocratic dwellers in western
+London protested with equal force against such an innovation as the new
+illuminant; and Lord Beaconsfield, in the opening chapters of the last
+of his novels, sketched with ironic pen the attempts of high-born ladies
+to prevent the spread of light. Thus, in things sublime and in things
+ridiculous, the cry of "dangerous innovation" has been raised until it
+has been rendered contemptible.
+
+Equally futile is the fear that the Liberals are about to propose "the
+impossible." There is nothing in politics to which that word can be
+applied, as even the most cursory study of our history will show. When
+men say that certain measures can "never" be carried, they are more
+likely to be wrong than right. In 1687 it would have been deemed
+impossible to place the Crown upon a strictly parliamentary basis; in
+1689 this was accomplished. In 1830 the most sanguine reformer scarcely
+dared hope that borough-mongering would in his lifetime be destroyed,
+and the first popularly elected Parliament was chosen in 1832. In 1865,
+none could have dreamed that household suffrage in the boroughs was
+near; in 1867 it was adopted by a Tory Government. In 1867 he would have
+been a hardy prophet who would have foretold the speedy downfall of the
+Irish Episcopal Establishment; and the Act of Disestablishment was
+placed upon the statute book in 1869. Such instances should of a surety
+teach men to be modest in their forecasts of what is possible in
+politics.
+
+In, therefore, pursuing our search into the why and the wherefore of the
+politics of the future, we must put aside phrases and come to facts. The
+phrases will die, but the facts will remain; and the more closely we
+grasp these latter the more certain will those Liberal principles which
+have done so much for the past, do even more for the future.
+
+And, when we come to the facts, we must not forget that a political
+question is not necessarily unpractical because it cannot be immediately
+dealt with; for good is accomplished by the calm discussion of points
+which are bound some time to be raised, and which, if undebated now, may
+be settled in a gust of popular passion. As Mr. John Morley has well
+observed--"The fact that leading statesmen are of necessity so absorbed
+in the tasks of the hour furnishes all the better reason why as many
+other people as possible should busy themselves in helping to prepare
+opinion for the practical application of unfamiliar but weighty and
+promising suggestions, by constant and ready discussion of them upon
+their merits."
+
+
+
+
+X.--SHOULD HOME RULE BE GRANTED TO IRELAND?
+
+
+The question of Irish self-government is for the present the greatest
+that concerns the Liberal party, and in current politics, as Mr.
+Gladstone has truly and tersely put it, Ireland blocks the way. This, of
+course, is not so simply because Mr. Gladstone said it, and even less is
+it so because he wished it. The question stands in the path of all other
+great measures of legislative reform, for the sufficient reason that, at
+the first opportunity after the franchise was enjoyed by every
+householder, Ireland declared emphatically, and by a majority
+unparalleled in modern political history, in favour of freedom to manage
+her own domestic affairs.
+
+It must be obvious that, when all the popularly-elected members for
+three out of four provinces into which one of the countries which form
+this kingdom is divided, pronounce against the existing system of
+government, and when a majority of those for the other province side
+with them, that that system cannot continue to exist with the good will
+of those whom it most intimately affects, and can only be maintained by
+force. Such as have followed Mr. Gladstone in this matter do not believe
+in the maintenance of a government against the constitutionally declared
+will of the governed, and are agreed that the Irish demand for the
+management of purely domestic affairs ought to be granted on the grounds
+of justice, expediency, and sound Liberal principles.
+
+They hold that to grant the demand would be just, because under the
+present system the vast majority of Irishmen have no practical control
+over those by whom they are governed; that it would be expedient,
+because the kingdom is weakened by the continual disaffection of one of
+its component parts; and that it would accord with sound Liberal
+principles, in that the overwhelming majority of the Irish electorate
+have asked for Home Rule through the constitutional medium of the
+ballot-box.
+
+"The liberty of a people," says Cowley, "consists in being governed by
+laws which they have made themselves, under whatever form it be of
+government." This definition, which applies strictly to England, applies
+not at all to Ireland. The English system of government has broken down
+there so completely that all parties profess to be agreed that something
+must be devised in its place. Liberals have always held that a people or
+a class knows better what is good for it than any other people or any
+other class, however enlightened or well-meaning. That has been one of
+the main reasons for giving the suffrage to the poor, the ignorant, and
+the helpless, because the experience of ages has taught that the rich,
+the educated, and the powerful, while well able to take care of
+themselves, are either too careless or have too little knowledge to take
+the same care of others. And as with the suffrage, so with
+self-government. Any extension must be granted upon broad principles:
+small concessions grudgingly given are always accepted without
+gratitude, and used to extort greater.
+
+"Well," it may be said, "I am willing to give Ireland a large measure of
+self-government, but I won't yield to agitators." This is one of the
+oldest of all replies to demands for reform. How could anything be
+gained in politics without agitation? The Tories swear they will yield
+nothing until agitation has ceased; and if it ceases, if only for a
+moment, they declare it is evident there is no popular wish for reform.
+"Proceed, my lords," said Lord Mansfield, when the American colonies
+revolted--"proceed, my lords, with spirit and firmness; and when you
+shall have established your authority, it will then be time to show
+lenity." And their lordships proceeded; but the "time to show lenity"
+never came, for it was such counsels which lost the American colonies to
+the British Crown.
+
+"But," it will be added, "this is not an ordinary agitation; it is a
+revolutionary one." In some of its phases that is true, and it is all
+the more reason why its cause should be closely examined. It is the
+English themselves who have taught the Irish that ordinary
+constitutional agitation gains them nothing. If it had not been for the
+organization of the Volunteers, Grattan's Parliament of 1782 would never
+have been granted; the Duke of Wellington in 1829 admitted that he
+yielded Catholic Emancipation to the threat of civil war; it needed the
+terrible crimes of the early "thirties" to arouse England to the
+necessity for abolishing an iniquitous system of levying tithe; the
+Fenian outbreaks, the attack on a prison van at Manchester, and the
+blowing up of a gaol in London, opened the eyes of the English to the
+need for disestablishing the Irish Church and clipping the claws of the
+Irish landlords; the fearful winter of 1880 led to the granting of still
+further protection to the tenants; and to the "plan of campaign" of the
+winter of 1886 was it owing that a Tory Government felt compelled to
+still further encroach upon the property and privileges of the landlords
+of Ireland. As long as Ireland has held to constitutional agitation--as
+witness that for Catholic Emancipation from 1801 to 1825, and that for
+tenant right from 1850 to 1868--so long has England refused to grant a
+single just demand; and this is exactly what the Tories are doing now.
+Is it any wonder that Irish agitation should have become revolutionary
+when that is the only kind we have rewarded? In the relations between
+the governing classes and popular movements there has all through been
+this difference--in England, revolution has been staved off by reform;
+in Ireland, reform has been staved off till there was revolution.
+
+"But," it may be continued, "it is not so much that the agitation is
+revolutionary as that it is criminal which makes me object." But a
+movement ought not to be called criminal because of the excesses of a
+few of its extreme partisans. No great popular agitation has ever been
+free from lewd fellows of the baser sort, who have given occasion to the
+enemy to blaspheme. But did English Liberals hesitate to support Mazzini
+because he was accused of favouring assassination; to sympathize with
+the French Republicans because Orsini prepared bombs for the destruction
+of Napoleon III.; or to-day to wish well to those Russians who conspire
+for liberty because the wilder spirits among them have assassinated one
+Czar and attempted to assassinate another? In our own history, are the
+Covenanters to be condemned because some of them murdered Archbishop
+Sharpe; the early Radicals because Thistlewood and his fellows plotted
+to kill King and Cabinet; the Reformers of 1831 because of the Bristol
+riots and the destruction of Nottingham Castle; or those of 1866 because
+the Hyde Park railings were thrown down? When it is remembered that even
+such a man as Peel could, in the midst of a heated controversy, accuse
+such another as Cobden of conniving at assassination, we should be
+careful how we accept the testimony of any partisan concerning the
+criminality of an agitation to which he is opposed.
+
+These objections touch, after all, only the fringe of the matter, and
+another which is frequently urged--that the Irish agitation is a
+"foreign conspiracy" because it receives aid from the United
+States--does not go much closer to the root. But this, like the others,
+may be disposed of by English examples. Did not Englishmen aid, both by
+men and money, in liberating Greece and uniting Italy? Did they not help
+by subscriptions the insurrections in Hungary and Poland, and, when the
+former failed, did not many of them take the refugees into their homes?
+Did they not even raise a fund to assist the slave-holding States when
+in rebellion? And in all these cases, except in a remote degree the
+last, they had no tie in blood, but only one in sympathy, with those
+concerned. That the Nationalist movement has been largely aided from the
+United States is undoubted; but that aid has mainly come from those of
+Irish birth or parentage who have been driven across the Atlantic to
+seek a home. And when it is said that, because of this help, a
+self-governed Ireland would rely upon the United States to the detriment
+of England, may we not ask why it is that Italy does not rely upon
+France, though it was France that struck the first effective blow for
+Italian unity; or Bulgaria upon Russia, though without the
+blood-sacrifice of Russia that principality would never have occupied a
+place on the European map? However much it may be to be regretted,
+gratitude does not play any large part in international affairs.
+
+When the more serious objections to the granting Home Rule are urged
+they are no more difficult to meet. "Ireland is not a nation," it is
+said; "its people are of different races." The argument has been used
+before by the Tories, and the value of it may be judged by an example.
+The late Lord Derby, as leader of the Tory party, addressed the House of
+Lords in 1860 in savage denunciation of the efforts then being made to
+secure the unity of Italy; and to the contention that all the
+inhabitants of that peninsula were Italians, he answered, in the words
+of _Macbeth_ to his hired murderers,
+
+
+       Aye, in the catalogue ye go for men;
+     As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
+     Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are cleped
+     All by the name of dogs.
+
+
+And those who remember the unbridgeable differences which then appeared
+to exist between the Sardinian and the Sicilian, the Florentine and the
+Neapolitan, the dweller in Venice and the resident in Rome, will know
+that the perfect unity between them which now makes Italy one of the
+Great Powers would have been considered as unlikely as any between a
+Belfast man and an inhabitant of Cork to-day.
+
+"The Irish are not fit for self-government," is the next contention. If
+this be so, the shame is ours in not having given them the opportunity
+for being trained. We did not refuse to liberate the slaves until they
+were proved to be fit for freedom; we did not decline to give the
+labourers the suffrage until they were proved to be capable of rightly
+using it; for we knew in each case that no such proof could be afforded
+until the opportunity was offered. No proof that the Irish are not able
+to manage a Parliament is given by the corruption of the
+semi-independent body which they enjoyed from 1782 to 1799; for that
+consisted entirely of Protestants, mainly chosen by a band of
+borough-mongers, whom Pitt had to buy out at a high price. The same
+thing exactly was said by the Tories--sneers about the pigs and all--of
+the Bulgarians in 1876; and they have had good reason since to change
+their minds. What reason is there to believe that the Irish would be
+less able to manage their own affairs than the people of Bulgaria?
+
+"But they are naturally lawless." Where is the proof? It is true that in
+certain mountainous districts of Kerry and Clare there have been
+outbursts of moonlighting, but these have been as nothing compared with
+the prevalence of brigandage in Greece before the Greeks were allowed to
+rule themselves, or in Italy before the Italians founded their united
+kingdom. Where there is little popular respect for the law, there
+lawlessness flourishes; where the people make their own laws, there
+lawlessness is put down with a strong hand.
+
+"If they had the power they would persecute the Protestants." This is a
+prophecy, and a prophet has the advantage of being able to soar above
+proofs. But the fact that every prominent defender of national rights in
+Ireland for the last century and a half, except O'Connell, from Dean
+Swift down to Mr. Parnell, has been a Protestant, should count for
+something. The fact that Protestants have again and again been returned
+to the Corporations of the most Catholic cities should count for much.
+And the fact that, when for years not a single one of the 450 English
+members was a Roman Catholic, several of the 103 Irish members, even
+from the most Catholic districts, were Protestants, should count for
+more. Such religious persecution as exists in Ireland is certainly more
+at Belfast than at Cork.
+
+"Giving them a Parliament would break up the empire." Why should the
+empire be broken up because there was extended to Ireland the principle
+we have granted to Australia and Canada, New Zealand and the Cape? How
+is it that the German Empire continues united, though the Reichstag, its
+Imperial Parliament, is one body, and the Prussian Parliament, the Saxon
+Parliament, the Wuertemberg Parliament, and the Bavarian Parliament are
+quite others? Is there no union between Austria and Hungary, or between
+Sweden and Norway, though each has its Parliament, and are the United
+States disintegrated because every one of the States has its own Senate
+and House of Representatives? If one were asked to name two of the
+strongest nations outside our own, Germany and the United States would
+be the reply; and in each there is a system of Home Rule for the
+separate portions.
+
+"But did not the United States crush the Confederates when secession
+was demanded?" Of course they did; the United States fought against the
+South separating from the North, as we should against Ireland separating
+from England. But every State which joined the Confederacy possessed as
+ample a measure of Home Rule as the Liberals now propose for Ireland;
+and, to the lasting honour of the Northern States, that measure was
+restored soon after the war. Home Rule the South had, and has still;
+separation the South asked for, and did not receive.
+
+"The Irish are ungrateful people; whatever you give them they ask for
+more." Would it not be well to first ask what the Irish have had to be
+grateful for? Granting that we yielded Catholic Emancipation, reformed
+the tithe system, disestablished the Church, and legalized tenant right;
+why, after all these things, should we expect gratitude? The old phrase
+that "gratitude is a lively sense of favours to come" may be unduly
+cynical; but is it not absurd to ask that recompense for the doing of
+acts of simple justice? Former generations of Englishmen deprived the
+Irish of their rights. To what thanks are later generations entitled for
+simply restoring to the Irish the rights of which they had been robbed?
+"Be just and fear not," was said of ancient time: "Be just and expect
+not gratitude," should be added to-day. And when it is stated that "the
+Irish ought to accept what we choose to give them," it must be replied
+that this is the purely despotic argument which has already done England
+sufficient injury by losing her the United States.
+
+It is only in this, the briefest, fashion that an answer has been
+sketched to the various arguments and assumptions against Home Rule. In
+determining to grant it, the Liberals are acting strictly according to
+their old policy of favouring struggling nationalities. The support
+given by Burke to the cause of America; by Fox to Ireland; by Canning
+(in this, as in some other matters, truly Liberal) to Greece; by
+Palmerston to Italy; and by Mr. Gladstone to Bulgaria, indicates with
+sufficient clearness the traditional Liberal position. For a century we
+have been telling the whole world the advantages of autonomy; are we
+now to decline to adopt, in similar circumstances, the remedy for
+discontent we have all along preached to, and sometimes forced upon,
+others?
+
+The Liberals say with Landor, "Let us try rather to remove the evils of
+Ireland than to persuade those who undergo them that there are none."
+They are utterly opposed to the idea that it is right to give a people
+free representation and then deliberately to ignore all that that
+representation asks. They are, it is true, in a minority at this moment,
+but they do not forget that all great causes have three stages--first to
+be laughed at, next to be looked at, and last to be loved. Home Rule has
+certainly reached the second stage; it will soon reach the third. The
+Liberals have been beaten before, but they have always won in the end.
+And it is well to be beaten sometimes. If life were all sunshine we
+should find it oppressive; an occasional cloud serves to temper the
+heat. To the Liberals, as to nature itself, a misty morning is often the
+prelude to the brightest day.
+
+
+
+
+XI.--WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH THE LORDS?
+
+
+In dealing with the other questions which the Liberals will have to
+consider, it will be well to take them in what may be called their
+constitutional order, and a beginning, therefore, may be made with the
+reform of the House of Lords. The theory upon which that House is upheld
+is that it is an assembly of our most notable men, called to rule either
+by descent from the great ones of the past, or by the proved capacity of
+themselves in the present, who discuss every question laid before them
+with impartiality, and who act as a check upon the hasty and
+ill-considered legislation of the House of Commons.
+
+So much for the theory: what of the fact? Those peers who are not
+creations of to-day mainly spring either from Pitt's plutocrats or from
+those who have been granted their patents because of having lavishly
+spent their money in electoral support of some party; those who can
+claim their peerage by direct descent from the great ones of the past
+can be numbered by tens, while the whole body is numbered by hundreds;
+and just as a sprinkling of successful lawyers, soldiers, and brewers
+adds nothing to its historical character, it in no sense brings the
+peerage into clear and close contact with the people. As to the
+impartiality displayed by the House of Lords, it is notorious that in
+these days it is little other than an appanage of the Carlton Club, and
+that, whatever the Tory whips desire it to do, it accomplishes without
+demur. And its power as a check upon hasty and ill-considered
+legislation may be judged from the fact that it never dares reject a
+measure which public opinion strongly demands and upon which the Commons
+insist.
+
+When the history of the House of Lords is studied, it will be found
+that during the past century it has initiated no great measure for the
+public good, and a hundred times has wantonly mutilated or impotently
+opposed the reforms the people asked. The mischief it has done touches
+every department of public life. Whether it was to throw out a bill
+abolishing the penalty of death for stealing in a shop to the value of
+five shillings, on the ground stated by one of the bishops in the
+majority that it was "too speculative to be safe;" to again and again
+vote down every proposal to relieve Roman Catholics and Jews from civil
+disabilities; to pander to the will of George IV. in the prolonged
+persecution of his wife; or to defeat measures calculated to place the
+electoral power in the hands of the people--the House of Lords has
+always been one of the main forces in the army of darkness and
+oppression. Remember that every one of the reforms the Liberals have
+secured within the last 50 years has been distasteful to the House of
+Lords, and calculate the worth or wisdom of that institution.
+
+It does not add to the estimation of either the worth or the wisdom that
+the Lords have ultimately accepted what they have bitterly opposed, for
+if they have consistently been a stumbling-block in the path of every
+reform which the people now cherish their tardy repentance is of little
+avail as long as they pursue the same obstructive course. And it is not
+merely measures which they throw out, but measures which they mutilate,
+that render them a power for harm. For the Lords are like rabbits; it is
+not so much what they swallow as what they spoil which makes them so
+destructive.
+
+Those who defend the institution as it exists should, therefore, be
+called upon to point to some one definite case in recent history in
+which it can be said, "Here has the House of Lords done good." Mere talk
+about the admirable administrators and the dexterous debaters it
+contains is no argument; for if the legislative functions of the peers
+were abolished to-morrow, those among them who were worthy a seat in the
+House of Commons would have no difficulty in securing it. What Liberals
+object to is the being subjected to the caprices, the passions, and the
+prejudices of some five hundred men, the majority of whom are not
+merely unskilled in legislative faculty and unqualified in
+administrative experience, but are drawn from a single class out of
+touch and sympathy with the mass of the people.
+
+It is not the least of the evils of the present system that the
+attendance at the sittings of the Lords is of so perfunctory a nature.
+Even during the discussion of important measures not more than sixty or
+seventy peers, out of over five hundred, are commonly present, while ten
+or twelve is not an unusual number to deal with Bills. As Erskine May
+has pointed out, "Three peers may wield all the authority of the House.
+Nay, even less than that number are competent to pass or reject a law,
+if their unanimity should avert a division, on notice of their imperfect
+constitution." And he furnishes an instance where an Irish Land Bill,
+"which had occupied weeks of discussion in the Commons, was nearly lost
+by a disagreement between the two Houses, the numbers, on a division,
+being seven and six."
+
+Adding to their number does not improve the average attendance, and yet
+the pace at which that number is growing is a scandal. In 1885, the
+first time since 1832, the total membership of the House of Commons was
+enlarged, not without trepidation and despite the fact that every member
+would be directly responsible to a constituency. The increase was only
+twelve, and a Premier often creates within a year as many legislators on
+his own account, who, with their successors, are responsible to no one
+for their public conduct. Is it not an absurdity to speak of ourselves
+as freely governed and ruled only by our own consent when a Prime
+Minister can make as many legislators as he chooses, and there be none
+to gainsay him?
+
+If it were only that under the present system the drunken and the
+dissolute, the blackleg and the debauchee are allowed to sit in the
+Lords and make laws for us and our children, we should have a right to
+demand that the institution should be "mended or ended." The former
+process has now distinctly been adopted as a plank in the Liberal
+platform, and the question of reform can, therefore, no longer be put on
+one side.
+
+There are many Radicals who say that as the House of Lords, if it agrees
+with the Commons, is useless, and if it disagrees is dangerous, its
+abolition as a legislative body should at once be made a plank in the
+party programme. They argue further, that to reform will be to
+strengthen it, and that, by the reasoning just given, this is
+undesirable. But the main point is to secure the best legislative
+machine we can, and there is much to be said for the improvement of the
+House of Lords into a Senate which shall be in fact what the present
+institution is in theory--a body of sage statesmen, experienced in
+affairs, and elected for a specified term, so as to be directly amenable
+to the people, and not removed from obedience to public opinion.
+
+As a first step to any reform, the creation of hereditary peerages,
+conferring a power to legislate, ought to be stopped. "The tenth
+transmitter of a foolish face" ought no longer to be able to transmit
+with the foolishness a power over the lives and liberties of his
+fellow-men. If there is any one who continues honestly to believe that
+because a man has secured a peerage by his brains (and the proportion of
+creations upon that ground is exceeding small) his successors are likely
+to prove good legislators, he would do well to procure a list of those
+peers who are descended from "law lords;" and he would find that while
+not one of them is distinguished for great political or administrative
+skill, there are various notorious instances, which will occur to every
+reader of the daily newspaper, of those distinguished for exactly the
+reverse.
+
+One minor reform in the constitution of the House of Lords ought to be
+pressed at once, and that is the removal of the bishops from their
+present place within it. Not only has no one section of religious
+persons the right to a State-created ascendency over others, but all
+parties are agreed in the most practical form that bishops as bishops
+have no inherent right to legislative power. In 1847, when the bishopric
+of Manchester was created, it was provided that the junior member of the
+episcopal bench for the time being should not have a seat in the Lords,
+and thirty years later, when the Government of Lord Beaconsfield made
+further new bishoprics, it similarly did not venture to add to the
+number of spiritual peers; there are consequently always four or five
+waiting outside the gilded chamber until the death of their seniors
+shall let them in.
+
+What Liberals, therefore, demand is that the House of Lords shall be
+thoroughly reformed. The bishops must be excluded, no more hereditary
+legislators created, and a system devised by which the House shall
+become a Senate so chosen as to be directly responsible to the people,
+whose interests it is assumed to serve. A sprinkling of life peers would
+aggravate instead of lessen the difficulty. An hereditary legislator
+may, for the sake of his successors, be careful not too grievously to
+offend the people; an elected legislator, for his own sake, will be the
+same; but a legislator who was neither one nor the other would have no
+such check, and all experience has shown that corporations elected for
+life become cliquish or even corrupt, for want of the frequent and
+wholesome breeze of public opinion.
+
+
+
+
+XII.--IS THE HOUSE OF COMMONS PERFECT?
+
+
+There was a time, and that not far distant, when the question "Is the
+House of Commons perfect?" would have been considered by many
+well-intentioned and easy-going persons to be impertinent, even if not
+actually irreverent. But we live in days when every institution has to
+submit to the test of free discussion, and its usefulness and efficiency
+have to be proved, if it is to retain its place in the political system.
+And as there can be little doubt that, for many reasons, a feeling has
+been widely growing within the past few years that the House of Commons
+is neither as useful nor as efficient as it ought to be, the popular
+reverence for that great assembly has somewhat diminished; and it
+behoves all who wish to preserve parliamentary government in its fullest
+and freest form to examine the causes of apparent decay and to suggest
+methods of amelioration.
+
+The preservation intact of the powers and privileges of the House of
+Commons must be the desire of every lover of freedom; but the conduct of
+its business must be brought into harmony with modern methods, and the
+mechanical side of the assembly made as perfect as possible. Not from me
+will fall one word derogatory to the venerable "mother of free
+parliaments." The House of Commons has done too much for England, its
+example has done too much for liberty the wide world through, to allow
+any but the ribald and the unthinking to speak lightly of its history or
+scornfully of its achievements. For the People's Chamber is not merely
+the most powerful portion of the High Court of Parliament; it is not
+alone the central force of the British Constitution, to which kings and
+nobles have had, and may again have, to bow; it is the directly elected
+body before whose gaze every wrong can be displayed, and to whose power
+even the humblest can look for redress. It deals forth justice to the
+myriad millions of India as to a solitary injured Englishman; it is a
+sounding board which echoes the claims of a single peasant or an entire
+people; and it practically commands the issues of peace and war,
+involving the fate of thousands, and of life and death, involving that
+of only one. No policy is vast beyond its conception, no person
+insignificant beyond its sight. It is a mighty engine of freedom,
+responsive to the heart-throbs and aspirations of a whole people, which
+has baffled tyrants, liberated slaves, and raised England to that
+position among the nations which our children and our children's
+children should be proud to maintain.
+
+Such is the assembly which needs reform. Often enough and with much
+success has there been raised a cry for "parliamentary reform," but this
+has meant an amendment of the method of electing members, not of the
+manner of conducting business; and it is this latter which now is
+urgently required. The stately ship which has sailed the ocean of public
+affairs for six centuries has naturally attracted weeds and barnacles
+which cling to its hull and retard its progress. These must be swept
+away if the vessel is to pursue a safe and speedy course; and as little
+irreverence is involved in the process as in cleaning and repairing the
+old _Victory_ herself.
+
+The cardinal defect of the existing system is that it strives to do
+modern work by ancient modes, an attempt which is as certain to fail in
+public concerns as it would be if any one were sufficiently ill-advised
+to try it in private. And when there is contemplated on the one side the
+vast and growing mass of affairs cast upon the consideration of
+Parliament, and on the other the rusty and creaking machinery employed
+to cope with it, little wonder can be felt that much needful work is
+left undone, and a deal of that which is accomplished is done badly.
+
+By granting to Ireland the right to manage her domestic affairs, and by
+providing some system by which England, Scotland, and Wales can in local
+assemblies each deal for herself with her own concerns, much will be
+accomplished in the way of real parliamentary reform. But even then more
+will remain to be done. The multiplied stages of each measure laid
+before the House of Commons must be lessened. It is possible to-day to
+have a debate and a division upon the motion for leave to introduce a
+bill, upon the first reading, the second reading, the proposal to go
+into committee, the report stage, the third reading, and the final
+proposition "That the bill do pass," while financial bills have even
+more stages to go through; and although, of course, all these
+opportunities for almost unlimited obstruction are not often made use
+of, they exist and should be diminished.
+
+Another fruitful source of wasted parliamentary time is the provision
+that if a bill is dropped at the end of a session, however far it may
+have progressed short of actual passing, it has to be started afresh
+when the House re-assembles, and every stage has to be as laboriously
+again gone through as if the measure had never been heard of before. One
+can understand why a new Parliament should start with a clean sheet, for
+no decision of a previous one in favour of the principle of a certain
+measure can bind it to pass that measure into law. But within the limits
+of the same Parliament, a decision once given should be so far binding
+that it should not be necessary for a bill to pass the stage of second
+reading four or five years running, because effluxion of time had
+prevented it passing into law during any of the sessions.
+
+Against such waste of time as this--waste which is imposed by the very
+rules under which Parliament works--the closure is no remedy. It is a
+weapon with which it is right that the majority should be armed, but it
+requires great skill in the wielding lest the legitimate efforts of the
+minority be stifled. What is wanted is the better ordering of the whole
+machine. When private bills and purely local business are taken
+elsewhere, when the stages of each measure are lessened, and when bills
+which have passed their second reading are not killed at the session's
+end, but allowed to remain in a state of animated expectancy, even then
+other means will have to be sought to make the machine move more surely
+and with greater expedition.
+
+Something has been done to this end by the earlier hour of assembling
+and fixed hour of adjourning which the House has now adopted. But why
+should not the process be carried further, and the affairs of the
+country be settled by day instead of by night? The first answer is that
+it would not be possible for a legislative body to do its business
+during the day; and a sufficient answer should be that the French
+Assembly and the German Reichsrath do theirs during that period. The
+next is that Ministers could not get through their work if the hours of
+meeting were made earlier; the reply is to the same effect--that what
+French and German Ministers can accomplish, English Ministers must be
+taught to do. A further contention is that such barristers and business
+men as are members would not be able to attend sooner than at present;
+and the answer of many as to the barristers would be that it were well
+for the country if three-fourths of those in the House never attended at
+all, for it is largely owing to the number of lawyers in Parliament that
+the law is a complicated and costly process, often proving an engine of
+injustice in the hands of the rich, and a ruinous remedy for the injured
+poor; while as to the business men who cannot attend earlier than now,
+their number is so exceedingly limited that their convenience ought not
+to be consulted to the detriment of parliamentary institutions. There is
+one more argument which would be of greater weight than all the rest if
+present conditions were likely to continue, and that is, that it would
+be a serious hindrance to private bill legislation, because members
+would be loth to serve on committees during the time the House was
+deliberating; but it is obvious to all observers of the parliamentary
+machine that the greater portion of private business will have soon to
+be delegated to other bodies, and the main point of an undeniably strong
+argument will thus be destroyed.
+
+But even such a reform in the hours of work would not expedite matters
+to a sufficient extent, if the present power of unlimited talk be
+preserved. Every member has the right of speaking once at each stage of
+a bill, and as many times as he likes during committee. If the number of
+stages be lessened, as they are likely to be, there will not be much to
+be objected to in the continuance of this right; but its retention
+should be contingent upon the shortening of each speech. This is a
+proposal which can be justified on "plain Whig principles," and has
+certainly a plain Whig precedent. For Lord John Russell, when Prime
+Minister, brought forward in 1849 a proposal to limit the duration of
+all speeches to one hour, except in the case of a member introducing an
+original motion, or a minister of the Crown speaking in reply. The
+proposal fell through, but that it was made by so cautious a Premier is
+a proof that there is much to be said in favour of compulsorily
+shortening speeches.
+
+The proposition that Parliaments should be chosen more frequently in
+order that they may preserve a closer touch with the people should be
+earnestly pressed forward. In the early days of the House of Commons
+annual Parliaments were practically the rule, an assembly being summoned
+to vote supplies and do certain necessary business and then dissolved.
+When matters were put upon a more certain footing, after the Great
+Rebellion, Parliaments elected for three years were ordained, and this
+term was extended to seven years shortly after the Hanoverian Accession,
+in order to guard against a Jacobite success at the hustings, which
+might seriously have endangered an unstable throne. The time has now
+come to ask that a term adopted in a panic, and for reasons which have
+long passed away, should be shortened. A four years' Parliament has been
+found to be long enough for France, Germany, and the United States; and
+as the average of the last half-century has proved a seven years' period
+to be unnecessarily long for England, the briefer should be enacted. Now
+that the suffrage is on so wide a basis, it is essential that members of
+Parliament should be in as close touch with the people as possible. Once
+elected, members frequently forget that they are not the masters of
+those who have chosen them, and that, though called in one sense to rule
+the country, there is another sense in which they are called to serve.
+It is necessary that this truth should be enforced upon such members as
+are apt to ignore it, and shorter Parliaments would enforce it.
+
+There are some who believe that by payment of members a better
+representation of the people would be secured. The example of other
+countries can certainly be quoted in favour of such a proposition, but
+there appears no necessity for any general payment in England. As,
+however, it is in the highest degree desirable that representatives of
+every class in the community should appear at Westminster, some
+provision should be made by which members, upon making a statutory
+declaration of the necessity for such a course, would be able to claim a
+certain moderate allowance for their expenses during the session. There
+would be nothing revolutionary in this; the fact of members being paid
+would be merely a return to the practice which prevailed for close upon
+four centuries after the House of Commons was established upon its
+present basis.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.--IS OUR ELECTORAL SYSTEM COMPLETE?
+
+
+Many would be surprised if told that there remained serious deficiencies
+in our electoral system; and would ask, "How can that be? We now have
+the ballot at elections, household suffrage in both counties and
+boroughs, and a nearer approach to equal electoral districts than the
+most sanguine Radical ten or even five years ago would have thought
+possible?"
+
+But has the suffrage really been extended to every householder? As a
+fact, it has not; it is largely a merely nominal extension; and tens of
+thousands of qualified citizens are disfranchised for years at a time by
+the needless restrictions and petty technicalities which now clog the
+electoral law. Registration should be so simplified that every qualified
+person would be certain of finding his name on the list; and the duty of
+compiling a correct register should be imposed upon some local public
+official, compelled under penalty to perform it.
+
+The common belief is that a twelvemonth's occupation qualifies for a
+vote, but all that it does is to qualify for a place on the register,
+which is an altogether different matter, the register being made up
+months before it comes into operation. At the very least, a man must
+have gone into a house a year and a half before he has a vote for it,
+and it often happens that he has to be in it for two years and a
+quarter, and even more, before he possesses the franchise. Let me state
+such a case. A man goes into a house at the half-quarter in August,
+1888; he will not be entitled to be placed on the register in the
+autumn of 1889, because he was not occupying on July 15 of the previous
+year; if he continues to occupy, he will, however, be placed there in
+the autumn of 1890; but it is not until January 1, 1891, that he will be
+able to exercise the suffrage. So that all taking houses from July 15,
+1888, are in the same position as those who take them up to July 15,
+1889, and will have to wait for a vote until 1891.
+
+"But," it may be said, "when a man once has his vote he is able to
+retain it as long as he holds any dwelling by virtue of 'successive
+occupation.'" That is so only as long as he remains within the
+boundaries of the constituency wherein he possessed the original
+qualification. He may move from one division of Liverpool to another, or
+from one division of Manchester to another, or from one division of
+Birmingham to another, and retain his vote by successive occupation; but
+if he goes from Liverpool to Birkenhead, from Manchester to Salford, or
+from Birmingham to Aston, his vote is lost for the year and a half or
+the two years and a quarter before explained. The effect of this is most
+apparent in London, where thousands of working men are continually
+moving from one district to another, treating the whole metropolis as
+one great town, but by passing out of their original borough they are
+disfranchised. And this is the more a grievance because the
+Redistribution Act, though dividing the larger provincial towns into
+single-member districts, left them as boroughs intact; while the old
+constituencies in London were not merely divided, but split up into
+separate boroughs. Lambeth thus became three boroughs--Lambeth,
+Camberwell, and Newington--each with its own divisions; Hackney was
+severed into the boroughs of Hackney, Shoreditch, and Bethnal Green;
+Marylebone into the boroughs of Marylebone, Paddington, St. Pancras, and
+Hampstead; and so throughout the metropolis. And the consequence of the
+purely artificial nature of the boundary lines thus created is that many
+a man who merely moves from one side of the street to the other, or even
+from one house to another next door, is disfranchised for a couple of
+years. The obvious remedy for this peculiar evil is that London should
+be treated as one single borough, like Liverpool, Manchester, and
+Birmingham; but the remedy for the whole evil is that when a man has
+once qualified for a place on the register, proof of successive
+occupation in any part of the country should suffice to give him his
+vote in the constituency to which he moves.
+
+When we pass from the household to the lodger franchise, we are faced by
+one of the hugest shams in the electoral system. There are certain
+constituencies which contain hundreds of lodgers, and of these not more
+than tens are on the register. The reason is twofold: it is not merely a
+trouble to get a vote, but there is a yearly difficulty in retaining it.
+For a lodger, as for a household vote, a twelvemonth's occupation is
+necessary to qualify, and the purely nominal nature of this
+qualification is the same in both; but the lodger has the additional
+hardship of being deprived of even as much benefit as "successive
+occupation" gives the householder, for if he moves next door, though
+with the same landlord, he is disfranchised, while the landlord retains
+his vote. And, further, he has to make a formal claim for the suffrage
+every succeeding summer, an operation too troublesome for the vast
+majority of lodgers to undergo, and one from which the householder is
+spared. And thus this particular franchise is a mockery, and the
+proportion of lodger voters to qualified lodgers is absurdly small.
+
+Of course, the term "householder," equally with the term "lodger,"
+presupposes at present that the one who bears it is a man, and, equally
+of course, an agitation is on foot to give the franchise to women. This
+is a matter which is likely to be settled in favour of the other sex,
+and the only question is as to how far it should go. The extreme
+advocates of female suffrage would give it to married women, but what
+appears the growing opinion is that spinsters and widows, qualified for
+the suffrage as men are qualified, should receive it; and this is a
+settlement which will probably soon be reached.
+
+Much dissatisfaction would continue to be felt, even were these points
+granted, if "faggot-voting" were still suffered, or a single person
+allowed to possess a multitude of votes. The "forty-shilling freehold"
+is a prolific source of bogus qualifications: abolished in Ireland by
+the Tories because it gave the people too much power, it ought to be got
+rid of throughout the kingdom by the Liberals because it leaves the
+people too little. For it is largely by its means that some men are able
+to boast that they can exercise the franchise in six, or ten, or even a
+dozen constituencies. Men of this type occupy themselves at a general
+election by travelling around, dropping a vote here and a vote there,
+and they ought to be restrained. That this can be done without violating
+any right is evident even under the present system. However many
+qualifications a man obtains, he can vote for only one of them in any
+constituency; and more, if he has qualifications in every division of
+the same borough he has, when the register is made up, to state for
+which division he will vote, and in that division alone can he claim a
+ballot paper. If it is right to prevent him from having more than a
+single vote in any one division--or, which is a still stronger point, in
+any one borough--it must be equally right to limit him to a single vote
+throughout the country. "One man, one vote," should be the rule in a
+democratic state. If a person possesses qualifications for various
+constituencies, let him be called upon to do what he is now compelled to
+do if he has qualifications for different parts of the same
+constituency--vote for only one of them; and that one should be the
+place in which he habitually resides.
+
+An indirect method of practically securing the "one man, one vote,"
+result would be to have all the elections throughout the country on the
+same day. Under the existing system, the polls drag on for weeks, and
+not only does this distract the attention of the nation and put a
+hindrance to business for a far longer period than is necessary, but it
+has the further evil effect of causing many voters in the constituencies
+which are later polled to waver until they see whither the majority
+elsewhere are tending, and then "go with the stream." The only instance
+in recent electoral history when the later polls reversed the verdict of
+the earlier was at the general election of 1885, when the boroughs,
+speaking broadly, voted Tory and the counties Liberal; but that, owing
+to the recent extension of the county franchise, was an abnormal period,
+and the rule is that the stream gathers as it goes, and the waverers are
+swept into the torrent. That it is possible for a great country to be
+polled on the same day is evident from the examples of Germany and
+France, and it is only adherence to worn-out forms which prevents its
+accomplishment here.
+
+The remedy, therefore, for the anomalies caused by the defective
+"successive occupation," the presence of "faggot voters," and the
+prolongation of the pollings, is simply to treat the kingdom as one vast
+constituency, in which a man once on the register remains as long as he
+has a qualification, in which no one has more than a single vote, and in
+all the divisions of which the poll is taken on the same day.
+
+This suggested single constituency would, of course, resemble the great
+county and borough constituencies of to-day in having divisions, but it
+would not be single in the sense proposed in Mr. Hare's original scheme
+of "proportional representation," by which the possessor of a vote could
+cast it where and for whom he liked. Those who have adopted Mr. Hare's
+ideas, while modifying his methods, have not been successful in
+discovering any feasible plan for representing public opinion in the
+proportion in which it is held, the sort of Chinese puzzle proposed by
+Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Courtney having failed to commend itself to any
+practical politician. It is wrong, however, to imagine that the present
+system of single-member districts roughly secures that the minority
+shall be duly represented while the majority retains its due share of
+power; for it was proved in some striking instances, the very first time
+it was put in operation, that, so far from retaining, it often
+sacrifices the rights of the majority. At the general election of 1885
+the Liberals of Leeds cast 23,354 votes, and the Tories 19,605, and yet
+the latter gained three seats and the former only two; the Sheffield
+Liberals won but two seats with 19,636 votes, while the Tories secured
+three with 19,594; and the Hackney Liberals could win only one seat with
+9,203 votes, and the Tories two with 8,870; while, on the other side,
+the Southwark Tories, with 9,324 votes, returned one member, and the
+Liberals, with 9,120, returned two. The reason is obvious: a party with
+overwhelming majorities in one or two districts is liable to be beaten
+by narrow majorities in most of the divisions, and the minority thus
+elects a majority of members. The present system, therefore, is
+evidently imperfect. It was adopted in haste and without due
+discussion; it has failed in France, Switzerland, and the United States;
+and in at least the divided boroughs it ought to give place to double or
+triple member districts.
+
+The question of having second ballots, so as to provide that, as in
+Germany and France, where there are several candidates and none secures
+an absolute majority of votes given, another ballot shall be held, is
+not an immediately pressing one, though much may be said in its favour;
+but that of the payment of election expenses out of the rates ought to
+be dealt with at once. It is highly unfair that a candidate should be
+fined heavily, by the enforced payment of the official expenses, for his
+desire to serve the country in Parliament; and it is the more unfair
+because the official expenses of elections for town councils, school
+boards, and boards of health and of guardians are paid by the public.
+
+This fine helps to keep men of moderate means out of the House, though
+their abilities might prove to be most useful there; and another method
+by which the wealthy have the advantage in parliamentary contests ought
+equally to be attended to. People are forbidden by law to hire
+conveyances for carrying voters to the poll, but they are allowed to
+borrow them, with the result that constituencies on an election day
+swarm with carriages of peers and other rich people, who have nothing
+whatever to do with the district, and who yet affect by this influence
+the voting. The use of carriages should not be prohibited, for the aged
+and infirm ought not to be disfranchised; but no importation of vehicles
+should be allowed, and while an elector, and an elector only, should be
+entitled to use his own, it should, as a means of identification, be
+driven by himself. Such a provision would largely diminish the present
+interference of peers in elections. They may address as many meetings as
+they like; but, as long as they have a legislative assembly of their
+own, they must not be allowed to use their wealth and position to
+interfere with the voters for the Commons House of Parliament.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.--SHOULD THE CHURCH REMAIN ESTABLISHED?
+
+
+From the great concerns of the State it is natural to come to the
+Church, and when that point is arrived at, the problem of
+disestablishment at once arises. "_Can_ the Church be disestablished?"
+is a question sometimes put, and the answer is plain, for that answer is
+"Most certainly," and a further question "Where is the Act establishing
+the Church?" as if the non-production of such an enactment would prevent
+Parliament from severing the link which binds Church and State, may be
+replied to by another. Supposing one asked, "Where is the Act
+establishing the monarchy?" would the non-production of that measure
+prove that it is not a parliamentary monarchy under which we live? By
+the Act of Succession, Parliament "settled" the monarchy; by various
+Acts in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Elizabeth, and Charles
+II., Parliament has "settled" the Church. There is no authority in this
+realm higher than Parliament; and if Parliament chooses to "unsettle"
+either monarchy or Church, it can do so.
+
+This is no new-fangled Radical idea; it is an old Whig principle.
+Charles Fox, in a debate just a century since, observed, while
+favourable to the principle of religious establishments, "If the
+majority of the people of England should ever be for the abolition of
+the Established Church, in such a case the abolition ought immediately
+to follow." Macaulay, in his essay on Mr. Gladstone's youthful book on
+"Church and State," was clearly of the same opinion. And Lord
+Hartington, in his declaration a few years ago that if the majority of
+the people of Scotland desired disestablishment their desire ought to
+be satisfied, completed the chain of Whig traditional opinion.
+
+If upon such a matter one is not content to swear by the Whigs, the
+verdict of the bishops may be accepted. Dr. Magee, of Peterborough, has
+declared that "Our Church is not only catholic and national: she is
+established by law--that is to say, she has entered into certain
+definite relations with the State, involving on the part of the State an
+amount of recognition and control, and on the part of the Church
+subjection to the State."
+
+The very use of the common term "The Church of England as by law
+established" involves recognition of the fact that what the law has done
+the law can undo. And if any one doubts the power of Parliament in this
+matter, let him read a table of the statutes passed in the session of
+1869, and he will find that the most important of all of them was "An
+Act to put an end to the Establishment of the Church of Ireland." Now,
+the legal position of the Irish Establishment and the English
+Establishment was identical. Is any further proof required that, if
+Parliament chooses, the latter can at any moment be severed from the
+State?
+
+It is sometimes said that Nonconformist bodies are equally established
+with the Church because they are subject to the law, as regards the
+construction of their trust-deeds, and other matters, of which the
+courts of justice have occasionally to take cognizance. But that is as
+if it were argued that all persons who come within the enactments
+affecting the relations between employer and employed should be
+considered servants of the Crown as well as those engaged in the
+government offices. The difference is plain: the law regulates all, the
+Government employs only some. The Crown appoints the Archbishop of
+Canterbury, but has no right to choose the President of the Wesleyan
+Conference; Parliament can deal with the salaries of the bishops, but
+cannot touch the stipend of a single Congregational minister.
+
+There being no doubt that, if the people will, the Church can be
+disestablished, a further question remains, "Ought it to be so dealt
+with?" and the reply in the affirmative is based upon the lessons of
+the past, the experiences of the present, and the possibilities of the
+future.
+
+The Church, though possessed of every advantage which high position and
+vast wealth could supply, has failed to be "national" in any true sense
+of the word. So far from embracing the whole people, it has gradually
+become but one of many sects; and, had it not been for the efforts of
+those who conscientiously dissented from its doctrines and its practice,
+a great portion of the religious life we see in England to-day would not
+have existed. Further, and from the time of its settlement on the
+present basis, it has been the consistent friend to the privileged
+classes, and foe to any extension of liberties to the mass of the
+people. In defence of its position and emoluments it has struck many a
+blow for despotism. The harassing and often bloody persecutions of
+Nonconformists and Roman Catholics in England and Wales, and of
+Covenanters and Cameronians in Scotland, were undertaken at its desire
+and in its defence; while the hardships and indignities inflicted for
+centuries upon the Catholics of Ireland were avowedly in support of "the
+Protestant interest"--a Protestantism of the Establishment, in which the
+Presbyterians were allowed little share. In its pulpits were found the
+most eloquent defenders of the English slave trade, which was from them
+declared to be "in conformity with principles of natural and revealed
+religion;" and when Romilly strove to lessen the horrors of the penal
+code, its bishops again and again came to the rescue of laws the
+disregard of which for the sanctity of human life can in these days
+scarcely be conceived. And when it was proposed to give to some extent
+the government of the country to the people whom it mainly concerned, it
+was the bishops who threw out the first Reform Bill.
+
+At this present the efforts of the better men within the Establishment
+are hampered by the State connection. It cannot bring its machinery into
+harmony with the growing needs of the time without appealing to a
+Parliament in which orthodox and heterodox, Catholic and Atheist, Jew
+and Quaker, Unitarian and Agnostic sit side by side, and to which a
+Hindoo has twice narrowly escaped election. By a Prime Minister
+dependent upon the will of this body its bishops are chosen; by a Lord
+Chancellor equally so dependent are many of its ministers appointed.
+Because of the necessity for going to Parliament for every improvement,
+little improvement is made. Private patronage is left untouched; the
+scandal of the sale of livings remains unchecked; criminous clerks are
+often allowed to escape punishment because of the cumbrous methods now
+provided; and disobedient clergymen defy their bishops and go to prison
+rather than conform to discipline, the law which permits persistent
+insubordination and provides an unfitting penalty remaining unaltered
+because Parliament has too much to do to attend to the Church.
+
+As to the future, things are likely to be worse instead of better. Then,
+as now, the connection between State and Church will injure both--the
+State because it is an injustice to all outside the Establishment that a
+single sect should be propertied and privileged by Parliament, and the
+Church because it is as a strong man in chains attempting to walk but
+only succeeding to painfully hobble.
+
+In how many ways disestablishment would benefit the Church, let Dr.
+Ryle, Bishop of Liverpool, declare:--"(1) It would doubtless give us
+more liberty, and enable us to effect many useful reforms. (2) It would
+bring the laity forward into their rightful position, from sheer
+necessity. (3) It would give us a real and properly constituted
+Convocation. (4) It would lead to an increase of bishops, a division of
+dioceses, and a reconstruction of our cathedral bodies. (5) It would
+make an end of Crown jobs in the choice of bishops, and upset the whole
+system of patronage. (6) It would destroy all sinecure offices, and
+drive all drones out of the ecclesiastical hive. (7) It would enable us
+to make our worship more elastic, and our ritual better suited to the
+times." True, the bishop adds that the value of these gains must not be
+exaggerated; but if disestablishment can do even as much good as this to
+the Church, it cannot be the bad thing some of its opponents would have
+us believe.
+
+But it is sometimes urged that if the Church were disestablished, there
+would be no State recognition of religion, and England would become
+un-Christian. Is not this a technical rather than a real argument? Would
+the number of Christians in this country be lessened by a single one if
+the Church were deprived of State support? Was not the same thing said
+when Jews were admitted to Parliament and Atheists claimed admission?
+And has England ceased to be Christian because Baron de Worms is sitting
+on one side of the Speaker and Mr. Bradlaugh on the other?
+
+A more real argument is that disestablishment would break up the
+parochial system; but those who use it impute a discreditable
+lukewarmness to their own community. Seeing what the Wesleyans, the
+Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the other dissenting denominations
+have done to spread religion in every village in England and Wales; what
+the Free Kirk has accomplished in Scotland; and what the Roman Catholic
+Church has effected in Ireland--and all without a penny of State
+endowment, and dependent alone for success upon the gifts of their
+members--is it to be believed that the adherents of the Episcopal
+Church, among whom are included the wealthiest men in the country, will
+permit that institution to perish for lack of aid? Is not experience all
+the other way? Is not that of Ireland in particular a striking testimony
+to the wisdom of substituting the voluntary system for State support?
+Upon this point the testimony of two Irish Protestant bishops is
+abundant proof. The Bishop of Ossory, Ferns, and Leighlin averred, in
+1882, that "no one could look attentively upon our Church's history
+during the last ten or twelve years without perceiving that, by the good
+hand of God upon them, there had been a decided growth in all that was
+best and purest and most important. Never in his recollection had their
+Church been more clear or united in her testimony to Christian truth, or
+more faithful in every good word and work;" and Lord Plunket, the
+Archbishop of Dublin, has congratulated his clergy that disestablishment
+saved the Church from being involved in the land agitation, adding, "The
+very disaster which seemed most to threaten our downfall has been
+overruled for good."
+
+The question is likely, however, to be considered a more immediately
+pressing one for Scotland and Wales than for England. In Scotland it is
+the Presbyterian and not the Episcopalian form of Christian government
+which is State supported; and the fact that forms so opposed in striking
+points of doctrine and practice should be established on the two sides
+of the Tweed, is an interesting commentary upon the system generally.
+When the majority of the members for Scotland demand disestablishment,
+and press that demand upon us, it will as assuredly be granted as was
+the like demand from Ireland just twenty years ago. And "the Church of
+England in Wales"--supported by a small minority, and never enjoying the
+confidence of the body of the people--should similarly be dealt with,
+according to the wish of the Welsh parliamentary representatives.
+
+The continued existence of the Church of England as an establishment is
+the largest question of all, and it is one which politicians will have
+to face, if not this year or next year, yet in the early years to come.
+It is only its continued existence "as an establishment" which is in
+dispute, for it would be a slanderous imputation upon its sons if it
+were said that a withdrawal of State support would cause its collapse as
+a religious body. The very strides it has made during the last few
+years, which are sometimes urged in its defence, have been made not by
+State help but by voluntary effort; and if that voluntary effort had
+free scope, the good effect would be greater and more lasting.
+
+What is wanted is that which Cavour asked, "A Free Church in a Free
+State," for both would be benefited by the process, and particularly the
+former. When the late Lord Beaconsfield was asked why, in the height of
+Tory reaction, he made no effort to re-establish the Irish Church, he
+replied that there was a difference between cutting off a man's head and
+putting it on again. But the illustration was imperfect, for it is a
+strange kind of decapitation which strengthens the patient; and that was
+the effect in Ireland. And the Irish Church was not only disestablished
+but _disendowed_. In the mind of the practical politician the two
+processes are inseparable.
+
+
+
+
+XV.--WOULD DISENDOWMENT BE JUST?
+
+
+The question, "Would disendowment be just?" is admittedly a crucial
+point to determine when the whole subject comes up for settlement, for
+there are many defenders of the Establishment who exclaim, "We are quite
+prepared for the severance of the Church from the State, but only upon
+condition that she retains her endowments."
+
+But the two concerns cannot be separated. Supposing the Government
+engaged an officer to perform certain functions, and that, in process of
+time, finding these functions not fulfilled, it determined to sever the
+connection, would the officer be justified in demanding not only
+consideration for his long service and his life interests, but that his
+salary should be paid to himself and his descendants in perpetuity,
+though directly neither he nor they would again render service to the
+State? If it be contended that the illustration is not applicable,
+because the Church receives no aid from the State, issue can be joined
+at once.
+
+For what is the first question that naturally arises? It is as to the
+source from which the Church originally derived her revenues. "Pious
+benefactors, stimulated by the wish to benefit their fellows and save
+themselves," is the reply of the average Church defender. But any
+attempt to prove this fails. Does a solitary person believe that every
+proprietor of land in each parish of England and Wales voluntarily and
+spontaneously imposed a tithe upon his possessions? Is it not an
+admitted fact that it was by royal ordinance such an impost was first
+levied, and by force of law that it has since been maintained?
+
+This most ancient property of the Church in England, the tithe, is a
+law-created and law-extorted impost for the benefit of a particular
+sect. As far back as the Heptarchy, royal ordinances were given in
+various of the kingdoms of which England was composed directing the
+payment of tithes; and that the far greater portion of these were not
+voluntary offerings is indicated in Hume's account of the West Saxon
+grant in 854. "Though parishes," he observes, "had been instituted in
+England by Honorius, Archbishop of Canterbury, two centuries before, the
+ecclesiastics had never yet been able to get possession of the tithes;
+they therefore seized the present favourable opportunity of making that
+acquisition when a weak, superstitious prince filled the throne, and
+when the people, discouraged by their losses from the Danes and
+terrified with the fear of future invasions, were susceptible of any
+impression which bore the appearance of religion."
+
+When England became one kingdom, and tithes were extended by royal
+decree to the whole realm, penalties soon began to be provided for
+non-payment, Alfred ordaining "that if any man shall withhold his
+tithes, and not faithfully and duly pay them to the Church, if he be a
+Dane he shall be fined in the sum of twenty shillings, and if an
+Englishman in the sum of thirty shillings;" and William the Norman,
+speedily after the Conquest, directed that "whosoever shall withhold
+this tenth part shall, by the justice of the bishop and the king, be
+forced to the payment of it, if need be." These provisions are part of
+the common law of England, and they effectually dispose of the idea that
+the tithe was a voluntary offering which the farmer to-day ought to pay
+because of the supposed piety of unknown ancestors.
+
+The proceeds of the tithe--which originally, according to Blackstone,
+were "distributed in a fourfold division: one for the use of the bishop,
+one for maintaining the fabric of the church, a third for the poor, and
+a fourth to provide for the incumbent"--were the first great source of
+revenue to the Church; but in the course of centuries that revenue was
+largely added to by gifts. It was not uncommon for a man to hand over
+his property to a monastery upon condition that he was allowed a
+sufficiency to keep him; while the money given for the provision of
+masses for the dead was a considerable aid to the Church in the Middle
+Ages. And as the monks were exceedingly keen traders, their wealth was
+increased by farming, buying, and selling to a degree that at length
+tempted the cupidity of a rapacious king. It was during that period that
+our great cathedrals and all our old parish churches were built; and
+when, because of a divorce dispute, the Eighth Henry resolved to cut the
+Church in England altogether adrift from the Church of Rome, he adopted
+a measure of Disendowment which, though not complete, was very sweeping,
+and proved in the most absolute form the right of the State to deal as
+it willed with the property of the Church.
+
+In the preamble of the Act dissolving the lesser monasteries, it is
+declared that "the Lords and Commons, by a great deliberation, finally
+be resolved that it is and shall be much more to the pleasure of
+Almighty God, and for the honour of this His realm, that the possessions
+of such small religious houses, now being spent, spoiled, and wasted for
+increase and maintenance of sin, should be used and committed to better
+uses." The State in this asserted a right it had never forfeited, and
+which, by successive Acts of Parliament, has been specifically retained.
+No one to-day would defend the fashion in which Henry took property
+which had been devoted to certain public uses and lavished it upon
+favourites and friends. The main point, however, is not the manner of
+disposal, but the fact that it could be disposed of at all; and when any
+one doubts the power of the State regarding the property of the Church,
+a reference to what Parliament has done in the matter is sufficient to
+show constitutional precedent for Disendowment.
+
+But though much was taken from the Church at the Reformation period,
+much was left, and it was left to a body differing in many important
+particulars from that which had been despoiled. As Mr. Arthur Elliott,
+M.P., a Whig writer, observes in his book "The State and the Church,"
+"It would be to give a very false notion of the position of the Church
+towards the State to omit all mention of the sources from which, as
+regards its edifices, the Church of England finds itself so
+magnificently endowed. In the main, the wealth of the Church in this
+respect was inherited, or rather acquired, at the time of the
+Reformation, from the Roman Catholics, who had created it. The Roman
+Catholics and the English nation had been formerly one and the same.
+When the nation, for the most part, ceased to be Catholic, these
+edifices, like other endowments devoted to the religious instruction of
+the people, became the property of the Protestant Church of England, as
+by law established."
+
+The new Act of Parliament Church--for it had its doctrines and its
+discipline defined by statute--became possessed, therefore, of the
+cathedrals, the churches, much of the glebe, and a large portion of the
+tithe that had been given or granted to the Roman Catholic communion,
+which had held the ground for centuries. And succeeding monarchs, with
+the exception of Mary, so confirmed and added to these gifts that "the
+Judicious Hooker" was led to exclaim--"It might deservedly be at this
+day the joyful song of innumerable multitudes, and (which must be
+eternally confessed, even with tears of thankfulness) the true
+inscription, style, or title of all churches as yet standing within this
+realm, 'By the goodness of Almighty God and His servant Elizabeth, we
+are.'"
+
+And it was not only "His servant Elizabeth" who, among monarchs since
+the Reformation, has assisted the Houses of the Legislature to
+pecuniarily aid the Church. Queen Anne surrendered the first fruits, or
+profits of one year, of all spiritual promotions, and the tithe of the
+revenue of all sees, in order to create a fund for increasing the
+incomes of the poor clergy; but Queen Anne's Bounty comes straight out
+of the national pocket, for, had our monarchs retained this source of
+income, it would have been taken into account when the Civil List was
+settled at the commencement of the reign, and at least L100,000 a year
+saved to the Exchequer. And the nation has even more directly helped the
+fund, Parliament having, between 1809 and 1829, voted considerably over
+a million towards it.
+
+But this is not all. Dealing merely with national money appropriated to
+Church purposes during the present century, it may be added that in 1818
+Parliament voted a million sterling for the purpose of building
+churches, that in 1824 a further sum of half a million was granted for
+the same purpose, and that a subsequent amount of close upon ninety
+thousand pounds has to be added to the total. And not only by large
+grants did Parliament help the Church. In the old days of Protection,
+when almost every conceivable article was taxed, the duty chargeable on
+the materials used in the building of churches was remitted, this
+amounting between 1817 and 1845 to over L336,000. A drawback was also
+granted on the paper used in printing the Prayer Book, and this, while
+the paper duty was levied, could scarcely have averaged less than a
+thousand a year. In small things, as in great, Parliament helped the
+Church, for an Act of George IV. specifically exempted from toll the
+carriage and horses used by a clergyman when driving to visit a sick
+parishioner.
+
+I claim, therefore, that the State has a right to dispose of such
+property of the Church as was not given to it in recent times by private
+donors, knowing it would be appropriated to the purposes of a sect; and
+I claim it because the tithes were law-created, because the bulk of the
+possessions passed from one communion to another by force of law, and
+because the State has continued to pecuniarily aid the Church throughout
+the centuries during which she has existed. And, if constitutional
+precedent be demanded, they are to be found in abundance upon the
+statute book, notably in the measures affecting the monasteries, the
+Tithe Commutation Act, and the Act putting an end to the Established
+Church in Ireland.
+
+If it be urged, as it sometimes is, that, because the original royal
+ordinance enforcing tithes was granted before our regular parliamentary
+system was in existence, Parliament has no power to deal with it, it
+must be answered that in all matters within these realms, touching
+either life or property, Parliament is supreme. And, as bearing even
+more directly upon the point raised, it may be added that rights of toll
+and market, granted to boroughs by royal charter before Parliaments were
+chosen as at present, have been altered and abolished by Parliaments
+since; and that Magna Charta itself, signed many years before Simon de
+Montfort called the first House of Commons into being, has been
+modified, and often modified, since that event.
+
+If further proof be wanted, not only of the power but of the will of
+Parliament to interfere directly in the monetary affairs of an
+Established Church, the Act disendowing the Irish Establishment eighteen
+years ago, and another passed fifty years since, chopping and changing
+the salaries of the English bishops, may be referred to. And, regarding
+a further measure of the last half-century, the words of such a sturdy
+Conservative as Lord Brabourne, used in a letter written in 1887, are
+eminently satisfactory:--"The Tithe Commutation Act was nothing more nor
+less than the assertion by the State of its right to deal with tithes as
+national property."
+
+But, it may be said, the property, whether contributed by private
+benefaction or royal grant, was distinctly given to the Church, and
+ought not, therefore, to be taken away. I dispute both points of the
+contention. The property was allotted to a Church which acknowledged the
+supremacy of the Pope, and it is used by one which abjures it; to a
+Church possessed of seven sacraments, and used by one with only two; to
+a Church believing in transubstantiation, and used by one holding that
+doctrine to be a dangerous heresy; to a Church with an unmarried clergy,
+and used by one in which the large families of the poorer parsons are
+their stumbling-block and reproach; to a Church which performed its most
+sacred mysteries in the Latin tongue, and used by one whose ceremonies
+are delivered in a language understanded of the people. If it be true
+that the Church to-day is the Church as it has always been, why, in the
+name of common reason, was Cranmer, the Protestant, burned by Mary, and
+Campion, the Jesuit, hanged by Elizabeth?
+
+From the fact that the Church of England is not a corporation--that is,
+it has not property in its own right, and what is possessed by its
+members is vested in them not as proprietors but as trustees--there
+flows the consequence that it is mainly the life interests of those
+engaged in clerical work which have to be considered. And those life
+interests will be considered and generously dealt with when the time for
+disendowment arrives.
+
+And then comes a question which many will deem of all-importance--"How
+is the Church to exist afterwards?" or, to put the point in the
+extremest fashion, and in the words addressed to the clergy in the very
+first of the "Tracts for the Times," "Should the Government of the
+country so far forget their God as to cut off the Church, to deprive it
+of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claims
+to respect and attention which you make upon your flock?" And the answer
+is that, if the Church be worthy to exist, it will be able, like other
+religious bodies, to stand upon the open and constant manifestation of
+its own excellences.
+
+Look around and see what the voluntary system has done. In England it
+has planted a place of worship in every corner of the kingdom; in Wales
+it has saved from spiritual starvation a populace neglected by the
+Establishment; in Scotland it has founded a Free Church by sacrifices
+which were the marvel and the pride of a preceding generation; and in
+Ireland it has secured to the mass of the people the ministrations of
+their own religion, despite every bribe, persecution, and lure. Is it in
+England, where the Episcopalian system has most that is wealthy and all
+that is socially influential on its side, that a State endowment is
+needed to provide for its professors what the miners of Cornwall and the
+labourers of Carmarthen, the hardy toilers in the Highlands, and the
+poverty-stricken peasants of Connemara provide for themselves? If this
+be so, then no greater indictment could be levelled against the process
+of Establishment, no more certain proof could be afforded of the evils
+which follow in its train, than that it produced such a mean coldness of
+soul. But the supposition is so dishonouring to the great body of
+church-goers that its use proves the straits in which the defenders of
+the existing system find themselves.
+
+Disendowment would undoubtedly reduce the larger salaries allotted to
+the clergy, and probably increase the smaller. A parson would then be
+paid according to his value to the parish, whether as preacher or
+administrator, and he would not draw a thousand a year for doing
+nothing, while his curate received eighty or a hundred for performing
+the work. The Church would no longer be a rich man's preserve, wherein
+younger sons could obtain comfortable family livings, while their duty
+was done by ill-paid deputies. We should no longer see an Archbishop of
+Canterbury, with a salary of L15,000 a year, begging upon a public
+platform for worn-out garments for the poorer working clergy. A primate
+is conceivable at a third the cost, and the money thus saved to the
+Church alone would prevent the necessity for such a humiliating
+proceeding as openly asking for old clothes for toiling clergymen. With
+disendowment, in short, men would be paid according to their merits and
+not their family connections--according to their work and not their
+birth. And, further, the scandal of the sale of livings--the shame of
+the public advertisement of cures of souls as eligible according as they
+are in a hunting country, or near a fishing river, or close to "good
+society"--would be done away with. Would all these gains count as
+nothing to the Church, considered as a religious body?
+
+The process of disendowment, then, is the necessary accompaniment of
+disestablishment; it is possible; it is just; and its effects would make
+for good. It is necessary, because if the Church is to be severed from
+the State on the ground that it has failed in its mission, it would be
+obviously out of the question to leave it possessed of the property
+given to it to secure that mission's due performance. It is possible,
+because Parliament is not merely supreme in all such matters, but has
+shown within the past few years its capacity for disendowing a Church
+having precisely the same rights and privileges as the English
+Establishment. It is just, because no one sect has the right to property
+granted it on the ground that it represented the religious sentiment of
+the whole nation. And it would make for good in giving a more
+distinctively religious character to the clergy, in paying them
+according to their deserts and not according to the length of the purse
+that purchased them their livings, and in freeing a religious system
+from the ignoble associations of the auction mart.
+
+Upon these grounds it is demanded that, with disestablishment,
+disendowment shall come. Life interests will be respected; all modern
+gifts to the Episcopalians as a distinct sect will be fairly dealt with;
+further than this the Establishment is not entitled to demand, and
+further than this Liberals will not be prepared to go.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.--OUGHT EDUCATION TO BE FREE?
+
+
+A question which is intimately connected in many minds with the Church
+is that of national education. It stood next to it in order in that
+early programme of Mr. Chamberlain which demanded "Free Church, free
+schools, free land, and free labour."
+
+This matter of free schools is not likely to create as much opposition
+as it would have done even a short time since, for no question awaiting
+settlement is ripening so rapidly. Experience is teaching in an
+ever-increasing ratio that certain defects exist in our system of
+national education which hinder its full development, some of which, at
+least, could be avoided by the abolition of fees.
+
+The progress which has been made in public opinion within only half a
+century regarding the amount of aid that should be given to elementary
+schools, encourages the hope that more will yet be given, and that very
+speedily. It is but a little more than fifty years ago that a Liberal
+Ministry led the way in devoting a portion of the national funds to this
+purpose; and no one unacquainted with the history of that period could
+guess the number and the weight of the obstacles thrown in the way of
+even such a modest proposal as that Ministry made. The Tories, while not
+particularly anxious that the mass of the people should be educated at
+all, were decidedly desirous that such teaching as was given should be
+under the direct control of the Church. Archbishops and bishops, Tories,
+high and low, joined to continually hamper the development of any system
+of national education which afforded the Nonconformists the least
+privilege; but despite their every effort the movement spread. The
+annual grant of L20,000, which was commenced in 1834, grew by leaps and
+bounds. In a little more than twenty years it had become nearly half a
+million for Great Britain alone; in thirty years it had increased by
+close upon another quarter of a million; and in fifty years (and the
+growth in the meantime had been mainly the fruit of the Education Act,
+passed by the Liberal Ministry in 1870) it had touched three millions.
+And that sum, vast as it was, represented only the amount granted from
+the national exchequer, being supplemented by an even larger total
+raised by local rates.
+
+So far has the nation gone in the path of State-aided and rate-aided
+education, and the question is whether it is not worth while to go the
+comparatively little way further which is needed to make elementary
+education free. For the fees which are now paid do not represent a
+quarter of the amount which the teaching costs. And not only so, but the
+existence of these fees is a continual hindrance to the working of the
+Act. The effect of the fee is to keep out of the board schools thousands
+of children who ought to be in them; and the attempt to enforce its
+payment increases the odium which almost necessarily attends upon
+compulsion.
+
+"But," it will be said, "where a parent is too poor to pay, the fee can
+be remitted." That is true, and the extent to which the system of such
+remission is carried in some districts is one of the strongest arguments
+in favour of free education. It is desirable to get the children into
+the schools, but it is highly undesirable to do this by practically
+pauperizing the parents. If elementary education were free to all, all
+could partake of it without any appearance of favour on the one hand or
+shame on the other. But the independent poor have now the choice of
+making themselves still poorer by paying the fee for the education they
+are bound to have administered, or of losing their independence by
+asking the school board or the poor-law guardians for relief. And the
+consequence, of course, is that many who have no independence to lose,
+and are the least deserving of help, receive the assistance they are
+never backward to ask.
+
+"What is worth having is worth paying for" is a remark sometimes made
+in this connection, but is it not as applicable to the State as to the
+individual? For it is for no philanthropic but for a decidedly practical
+reason that the country assists education. All men in these days admit
+that the most cultivated people, like the most cultivated individual
+man, has the best chance of success. With educated Germany, and educated
+France, and educated America pressing us hard, it is a necessity of
+existence for England to be equally educated. And seeing that the school
+board rate and the Government grant mount higher and higher and the fees
+become lower and lower, the only practical question is whether the State
+had not better boldly step in, abolish fees which are a hindrance to
+educational progress, pay the whole amount instead of three-quarters,
+and provide free teaching for all.
+
+If such a consummation were secured, the status of what are now called
+voluntary schools would of necessity be materially altered. As at
+present applied, the name "voluntary" affixed to the schools of the
+National Society and similar bodies is very much a misnomer. It conveys
+that the schools are supported by voluntary subscriptions; but this is
+true in only a limited degree, for it is the Government grant--that is,
+money taken out of the pocket of every one who pays taxes, direct or
+indirect--which keeps them in existence. And, therefore, when Churchmen
+complain, as some of them are occasionally ill-advised enough to do,
+that they not only subscribe to their own schools but have to pay the
+rate as well, ought it not to be enough to remind them that their
+schools are supported not alone for educational but for sectarian
+purposes, and that, if they wish to proselytize, they must pay, in
+however inadequate a degree, for the privilege? The real hardship is
+that those who do not believe in the clerical system of education have
+to pay heavily by means of taxation to keep up establishments over which
+they have not the least control, and which are used by the clergy for
+denominational ends.
+
+One result, then, of free education would be, not to destroy the
+voluntary schools, but to put them under the control of those who really
+and not nominally pay for keeping them up. If Churchmen demand schools
+of their own, they must support them out of their own pocket and not out
+of other people's, though it may be well that, under a stringent
+"conscience clause" and with direct popular control, they should still
+share in the taxpayers' grants. As matters stand, the national
+schoolmaster is too often treated as if he were a mere servant of the
+clergyman, an idea which, with free education and popular government of
+all State-aided schools, would be bound to cease.
+
+The cry raised by some clergymen when the Education Act was passed, that
+the undenominational system would be fruitful only in producing "astute
+scoundrels and clever devils," has died away. It is doubtful whether
+anybody ever really believed it; it is certain that no man with a
+reputation to lose would now repeat it. And, that being the case, the
+excuse for keeping up at the public expense two rival sets of
+schools--one sectarian and the other undenominational--has so largely
+disappeared that the onus of proving its necessity lies upon its
+advocates, and the burden of paying for it should be shifted upon the
+right shoulders.
+
+Of course it is said that this proposal of free education is only
+another step towards Socialism, but no one should be frightened by
+phrases. Socialism has as many varieties as religion--some as bad and
+some as good--and from them must be selected those worth having. If,
+upon consideration of the whole case, free education be thought to be
+one of these, the fact that it is called Socialistic will not weigh to
+its disadvantage with a single sensible man.
+
+What, then, is it that is asked, and why is it demanded? It is asked
+that elementary schools shall be freed from fees, and entirely supported
+out of the public funds, local and imperial; that advanced and technical
+education shall be made cheap and accessible, in order that those who
+want to progress can do so with as few hindrances as possible; and that
+all schools supported by public money shall be placed under popular
+control, and the schoolrooms, out of educational hours, made available
+for public use.
+
+These things are demanded because by the present arrangements the
+progress of compulsion is hampered, the deserving and independent poor
+are inequitably dealt with, and the cost of collecting the fees is out
+of all proportion to their value when received. Already the public pay
+three-quarters of the cost of elementary education, and they do it for
+the benefit of the community; if payment of the remaining quarter would
+increase the efficiency of the system, even only to a corresponding
+degree, it would be worth making. "Vested interests" might object; but
+the national welfare must override them, though there is no intention of
+dealing with them otherwise than fairly. Due allowance would be made for
+the subscriptions which have been raised towards the erection and
+support of the voluntary schools; but the nation has rights as well as
+individuals, and, in considering any compensation which may be demanded
+by the managers of such institutions, if free education be adopted, the
+public money which has been expended upon them must be taken into
+account equally with the private.
+
+This much is certain: although England will not be able to hold her own
+simply with "the three R's," and advanced and technical education
+should, therefore, be widely spread, it is our duty to make "the three
+R's" as widely known as we can. It is not a question of principle, but
+of policy. Opposition to any education at all for the masses has
+disappeared; the State and the parish already pay most of the cost; if
+the system can be made more perfect by the abolition of fees, fees will
+have to be abolished.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.--DO THE LAND LAWS NEED REFORM?
+
+
+Immediately the question of the land is touched, a whole host of
+opponents to progress are roused to fierce and continuous action,
+though, as all politicians in these days affect a belief in the
+necessity for land reform, the question appears at first to be more one
+of degree than of principle. But, at the very outset, it is necessary to
+face the fact that there is an active propaganda going on which denies
+that any reform, even the most sweeping, will be of avail, and asserts
+that it is the very existence of private property in land which must be
+done away with.
+
+In what is termed "Land Nationalization" a very dangerous fallacy
+exists. The first thing to be asked of any one who advocates it is to
+define the term. It is vague; it is high-sounding; but what does it
+mean? If it means that the State is to take into its keeping all the
+land without compensating the present holders, it proposes robbery; if
+it means that the process is to be accompanied by compensation, it would
+entail jobbery. There are thousands who, by working hard, have saved
+sufficient to buy a small plot on which to erect a house. Is that plot
+to be seized by the State without payment? And if fair payment be given,
+and the taint of theft thus removed, does a single soul imagine that a
+Government department would be able to manage the land better than it is
+managed at present? Are our Government departments such models of
+efficiency and economy that such a belief can be entertained for a
+moment? What may fairly be demanded of all advocates of the
+nationalization or municipalization of the land is that they shall
+clearly show that the process would be honest in itself, just to the
+present holders, and likely to benefit the whole community. Unless they
+can do all these things, generalities are of no avail.
+
+The land, it is sometimes urged, has been stolen from the people; but it
+cannot have been stolen from those who never directly possessed it: and,
+whatever may be said of the manner in which the large properties were
+secured centuries ago, much of the land has changed hands so often that
+most, at least, of the present holders have fairly paid for it. There is
+an old legal doctrine that the title of that which is bought in open
+market cannot afterwards be called in question, and that applies to the
+present case. And when we are told that there cannot exist private
+property in land because that commodity is a gift of God to all, is it
+not the fact that, in an old country like ours, land is worth little
+except it be highly cultivated; that the labour, the manure, and the
+seed are private property without the shadow of a doubt; and that it is
+these we largely have to pay for when agricultural commodities are
+bought? Upon the same ground it is sometimes contended that we should
+have our water free because it falls from the heavens; but nature did
+not provide reservoirs, or lay mains, or bring the pipes into our
+houses; and for the sake of obtaining water easily we must pay for the
+labour and appliances used in collecting and distributing it. And the
+value of these illustrations, both as to land and to water, is to teach
+an avoidance of sounding generalities and a resolve to look at all
+questions in a practical light.
+
+Recognizing, therefore, that private property in land has existed, is
+existing, and is not likely to be abolished, the duty of progressive
+politicians is to see how the laws affecting it can be so modified as to
+benefit a considerably larger portion of the community than at present.
+And three of the points which have been most discussed, and which now
+are nearest settlement, are the custom of primogeniture, the law of
+entail, and the enactments relating to transfer.
+
+After spurning for many years the Liberal demand for the abolition of
+the custom of primogeniture--by which the land of a man dying without a
+will passes to the eldest son, to the exclusion of the rest of the
+family--the Tories in 1887 themselves proposed it; and in the House of
+Lords only one peer had sufficient courage to stand up in defence of a
+custom which the whole peerage had sworn by until that time. It puzzles
+any one not a peer to understand how a distinctly dishonest practice
+could have existed so long, save for the utterly inadequate reason that
+its tendency was to prevent large estates from being broken up, and that
+there were those who imagined that large estates were a benefit to the
+country. In actual working, however, it did not affect the largest
+estates but the smallest, and primogeniture was thus a question touching
+much more closely those of moderate means than the possessors of great
+wealth. A large holder of land is an exceedingly unlikely person to die
+without a will; a small holder frequently does so, with the result of
+much injustice to and suffering among his family.
+
+A practical instance is worth a hundred theories upon a point like this,
+and here are some such which have come under my own notice within the
+past few months. A man possessed of a small landed property died
+intestate; his daughter, who had ministered to his wants for years, was
+left penniless, the whole of the property going to the eldest son.
+Another similarly circumstanced, whose stay and comfort during his old
+age had likewise been a daughter, shrank, with the foolish obstinacy of
+the superstitious, from making a will; his friends, recognizing that, if
+he failed in this obvious duty, the daughter would be thrown without a
+penny on the world, while the eldest son, who for various reasons had
+not the least claim upon his father, would take everything, besought the
+old man to act reasonably; and almost at the last moment he did. In a
+third case, a fisherman, who for eighteen years had been paying for a
+piece of land through a building society, was drowned in a squall; and
+his savings, designed for the support of himself and his wife, were
+swept straight into the pocket of his eldest son. Now in all these
+instances, had the money been invested in houses, ships, consols--in
+fact, anything but land--it would, in case of no will being made, have
+been divided among the whole family in fair proportion. The accident of
+it being put into land caused wrong and suffering in two cases, and
+wrong and suffering were very narrowly avoided in the third. The
+abolition of primogeniture, therefore, is much more needed by the
+working and the middle classes than by the rich, whose lawyers very
+seldom allow them to die without a will.
+
+The law of entail is on its last legs, as well as the custom of
+primogeniture, and the Tories, by Lord Cairns' Settled Land Act, and a
+subsequent amending measure, have practically admitted that it is
+doomed. Entail affects the community by giving power to a man to fetter
+his land with a multitude of restrictions for an indefinite period; it
+makes the nominal owner only in reality a life tenant; and by cramping
+him upon the one side with conditions which may have become out of date,
+and tempting him on the other to limit his expenditure on that which is
+not wholly his own, the development of the land is impeded, and the
+progress of agriculture hampered by force of law. Entail, like
+primogeniture, has been defended on the ground that it tends to keep
+large estates intact; but it is now so generally believed that a more
+widespread diffusion of land is desirable, that it is only necessary
+here to state the argument.
+
+A more widespread diffusion of the land will not, however, be attained
+unless the process of transfer is at once cheapened and simplified. The
+lawyers reap too much advantage from the present system, and many a man
+refrains from buying a plot he would like because the cost of transfer
+unduly raises the price. If it were provided that all estates should be
+registered and their boundaries clearly defined, there would be no more
+difficulty and expense in transferring a piece of land than is now
+involved in selling a ship. In these days buyer and seller are parted by
+parchments; and many who would like a plot, but who do not see why they
+should pay, because of the lawyers, ten, or fifteen, or twenty per cent.
+more than its value, put their money into concerns in which
+meddlesomeness created by Act of Parliament does not mingle.
+
+Simpler and cheaper transfer would be a step towards the more general
+ownership of land by those who till it. Let all artificial aids to the
+holding together large estates by power of Parliament be abolished, let
+transfer be cheapened and simplified, and then let him who likes buy.
+Free trade in land is what we ask, and when it is attained land will be
+able to be dealt with the same as any other commodity, and those who
+want a piece can have it by paying for it.
+
+But although it may not be desirable for the State to interfere in
+England for the creation of a peasant proprietary, it is needful that
+Parliament should do something tangible in the direction of securing
+allotments for the labourers. Upon that point, as upon primogeniture and
+entail, the Tories profess to be converted; but as their Allotments Bill
+of 1887 appears in practice to be a sham, it is necessary that such
+amendments should be introduced as may render it a reality.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.--SHOULD WASTE LANDS BE TILLED AND THE GAME LAWS ABOLISHED?
+
+
+A dozen or fourteen years ago the questions attempted now to be answered
+were put much more frequently than at present. In the last days of the
+first Gladstone Administration and the earliest of the second Government
+of Mr. Disraeli, Liberals were looking for other worlds to conquer; and
+many of them, not venturing upon such bold courses on the land question
+as have since been adopted by even moderate politicians, fastened their
+attention upon the waste lands and the game laws. No great results came
+from the movement; other and more striking questions forced themselves
+to the front; and we are almost as far from a legislative settlement of
+the two just mentioned as in the days of a more restricted suffrage.
+
+This is the more surprising because the points named are of practical
+importance to the agricultural labourer, and the agricultural labourer
+now holds the balance of political power. But it is not likely that this
+state of quietude upon two such burning topics will long continue, for
+the country voter is certain soon to profit by the example of his
+brethren in the towns, and to demand that his representatives shall
+attend to those concerns immediately affecting his interests.
+
+And first as to the question of waste lands. Town-bred theorists who
+have never walked over a mile of moorland are apt sometimes to talk as
+if all the uncultivated land in the country was in that condition
+because of the wicked will of those who own it, and to argue that, if
+only an Act of Parliament could be secured, the waste lands would
+blossom like the rose. They have the same touching faith in the efficacy
+of legislation as had Lord Palmerston when he put aside some difficulty
+with the exclamation, "Give me an Act of Parliament, and the thing will
+be done." But facts are often too strong for legislation, however well
+intentioned and skilfully devised, and those about much of our waste
+land come within the list.
+
+A large portion of uncultivated land is mountain and moor, the greater
+part of which it would be impossible to make productive at any price,
+and the remainder could not be turned to account under a sum which would
+never make a profitable return. Those who think it an easy matter to
+cultivate waste land should visit that portion of Dartmoor which is
+dominated by the convict establishment. There they would see many an
+acre reclaimed, but, if they were told the cost in money and labour,
+they would be convinced that, were it not for penal purposes, both money
+and labour might be put to better use elsewhere. And if it be argued
+that the State should step in and advance all that is required to
+cultivate such waste as can by any possibility be brought under the
+plough, it must be asked why the taxpayer (for in this connection the
+State and the taxpayer are one and the same) should add to his burdens
+for so small a return.
+
+But there is, without doubt, a large amount of land in this country
+which now produces nothing, and which could be made to produce a deal.
+That which is absorbed by huge private parks, scattered up and down the
+kingdom, forms a great portion of this; and though, for reasons which
+are mainly sentimental, one would not wish to see all such private parks
+turned into sheep-walks or turnip-fields, there is the consideration
+that property--and peculiarly property in land--has its duties as well
+as its rights, and that those who wish to derive pleasure from the
+contemplation of large spaces of cultivable but not cultivated land, and
+in this way prevent such from being of any direct value to the
+community, ought to pay for the privilege. The rating of property of
+this kind at the present moment is ridiculously low; it should at least
+be made as high as if the land were devoted to some distinctly useful
+end.
+
+As with parks, so with sporting lands. The rating of the latter is
+utterly inadequate; and although it maybe true that much of the land,
+especially in England, devoted to sporting purposes, is of little value
+for anything else, it is equally true that a great deal of it,
+particularly in Scotland, is fit for cultivation, and that tenants have
+been cleared from it to make room for deer and grouse. In all cases
+where the land would have value if cultivated, the owner ought to be
+made pay as if that value were obtained, seeing that for his own
+pleasure he is depriving the community of the chance of obtaining
+increased food. It would be too drastic a measure to adopt the Chinese
+method of hanging proprietors who did not till cultivable land; but many
+a landowner, if made to feel his duty through his pocket, would do that
+duty rather than pay.
+
+From the question of sporting lands to that of the game laws is a very
+short step. It may be that we have heard less of the latter during the
+last few years, because the Hares and Rabbits Act, passed by the second
+Gladstone Government in the first flush of its power, has done much to
+reconcile the tenant-farmers to the present state of things, by removing
+the grievance they most keenly felt.
+
+The Act referred to provides (to quote Mr. Sydney Buxton's summary)
+"that every occupier of land shall have an inalienable right to kill the
+ground game (hares and rabbits) concurrently with any other person who
+may be entitled to kill it on the same land; that the ground game may
+only be killed by the occupier himself or by persons duly authorized by
+him in writing; that the use of firearms is confined to himself and one
+other, and they may only be used during the day; that those authorized
+to kill the game in other ways (poison and traps, except in
+rabbit-holes, are prohibited) must be resident members of his household,
+persons in his ordinary service, and any one other person whom he
+employs for reward to kill the game; that tenants on lease do not come
+under the provisions of the Act until the termination of their lease."
+
+This was such a concession to the tenant-farmers that it is little
+wonder that those of them who had groaned under the ground game should
+have felt generally satisfied with it; and although a wail has been
+going up from certain sportsmen that if the Act be not speedily amended
+the hare will become as extinct as the mastodon, it is not the least
+likely to be altered in the direction they wish. If amended at all, it
+will be so as to bring winged game within its provisions.
+
+No one acquainted with rural life can doubt that the game laws, as at
+present administered, are a fruitful source of demoralization and crime.
+They demoralize all round, for they pollute the seat of justice by
+allowing such game preservers as are county magistrates to wreak
+vengeance upon all who transgress upon their pleasures; they lower the
+moral standard of the gamekeepers, whose miserable employment turns them
+into spies of a peculiarly unpleasing description; they make the rural
+police a standing army for the preservation of game; and they consign to
+gaol many a man who, but for these laws, would be honest and free.
+
+Such as would see justice most openly travestied should sit in a country
+police court and hear game cases tried. Let them notice the ostentatious
+fashion in which some magistrate, while a summons in which his game is
+concerned is being heard, will (as is carefully noted in the local
+papers) "withdraw from the bench" by taking his chair a foot back from
+his fellows and friends. Let them hear evidence upon which no man
+charged with any other offence would ever be convicted. Let them see the
+vindictive sentences that are passed. And then let them go home and
+think over the fashion in which that which is nicknamed "justice" is
+administered to any man unlucky enough to have offended a gamekeeper or
+a policeman, and to be charged as a poacher.
+
+In the good old hanging days, a man was sentenced to death in a western
+county for sheep-stealing. The sentence was the usual one, but other
+sheep-stealers had been let off the capital penalty for so many years
+that it was greatly to the astonishment of the district that this one
+was hanged. Then people began to think, and, remembering that he had the
+reputation of being a clever poacher, they saw that he had been paid off
+for the new and the old. It is much the same in the rural districts
+to-day. In game cases the presumption of the English law courts that a
+man shall be held to be innocent until he is proved guilty is
+systematically reversed. The unsupported word of a gamekeeper is
+considered to be worth that of half-a-dozen ordinary men; and it is not
+uncommon for a defendant convicted of some offence, totally unconnected
+with the game laws, to have his penalty increased because the
+superintendent of police has whispered to the justices' clerk, and the
+clerk to the magistrates, the fatal word "poacher." Those who live in a
+town can scarcely conceive the open fashion in which justice is degraded
+by the county magistrates when the game is in question. But, if any
+would bring it home to themselves--and the strongest words are too faint
+to picture the reality--let them go to some rural court, where the
+justices do not imagine that the light of public opinion can be brought
+to bear upon them, and see how poachers are tried.
+
+If it were only because of the widespread demoralization they cause, the
+game laws ought to be repealed. They are avowedly kept up for the
+benefit of the class which does little or no work, and they fill the
+prisons at our expense to preserve a sport in which we have no share and
+no wish to share. And, if they are to be retained on the statute book at
+all, their administration should, at the very least, be taken from those
+who are practically prosecutor, jury, and judge in one, and placed in
+impartial hands.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.--OUGHT LEASEHOLDS TO BE ENFRANCHISED?
+
+
+The proposal to enfranchise leaseholds--that is, to enable a
+leaseholder, upon paying a fair price, to claim that his tenure be
+turned into freehold--is a comparatively new one in the field of
+practical politics; but it has come to the front so rapidly that it is
+already far nearer solution than others which have agitated the public
+mind for many years. The grievance had for a long time been felt, and in
+some parts of the kingdom sorely felt; but a ready remedy had not
+suggested itself, and the subject slept.
+
+The grievance is this--that the present system of leases for lives or
+for a term of years causes frequent loss to the leaseholder and much
+injury to the community, benefiting only the owner of the soil. The
+remedy would be to empower a leaseholder to demand from the ground
+landlord that the land shall be transferred to him upon payment of its
+fair value, as appraised by some public tribunal.
+
+And first as to the results which flow from the present state of things.
+These vary with the circumstances, and some of the circumstances demand
+study. Leases, broadly speaking, are of two kinds--those which are
+granted on lives and those which are for a specified term of years. Of
+the two, the former are the more objectionable, as they frequently work
+gross injustice. A lease is granted which shall expire at the death of
+the third of three persons named in the deed. Under that lease a man
+builds a house; the first life expires, and the leaseholder has to pay a
+fine--or, as it is called, a heriot--of a specified sum; the second
+dies, and another fine has to be paid; and when the third passes away,
+the property and all upon it revert to the landlord. Is it not easy to
+see that no particular chapter of accidents is required to terminate any
+three given lives within a comparatively short period, while, if an
+epidemic occurred, ground landlords everywhere would reap a rich harvest
+from the ready falling in of leases for lives?
+
+One instance out of thousands may be quoted of how the system works. "A
+piece of land which let for L2 an acre as an agricultural rent was let
+for building purposes at L9 an acre, and divided into eleven plots. On
+one of these a poor man built a cottage, at a cost of L60, on a ground
+rent of 16s. 6d. The term was for three lives and one in reversion. The
+charge for the lease was L5. On the expiration of each of the three
+lives L1 was payable as a fine or heriot, and L10 was to be paid on
+nominating the life in reversion. All the four lives expired in
+twenty-eight years. The landlord thereupon took possession of the house.
+He had thus received in twenty-eight years, besides the annual ground
+rent, the following sums:--L5 for the lease, L10 for nomination of life
+in reversion, L3 as heriot on the expiration of the three lives--in all
+L18; and, in addition, the house built at the expense of the victim,
+which he sold for L58."
+
+The reply may be made, "But, granting that leases for lives often have
+cruel results, is not the remedy in the hands of those who want leases?
+Why do they take those for lives?" For this reason--that in some parts
+of the country it is the only way by which a building plot can be
+obtained, and that, as long as the possibility of securing so good a
+bargain is legalized, so long will the more unscrupulous among the
+landlords force an intending tenant to accept that or nothing.
+
+Leases for long terms of years do not as readily lend themselves to the
+chance of legal robbery, but they have their own ill effects. Houses are
+built in flimsy fashion upon the express idea that they are intended to
+last only the specified term; and during the expiring years of the
+lease, repairs are grudged, and the dwellings rendered unhealthy to the
+occupier and unsafe to the passers-by. If a man has a house which is
+erected upon leasehold land, and therein builds up, by his own skill
+and industry, a good business, he is absolutely at the mercy of the
+ground landlord when the lease expires. The rent is raised because of
+the success his own faculties have secured, onerous conditions in the
+way of repairs are imposed, and what can he do? "If you don't like it,
+you can leave it," is the landlord's reply; but there is many a business
+which does not bear transplanting, and if the tenant be on a large
+estate it might happen that, if he did not accede to the owner's terms,
+he would have to move to a far-distant part of the town, or even--as at
+Devonport and Huddersfield among other places--out of the town
+altogether, and that would mean ruin. And thus he is practically
+compelled to struggle on in order to increase the wealth of the
+landlord, who has done nothing, at the expense of himself, who has done
+all.
+
+And this is not always the worst, for in many cases landlords for
+various reasons will not renew at any price, and the tenant has perforce
+to go the moment his lease expires. A certain Whig duke--and, of course,
+a zealous defender of "the rights of property"--conceived the idea, upon
+coming into his estates some years ago, that a village stood too near
+his park gates. Not brooking that herdsmen and traders should stand
+between the wind and his nobility, he directed that, as leases fell in,
+the tenants should be cleared out, graciously, however, offering them
+other plots some three miles away. And the tenants had to leave the
+homes in which they had been born and where their parents had lived
+before them, and to see them tumble down in utter ruin, in order that so
+mighty a person as a duke should not be shocked by the sight of the
+common herd. It was one of the thousand cases in life where a man had a
+right to do that which it was not right for him to perform.
+
+Another fashion in which grievous injustice to the leaseholder can be
+done is frequently illustrated. It has happened, and happened very
+recently, that a ground landlord has granted leases for a term of years;
+that, upon the strength of these agreements, houses have been built; and
+that upon the landlord's decease it has been discovered by some skilful
+lawyer that the dead man had had no power, under an entail or
+settlement, to grant such leases; whereupon the heir has invoked the law
+to cancel the whole, and has seized everything upon the land. This is
+legal, but is it commonly honest?
+
+In other ways the leasehold system is an injury not only to individuals
+but to the community. A west country town, where all the land is held by
+one man, has been crippled in every attempt to expand and improve by the
+impossibility of obtaining a freehold plot. What person in his senses
+would erect a substantial factory or a large concern of any kind upon a
+comparatively short lease? Men embark upon such enterprises in order
+that, as year follows year, their property may become more valuable, not
+that year by year it may become less so by the growing nearness of the
+time when it will pass to the landlord, who has never contributed a
+penny or a thought to the success of the concern, the building
+containing which, at the expiration of the lease, he can call his own.
+
+For all these unfairnesses to individuals, hindrances to trade, and
+injuries to the community, is proposed the remedy stated--that a
+leaseholder who has twenty (or, as some suggest, ten or fifteen) years
+to run, shall be empowered to demand that his land be made freehold upon
+the payment of its value, as assessed by some specified tribunal.
+
+The first objection is that this would be an undue interference with
+"the rights of property." But it has already been laid down by
+Parliament that such "rights" can be set aside in the public interest
+upon the payment of fair compensation; and what has been done in regard
+to the making of railways can be done respecting the building or the
+preserving of houses. The existing system is an injury to the community;
+and as the price to be paid for its abolition, whether wholly or in
+part, would be assessed by a tribunal constituted by Parliament, the
+landlords would have no more reason to complain than they now have when
+compelled to sell a portion of their property to a railway company.
+
+The next plea is that it would interfere with "freedom of contract."
+Upon the general question of what that freedom is, how far it now
+exists, and in how large a degree the State has a right to interfere
+with it, one need not speak, for in this matter of leases Parliament
+has already stepped in to "interfere with freedom of contract." It
+having been found that some landlords were accustomed to insert in
+leases oppressive provisions for forfeiture in certain conditions, the
+Legislature empowered the courts to lift from the leaseholders covenants
+which unduly burdened them. And if a precedent is asked for the
+particular remedy proposed, the Acts enabling any copyholder to
+enfranchise his holding should be consulted.
+
+If it be said that, should such a power be granted by law, no one
+possessing land would let on a long lease, it may be answered that this
+would be no great evil, seeing how the leasehold system has worked. But
+as landowners will want in the future as in the past to let or to sell,
+and as it is not to be supposed that any man will take a lease of less
+than twenty years and build upon the land, the owners will accommodate
+themselves to circumstances, and dispose of their property as best they
+can.
+
+Owners in other countries do so, and why not here? Such a leasehold
+system as that of England is practically unknown elsewhere. In France,
+it is true, something of the kind exists, but we seek for it in vain in
+Germany and Austria, in Russia and Switzerland, or in Spain and
+Portugal; while in Italy, where no leases for over thirty years are
+permitted, a tenant can convert his property into freehold by redeeming
+the rent.
+
+The supporters of leasehold enfranchisement, therefore, have on their
+side not only the practical evils of the present system, but
+parliamentary precedent and continental custom. These should suffice to
+persuade all who study the matter that the time for a change has come,
+and that the way in which that change is proposed to be effected is just
+and equitable.
+
+
+
+
+XX.--WHOSE SHOULD BE THE UNEARNED INCREMENT?
+
+
+There is a school of politicians which reply to all such proposals as
+have been sketched for practical land reform: "They do not go far
+enough, for they would merely transfer the unearned increment from the
+present freeholders to the present leaseholders, and we want it
+transferred to the community." This "unearned increment" is a matter of
+which we are likely to hear a deal in the immediate future, for since
+John Mill stated the theory it has been much talked of, and to-day more
+than ever. It is sometimes contended, in fact, that, supposing all the
+projected reforms carried and in full and untrammeled action, "the
+absorption of the unearned increment by private individuals would
+perpetuate an evil which would swallow up whatever good those reforms
+might have a tendency to bring about."
+
+What then is the theory upon which so much may depend? It cannot be
+better stated than in the words of Mill:--"Suppose that there is a kind
+of income which constantly tends to increase, without any exertion or
+sacrifice on the part of the owners: those owners constituting a class
+in the community, whom the natural course of things progressively
+enriches, consistently with complete passiveness on their own part. In
+such a case it would be no violation of the principles on which private
+property is grounded, if the State should appropriate this increase of
+wealth, or part of it, as it arises. This would not properly be taking
+anything from anybody; it would merely be applying an accession of
+wealth, created by circumstances, to the benefit of society, instead of
+allowing it to become an unearned appendage to the riches of a
+particular class. Now this is actually the case with rent."
+
+When Mill's "Principles of Political Economy" was published, this theory
+of the State absorbing, in whole or in part, the "unearned increment" of
+the land, was regarded by many as so utopian that it was put aside with
+a scoff, and was thought to have been settled with a sneer. But it has
+struck deep root into many a Radical mind, and those who believe in it
+ask it to be shown how it is either dishonest as a theory or would be
+impossible in practice.
+
+There need be no attempt to do either, for Mill himself made an
+important restriction in his definition of what should be done which
+relieves it from the stigma of dishonesty or impracticability. He
+believed that "it would be no violation of the principles on which
+private property is grounded, if the State should appropriate this
+increase of wealth, _or part of it_, as it arises." It may be agreed
+that the State could fairly appropriate a part of this increment, and
+this might be done by means of taxation. But that is a very different
+matter from taking the whole.
+
+One who argues in favour of the latter plan, submits this
+contention:--"The area of a county, for purposes of illustration, may be
+taken as a fixed quantity. Now, the demand for land will increase, and
+as a corollary the price of land will rise, exactly in proportion to the
+increase of population. This additional value is not brought about by
+either independent industry, ingenuity, or the outlay of capital on the
+part of any private individual: it is a growth entirely due to the
+increase of the community: it is of enormous value, is extracted from
+the dire necessities of the whole population, and goes into the pockets
+of private individuals who have never done anything to create it."
+
+But does the illustration hold good whether applied to such a limited
+area as a county or to the country at large? It is not the case that the
+demand for land increases and its price rises exactly in proportion to
+population; and it is as little the case that its increased value, if
+any, is "extracted from the dire necessities of the whole population."
+For while the number of our inhabitants is increasing, the value of such
+land as ministers directly to their wants in the provision of food and
+clothing is decreasing. If all the bread that is eaten, beef that is
+killed, and wool that is worn, were raised within these shores, there
+would be a semblance of truth in the illustration; but we have left the
+days when we lived on our own produce far behind, and the British farmer
+would only be too happy if the picture thus presented were even
+approximately like reality.
+
+It may be replied that bread and beef and wool do not exhaust the
+catalogue of men's requirements from the land; and they do not, for we
+require plots upon which to build, and good houses are just as necessary
+as cheap food. But even where land is made more valuable by its becoming
+used for building purposes, is there any justice in either the State or
+a municipality taking the whole increased value? Let the case be that of
+a man who thinks that he sees a chance of a town expanding, and who
+purchases a piece of land which will be of little use to anybody unless
+his idea proves correct, but which will bring him a good profit if he
+has skilfully foreseen. Why should he not be as fairly paid for his
+skill and foresight as if he had bought a house on a similar belief? The
+reply is, "The quantity of land is limited; that of houses is not;" but
+that is only true up to a certain and very definite point; and with the
+reforms which have already been suggested, and with a fairer system of
+taxing the land, the community would gain all it could fairly ask.
+
+My contention, shortly put, is this--That the State has a right to share
+in the increased value of all property, landed or otherwise; and that,
+in the case of land, it has an additional, though limited, claim,
+because of the conditions upon which that commodity passed into private
+ownership. Those who work for wages have to pay income tax immediately
+those wages touch a certain point; as they rise, so does the payment
+increase; and, after a given amount, the tax is proportionately much
+heavier. Why should not the same principle be applied to income of every
+sort from land as to income of every sort from wages, profits, or
+invested capital?
+
+It is not so at present, as a study of the land tax will show.
+Nominally that tax is four shillings in the pound on the full annual
+value, but actually what does it stand at? It was fixed by Parliament in
+the seventeenth century, the semi-owners of the land, who had held their
+property under certain weighty conditions of contributing military
+strength to the King, and who had managed by degrees to slip through
+their obligations, agreeing thus to tax themselves as a compensation for
+the burden that had been lifted from them. But in 1798 it was
+enacted--by a Parliament in which practically only landowners were
+represented--that the valuation upon which the tax was to be paid should
+be that of 1692, when on its then conditions it was first levied. And
+the consequence is that, although this later Act directed that it should
+be assessed and collected with impartiality, in parts of the country
+which have stood still the tax now is not far from the original sum,
+while it amounts in the immediate neighbourhood of such a city as
+Liverpool to about a fifth of a farthing in the pound. It may not be
+feasible, because of the manner in which much of the impost has been
+"redeemed," and it might in some cases be unjust, to raise the land tax
+at once to four shillings in the pound on the valuation of 1888 instead
+of 1692; but the same Parliament which put the clock back has the power
+to bring it up to the proper time; and, at least, something could be
+done to lessen the loss the State is now made to suffer.
+
+There is another way in which landowners could justly be called upon to
+pay a portion of the unearned increment to the State, and that is
+through the taxation of ground-rents. This is a point which keenly
+touches the towns, and deserves the early attention of Parliament. At
+present the great ground landlords escape their fair share of the
+burdens which fall heavily upon those who take their leases. And, so
+certain are some of them that the taxing time will soon come, that they
+are already selling a portion of their town estates, so as to "get out
+from under" before that period arrives.
+
+It may therefore be submitted that, with a fairer land tax and the
+taxation of ground rents, we should secure to the State the proportion
+of the "unearned increment" to which she is justly entitled. Those who
+would go further must be prepared to prove that property in land is so
+different in every essential from all other kinds that it would be
+honest for the State to absorb the whole unearned increment of the one,
+and to levy only an income and property tax on the other.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.--HOW SHOULD LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT BE EXTENDED?
+
+
+It is always consolatory to find amid the welter of party politics some
+topic upon which all say they agree, and such a topic certainly is that
+of the reform of local government. Politicians of every shade have long
+professed their desire for such a reform, and it ought now to be within
+measurable distance of accomplishment.
+
+Upon the great question of the extension of self-government to Ireland I
+have already spoken; and in regard to the purely domestic affairs of all
+the four divisions of the kingdom--England, Scotland, and Wales, as well
+as Ireland--it need only here be added that the solution of much of the
+difficulty which springs from an overburdened Parliament will be found
+in devolving upon a special authority for each the right of dealing with
+its own local concerns. But, as to three of the four divisions, it is
+not so pressing a question as that which is commonly known as the reform
+of local government, and the main proposition touching which is summed
+up in the demand for county councils.
+
+This is a matter which more intimately touches the country districts
+than the towns, for in all the latter of any size there are popularly
+elected municipal councils, which exercise much power over local
+affairs. The only exception is the greatest town of all, for London was
+specifically exempted (by the action of the House of Lords) from the
+reform effected in all other cities and boroughs by the Municipal
+Corporations Act of 1835. There is a Corporation of the City of London;
+but this body, against which a very great deal can be said, has
+authority only over one square mile of ground, the remaining 119 square
+miles upon which the metropolis stands being governed by vestries,
+trustee boards, and district boards of works, all connected with and
+subject to the Metropolitan Board of Works--or Board of Words, as it was
+once irreverently but truly called--which is not chosen directly by the
+ratepayers, but is selected by the vestries, who themselves are elected
+by handfuls of people, the general public paying them no heed. And thus
+it comes to pass that the greatest and wealthiest city in the world is
+worse governed than the smallest of our municipal boroughs, for nine out
+of ten ratepayers take not the least interest in electing the vestries,
+and not one ratepayer in a hundred could tell the name of his district
+representative on the Metropolitan Board of Works, now proposed, by even
+a Conservative Administration, to be abolished.
+
+It is not a small concern, this of reforming the government of London,
+for it affects four millions of people--a number not far short of the
+population of Ireland; but politicians in the mass, as even the keenest
+metropolitan municipal reformer will admit, are more interested in the
+general question of local government.
+
+Speaking broadly, the defects of the system proposed to be reformed are
+that of the popularly elected bodies there are too many, and that the
+great governing body is not elected at all. In a certain town of 3000
+inhabitants, there are at this moment a Town Council, a School Board, a
+Burial Board, and (because under the Public Health Act an adjoining
+parish was tacked on) a Local Board of Health; while, notwithstanding
+that it sends representatives to a Board of Guardians for the whole
+Union, it had until recently, and in addition to the other bodies, a
+Local Board of Guardians, chosen under a special Act. And, beyond all
+these, a Highway Board meets within its borders, which has to be
+consulted and negotiated with whenever a road leading into the town
+needs to be re-metalled or an additional brick is required for a
+neighbouring bridge.
+
+As if all these boards were not sufficient to keep the district in good
+order, there is the Court of Quarter Sessions, which has jurisdiction
+in various details that the multitude of small bodies cannot touch.
+These latter have one justification, however, that the former cannot
+claim, and that is that, despite there being magistrates who are members
+of the boards of guardians by virtue of their office, and although the
+more property one possesses the more votes one can give for certain of
+the local bodies, these in the main are popularly elected, and are,
+therefore, directly responsible to the ratepayers for the manner in
+which their trust is used.
+
+It is quite otherwise with the Court of Quarter Sessions. This consists
+only of magistrates, such magistrates being appointed by the
+Lords-Lieutenant of counties, and the appointments being made mainly on
+political grounds. As a rule, the holders of that distinguished position
+are Tories, and they take good care that the magistrates shall be Tories
+also. It is not long since it would have been impossible to find a
+single Liberal on the commission of the peace for Huntingdonshire; and
+when comparatively recently it was pointed out to the Lord-Lieutenant of
+Essex that an almost exactly similar state of things prevailed in that
+shire, he replied he did not consider there was a Liberal in the whole
+county who was socially qualified for the magisterial bench. The idea of
+making a banker or a merchant a justice of the peace was too shocking;
+and thus the commercial classes and a good half of the population
+(giving the other half to the Tories) were completely unrepresented, not
+merely on the bench, but in the Court of Quarter Sessions, which
+governed the affairs and spent the money of the county.
+
+There is no necessity to prove that these courts have spent the county
+monies wantonly or with conscious impropriety in order to show this
+condition of things to be wrong. In imperial affairs, the doctrine that
+taxation without representation is tyranny has been asserted to the
+full; in municipal matters, since the Act of 1835, the same has
+prevailed; but in county concerns it has been non-existent. The
+magistrates represent no one but themselves, their party, and their own
+class; they are necessarily swayed by the passions and prejudices that
+party and class possess; and, seeing that the English people long ago
+refused power over the national purse to an unrepresentative body like
+the House of Lords, it is surprising they have until now allowed power
+over the local purse to be in the hands of such equally unrepresentative
+bodies as the courts of quarter sessions.
+
+The line which the immediate reform of local government must take is,
+therefore, the creation of a directly-elected body to deal with county
+affairs, and the federation of such of the smaller boards as have to do
+with the more purely district concerns, both of which points the Cabinet
+of Lord Salisbury appear disposed to concede. But upon the former point
+Liberals will claim that the whole--and not merely three-fourths--of the
+County Councils shall be directly elected, for the system of aldermen,
+included in the Municipal Reform Act by the House of Lords, has been
+used for partisan purposes, as it was intended to be, and the same
+effect will follow in the case of the counties if the same cause is
+provided.
+
+Any system, in fact, which involves "double election" tends to make the
+body concerned hidebound and cliquish. A county alderman once chosen,
+especially if he were a squire, as he most likely would be, would have
+to behave himself in most outrageous fashion ever to lose his post. The
+ratepayers might grumble, but it would be difficult in the extreme to
+dislodge him, for he would be removed from their direct control, and the
+Council would consider it ungracious to get rid of an "old servant." If
+one wants to know how this double election operates, let him ask some
+clear-sighted Londoner who is acquainted with the manner in which his
+own city is ruled. He will be answered that for scandalous and wanton
+expenditure not many bodies can equal the Metropolitan Asylums Board,
+the members of which are mainly chosen by the various boards of
+guardians; while for jobbery and general mismanagement it is even beaten
+by the Metropolitan Board of Works, which is elected by the several
+vestries. And he will add that this chiefly arises from the fact that
+the ratepayers have no direct control over either of these bodies, and
+that the good result of such direct control was shown by this fact--that
+when the metropolitan ratepayers considered that the School Board, which
+is directly elected, was practising extravagance, they placed at the
+bottom of the poll those responsible for the policy, with the effect
+that considerable savings were speedily effected.
+
+And therefore now, when County Councils are being established, all
+Liberals will have very carefully to watch the points upon which the
+Tories and Whigs may combine in an attempt to give the country a
+semblance without the reality of representative local self-government.
+What must be insisted upon is--(1) That the Councils shall be entirely
+elective; (2) that the ratepayers shall directly elect; (3) that there
+shall be no property qualification for membership; (4) that the voting
+shall be by household suffrage--one householder one vote; and (5) that
+women ratepayers shall have the same right of voting for county as for
+town councils.
+
+With such a Council in each county, or, in the case of Lancashire and
+Yorkshire, in each great division of a county, we should have a central
+local organization, to which highway boards, local boards of health,
+village school boards, and other small bodies could be affiliated; and
+it is not impossible that, as a development of the system, the various
+bodies controlling the destinies of our lesser towns could be federated
+to save friction, trouble, and expense; while, above all, it must be
+insisted that the representatives of the ratepayers shall have full
+control over the police.
+
+It is a truism that without good citizens the best of governments must
+fail; but our experience of the House of Commons and of the many town
+councils has shown that the improvement of the machinery and the handing
+over of control to the great body of the people have brought
+public-spirited men to the front to do the duties required. As it has
+been at Westminster and in the towns, so will it be in the counties.
+England has become greater and freer, our towns have expanded and
+benefited, owing to the whole of the inhabitants having a direct voice
+in the rule; and the counties will correspondingly improve when the same
+is applied.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.--HOW IS LOCAL OPTION TO BE EFFECTED?
+
+
+Intimately connected with the question of county government is that of
+local option; and the problem of transferring the licensing power from
+an irresponsible bench of magistrates to a specially elected body, or to
+a direct vote of the ratepayers, has ripened towards settlement in a
+remarkable degree since the day--just twenty years since--when Mr.
+Gladstone wrote to the United Kingdom Alliance that his disposition was
+"to let in the principle of local option wherever it is likely to be
+found satisfactory," and thus used in relation to this question for the
+first time, as far as is known, a phrase which has become famous.
+
+No leading politician to-day disputes that some form of local option
+must speedily be provided; but, as a body, they have been shy of
+touching a problem that presents a host of difficulties, and the attempt
+to settle which could not fail to arouse a number of enemies. What
+those, therefore, who wished for local option have had to do was to show
+the body of electors that it was reasonable and just, and to trust that
+their appreciation of these two qualities would lead them to its
+support.
+
+As to its being reasonable, the very fact that the granting of licences
+even now is in the hands of the magistrates, and not in those of a
+Government department, indicates that it is intended that local feeling
+shall be consulted. This, in fact, was specifically stated in an Act of
+1729, which, after reciting that "inconveniences have arisen in
+consequence of licences being granted to alehouse-keepers by justices
+living at a distance, and, therefore, not truly informed of the occasion
+or want of ale-houses in the neighbourhood, or the character of those
+who apply for licences," enacted that "no licences shall in future be
+granted but at a general meeting of the magistrates acting in the
+division in which the applicant dwells."
+
+Just a hundred years later, Parliament thought fit to withdraw from the
+magistrates--who, at the least, knew something of "the occasion or want
+of alehouses in the neighbourhood, or the characters of those who apply
+for licences"--the power over applications for beerhouse licences; and
+the result showed that even the most modified form of local option was
+better than none. The Act of 1830, "to permit the general sale of beer
+and cider by retail in England," provided that "any householder desirous
+of selling malt liquor by retail in any house" might obtain a licence
+from the Excise without leave from the magistrates. Within five years
+another Act had to be passed demanding better guarantees for the
+character of those applying for such licences, the preamble declaring
+this to be necessary because "much evil had arisen from the management
+of houses" created by the previous statute. Other amending Acts
+followed, and in 1882 the magistrates were once more given complete
+jurisdiction over beer off-licences, with the result that in the borough
+of Over Darwen alone the renewal was at once refused of 34 out of 72
+licences of the kind, a decision which, it is important to note as
+bearing upon a point yet to be raised, was upheld by the Queen's Bench
+on appeal.
+
+It is not merely a matter of historical interest, but it has very
+distinctly to do with the argument in favour of local option, to show
+that the magistrates for four centuries have had committed to them the
+duty of seeing that the needs of the district were no more than
+satisfied. In 1496, a statute directed "against vacabounds and beggers"
+empowered two justices of the peace "to rejecte and put awey comen
+ale-selling in tounes and places where they shall think convenyent;" and
+in 1552 another Act confirmed this exercise of authority. In 1622, the
+Privy Council peremptorily directed the local justices to suppress
+"unnecessary alehouses;" and in 1635 the Lord Keeper, in his charge to
+the judges in the Star Chamber previous to their going circuit,
+denounced alehouses as "the greatest pests in the kingdom," and added
+this significant hint: "In many places they swarm by default of the
+justices of the peace, that set up too many; but if the justices will
+not obey your charge therein, certify their default and names, and I
+assure you they shall be discharged. I once did discharge two justices
+for setting up one alehouse, and shall be glad to do the like again upon
+the same occasion."
+
+These facts show that the theory upon which our licensing system has
+grown up is that the wants of a locality shall be strictly borne in
+mind, and of late years the wishes of a locality have more and more been
+considered. No one would deny that magistrates as a whole pay greater
+attention to those wishes to-day than they were accustomed to do even as
+recently as fifteen years ago; and when new licences are applied for
+memorials against their grant, signed by the inhabitants, are allowed to
+have considerable weight with the bench. But that, after all, is only
+the result of indirect and irregular pressure. What Local Optionists
+desire is that the pressure shall be made direct and customary.
+
+The reasonableness of demanding that local wishes shall control the
+issue of licences is proved by the facts adduced, and the justice is
+equally capable of being shown. If a locality determines that no fresh
+licences shall be granted, or that certain old ones shall be taken away,
+no more injustice will be done than if the magistrates under the present
+system did the like. No compensation has ever been granted to the holder
+of a licence the renewal of which a bench has refused; and although the
+majority of such refusals has been because of ill-conduct, there have
+been many cases (and those at Over Darwen were among them) where the
+magistrates have not renewed because they did not think the house was
+required. The fact stands that a publican's tenure is in its nature
+precarious; he holds his licence from year to year at the pleasure of
+the magistrates; he would hold it in the same fashion were Local Option
+secured. And the fact that the power of refusal to renew a licence would
+pass from an irresponsible bench to either the whole of the ratepayers
+or a body specially elected by them for the duty, would not entitle him
+to demand a compensation then that does not exist for him now.
+
+A great difficulty of the problem lies in consideration of the manner
+in which the popular power shall be exercised. "Local Option" is a
+somewhat elastic phrase, adopted by many who have never troubled to
+think what it may involve. Broadly speaking, there are three methods by
+which it might be carried into effect: (1) By placing the power of
+licensing in the hands of the Town Councils or the proposed County
+Councils; (2) in those of specially-elected licensing boards; or (3) in
+those of the ratepayers, who would exercise by ballot a "direct veto."
+
+It is the first plan that finds favour with most of our statesmen. It
+was prepared to be adopted by the last Liberal Ministry, and is by no
+means so novel as many suppose. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835,
+as originally drawn, contained a clause giving the Town Councils the
+power of granting alehouse licences, but the proposition was abandoned.
+The Local Government Bill of Lord Salisbury's Administration has a
+similar provision, giving the licensing to the County Councils; but to
+this has been urged the objection that these bodies will have sufficient
+business to attend to without having the public-houses placed on their
+shoulders. When our system of popular education was fixed upon its
+present basis, it was resolved that the work should be done by specially
+chosen school boards. Mr. Forster at first proposed that these boards
+should in the towns be selected by the Municipal Councils; but it was
+felt by the House of Commons that so special a function demanded direct
+election, and direct election was provided, with the best results. And
+if the licensing power is to be vested in a representative assembly and
+local option is to be anything but a sham, it must be placed in the
+hands of those elected by the ratepayers for that special purpose, so
+that no bye-issues of waterworks, or paving, or the increase of rates
+shall affect the one distinct question of the public-house.
+
+The extreme temperance section argue that even such Licensing
+Boards--directly elected by the ratepayers for the specific
+purpose--would not meet the requirements of the case, and that nothing
+short of a popular vote can be accepted. But why should the
+representative system be abolished and a direct vote established in this
+case, any more than in the equally burning questions settled every day
+by Parliament, and the lesser but still important matters decided by
+town councils and school boards? We in England long ago made up our
+minds that the most excellent way to get public work done is to choose
+the best men, give them the requisite authority, and then allow them to
+do the duty to which they are called. And if we can disestablish a
+church, revolutionize the land system, or reform our institutions from
+top to bottom through our representatives, without a direct vote of the
+people, the question of renewing public-house licences can scarcely
+demand so exceptional a process as is by some suggested.
+
+My answer, therefore, to the question, "How is Local Option to be
+worked?" as well as to the kindred temperance question, "How is Sunday
+closing to be settled?" is, "By means of licensing boards, directly
+elected by the ratepayers." And if this solution be adopted, our
+licensing system will be placed upon a basis at once more safe and more
+free from friction or the likelihood of injustice than any other that
+has been proposed.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.--WHY AND HOW ARE WE TAXED?
+
+
+Taxes are the price we pay for being governed: they defray interest upon
+money borrowed and wages for protection and service. The fact that they
+are called by a name which is to many obnoxious, or that they are handed
+to the State instead of to an individual, ought not to blind us to their
+real nature--that they are the price of services rendered. The name is
+nothing. In churches the money we pay is called a pew-rent or an
+offertory; in clubs it is a subscription; to doctors or lawyers a fee;
+to tradesmen a price; to railway companies a fare; for personal services
+wages; for the loan of a house rent; for life or fire insurance a
+premium; and for water a rate. All are in a measure taxes; and if it be
+answered that the difference is that these payments are voluntary, may
+not the same be said of much that is called "indirect taxation"?
+
+When the subject is considered, there are three questions which
+naturally demand reply.
+
+
+     1. Why are we taxed?
+     2. How are we taxed? and
+     3. How ought we to be taxed?
+
+
+To the first question some answer has already been given. Put in the
+simplest fashion, the reply would be that it is cheaper to pay taxes and
+be taken care of than not to pay them and have to take care of
+ourselves. As members of an organized society, we have to provide for
+external protection and internal service--for the army and navy as a
+safeguard against enemies from without, for the officers of the law as a
+safeguard against depredators within, for the means of government, for
+education, and for a large number of other matters designed for the
+security of our persons and property and for the welfare and advancement
+of the community. We have further to pay the interest upon the National
+Debt--money borrowed by the State at times of emergency to prosecute
+such wars as Parliament had sanctioned.
+
+In point of fact, taxes are a substitution for personal service. The
+State in England once compelled this as a means of raising an army; and,
+though this form of personal service was long ago commuted by the
+payment of a sufficient sum through taxation for the maintenance of a
+standing force, the State has only waived, not abrogated, the right.
+Even as lately as the last century people in our country districts had
+to give six days in the year to the repair of such highways as were
+under the management of the justices of the peace. In the one case the
+personal service has been commuted into a tax, in the other into a
+rate--the difference being that a tax is imperially and a rate locally
+levied--it being found that forced labour of the kind indicated is more
+wasteful and less efficacious than hired labour; and, if any want to
+know how wasteful and how inefficient, they can find abundant
+illustrations in the history of the old _regime_ in France, or that of
+the Egyptian fellaheen.
+
+There has been indicated the difference between imperial and local
+taxation--the one being a tax imposed by the State and the other a rate
+levied by a local authority. The object in each case is similar; but,
+while the cost of the central administration, the army and navy, and the
+superior courts of justice, with the interest on the National Debt, is
+paid by taxes, that of lighting, draining, and other purely local
+matters is defrayed by rates, and that of the police, the poor, the
+highways, and education comes out of taxes and rates combined.
+
+So much for the _why_ of being taxed; let us now consider the _how_. At
+present the receipts of the State are derived from direct and indirect
+taxation, together with a form which may be said to come under both
+these heads. The most familiar mode of direct taxation is the Income
+Tax; of indirect, the Customs and Excise; and of that which savours of
+both, the stamp duties and the profits from the Post Office.
+
+These methods of taxation are, as far as England is concerned,
+comparatively modern. In the earlier days of settled government in this
+country, the mode of taxing was different and somewhat fitful, causing
+much trouble in the collection, and sometimes forming the pretext for
+revolt. "Aids" to the King were a frequent means of oppression long ago;
+and as far back as the time of John they were felt as a grievance, Magna
+Charta providing that the King should take no aids without the consent
+of Parliament, except those for knighting the lord's eldest son, for
+marrying his eldest daughter, and for ransoming the lord from captivity
+(the lord, it being remembered, holding at that time his land direct
+from the sovereign). "Benevolences"--a charming name for an unpleasing
+idea--were also in vogue in the Middle Ages, and, although specifically
+declared by an Act of Richard III. to be illegal, were levied in a
+fashion which caused much discontent. "Loans" were another form of
+raising money which the nation resented, as Charles I. found to his
+cost; while a "Poll Tax," as all men know, drove Wat Tyler into
+rebellion. "Subsidies" and "Tenths" and other taxing devices equally
+failed in the long run to answer the desired purpose of filling the
+National Exchequer; and after the Restoration all such gave place to a
+system by which the Customs, the Excise, and the Land Tax provided most
+of the money required.
+
+Gradually the proceeds of the Land Tax dwindled, and direct taxation was
+almost extinct when, in the throes of the great war with France, which
+lasted, with slight intervals, for twenty-two years, the younger Pitt
+revived it in an Income Tax, the form in which it is now mainly known.
+With the end of the war this ceased, and the proceeds of indirect
+taxation were again chiefly those upon which the State relied. What the
+result was, how in every direction trade was hampered and public comfort
+destroyed, has been summed up for all time in one of Sydney Smith's
+essays; and the quotation is worth re-perusal by everybody interested in
+the subject, and especially by those who to-day are wishing to get rid
+of the main form of direct taxation we possess--the Income Tax, as
+revived by Sir Robert Peel.
+
+Uttering, in 1820, a warning to the United States to avoid that spirit
+which we now call "Jingoism," Sydney Smith wrote--"We can inform
+Jonathan what are the inevitable consequences of being too fond of
+glory--TAXES upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers
+the back, or is placed under the foot; taxes upon everything which it is
+pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; taxes upon warmth, light,
+and locomotion; taxes on everything on earth and the waters under the
+earth--on everything that comes from abroad or is grown at home; taxes
+on the raw material; taxes on every fresh value that is added to it by
+the industry of man; taxes on the sauce which pampers man's appetite,
+and the drug that restores him to health; on the ermine which decorates
+the judge, and the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man's
+salt, and the rich man's spice; on the brass nails of the coffin, and
+the ribands of the bride--at bed or board, couchant or levant, we must
+pay. The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his
+taxed horse, with a taxed bridle, on a taxed road; and the dying
+Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid 7 per cent., into a
+spoon that has paid 15 per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz
+bed, which has paid 22 per cent., and expires in the arms of an
+apothecary who has paid a licence of a hundred pounds for the privilege
+of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed
+from 2 to 10 per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for
+burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on
+taxed marble; and he is then gathered to his fathers--to be taxed no
+more."
+
+Ludicrous as the picture seems, it was correctly painted for the time it
+depicted; and it is first to Sir Robert Peel and next to his greatest
+pupil, Mr. Gladstone, that we owe the change from the harassing indirect
+taxation of the past to the comparatively innocuous forms of it we have
+to-day. But it is still from indirect taxation that most of our revenue
+is derived. The heads of that revenue, as given officially, are--(1)
+Customs, (2) Excise, (3) Stamps, (4) Land Tax, (5) House Duty, (6)
+Income Tax, (7) Post Office, (8) Telegraph Service, (9) Crown Lands,
+(10) Interest on Advances for Local Works and Purchase Money of Suez
+Canal shares, and (11) Miscellaneous. Of all these, Excise stands first
+by several millions, while Customs are far ahead of any of the rest,
+Stamps and Income Tax being the next best paying sources of revenue.
+And, in some form or other, every one among us--the peer who smokes a
+cigarette, the peasant who drinks a pint of beer, and the very pauper
+who sends a letter to a friend--has indirectly to contribute his quota
+to the Exchequer, while all who earn more than L150 a year have to pay
+Income Tax; and those who inherit property, probate, legacy, or
+succession duty.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.--HOW OUGHT WE TO BE TAXED?
+
+
+It being certain that, as long as we are citizens of any sort of State,
+we shall be called upon to pay for its maintenance, the question "How
+ought we to be taxed?" is one of considerable moment to all. Grumble we
+may, but pay we must.
+
+Some think they would solve the problem at a stroke by substituting
+direct for indirect taxation. They argue that people should know exactly
+what they are paying for the service of the State; and that direct
+taxation is not only a more logical but a more economic method of
+raising the revenue. They show that the consumer of duty-bearing
+articles pays not only the duty but a percentage upon it as interest to
+the middleman; and a striking instance of this was afforded in the fact
+that when, in 1865, Mr. Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, took
+sixpence a pound off the tax on tea, the retail price of that article
+immediately fell eightpence.
+
+But it may be feared that those who argue in favour of entirely direct
+taxation make small allowance for the weaknesses of human nature. I may
+prove to demonstration to the first person I meet that he is paying more
+than he ought to do because of the working of the indirect system, and
+that to this wastefulness is added the sin of ignorance as to what he
+actually does pay; but the chances are ten to one that he will reply
+that, hating all taxation as the natural man does, he would rather not
+know to what extent he was being mulcted, and that, if the whole amount
+were annually and in a lump sum presented to his view, he would never
+find it in his heart or his pocket to pay it.
+
+To the sternly logical this attitude will appear sad, if not absolutely
+sinful; but we have to take man as we find him, and it is of little use
+attempting to run straight athwart his deepest prepossessions for so
+small a result as even the substitution of direct for indirect taxation
+would attain. But there is a further point, which even the political
+logician must bear in mind, and that is what the practical effect would
+be of sweeping away all duties of Customs and Excise.
+
+If we could secure a "free breakfast table" by liberating from toll tea,
+coffee, cocoa, currants, raisins, and other articles of domestic
+consumption, all would rejoice--though, in the present state of our
+finances, no Chancellor of the Exchequer is likely to sacrifice the five
+millions of revenue now raised from those commodities. But the English
+people will think a good many times before striking tobacco, spirits,
+and wine off the Customs list, with the more than 13 millions they
+produce, or spirits and beer off the list of the Excise, with the 13
+millions in the one case and the 81/2 millions in the other that we now
+receive from them. Even if any one can imagine for a moment that the 27
+millions here involved could be made up by some new direct tax, it does
+not need an extensive acquaintance with our social history to be aware
+that the result of removing the duties from the various intoxicants
+would be widespread national demoralization.
+
+The taxation of the future, therefore, as of the past, will certainly
+include Customs and Excise. Some items may be struck off both; that a
+free breakfast table can be secured should be no dream; and it may be
+fairly hoped that the hindrances to trade involved in such licences as
+those for auctioneers and hawkers--who ought no more to be fined by the
+Government for practising their employment than butchers, bakers, or
+other traders--will soon be swept away. But upon beer, wine, spirits,
+and tobacco--their importation, manufacture, and sale--the tax-gatherer
+will continue, and rightly continue, to lay his hand.
+
+Similarly, there will be no disposition to abolish the probate, legacy,
+and succession duties, but every disposition to strengthen them, and
+especially the last of them. The "Death duties" at present are
+inequitably levied; great fortunes do not pay as large a proportion as,
+relatively to small ones, they ought to do: and landed property is
+lightly let off compared with other forms.
+
+But it is a comparative few who will be touched even by this much-needed
+reform; and taxation, to be fair, must touch all round. The Income Tax,
+obnoxious as from some aspects all will admit it to be, has almost
+infinite capacities of being made useful to the State; and the question
+which practical statesmen will soon have to consider is the direction in
+which that usefulness can best be developed.
+
+As at present levied, this tax does not affect those whose incomes are
+below L150; if their incomes are between that sum and L400, the tax is
+paid upon L120 less than the correct figure; while if they exceed L400
+the full tax is levied.
+
+Now these regulations act unfairly in various directions. In the first
+place, the tax starts at too high a figure. Until a few years ago it
+began at an income of L100--a deduction of L80 being allowed--and there
+is no reason why it should not begin at L50, so that every man earning a
+pound a week in wages should be made to see as by a barometer how the
+national expenditure was rising or falling--though it never falls. And,
+however little he might be called upon to pay, there would be a distinct
+gain in so many additional capable citizens knowing from experience what
+an extra penny on the Income Tax means, for they would thereby be taught
+more closely to watch how the national money is got rid of, and their
+pockets consequently made the lighter.
+
+In the next place, the regulations now in force make no distinction
+between a precarious and a settled income, causing the tradesman or
+professional man, whose revenue dies with him, to pay as heavily as his
+neighbour who has inherited or acquired property, of which those
+dependent upon him will not be deprived by his decease. As the point was
+put in a motion made many years ago in the House of Commons by Mr.
+Hubbard (now Lord Addington), "the incidence of an Income Tax touching
+the products of invested property should fall upon net income, and the
+net amounts of industrial earnings should, previous to assessment, be
+subject to such an abatement as may equitably adjust the burden thrown
+upon intelligence and skill as compared with property." Upon this point,
+it is true, Mr. Gladstone has been antagonistic to the view here held;
+he opposed this very motion, and years before it was introduced he
+declared that it was not possible for him to conceive a plan which would
+secure the desired end. But it is also true that more than thirty years
+ago, and in his very first Budget speech, he intimated that "the public
+feeling that relief should be given to intelligence and skill as
+compared with property ought to be met, and may be met"; and that as
+plans he could not conceive in 1853 have become realized achievements
+with him before 1888, this concerning a differentiated Income Tax may
+yet be added to the number.
+
+The words of Cobden upon the point are as true to-day as when they were
+uttered. Speaking upon the Budget of 1848, he dwelt upon the
+inequalities of the Income Tax, which was then still talked of by
+Chancellors of the Exchequer as a temporary measure. "Make your tax
+just," he said, "in order that it may be permanent. It is ridiculous to
+deny the broad distinction that exists between incomes derived from
+trades and professions, and those drawn from land. Take the case of a
+tradesman with L10,000 of capital; he gets L500 a year interest, and
+L500 more for his skill and industry. Is this man's L1000 a year to be
+mulcted in the same amount with L1000 a year derived from a real
+property capital of L25,000? So with the cases of professional men, who
+literally live by the waste of their brains. The plain fair dealing of
+the country revolts at an equal levy on such different sorts of
+property. Professional men and men in business put in motion the wheels
+of the social system. It is their industry and enterprise that mainly
+give to realized property the value that it bears; to them, therefore,
+the State first owes sympathy and support."
+
+There is a further injustice under the present system, and that is that,
+when a man has passed the L400 limit, he has to pay as heavy a
+percentage upon his income, precarious or permanent, as the wealthiest
+millionaire among us. The struggling tradesman, the hardly-pressed
+professional man, every one who depends upon his brains for his living,
+has to pay as heavily as the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Westminster,
+and the Duke of Portland, to whom the brains they possess makes no
+difference to their income, and whose property has been secured not by
+efforts of their own, but of others.
+
+Is it any wonder, then, that the demand should be growing for a
+graduated Income Tax? It is one upon which Mr. Chamberlain has spoken
+plainly. At Ipswich, in January, 1885, he said--"Is it really certain
+that the precarious income of a struggling professional man ought to pay
+in the same proportion as the income of a man who derives it from
+invested securities? Is it altogether such an unfair thing that we
+should, as in the United States, tax all incomes according to their
+amount?... Prince Bismarck some time ago proposed to the Reichstag an
+Income Tax, to be graduated according to the amount of the income, and
+to vary according to the character of the income. We already have done
+something in that direction in exempting the very smallest incomes from
+taxation. But I submit that it is well worthy of careful consideration
+whether the principle should not be carried a little further." And at
+Warrington, eight months later, he observed--"I think that taxation
+ought to involve equality of sacrifice, and I do not see how this result
+is to be obtained except by some form of graduated taxation--that is,
+taxation which is proportionate to the superfluities of the taxpayer.
+When I am told that this is a new-fangled and a revolutionary doctrine,
+I wonder if my critics have read any elementary book on the subject;
+because if they had, they must have seen that a graduated Income Tax is
+not a novelty in this country. It existed in the Middle Ages, when those
+who exercised authority and power did so with harshness to their equals,
+but they knew nevertheless how to show consideration for the necessities
+of those beneath them."
+
+The first answer to the demand for a graduated Income Tax will, of
+course, be that it would be "confiscation"--a word by which the rich are
+ever striving to frighten others from making them pay their proper share
+to the State; and one may be content to rest in this matter upon the
+apparent paradox of Disraeli: "Confiscation is a blunder that destroys
+public credit; taxation, on the contrary, improves it; and both come to
+the same thing." The fact, as has before been stated, is that taxation
+is the price we pay for protection; and the more we have to protect, the
+more we ought to pay.
+
+And, as Mr. Chamberlain observed, this suggestion of a graduated tax is
+no new-fangled or revolutionary idea: it is one for instances of which
+it is not even necessary to go back with him to some vague reminiscences
+of the Middle Ages, for it exists in various degrees at the present
+time. It is only dwellings of over the annual value of L20 that are
+liable to inhabited house duty; houses of less than L30 rateable value
+have in various districts certain water privileges for nothing which
+those of greater value have to pay for; and the difference in the death
+duties, according to the degree of relationship of the legatee,
+indicates that the law recognizes the reasonableness of graduating the
+burden according to the shoulders which have to bear it. And when we
+come to the Income Tax itself, we find not merely that incomes under
+L150 are exempt, while those between that sum and L400 are subject to
+reductions which lessen the percentage of the tax to be paid compared
+with those above the last given figure, but that no other a Chancellor
+of the Exchequer than Mr. Gladstone has acknowledged the principle of
+graduation, and that in the most practical way; for in his Budget of
+1859, when the rate of the tax stood at 5d. and he proposed to add
+another 4d., he coupled with it the proviso that incomes from L100 to
+L150 (L100 being the then initial point) should pay only 11/2d. extra.
+
+The argument sometimes used that the heavier taxation of large incomes
+would tend to discourage thrift by putting a penalty upon its results is
+disposed of by every-day experience. Does a man cease to wish to earn
+L150 because that sum will make him liable to Income Tax, or L400
+because that will bring him fully within its scope? We know such a man
+does not exist, and why should the conditions be changed if the
+graduation went further than at present?
+
+Here, then, is the claim for a graduated Income Tax, and, after the
+examples which have been given, it cannot honestly be argued that such a
+system is either immoral in design or impossible of execution. What is
+wanted is that the burden of taxation shall be equalized by fixing the
+greater weight upon the shoulders that ought most to bear it. No single
+citizen should be exempt from a share, and by preserving indirect
+taxation upon luxuries and starting a direct tax at the lowest
+reasonable point, every one will have to pay something. But by
+rearranging the death duties and graduating the Income Tax we shall
+secure that those who have most to lose, and, therefore, who demand most
+from the State, shall pay the State in proportion to their demand.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.--HOW IS TAXATION TO BE REDUCED?
+
+
+At no moment in recent years was it more desirable to urge a demand for
+retrenchment in the national expenditure, and probably at no moment
+could such a demand be urged with more chance of good result. For the
+recent revelations made upon the highest authority as to the
+wastefulness which characterizes our Government departments have aroused
+in the public mind not merely indignation at the spendthrifts who rule
+us but determination to put an end to much of their extravagance.
+
+The only way in which taxation can be reduced is to lessen the need for
+taxes, and that can be done in no other fashion than by reducing the
+expenditure. Ministry after Ministry has entered Downing Street with the
+announced determination to exercise retrenchment, and Ministry after
+Ministry has left that haven for office-seekers with the expenditure
+higher than ever. The stock excuse for this state of things is, that as
+the national needs increase, the national expenditure must increase with
+them; but, allowing that this will justify a rise upon certain items,
+the question which will have to be pressed home to every Minister and
+would-be Minister, to every member of Parliament and would-be member, is
+this--"Is the money that is disposed of spent in economical fashion and
+to the best advantage?" And he will have to be a very thick-skinned
+specimen of officialdom who will venture to reply "Yes" to the question.
+
+In the estimates for the navy, the army, and the Civil Service, there is
+abundant room for the pruning knife, while to the principle which
+underlies the granting of many of the pensions there ought to be
+applied the axe. Of course, as long as we possess an empire which
+exceeds any the world has ever seen for the vastness of its extent and
+its resources, so long must an army and navy be maintained; and even if,
+by a reverse of fortune, every one of our colonies were cut off from us,
+an army and navy would still be needed for our own protection. They are
+as necessary to a nation, situated like our own, as a fire-brigade to a
+town; and it would be folly, and worse, to starve them into
+inefficiency. What money is needed, therefore, to place the defences of
+the country--whether those defences be men, ships, forts, or coaling
+stations--in such a state of efficiency as shall avoid the chance of
+national disaster should war burst upon us, ought to be definitely
+ascertained and cheerfully granted.
+
+But is the money now voted for the army and navy expended to the best
+advantage, or is not a large portion of it wasted in useless and
+ornamental adjuncts? We have not yet reached the point attained by that
+Mexican force which is traditionally stated to have contained
+twenty-five thousand officers and twenty thousand men: but the number of
+superior officers of both services is altogether out of proportion to
+the size of the force. In order to stimulate what is called the "flow of
+promotion," officers are placed on the retired list at a ridiculously
+early age, and the country is deprived of, while having to pay for, the
+services of those who are in the prime of life, and still capable of
+doing their full duty, in order that room may be made for their juniors
+to climb into their places, those juniors themselves being soon
+supplanted, and the "flow of promotion" going merrily on--at our
+expense. And the hollowness of the pretension that all this is for the
+country's good is shown by the fact that, while a determined effort was
+made by the Horse Guards to compulsorily retire Sir Edward Hamley, the
+finest tactician England possesses, the Duke of Cambridge is suffered to
+remain commander-in-chief long after the age at which any other officer
+would have been shifted. This is only one example of how all rules,
+salutary and otherwise, are put aside when courtiership demands, for
+there is a distinct danger, to which the country should be awakened, of
+our services being royalty-ridden.
+
+Royalty, it is true, has not yet invaded the Civil Service, though the
+scions of the reigning house are so rapidly increasing in number that
+the prizes even of this department are likely, at no distant date, to be
+snatched from the skilled and deserving; but this particular Government
+department has plenty to be purged of, notwithstanding. Put in the
+shortest fashion, the complaint the public have a right to bring against
+the Civil Service is that it is over-manned and over-paid. A large
+section of its members--and those located at the various offices in
+Whitehall afford a glaring instance--commence work too late, leave off
+too early, and even when on their stools have not enough to do. Their
+number should be lessened, and their hours increased. Ten to four, with
+an interval for lunch, is a working period so scandalous in its
+inadequacy that even the Salisbury Ministry has condemned it, and has in
+some fashion, but at the country's expense, been striving to make it
+longer. No private business could possibly pay if it adopted such a
+system; and what must be done is to treat the Government service upon
+the same lines as a flourishing private concern. The old notion that a
+State should provide a maximum of pay for a minimum of work, and that a
+Government office should be a paradise for the idle and incompetent,
+must be swept away. It is nothing less than a scandal that taxes should
+be wrung in an ever-increasing amount from the toilers of the country to
+pay for work which, under efficient management, could be better done at
+a less price.
+
+With this question of pay there is linked that of pensions. It is often
+urged that men join the public service at a less rate of pay than the
+same abilities could obtain in other walks of business life, not merely
+because of the security of tenure, but because they know there is a
+pension to follow the work. This is exceedingly to be doubted; and
+although it would be unjust to deprive of pensions those who have
+entered Government employment under present conditions, the question
+ought very seriously to be considered whether it would not be wise for
+the State to pay, as private firms do, for the services actually
+rendered, and for individual thrift to be allowed to provide for illness
+or old age. Or, if it be thought desirable to maintain the pension
+system, the Government servants should be called upon, like the police,
+to contribute out of their wages to a superannuation fund. The system of
+pensions, as at present in operation, is indefensible upon sound
+business principles, and taxpayers have something better to do with
+their money than continue to spend it for sentimental reasons.
+
+As to hereditary pensions, there is no need to say much. Thanks to Mr.
+Bradlaugh these are in a fair way to be disposed of; but it will still
+need that a keen watch be kept, to prevent the State being further
+robbed by any fanciful scheme of commutation. It may be taken as settled
+that no further pensions will be granted for more than one life; but
+pensions for a single life, as now arranged, often prove an intolerable
+burden upon the revenue. A favourite device of the Government offices is
+to "reorganize" departments, with the result of placing a new set of
+officials upon the pay sheet and an old set upon the pension list. Many
+of the latter will be comparatively young men, capable of doing service
+in other departments; and, if they are not wanted in one, they ought to
+work for their pay in another. But that is not the way in which the
+State does its business. They are pensioned off with such astounding
+results as was seen in the case of one official, whose place was
+abolished in 1842, who was pensioned at the rate of nearly L2500 a year,
+and who lived until 1880; or of another, whose office was abolished in
+1847, who was pensioned in L3100, and who, up to this date (for he is
+believed still to be living), has drawn over L120,000 from our pockets
+without having done a single day's work for the money. And not only is
+the "reorganization" system a means of lightening the national pocket
+without good result, but the "ill-health" device has the same effect.
+Annuitants live long, as all insurance offices will tell you, and it is
+proved by the fact that there are pensioners still on the list who
+retired from the Government service between forty and fifty years ago
+because of "ill-health."
+
+Here, then, are some of the fashions in which the country is defrauded;
+they could be multiplied, but the samples should suffice to arouse the
+attention of all who bewail the continual increase of taxation. The
+State is evidently regarded by a large section of the population as a
+huge milch-cow, which shall provide an ever-flowing stream; and this
+view will continue to be held as long as our legislators are not forced
+by the constituencies to give due heed to economy. Nothing practical in
+that direction can be done until the House of Commons has a thorough
+control over the national expenditure. At present the control it
+exercises partakes so largely of the nature of a sham that it is not
+worth considering; its scrutiny must become active and persistent, and
+it should be directed to the pickings secured in high places as well as
+in low--to the receivers of heavy salaries as well as of light wages.
+The tendency has too long been to exhibit economy in regard to the small
+people and to pass over the extravagances which feed the large, and that
+is a tendency which will have to be stopped.
+
+No one desires to lessen the efficiency of the public service; but as no
+one would seriously dream of saying that that quality is at this moment
+its most distinguishing feature, good rather than harm would be done by
+the exercise of sound economy. It is only by lopping off the
+extravagances which have grown up like weeds in our Government
+departments, and which are now choking much of their power for good,
+that the taxes can ever be reduced. And so it is the bounden duty of the
+Liberals to raise their old banner of Retrenchment once again.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.--IS FREE TRADE TO BE PERMANENT?
+
+
+Before leaving the consideration of taxes, the question of Free Trade
+must be dealt with. A very few years ago it would have been thought as
+unnecessary to discuss the wisdom of continuing our system of Free Trade
+as of lengthening the existence of the House of Commons; but we are
+to-day threatened with the revival of a Protectionist agitation, and it
+is necessary to be argumentatively prepared for it.
+
+It is impossible within my limits to say all that can be said in favour
+of Free Trade or all that ought to be said against Protection; but it
+should be the less necessary to do the former, because the proof that it
+is working evil to the country must rest with those who assert it, and
+that proof they do not afford.
+
+The main contention of the Protectionists--Fair Traders some of them
+call themselves, but the old distinctive name is preferable--is that the
+free importation of corn has ruined agriculture, and of other goods has
+crippled manufactures. And, having assumed this to be correct, their
+remedy is to place such a duty upon all imported articles which compete
+with our own productions as to "protect British industry."
+
+First for the complaint. Is it true that the system of free imports has
+ruined agriculture and crippled manufactures? There is no doubt that the
+farming interest has been very seriously hit by a series of inadequate
+harvests and the growth of foreign competition; and there is as little
+doubt that, if such a duty were placed upon imported grain as would make
+its culture in England profitable under the present conditions, the
+farmers would thrive, even if the poorer among us starved. No one can
+deny that, if there is to be Protection at all, the agricultural
+interest demands it the most, but we will see directly whether such a
+tariff as would make profitable the growth of wheat is practicable. As
+to the crippling of manufactures, there is something to be said which is
+as true as it may be unpalatable. Without denying that the free
+importation of foreign goods, coupled with the heavy duties levied by
+other countries upon our exported articles, has seriously diminished the
+profits of certain of our manufacturers, and has thereby injured the
+persons by them employed, those who have watched the recent course of
+British trade are compelled to see that other causes have been at work
+to account for much of the depression.
+
+Making haste to be rich has had more to do with that depression than the
+weight of foreign competition. Manufacturers who scamp and merchants who
+swindle; folks who endow churches or build chapels to compromise with
+their conscience for robbing their customers and blasting the honour of
+the English name--these are the men who deserve to be pilloried when we
+talk of depression. We _do_ want fair trade in the sense of honest
+trade, for it is the burning desire for gain, the resolve to practise
+any device that leads to money-making, which is injuring the British
+manufacturing industry far more than the foreigner. The sick man who
+disliked a wash was at last, in desperation, recommended by his doctor
+to try soap; the manufacturers who size their cottons to the rotting
+point, and the merchants who have been accustomed to sell German cutlery
+with a Sheffield label, should be told, when they cry out upon
+depression, to try honesty. And when they whine, as they sometimes do,
+that it is the demand for cheap goods that makes such a supply, they
+must be reminded that the butcher who sells bad meat, or the baker who
+adulterates his bread, pleads the same excuse, but it does not save
+either from being branded as a cheat.
+
+There is a further point which will account for the loss of British
+trade in foreign markets, and that is the lack of adaptability to new
+circumstances shown by English traders. And this is displayed all
+round. Our farmers ought to know by this time that they cannot compete
+by wheat-growing with the United States, Canada, or India; but they will
+not comprehend that they can compete with foreign countries in the
+matter of butter, eggs, cheese, fruit, and poultry. And the consequence
+is that we are paying many millions yearly to France, Holland, Belgium,
+and America for articles that our own farmers ought to supply; and that
+the largest cheesemongers in London find it cheaper, easier, and quicker
+to import all their butter from Normandy than to buy a single pound in
+England. It is the same with our manufacturers. An American firm had a
+large order to give for cutlery; they asked terms which the English
+manufacturer rejected because they were novel; and a German at once
+seized the chance, and kept the trade. In New Zealand there was wanted a
+light spade for agricultural purposes; the English manufacturer would
+not alter his pattern to suit his customers; and the whole order went to
+the United States. In China the people wish for a cotton cloth which
+will not vanish at the first shower of rain; Manchester is so accustomed
+to heavily size its goods that it cannot change; and the China trade in
+that commodity is going elsewhere. Before, then, we complain of foreign
+competition--a complaint which is bitterly heard to-day as against
+England in France, Germany, Austria, and the United States--let us be
+certain that we are doing all we honestly can to cope with it.
+
+Some there are who say that they are in favour of Free Trade in the
+abstract, but that they will not support it as long as it is not
+accepted by other nations. This is about as sensible as a decision to
+cheat in business as long as some of our neighbours cheat would be
+honest, and is exactly on a level with the old death-bed injunction of
+the miserly parent--"My son, make money--honestly if you can, but make
+money." And when it is stated, as it sometimes is, that Free Trade was
+adopted by this country only on the understanding that it would be
+universally agreed to, it is a sufficient answer that Sir Robert Peel,
+in introducing his measure for the repeal of the Corn Laws,
+observed:--"I fairly avow to you that in making this great reduction
+upon the import of articles, the produce and manufacture of foreign
+countries, I have no guarantee to give you that other countries will
+immediately follow our example."
+
+When the Protectionists, call themselves by what name they will and use
+what arguments they may, ask us to change our present system, we first
+then deny their assumption that England is going to the dogs, and next
+we ask what they propose to put in its place. Upon a plan they find it
+impossible to agree. Some would tax corn lightly, others as heavily as
+would be required to make its growth certainly profitable to the farmer;
+some would fix a duty only upon manufactured articles, others upon
+everything which is imported that can be raised here; some would admit
+goods from our colonies at a lighter rate than from foreign countries,
+others would put them all on the same level. Out of this chaos of
+contradictions no definite plan has yet been evolved, and none is likely
+to be.
+
+The corn question is the first difficulty, and will long remain so.
+Wheat, in the autumn of 1887, was selling at 28s. a quarter; on the
+average it cannot be grown to pay at less than 45s.; yet it is only a
+5s. duty which is being dangled before the farmer. But if he is to lose
+12s. a quarter he will be little farther removed from ruin than if he
+loses 17s.; he will as much as ever resemble the traditional refreshment
+contractor who lost a little upon every customer, but thought to make
+his profit by the number he served; and the agricultural interest in its
+wildest dreams cannot imagine that Englishmen are likely to impose a
+duty raising the price of wheat 60 per cent. A rise of 10 per cent. in
+the price of bread means a rise of 1 per cent. in the death-rate, and if
+a duty of 17s. were imposed, that rise would be 6 per cent. What would
+this mean? That where 100 persons die now, 106 would die then, and the
+added number would perish from that most awful of all forms of
+death--death from lack of food. And those extra six would not be drawn
+from the well-to-do, from the trading classes, or from the ranks of
+skilled labour, but from those who even now are struggling their hardest
+for bread, and to whom the rise in price of a loaf from threepence to
+fourpence three-farthings would mean starvation. For let it never be
+forgotten that it is upon the poorest that a corn-tax would fall most
+heavily. The peer eats no more bread--probably he eats less--than the
+peasant; even when all his family and servants are reckoned, the
+quantity of bread consumed is comparatively little more than in an
+artisan's household; but while the peasant and the artisan would be made
+to feel with every mouthful that they were being starved in order that
+others might thrive, the few shillings a week that the peer would have
+to pay would be but a drop spilt from a full bucket, the loss of which
+no one could perceive.
+
+Arising out of the proposal for the re-imposition of a corn-tax is a
+consideration which bears upon the idea of levying a duty upon other
+imports. India is rapidly becoming more and more a corn-growing country;
+if it were decided to admit its wheat free, the British farmer would
+continue handicapped; if it were resolved to tax it, India would
+necessarily retaliate by protecting its own cotton industries: and what
+would Lancashire say to that?
+
+The fact is that, when the proposal to protect industries all round is
+considered, the difficulties of securing a feasible plan are found to be
+insurmountable. The simplest way, of course, would be to place a duty
+upon everything that entered our ports, and to follow that American
+tariff which commenced with a tax upon acorns, and was so jealous of
+interference with native industries that it fixed a duty upon skeletons.
+And if it be replied that the line should be drawn at manufactured
+articles, the question must be asked at once how these are to be
+defined. One can understand shoemakers desiring to place a duty upon
+foreign-made boots, but they would object to have the price of leather
+increased by a tax upon the imports of that material. The tanner and
+currier would strongly favour a tax upon leather, while perfectly
+willing that hides should be admitted free. But the free importation of
+hides would affect the farmer, who would have as much right to
+protection as either tanner or bootmaker. And so the price of boots from
+the beginning would be raised to everybody, less boots would be bought,
+and the whole community, as well as the particular trades concerned,
+would suffer. Take the woollen industries again. Manufacturers might
+like cloths to be taxed, but would be willing to see yarns admitted
+free. Spinners would place a duty upon yarns, but would let wool alone.
+But the farmer would again step in and demand that the price of his wool
+should not be lowered by free importation. If Protection is started
+there is no stopping it; no line can fairly be drawn between the
+importation of raw material and manufactured articles; every trade will
+want to be taken care of. And we shall be driven back to the time when,
+in order to protect the farmer, all bodies had to be buried in woollen
+shrouds; and, to protect the buckle maker, the use of shoestrings was by
+law prohibited. More; we shall be driven back to the period when the
+artisan and the labourer saw wheaten bread but once a year, when it was
+barley alone they could afford to eat, and when the rent of the landlord
+was the one consideration for which Parliament cared, and the welfare of
+the poor the last thing of which Parliament dreamed.
+
+One can understand why the Protectionist movement should have supporters
+in high places. There are landlords who are tired of seeing their rents
+continuously fall, and are as anxious as ever their fathers were to make
+the community pay the difference between what the land can honestly
+yield and the return its possessor desires; and there are manufacturers
+who are disgusted to find that the days when colossal fortunes could be
+rapidly made are departing.
+
+It is the duty, therefore, of every Liberal to resist the least approach
+to a reversal of the present fiscal policy. For it is not a mere
+question of taxation; it is not even a question only of money; it is a
+question of life and death to the poor. And every man who knows to what
+a depth of misery Protection brought this country less than fifty years
+since, and who feels for those who are hardly pressed, will strive to
+the uttermost against any renewal of the system which, while enriching a
+few, impoverishes the many, and, to add bitterness to its injustice,
+involves death by starvation.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.--IS FOREIGN LABOUR TO BE EXCLUDED?
+
+
+Another of the remedies suggested by political quacks for depression in
+trade is the revival of the system of "protecting British labour" by
+preventing the immigration of foreigners--a process which, by the good
+sense of all Englishmen, has been abolished for centuries.
+
+It is easy, of course, to take what at first sight may seem the
+"popular" side upon this question. There would be no difficulty in
+summoning a meeting of English bakers in London, and telling them that
+they were being ruined because German bakers are overrunning their
+trade; or gathering a small army of clerks, and informing them that but
+for foreign, and particularly German, competition, the native article
+would have a better chance; or assembling a serried array of
+costermongers, and persuading them that, if it were not for Russian,
+Polish, and German Jews, who swarm the metropolitan thoroughfares with
+their handcarts, their own barrows would attract more customers. But the
+whole idea of excluding foreigners because they become competitors is
+not merely a confession of weakness and incapacity which Englishmen
+ought never to make, but it is so contrary to the spirit of freedom
+which has been cherished in this country for ages that no Liberal ought
+for a moment to give it countenance.
+
+And, to put it on the most sordid ground, where would England and
+English trade have been had such a principle been acted upon by other
+countries? No people in the world has so much benefited by freedom of
+movement in foreign lands as ourselves. Go where one may, he will find
+Englishmen to the fore--not only as traders but as workers. What they
+have done in the colonies and in the United States is patent to all men,
+but it is not alone in Saxon-speaking lands that they have flourished.
+If one visits Italy to-day, he will find Englishmen working in the
+Government dockyards; when Russia wanted railways it was Brassey and his
+navvies who made them, and when she needed telegraphs it was English
+linesmen who stretched the wires; while in Brazil on every hand
+Englishmen are pushing to the front. And there is a lesson to be learned
+from that passage in the diary of Macaulay, which records how, on a
+visit to France, he met some English navvies, with the leader of whom he
+entered into talk: "He told me, to my comfort, that they did very well,
+being, as he said, sober men; that the wages were good, and that they
+were well treated, and had no quarrels with their French
+fellow-labourers."
+
+China for a long series of ages acted upon the principle of keeping out
+the foreigner, and upon various pretexts we fought her again and again
+to secure our own admission. Japan was equally exclusive, and for a
+longer time; but even Japan has found out the mistake of trying to live
+in "a garden walled around." As far back as the date when Magna Charta
+was signed, the right of foreign merchants to reside and to possess
+personal effects in England was recognized; and although the blindness
+and bigotry of succeeding times banished the Jews in one age and the
+Flemings in another, we long ago established the right of free entry. It
+is true that, in the fit of reaction provoked by the French Terror,
+Alien Acts were passed conferring upon the Crown the power of banishing
+foreigners, but these were superseded half a hundred years ago, and
+their revival is not to be looked for.
+
+It may be retorted that the United States Congress has taken a different
+view, for, in addition to various measures adopted in recent years to
+prevent the immigration of Chinamen, an Act was passed in 1885 "to
+prohibit the importation and migration of foreigners and aliens, under
+contract or agreement to perform labour in the United States, its
+territories, and the district of Columbia." The effect of that measure,
+coupled with an amending Act adopted two years later, according to
+English official authority, is "to subject to heavy penalties any person
+who prepays the transportation, or in any way assists the importation or
+migration of any alien or foreigner into the said countries under
+agreement of any kind whatsoever made previously to such importation, to
+perform there labour or service of any description (with a few
+exceptions). Masters of vessels knowingly conveying such aliens render
+themselves liable to fine or imprisonment, and the aliens themselves are
+not allowed to land, but are returned to the country whence they came."
+
+This law, even if it had not been rendered ridiculous by an attempt to
+bring ministers of religion within its scope, and even also if it had
+not proved practically a dead letter, does not, however, go far in the
+direction of excluding foreign labour. For men of all nations are as
+free to proceed to the United States to-day as ever they were, the only
+condition being that they shall not, before landing, have made
+themselves secure of finding work. If the same law were applied in
+England, and even if not a single person evaded (as it would be
+remarkably easy to evade) its provisions, it would not affect one in a
+hundred of the foreigners who come hither to compete with our own
+people. Does any one imagine that the German bakers and clerks and
+costermongers, who are now so much in evidence, have before landing
+entered into a contract of service?
+
+If they have not, what further measure could be taken? Ought we to pass
+a law prohibiting every foreigner from landing? Should we add to it the
+condition that, if he will swear he is a _bona fide_ traveller, he may
+be allowed to remain a few weeks under strict surveillance of the
+police, who will not only watch very carefully that he does no stroke of
+work while in England, but will see to it that he is promptly expelled
+when his time is up? Are our customs officers to search incoming ships
+for aliens as they do for tobacco, and is the penalty for smuggling
+foreigners to be the same as for smuggling snuff? The project of totally
+excluding foreign labour would be as impossible of accomplishment as it
+would be repellent to attempt.
+
+"But," some will answer, "is it right that we should be deluged with
+foreign paupers, who come upon our rates without paying a penny towards
+them?" That is quite another matter, and does not affect the question of
+foreign labour in any but an indirect way. It certainly is not right
+that we should be burdened by foreign paupers; and England would be
+acting in perfect consistence with the principles of liberty and justice
+if she did as the United States and the Continental countries have done,
+in prohibiting the landing of paupers, and insisting upon sending them
+back to the place whence they came. This is a matter of municipal rather
+than international law; and a repetition of such a scandal as that of
+the Greek gipsies, who were excluded from various European ports, and
+were yet suffered to land here and to become a nuisance and a burden,
+ought not to be allowed.
+
+What is being argued against is not the enactment of a law to exclude
+foreign paupers, but of one to exclude foreign workers. But even if the
+former were to be proposed, it would have to be narrowly watched, lest
+it should be so drafted as to deprive England by a sidewind of the title
+of an asylum for the oppressed which she has so long and proudly worn.
+For it is at the right of asylum that some of the advocates of exclusion
+wish to strike. In the United States there is being formed a party to
+strengthen the "Contract to Labour" Law, which avowedly wishes "to stop
+the import of lawless elements"--an elastic phrase which might cover any
+body of persons who wished for reform. And in England, Mr. Vincent, the
+proposer of the Protectionist resolution adopted by the Tory conference
+at Oxford in 1887, stated that "the indiscriminate asylum afforded here
+has long been regarded by continental Governments as an outrage on good
+order and civilization." He may rely upon it, however, that the English
+love for the right of asylum is not to be destroyed by the wish or the
+opinion of any despotic Government on earth, and that a right which
+shook down the strong Administration of Lord Palmerston, when in an evil
+hour he menaced it at the bidding of Louis Napoleon 30 years since, will
+withstand the threatenings even of a conclave of chosen Conservatives.
+
+Many things are possible to a Tory Government, and it may be that, in
+the endeavour to secure some puff of a popular breeze to fill its
+sails, it will pander to the section which demands the exclusion of
+foreigners. But how could such a measure be proposed by a Ministry which
+has among its members the Duke of Portland, whose family name, Bentinck,
+proclaims his Dutch descent; Mr. Goschen and Baron Henry de Worms, whose
+names no less emphatically announce them to have sprung from German
+Jews; and Mr. Bartlett, who, though he tells the world by means of
+reference-books that he was born at Plymouth, forgets to add that this
+is not the town in England but one in the United States?
+
+But it is not to be believed that England will in this matter forget her
+traditions. We, who are descended from Briton and Saxon, from Norman and
+Dane, have had reason to be proud of our faculty of absorbing all the
+foreign elements that have reached these shores, and turning them to
+good account. When our Puritan fathers were hunted down in England, it
+was in a foreign clime they made their home; when other Englishmen have
+lacked employment, it is to foreign lands they have gone; and the
+hospitality extended to them by the foreigner we have returned. Go into
+Canterbury Cathedral to-day, and there see the chapel set apart for the
+French refugees, driven from their country for conscience' sake;
+remember how, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the unhappy
+Huguenots fled to England to do good service to their adopted country by
+establishing here the manufacture of silk. Never forget how advantageous
+it has been for Englishmen to have the whole world open to their
+endeavours; and hesitate long before attempting to deny to others that
+right of free movement in labour which has been and is of such immense
+advantage to ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.--HOW SHOULD WE GUIDE OUR FOREIGN POLICY?
+
+
+By a natural process of thought, the consideration of the proposed
+exclusion of foreign labour leads to that of foreign policy generally;
+and although the vast questions involved in our external relations are
+not to be solved in a few lines, an attempt to lay down some general
+principles upon the matter can hardly be wasted, for of all things
+connected with public affairs, foreign policy is that of which the
+average voter knows the least, and for which he pays the most. The
+yearly twenty-seven millions as interest on the National Debt is a
+perpetual legacy from the foreign policy of the past; while an equally
+turbulent one in the present would increase the already heavy
+expenditure on the navy and army to an alarming extent. But as all
+questions covered by the phrase cannot be put in the simple form "Shall
+we go to war?" there is a necessity for the leading principles which
+should govern them to be considered.
+
+A good guide to the future is experience of the past, and our English
+history will have taught us little if it has not shown that many a war
+has been waged which patience and wisdom might have avoided. And
+although we have never avowedly gone to war "for an idea," as Louis
+Napoleon said that France did concerning the expedition in which he
+stole two Italian provinces, it has been because of the devotion of our
+statesmen to certain pet theories that much shedding of blood is due.
+
+One of these theories is that some nation or other is "our natural
+enemy." France for several centuries held that position, and it was as
+obvious to one generation that the word "Frenchman" was synonymous with
+"fiend" as it was for another to link "Spaniard" with "devil" and for a
+nearer still to consider that the Emperor Nicholas of Russia and "Old
+Nick" were one and the same. Just now the "natural enemy" idea is
+happily dormant, if not dead; but its evil effect upon our foreign
+policy has been all too plainly marked in many a page of history.
+
+Another theory, and one which has had a more far-reaching extent, is
+that it is incumbent upon the nations of Europe to maintain "the balance
+of power." This, again, is a phrase which has lost much of its old
+force; but a Continental struggle might cause it to bloom once more with
+all its baleful effects. Speaking about a quarter of a century ago, Mr.
+Bright, considering the theory to be "pretty nearly dead and buried,"
+observed of it to his constituents: "You cannot comprehend at a thought
+what is meant by that balance of power. If the record could be brought
+before you--but it is not possible to the eye of humanity to scan the
+scroll upon which are recorded the sufferings which the theory of the
+balance of power has entailed upon this country. It rises up before me,
+when I think of it, as a ghastly phantom which during 170 years, whilst
+it has been worshipped in this country, has loaded the nation with debt
+and with taxes, has sacrificed the lives of hundreds of thousands of
+Englishmen, has desolated the homes of millions of families, and has
+left us, as the great result of the profligate expenditure which it has
+caused, a doubled peerage at one end of the social scale and far more
+than a doubled pauperism at the other. I am very glad to be here
+to-night, amongst other things, to be able to say that we may rejoice
+that this foul idol--fouler than any heathen tribe ever worshipped--has
+at last been thrown down, and that there is one superstition less which
+has its hold upon the minds of English statesmen and of the English
+people."
+
+The theory which was thus unsparingly denounced held that we, as a
+nation, have a right to interfere to prevent any other nation from
+becoming stronger than it now is, lest its increased strength should
+threaten our interests. Politicians of the old school were accustomed to
+assure us that, although the name might not have been known to the
+ancients, the idea was; and, with that almost superstitious regard which
+used to be paid to Greek and Roman precedents, Hume, in one of his
+"Essays," related that "in all the politics of Greece, the anxiety with
+regard to the balance of power is apparent, and is expressly pointed out
+to us even by the ancient historians;" he was of opinion that "whoever
+will read Demosthenes' oration for the Megalopolitans may see the utmost
+refinements on this principle that ever entered into the head of a
+Venetian or English speculatist;" and, having quoted a passage from
+Polybius in support of the theory, he observed: "There is the aim of
+modern politics pointed out in express terms."
+
+But "the aim of modern politics" has been changed within the past
+century. Since the era which closed with Waterloo in 1815, England,
+Austria, Russia, France, and Germany have held in turn the dominant
+power in the councils of Europe, and the balance has been so frequently
+disturbed that the mapmakers have scarcely been able to keep pace with
+the changes of the frontiers. Look back only thirty years, and see what
+has occurred. Instead of Italy being "a fortuitous concourse of atoms,"
+or merely "a geographical expression," she is the sixth great Power, the
+kingdom of Sardinia, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Papal States,
+the grand duchies of Lucca, Parma, Tuscany, Modena, and the rest, with
+Venetia (in 1858 an Austrian possession) thrown in, having been combined
+to form that old dream of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and their
+fellow-revolutionaries, "United Italy, with Rome for its capital." In
+the place of a congeries of petty kingdoms and states, always jarring,
+and with Austria and Prussia ever struggling for the mastery, we see a
+German Empire, formed by the kingdom of Hanover being swept out of
+existence, and those of Bavaria, Saxony, and Wurtemburg, with various
+grand duchies, placed under the domination of Prussia. In the same
+period Russia has gained and France has lost territory; the Ottoman
+Empire has been "consolidated" into feebleness; and the kingdoms of
+Roumania and Servia, with the principality of Bulgaria, have been called
+in their present shape into being. All this has seriously disturbed the
+"balance of power;" but what could England have done to hinder the
+process if she had wished, and what right would she have had to attempt
+it if she had dared?
+
+And in addition to the disturbance of the "balance of power" by process
+of war and revolution, there is that which comes from physical,
+educational, industrial, and moral causes. Some nations have a greater
+faculty than others of securing success in the markets of the world, and
+these develop their natural resources in such fashion as to outstrip
+their neighbours. If we ought to be continually fighting to prevent
+other countries from aggrandizing themselves in point of territory, we
+ought equally to do so to hinder them from becoming disproportionately
+powerful in point of wealth. But as there is no man among us so insane
+as to suggest the latter, so, it may be hoped, will there soon be none
+to instigate the former. It is now over twenty years since even a Tory
+Administration felt constrained to omit from the preamble of the Mutiny
+Bill some words relating to the preservation of the "balance of power";
+and if anything had been needed to cast undying ridicule upon the theory
+it was the plea of King Milan that he went to war with Prince Alexander
+in 1885, because the union of Bulgaria with Eastern Roumelia had
+disturbed the "balance of power" in the Balkan States.
+
+Another idea upon which it is often sought to provoke war is "regard for
+the sanctity of treaties." There is an honest sound about this which has
+caused it to deceive many worthy folk, but who in his heart believes
+that there is any "sanctity" about treaties? Nations, as a fact, abide
+by treaties just as long as it suits their purpose, and not a day
+longer. Take the Treaty of Vienna, which after 1815 was to settle the
+affairs of Europe for ever. The disruption of Belgium from Holland was
+the first great blow at its provisions, and one after another of these
+subsequently became a dead letter. The Treaty of Paris, concluded after
+the Crimean War, Russia deliberately set aside in a most important part
+as soon as she conveniently could. The Treaty of Frankfort, between
+Germany and France, will last only as long as the French do not feel
+themselves equal to the task of wresting back Alsace-Lorraine. And the
+Treaty of Berlin, the latest great European compact of all, entered into
+after the Russo-Turkish War, has already been violated in various
+directions, and is daily threatened with being violated in more. A
+treaty, in fact, is not like an agreement between equal parties, in
+which one gives something to the other for value received; it is
+customarily a bargain hardly driven by a conqueror as regards the
+conquered, and one from which the latter intends to free himself as soon
+as he has the chance. And so, whenever any one talks about the "sanctity
+of treaties," let us first see what the treaties are, and under what
+circumstances they were obtained. It will then be sufficient time to
+consider the amount of reverence which is their due.
+
+But there is a further theory upon which war is made, and that is the
+most sordid of all, for, discarding all notions of honour and glory, it
+simply avers that we ought to physically fight for commercial
+advancement. A recent writer who seeks to tell us all about "Our
+Colonies and India; how we got them, and why we keep them," devotes his
+first chapter to attempting to prove that nothing but desire for gain
+actuated our forefathers in every one of their great wars, or, to use
+his own illustration, "we were afraid that our estate was going to be
+broken up; we had a large family; and we spent money and borrowed money
+to keep the property together, and to extend it. From our point of view,
+as a nation, we have to set one side of our account against the other
+and see whether our transaction paid. It is," he adds, "very often said
+that England has very little to show for her National Debt. Nothing to
+show for the National Debt! It is the price we pay for the largest
+Colonial Empire the world has ever seen." This is probably the most
+naked exposition of the worst side of the saying that "Trade follows the
+flag" which has in late years been published; but that the idea which
+underlies it still actuates a certain school of statesmen is shown by
+the fact that Lord Randolph Churchill justified the expedition to Upper
+Burmah--as long, tedious, and destructive a business as it was promised
+to be short, easy, and dangerless--on the ground that the new territory
+would "pay."
+
+Now here are certain principles which have guided the foreign policy of
+the past, and which stand as beacons to warn us against dangers in the
+future. That we shall escape war for all time to come is not to be hoped
+for, but, by considering the crimes and blunders and bloodshed which
+have flowed from previous methods, something may be done to avoid it.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.--IS A PEACE POLICY PRACTICABLE?
+
+
+The question whether a settled adherence to the principles of
+non-intervention is compatible at once with our interests and our honour
+is one upon which much of the future of England may depend. The answer
+is not to be found in sneers at a "peace-at-any-price policy," which has
+never been adopted by any section of our countrymen, or in panegyrics
+upon the virtues evolved by war, made by men who sit comfortably in
+their arm-chairs while they hound others on to bloodshed. It is a
+question which of necessity can only be answered in certain cases as the
+circumstances arise, but there is nothing either cowardly or
+dishonourable in considering the general principles involved in a reply.
+
+Looking at the world as it stands, it seems almost beyond hope that war
+will ever cease. It is true that we have got rid of blood-letting in
+surgery and that we have got rid of blood-letting in society, and it
+may, therefore, seem to some that there is a chance of getting rid of
+blood-letting between States. A century since, the doctor's lancet and
+the duellist's pistol were rivals in slaughter, and all but fanatics
+thought their abolition impossible. What will be said of war in the time
+to come?
+
+Whatever may be said of it then, we know what can be said of it now. It
+is a grievous curse to the nations engaged, and a calamitous hindrance
+to civilization. It is a barbarous and illogical method of settling
+international disputes, which decides only that one side is the
+stronger, and never shows which side is the right. The cynical saying
+that God is on the side of the big battalions is true at bottom. We
+laugh to-day at the old custom of "Trial by battle," recognizing that
+the innocent combatant was often the weaker or less skilful, and that
+the guilty consequently triumphed. But "Trial by battle," as between
+nations, is equally absurd, if any one imagines that it shows which is
+the righteous. Who would contend that France was in the right when
+Napoleon Bonaparte, in his early career, by his superior skill in
+tactics, swept the nations of Europe before him at Arcola and Marengo,
+Austerlitz and Jena, and that he was in the wrong when, in the waning of
+his powers, he was irretrievably ruined at Waterloo? That Denmark was in
+the wrong because the combined forces of Austria and Prussia crushed her
+in the struggle over Schleswig-Holstein, and that Prussia was in the
+right when, after she and her neighbour had quarrelled like a couple of
+thieves over their booty, she placed the needle-gun against the
+muzzle-loader and overwhelmed Austria? The spirit which impels each
+combatant to call upon the Almighty as of right for assistance, and
+which leads the victor to sing a _Te Deum_ at the struggle's close, is a
+blasphemous one, which should not blind us to the criminality of most
+wars. To hurl thousands of men into conflict in order to extend trade or
+acquire territory is an iniquity, disguise it by what phrases we will.
+In private life the man who steals is called a thief, the man who kills
+is called a murderer; why in public life should the nation which steals,
+and which kills in order to steal, be differently treated? If there be
+retributive justice beyond the grave, Frederick the Great and Napoleon
+Bonaparte, who in cold blood and for selfish motives sacrificed tens of
+thousands of lives, will stand at the murderers' bar side by side with
+those lesser criminals who have gone to the gallows for a single
+slaughter.
+
+Let us look at war, therefore, as it is--a direful necessity, even when
+justified by self-preservation, a flagrant crime when entered upon for
+the extension of territory or trade. It is easy to raise the cry of
+patriotism whenever a war is undertaken, but the patriotism that pays
+others to fight is a cheap article which deserves no praise. As for the
+bloodthirsty bray of the music halls, which even English statesmen have
+not disdained to stimulate in favour of their policy, it is abhorrent to
+cleanly-minded men; the ethics of the taproom and the patriotism of the
+pewter-pot are not to their taste; and when it is seen that the most
+sanguinary writers and the most blatant talkers are the last to put
+their own bodies in peril, it cannot but be concluded that their theory
+is that patriotism is a virtue to be preached by themselves and
+practised by their neighbours.
+
+But though a reckless or merely aggressive war is not only the greatest
+of human ills but the gravest of national crimes, an armed struggle is
+in certain instances a necessity. Self-preservation is the first law of
+nature; and as no man would condemn another for slaying, if no milder
+measure would do, one who attempted to kill him, and the law would
+regard such a course as justifiable homicide, so a nation is right to
+fight against invasion, and would deserve to be extinguished or enslaved
+if it did not. "Defence, not defiance," the motto of our volunteers,
+should be the motto of our statesmen; and then, if an enemy attacked us,
+we should be able to give a good account of ourselves.
+
+In order to act up to this motto, we must dabble as little as possible
+with affairs that do not directly concern us. We should cease to think
+that we are the arbiters of the world's quarrels--we have enough to do
+to look after our colonies and ourselves--and we should withdraw from
+such entangling engagements as we have, and enter upon no fresh ones.
+When, for instance, we are urged to formally join the Triple Alliance,
+we must ask why we should bind ourselves to fight France and Russia
+because Germany would like to pay off old scores, Austria wishes to get
+to Salonica, and Italy is eager to assert her position as the
+latest-created "Great Power." As it is, a Continental struggle, such as
+is bound to come in the near future, may sufficiently involve us. No one
+seems quite to know whether we are or are not bound by treaty to defend
+the territorial independence of Belgium; but as it is through "the
+cockpit of Europe" that Germany may next attempt to assail France, or
+France try to reach Germany, the question is a very important one.
+Would it not be better to settle that before we proceed to bind
+ourselves with the chains of an alliance which could do us little good,
+but might easily effect considerable harm?
+
+Non-intervention has again and again been proved to be an honourable and
+beneficent policy. There has been scarcely a great war within the last
+thirty years in which we have not been urged by some section in this
+country to interfere. The Franco-Austrian conflict in 1859, the civil
+war in America, the Austro-Prussian attack upon Denmark, the
+Franco-German war, and the Russo-Turkish struggle--in every one of these
+we were urged to interfere on behalf of our interests or our honour, or
+both. In none did we do so, and who to-day will argue that abstention
+was wrong? There are some politicians who appear wishful to see
+England's finger in every international pie, and the same old arguments,
+the same vehement appeals, are used whenever there is a struggle abroad.
+And when the next occurs, and these weather-beaten arguments and appeals
+are again brought to the fore, let those who may be swayed by them turn
+to the files of the newspapers which instigated intervention in all of
+the cases named; and let them reflect that non-intervention proved the
+best course in every one, and that what did so well before is most
+likely to do well again.
+
+But, even if we sedulously pursue this policy, there are occasions when
+differences arise with other States, and the question is how these can
+be composed. In the large majority of cases the remedy will be found in
+arbitration. Here, again, we shall be confronted with assertions about
+honour and patriotism, which experience has proved to be worthless. Two
+striking instances have been afforded of the value of international
+arbitration. The greater is that which solved the difficulty between
+ourselves and the United States concerning the Alabama claims. Here was
+a matter in which England was distinctly in the wrong, and, as long as
+the sore remained open, so long was there danger of war ensuing between
+the two great English-speaking nations of the earth. When Mr.
+Gladstone's first Government resolved to submit it to arbitration, no
+language was too vehement for some of our Tories to apply to the
+process. It was dishonourable, unpatriotic, and pusillanimous; but Mr.
+Gladstone persevered, and with what result? The dispute was settled, the
+sore was healed; and is there a solitary man among us who will contend
+that the better plan would have been to send into their graves thousands
+of unoffending men, and to perpetuate, perhaps for generations, a
+quarrel which has been so happily decided as now to have almost faded
+out of mind? The other instance is afforded by the resolve, in the
+spring of 1885, to refer the dispute with Russia concerning the Penjdeh
+conflict to arbitration. There were threatenings of slaughter on every
+hand, for weeks there appeared a danger of our being launched into war
+for a strip of Afghan territory, worthless alike to Russians, Afghans,
+and ourselves, and upon a conflict of testimony as to the original
+aggression, which even yet has not been composed. The agreement to
+submit the matter to the King of Denmark, though his arbitrament
+ultimately was dispensed with, gave a breathing time to Russia and
+England both; and who now would argue that we ought to have gone to war
+because of Penjdeh?
+
+Therefore, if we adhere to a policy of non-intervention in disputes that
+do not directly concern us, and of arbitration in those in which we
+become involved, we shall be following a course which the immediate past
+has proved to be not only peaceful but honourable and agreeable to our
+interests. "The greatest of British interests is peace," once observed
+the present Lord Derby; and the truth of the saying is unimpeachable.
+And when we are told that, strive as we will, war sometimes must come,
+one is reminded of the saying of a far greater statesman than Lord
+Derby, and one upon whose patriotism none has been able to cast a slur.
+It was Canning who, when told that a war in certain circumstances was
+bound to come sooner or later, replied, "Then let it be later."
+
+If, however, we wish England to pursue a peaceful policy, we must teach
+the people to believe that it is as honourable as it is practicable, and
+as truly patriotic as both. It is a mistake to think that the masses
+will oppose war merely because of the suffering and loss it entails;
+there are considerations beyond these which the artisan feels as keenly
+as the aristocrat, the peasant as the peer. The sentiment which resents,
+even to blood-shedding, an insult to the national flag, may be often to
+be deprecated but never to be despised; for when the people shall care
+nothing for the country's honour, the days of independent national
+existence will be drawing to a close. And, therefore, when it is argued
+that a peace policy is practicable, it is held to be so only because it
+is honourable, patriotic, and just.
+
+
+
+
+XXX.--HOW SHOULD WE DEAL WITH THE COLONIES?
+
+
+The foreign relations of England are necessarily complicated by her
+colonial concerns; and these deserve the most careful consideration,
+because at any moment they may arouse the hottest political dispute of
+the day. In considering the colonies we have to ask three questions: (1)
+How and why did we get them; (2) How and why do we keep them; and (3)
+Ought we to force them to stay?
+
+At the history of the why and how we acquired our colonies, it is
+impossible here to do more than glance. By settlement as in the case of
+Australasia, by conquest as in that of Canada, and by treaty cession as
+in that of the Cape, have been obtained within the past three centuries
+practically all that we have. The wish for expansion has continually
+made itself felt, and the frequent result of war as well as of peaceful
+discovery has been to gratify it. And the consequence of both conquest
+and discovery has been the acquisition of a colonial empire vaster in
+extent and resources than the world has ever seen.
+
+Having got our colonies, there are various reasons for retaining them.
+The imperial spirit, which is elated by expansion and would be deeply
+wounded by contraction, has been a prominent factor in causing England
+to take a leading position in the world's affairs; and it is one which
+none interested in her prosperity will despise. Even if there were no
+material reasons for keeping our colonies, this sentiment would cause
+many Englishmen, and probably the majority, to regard with the deepest
+distrust any movement having a tendency to separate the colonies from
+the mother country.
+
+But there are material reasons for binding the colonies to us which
+none will ignore. They form not only an outlet for our surplus labour
+and enterprise, but give us markets of high importance to our trade.
+Emigrants who go to Canada or Australia not merely remain attached by
+obvious considerations to the English connection, but continue to be our
+customers in a very much larger degree than if they went to the United
+States or any other foreign country. Those who study the statistics of
+our export trade will recognize that if we lost the custom of our
+colonies--and this we should be likely to do if we lost the colonies
+themselves--the consequences to our commerce would be very serious.
+
+Thus there are reasons of the highest sentiment, as well as of
+commercial expediency, for retaining the possessions the hard fighting
+and determined enterprise of many generations of Englishmen have
+acquired; but the question which is needed to be answered in much more
+fulness than either of the others is that which may affect the politics
+of the near future: Ought we, if any of our self-governing colonies
+desire to secede, to force them to stay?
+
+A distinct difference has been made in the form of this question between
+the self-governing colonies and the dependencies--a distinction arising
+from the very nature of things. There is a chasm between the
+consideration of letting Australia or letting India go, which is too
+wide to be bridged. Australia consists of various colonies, peopled by
+Englishmen or the descendants of Englishmen, who have the fullest means
+of constitutionally expressing their desires. India has a vast concourse
+of deeply-divided peoples, who have no bond of union, whether of race,
+religion, or common descent, and who are in no sense self-governed. In
+the argument about to be set forward, therefore, it is to be understood
+that only the colonies, and not the dependencies, are in consideration.
+
+Broadly speaking, it may be submitted with regard to our self-governing
+colonies that we are bound in honour to keep them as long as they will
+stay, and in conscience not to detain them when they are able and
+willing to go. Having acquired them, and given the most practical
+guarantees to protect them, we ought to hold to our implied bargain at
+any cost, and to defend them with as much energy as our native soil.
+But, just as a parent's duty to a child is to do everything to protect
+and assist him in his period of growth, so is it equally his duty, when
+the training-time has been accomplished, to set no hindrance in the path
+of his acquiring an independent position. And the relation of parent to
+child has a true likeness to that of England to her self-governing
+colonies.
+
+If it be asked whether this question of what should be done in case of a
+proposed separation ought to be raised at the present moment, the reply
+is that events are forcing the matter forward, and that it is well to
+consider in a time of comparative quiet a problem which may convulse the
+nation from end to end if urged upon us in a storm.
+
+For rumblings of the storm have already been heard from the three great
+self-governing portions of our colonial empire. Sir Henry Parkes, the
+Premier of New South Wales, in an article published no long time since,
+and in the very act of proposing a scheme by which he imagined the
+mother country and the colonies might be knit more closely together,
+uttered a warning that separation might within the next generation be
+pushed to the front, for "there are persons in Australia, and in most of
+the Australian Legislatures, who avowedly or tacitly favour the idea."
+And he added: "In regard to the large mass of the English people in
+Australia, there can be no doubt of their genuine loyalty to the present
+State, and their affectionate admiration for the present illustrious
+occupant of the throne. But this loyalty is nourished at a great
+distance, and by tens of thousands, daily increasing, who have never
+known any land but the one dear land where they dwell. It is the growth
+of a semitropical soil, alike tender and luxuriant, and a slight thing
+may bruise, even snap asunder, its young tendrils."
+
+When we turn from Australia to Canada, the same warning is in the air.
+In the autumn of 1887, the remarks of Mr. Chamberlain at Belfast,
+repudiating the principle of commercial union between Canada and the
+United States, evoked strong protests from some leading newspapers in
+the Dominion against the idea of England interfering if such a union
+were agreed upon. The Toronto _Mail_ put the matter in a nutshell when
+it observed--"Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. Canadians
+have not ceased to love and venerate England, but have simply reached
+that stage of development when their choice of what is best for
+themselves, be it what it may, must prevail over all other
+considerations." Should it be said that this is only an utterance of our
+old friend "the irresponsible journalist," it may be added that the
+practice of Canadian statesmen appears to be in accordance with the
+principles of Canadian writers. This was certainly the opinion of our
+own _Standard_, which, in an article in 1887 upon the increases in the
+Canadian tariff directed against imported iron and steel, wrote--"The
+obvious truth of the matter is that Canada has given no thought to our
+interests at all, but only to her own.... Of course these Canadians are
+a most 'loyal' people for all that, and if they can get us to lend them
+our money they will flatter us and heap sweet-sounding phrases upon us,
+till the most voracious appetite for such is cloyed to sickness. It is
+only when we expect them to pay us our money back, or at least to put up
+no barriers against our trade with them, that we find out how hollow
+these phrases are. No federation of the empire can take place under any
+guise while its leading colonies, which love us so exceedingly, strive
+their utmost to injure our trade.... Why should we waste a drop of our
+blood or spend a shilling of our means to shelter countries whose
+selfishness is so great that they never give a thought to any interest
+of ours? That is the question the Protectionist colonies are forcing
+Englishmen to ask themselves, and it is as well that it should be
+bluntly put to them now."
+
+Cape Colony is as ready as Australia or Canada to resent the least
+interference from the mother country. Sir Gordon Sprigg, its Premier,
+referring at a public meeting late in 1887 to a Bill which the Imperial
+Ministry had been asked to disallow, observed that, if it should be
+disallowed, it was not a question of this particular Bill, but whether
+the colony was to have a free government, or whether necessary
+legislation in South Africa was to be checked by irresponsible persons
+at home, and they were to go back to the old Constitution, and be
+governed by a people six thousand miles away, knowing little of the
+requirements of the inhabitants of the Cape.
+
+Therefore, we have to face a growing opinion among the self-governing
+colonies that they will allow England no controlling voice in their
+internal affairs; and the question will present itself to many
+Englishmen whether it is right that we should be saddled with the
+responsibility of defending colonies which resent any interference, and
+use their tariffs to lessen our trade. As long as they require help we
+are bound in honour to give it; but when they demand, as at some time
+they will demand, separation, the conviction they are now impressing
+upon us that they can do without England, will materially strengthen the
+desire to say to them, "Go in peace."
+
+Even if such a consideration did not exist, one might hope that England
+would never repeat the enterprise once attempted against what are now
+the United States, and try to crush a growing nation of our own children
+when wishing to take its own place in the economy of the world. Some
+will answer that all danger of such a contingency would be avoided by
+the adoption of a sound plan of imperial federation; but where is that
+sound plan to be looked for? Even the most ardent advocates of the
+principle do not venture upon a plan. They are content to talk of
+sympathy rather than develop a system; but sympathy does not go far when
+practical considerations are concerned. It may be argued that sympathy
+went a long way when a detachment from New South Wales assisted our
+military operations in the Soudan; but the experiment was a dangerous
+one which ought not to be often repeated. Franklin in his autobiography
+tells us that it was the defeat of Braddock's force which first taught
+the American colonists that it was possible to hope for independence;
+and the lesson needs remembering.
+
+What those who advocate imperial federation have to prove is that it is
+practicable to persuade each portion of this vast empire to pay and to
+fight for every other portion. As long as England does both the paying
+and the fighting, things may go smoothly. But if England went to war
+with France over the New Hebrides, in order to protect the interests of
+Australia, what would Newfoundland say on being asked to share the
+bill? Similarly, if England engaged France over the bait question, so as
+to preserve the fishing trade of Newfoundland, how would Australia like
+to be taxed for the fray? And if we fought the United States on the
+fisheries dispute in order to please Canada, does any one imagine that
+Australia or Cape Colony would agree to additional imposts for the
+lessening of our National Debt? It is when considerations like these are
+discussed that imperial federation appears a pleasing dream rather than
+a probable reality.
+
+And, therefore, when we discuss our future dealings with the colonies,
+we ought to know how far we intend to go. As long as they remain with
+us, we ought to do our utmost to preserve the most friendly relations;
+but, having given them self-government, we ought to impress upon them
+the necessity for self-preservation. And if, when they can not only rule
+but protect themselves, they should ask to be freed from even the
+nominal allegiance to the English Crown which is all they now give, they
+should be suffered to go, in the hope and belief that they would
+prosper.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.--SHOULD THE STATE SOLVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS?
+
+
+Though we have been discussing at this length our foreign and colonial
+relations, we must never forget that there is a "condition of England
+question" which claims the closest attention. The politics of the future
+will be largely coloured by considerations arising from our social
+developments; and it is important to decide whether the State ought to
+attempt to solve social problems, and how far it ought to interfere in
+the relations between man and man.
+
+There is just now so much talk about Socialism that it is desirable to
+examine the principles which underlie State-interference with private
+affairs. Those who like to divide men into strictly defined parties are
+accustomed to describe their fellows as Socialists and Individualists;
+and, although there is no Socialist who would prevent all liberty of
+personal action, and no Individualist who would protest against every
+form of State-interference, the distinction is fair enough if it be
+understood that the Socialist believes that the State should do as much
+as possible, and the Individualist that it should do as little as
+possible, for those who dwell within its limits.
+
+The view of the former is concisely stated in the programme of the
+Social Democratic Federation, in which are urged the immediate
+compulsory construction of healthy artisans' and agricultural labourers'
+dwellings, free compulsory education for all classes, with at least one
+wholesome meal a day in each school, an eight hours' working day,
+cumulative taxation upon all incomes above a fixed minimum, State
+appropriation of railways with or without compensation, the
+establishment of national banks absorbing all others, rapid extinction
+of the National Debt, nationalization of the land, and organization of
+agricultural and industrial armies under State control on co-operative
+principles. These are merely claimed to be palliative measures, which
+should be followed by others more drastic; but they suffice to show the
+present-day Socialistic idea.
+
+Against this extreme Socialist view must be set the extreme
+Individualist, which has been expressed by Mr. Spencer, who says--"There
+is reason to believe that the ultimate political condition must be one
+in which personal freedom is the greatest possible, and governmental
+power the least possible; that, namely, in which the freedom of each has
+no limit but the like freedom of all; while the sole governmental duty
+is the maintenance of this limit." And the main idea of this statement
+had been anticipated in the remark, a couple of thousand years ago, by
+one of the greatest of Greek philosophers--"The truth is that the State
+in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is the best and most
+quietly governed, and the State in which they are most willing is the
+worst."
+
+The real question, of course, is not between any such extreme views, for
+Mr. Spencer would not deny that the State sometimes must interfere, and
+Mr. George would be the last to plead against the use of all individual
+effort. But though the limits of State-interference are what we have to
+determine, it is necessary first to consider whether the State should
+interfere at all.
+
+An obvious answer is that the State interferes already in many a social
+problem, and that no one seriously proposes to do away with that
+interference. But even those who would thus reply may not be aware of
+the extent to which the State makes its influence felt in social
+affairs. The administration of justice and the protection of the
+commonwealth are necessarily, in all civilized communities, the affair
+of the State. But beyond these limits, the ruling authority, whether
+exercised through imperial or local officials, wanders at many a point.
+
+The Poor-law is a striking instance of this fact, for it is a piece of
+legislation the Socialistic tendency of which none can gainsay, the
+State practically asserting that no one need starve, and providing food
+and shelter, under certain conditions, for all who are unable, or even
+unwilling, to work. The system of national education is another instance
+of Socialistic legislation; it makes me pay towards the education of my
+neighbour's child, not for any immediate benefit to myself, but for my
+ultimate benefit as a citizen of an improved State. And the ruling
+authority goes further even than compelling me to feed the poor and
+educate the young, for it interferes, presumably for my good, with my
+liberty in many a detail.
+
+From birth to death the State, even under present conditions, steps in
+at point after point to direct one's path. Within forty days of being
+born I am compelled by the State to be registered; within three months I
+am equally constrained to be vaccinated; from five years old to
+thirteen, with certain limitations, I have to be sent to school; and,
+should my parents be so sensible as to apprentice me to a trade, a fee
+has to be paid to the State for the indentures. When I marry it is at a
+State-licensed institution; when I die it is by a State-appointed
+officer that my decease is certified. And in the interval, the State
+prevents me from obtaining intoxicating liquor except from certain
+individuals and within specified hours; it compels me, if I am a
+house-owner, to effect my sanitary arrangements in a given way; and if I
+am a house-holder, to keep my pavement free from snow. From the highest
+details to the lowest, then, the State even now interferes; whether I
+fail to have my child vaccinated or my chimney swept, it steps in; and
+those who argue that Individualism is a theory so true that
+State-interference should be abolished, have a number of fruits of that
+State-interference to get rid of before they can claim the victory.
+
+But probably even those who imagine that they are extreme Individualists
+would not wish to remove from the Statute Book such specimens of
+State-interference as are now upon it. If they did, the clearance would
+indeed be great. For imagine what the effect would be if, in addition to
+the other measures indicated, we got rid of all the enactments affecting
+labour, and again allowed the employment of climbing boys as
+chimney-sweeps, of women and small children in mines, of men and women
+in white-lead works without precaution of any kind, of sailors in the
+merchant service without the protection of lime-juice against scurvy and
+of survey against sinking; picture what the population of our
+manufacturing districts would by this time have become without the
+protection afforded by the Factory Acts; remember what an improvement
+has been made in the way of guarding dangerous machinery, owing to the
+penalties inflicted upon careless owners by the Employers' Liability
+Act; and then answer whether State-interference is necessarily a bad
+thing.
+
+Within the limits which experience has shown to be desirable, it is a
+good thing; and it is no answer to this assumption that it has sometimes
+failed to secure the object aimed at. As long as nothing in this world
+is perfect, we cannot expect the action of the State to be; the only
+test in every case is an average test. If such State-interference as we
+see has on the whole done well, the balance must be struck in its
+favour; and in human affairs a favourable balance is all we have a right
+to anticipate.
+
+The Individualistic ideal may be a good one, but it is the
+Individualistic real we have to examine. And what would become of the
+poor, the weak, and the helpless if the State stood aside from all
+interference with the affairs of men? That the rich and the powerful
+would grind them to powder in their struggles for more riches and
+greater power. The days of universal brotherhood have never
+existed--and, what is more, never will exist--and that State which
+protects the weak against the strong and the poor against the rich is
+the best worth striving for.
+
+An ideal condition of society would be that in which every able-bodied
+person would have to work for a living with body, brains, or both; but
+birth and bullion play so large a part under present circumstances that,
+while we may sigh for the ideal, we must recognize the real. And this
+applies to all thinkers on our social affairs--to the extreme Socialist
+as to the extreme Individualist. The mystery of life cannot be solved by
+logic, and the pain, the poverty, and the crime which that mystery
+involves dissipated by law.
+
+It must constantly also be borne in mind that mankind is not governed
+by material considerations alone, but is largely swayed by sentiment;
+and any system which ignores this and treats men simply as calculating
+machines is bound to fail. Thus it is that, while men accept the latest
+doctrines of social science, they do not act upon them. They sympathize
+with Mr. Spencer's account of an ideal State in which the governmental
+power is the least possible, but they pay the education rate, support
+compulsory vaccination, and express not the slightest wish to see
+public-houses open all night. It is in this as in other theoretical
+affairs--our minds agree, but our hearts arbitrate. A parent may accept
+most thoroughly the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, but he will
+strive his utmost to preserve life to a crippled or lunatic child. And a
+trader may indicate assent when he hears that the employed ought to be
+paid only the amount which would secure similar services in the labour
+market; but, if he is even commonly honest in his dealings with his
+fellows, he will not discharge an old servant because he can obtain
+another for something less.
+
+But no sooner do some men secure a fact than it begets a theory, and
+truth thus becomes the father of many lies. It is well enough that every
+one should strive to be independent of external help, but it is not
+within the bounds of the possible that every one can be perfectly so;
+and that being the case, the State, as the protector of all, is bound to
+interfere. What has to be decided is the limit of such interference; and
+although upon that point no precise line can be drawn, for as conditions
+vary so must the limit change, discussion may serve to show that all the
+truth lies in neither of the contending theories, but in a judicious use
+of both.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.--HOW FAR SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE?
+
+
+To precisely limit the interference of the State in private affairs has
+been urged to be impossible, for the boundaries of such interference are
+ever changing, and will continue ever to change as the circumstances
+vary. In some respects the State has more to say about our domestic
+concerns, in others less, than it formerly had; but there never was a
+time when it left us altogether alone, and there is never likely to be.
+
+When people groan about "grandmotherly government," and talk hazily of
+"good old times" when such was unknown, they speak with little knowledge
+of the social history of England. They forget that there was a day when
+under penalty men had to put out their fires at a given hour; that later
+they were directed to dress in a fashion presumed to be becoming to
+their several ranks; that at one period they had to profess Catholicism
+under fear of the fagot, and at another Protestantism under penalty of
+the rope; that in later days they had to go to church to escape being
+fined, and even until this century had to take the Sacrament in order to
+qualify for office; that in other times they were allowed to bury their
+dead only in certain clothing; that a section of them had to give six
+days in the year to the repair of the highways; and that in divers
+further ways their individual liberty was fettered in a fashion which
+would not now be tolerated for a day.
+
+The State, in fact, has always claimed to be all-powerful, and has never
+assigned set limits to its demands. It has asserted, and still asserts,
+rights over that which is intangible, which it has not created, and
+which in its origin is superhuman. If a man has used a stream for his
+own purposes for a given period, the State secures him a right of use,
+protecting him from interference in or providing him compensation for
+that which neither he nor the State made or purchased. If another has a
+window which is threatened with being darkened by a newer building
+adjacent, the State steps in to assure him of the retention of his
+"ancient light." And when people have for a series of years walked
+without hindrance across land belonging to others, the State gives to
+the commonalty a right of way, which, however seemingly intangible,
+often seriously deteriorates the value of the property over which it is
+exercised.
+
+In the gravest concerns of man as well as in those which merely affect
+his comfort or his purse, the State intervenes. It used to assert by
+means of the press-gang its right to seize men for service in war; and
+it could at this day order a conscription which would compel all in the
+prime of life to pass under the military yoke. It can and does direct
+property to be seized for public purposes, upon compensation paid, from
+an unwilling owner; and it can and does take out of our pockets a
+proportion of our income, which proportion it has the power to largely
+increase, in order to pay its way.
+
+That which does all these things is for convenience called "the State,"
+but in present circumstances it is really ourselves. The nation is
+simply the aggregate of the citizens who compose it, and each one of
+us--especially each possessor of a vote--is a distinct portion of the
+State. The misfortune which attends upon the frequent use of the word is
+that many persons seem to think that there is some mystic power called
+"the State" or "the Government," which can dispense favours, spend
+money, and do great things--all from within itself. But neither State
+nor Government has any money save that which we give it, and no power
+except that which is accorded by the constituencies. And, therefore,
+when people cry out for "the State" to do this or "the Government" to do
+that, they should remember that _they_ are portions of the force they
+beseech, and that if what is to be done costs money they will have to
+pay their share; and this much it is highly useful to recollect when
+appeals are more and more being made to the State for help.
+
+Let us start, therefore, with the conviction that the State, which is
+simply ourselves and others like us, has no power beyond what the people
+give it, and no money but what the people pay; that it has throughout
+our history attempted to solve social problems, and is doing so still;
+and that it is as sure as anything human can be that if it did not
+interfere in certain cases to aid the struggling, to put a curb upon the
+tyrannous, and to regulate divers specified affairs, the poor and the
+helpless would be the principal sufferers, and greed of gain and lust of
+power would be in the ascendant.
+
+But it would be easy to push this interference too far. Admitted that
+the State has done certain things for us, and, in the main, done them
+well, this affords no argument that it should do everything in the hope
+that equal success would follow. There is an assumption dear to pedants
+and schoolboys that because one does _this_ he is bound to do _that_,
+but neither our daily lives nor our State concerns are or ought to be so
+governed. They are largely regulated by circumstances, with the idea of
+doing the best possible under existing conditions. For there is no
+infallible scheme of government or of society, and the system must be
+made to suit the people and not the people to suit the system.
+
+And although the State, in certain departments of its interference, has
+done well, it has not brilliantly succeeded where it has entered into
+competition with private enterprise. Just as public companies are worked
+at a greater cost than the same concerns in the hands of individual
+proprietors, so Government enterprises are always highly expensive and
+often disastrous failures. It did not need the recent revelations
+concerning the waste, the jobbery, and the wanton extravagance of
+certain of our departments to inform those who knew anything of the
+public offices or the Government dockyards, that such things were the
+customary results of the system. Stroll through a private dockyard and
+then through a public one; visit a large mercantile office and then a
+Government department in Whitehall; and decide whether the State is a
+model master. It may be said that it is simply the system that is to
+blame, but surely the universality of evil result from the same cause
+should teach a lesson.
+
+There may be asserted the possible exception of the Post-office to the
+charge that the State fails where it competes with private enterprise;
+and no one would deny that that department does good work, and that, if
+all others were like it, there would be less reason to complain. But it
+must not be forgotten that the Post-office, as far as the main portion
+of its business--letter-carrying--is concerned, does not compete with
+private enterprise, for it possesses by law the monopoly of the work;
+and that the cheapness of postage, upon which it prides itself, is
+largely secured by making the people of London pay at least twice as
+much as they would if competition existed for the letters they send
+among themselves, in order that they and others may, for the same money,
+forward letters to Perth or Penzance. As to the Government monopoly of
+the telegraphs, the result, while beneficial in a certain degree, has
+had this effect--it has partially strangled the telephone system; and
+that will hardly be claimed as a triumph.
+
+Any suggestion, therefore, for making the State interfere still further
+with private enterprise ought to be most carefully weighed. The question
+really is whether it has not already done as much in this direction as
+it ought, and whether, generally speaking, the limits now laid down are
+not sufficiently broad.
+
+What it does is this: it undertakes by means of an army and navy our
+external defence; secures by the police our internal safety; makes
+provision by which no person need starve; enforces upon all a certain
+amount of education; and enjoins a set of sanitary regulations for the
+protection of the community from infectious or contagious disease. These
+are the main items of its work, but beyond them it provides the means of
+communication by post and telegraph; fixes in certain degree the fares
+on railways and the price of gas; encourages thrift by the institution
+of savings banks; and gives us all an opportunity for religious exercise
+by the provision of an Established Church.
+
+The objectionable part of this is that which directly interferes with
+personal opinion or private enterprise. The noble saying of
+Cromwell--"The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of
+their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that
+satisfies"--spoken before its time, as even some of the Protector's
+friends may have considered, must now be extended to the contention that
+the State has no concern whatever with the opinions of its citizens, and
+that it ought not to endow any sect at the expense of the rest.
+Concerning the competition with private enterprise, the State, in
+providing a system of national education and a postal and telegraph
+service, has gone to the verge of what it should do in such a direction.
+
+While, therefore, the State should not abandon any function it now
+exercises, the severest caution ought to be used before another is
+undertaken. All attempts of the ruling power to interfere too closely
+with the private concerns of men--as witness the sumptuary laws and
+those against usury--have defeated themselves, and it is not for us to
+revive systems of interference which, even in the Middle Ages, broke
+down. It is no answer that some things are going so badly that
+State-interference may be considered absolutely necessary, and that it
+is merely the extremity of nervousness that hinders the experiment being
+tried. Caution is not cowardice, and no man is called upon to be
+foolhardy to prove his freedom from fear.
+
+When it is said that, in certain directions, matters have come to such a
+pass that the State must more actively interfere, let us note that
+extremes meet upon this as upon so many other matters; for the cry that
+"the country is going to the dogs" is nowadays raised as lustily by some
+friends of the working man as ever it has been by the retired colonels
+and superannuated admirals whose exclusive possession it was so long.
+And the remedy suggested is that the State should do this, that, and the
+other, with an utter ignoring of the fact, which all history proves,
+that the creation of an additional army of officials would strangle
+enterprise and stifle invention. Thus from the general, it will be
+necessary to go to the particular, and to ask how far the proposed
+remedy would be effectual. The principle here argued is that the State
+should concern itself simply with external defence, internal safety,
+the protection of those unable to guard themselves, and the undertaking
+of such work for the general good as cannot be better done by private
+enterprise; and this principle holds good against many a nostrum now put
+forward as an infallible remedy for social ills.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII.--SHOULD THE STATE REGULATE LABOUR OR WAGES?
+
+
+Among the many social questions which the pressure of circumstances may
+soon make political is that of the State regulation of the hours of
+labour. The president of the Trades Union Congress for 1887 advocated,
+for instance, the passing of an Eight Hours Bill; and it is desirable to
+consider whether this would in any respect be a step in a right
+direction.
+
+The argument for such a measure appears in principle to be this: that
+the classes dependent upon manual labour for their livelihood have too
+many hands for the work there is to do; that those who do get work toil
+too long; and that both evils would be remedied by restricting the hours
+of labour, more men thus finding employment and all working well within
+their strength.
+
+Against these points may be set others: that England has already been
+severely affected by competition with countries where the hours are
+longer and the pay less; that any further restriction of hours without a
+corresponding reduction of pay would be ruinous to our trade; and that
+it is highly probable that the majority of workmen would prefer to
+labour for nine hours at their present wages than for eight hours at
+less. The last contention, of course, might be answered by an enactment
+fixing not only the hours to be worked but the wages to be paid. If this
+is wished for, it should be clearly put; but before any step is taken
+towards either such measure, several points concerning each, which now
+appear more than doubtful, should be made clear.
+
+A fallacy underlying much of the contention in favour of any such
+enactment is the idea that the community is divided into two distinct
+classes--the producing and the consuming. As a fact, there are no
+producers who do not consume, though there are some consumers who do not
+produce. But is even that an unmixed evil? There is a further fallacy
+which arbitrarily divides us into capitalists and labourers; but every
+man who can purchase the result of another's labour is a capitalist, and
+that much-denounced person will never be got rid of as long as it is
+easier to buy than to make.
+
+A third class which secures the condemnation of many is "the
+middle-man." It is easy to denounce him, but he is a necessity at once
+of commerce and of comfort. If one wants some coffee at breakfast, he
+cannot go to Java for the berry, the West Indies for the sugar, the
+dairy-farm for the milk, and the Potteries for the cup from which to
+drink. So far from the middle-man unduly increasing the price of those
+articles, he lessens it by dealing in bulk with what it would pay
+neither the producer nor the purchaser to deal with in small quantities;
+and not only lessens the price but, in regard to the commodities of a
+distant land, renders it practically possible for us to have them at
+all.
+
+It is equally useless to rail at competition as if it were inherently
+evil, for there will be competition as long as men exist to struggle for
+supremacy. And competition keeps the world alive, as the tide prevents
+the sea from stagnating. Occasionally the waves break their bounds, and
+loss and tribulation result; but the power for good must not be ignored,
+because the power for evil is sometimes prominent.
+
+To talk of the working classes as if they thought and acted in a body is
+another delusion. Not only this. The frequent assumption that somebody
+or other can speak on behalf of "the people" is a mistake. When it is
+done, one is entitled to ask what the phrase means? "The people" are the
+whole body of the population, and no one section, even if a majority has
+a right to exclusively claim the title. In legislating, regard must be
+had to the interests of all and not to those of a part, however
+numerous; and this brings us straight to the question of interfering by
+enactment with the price or the amount of labour.
+
+It is curious to note that the demand which is now being raised by some
+Trade Unionists on behalf of labour is similar in principle to that
+which was used for centuries by the propertied classes against labour.
+The Statute of Labourers, passed in the reign of Edward III., fixed
+wages in most precise fashion, settling that of a master mason, for
+instance, at fourpence and of journeymen masons at threepence a day. And
+as lately as only eight years after George III. came to the throne, all
+master tailors in London and for five miles round were forbidden under
+heavy penalties from giving, and their workmen from accepting, more than
+2s. 71/2d. a day--except in the case of a general mourning. Subsequently,
+statesmen grew more wise, and, in the closing years of last century, the
+younger Pitt refused to support a bill to regulate the wages of
+labourers in husbandry. But it is singular that, whereas Adam Smith
+could say that "whenever the Legislature attempts to regulate the
+difference between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always
+the masters," to-day it is the workmen who promise to become so.
+
+If it be replied that it is State interference with the hours alone and
+not with the wages that is demanded, it may be submitted that if the one
+is done it will be a hardship to the worker rather than a boon if the
+other be not attempted. For, if a man, by working nine hours a day,
+could earn, say, 27s. a week, it is obvious that for eight hours a day
+he would not earn more in the same period than 24s., unless Parliament
+insisted that he should receive the higher sum for the less work. But is
+Parliament likely to do anything of the kind; if it did do it, would it
+be found to be practicable; and, if it were found to be practicable,
+would it be just?
+
+Parliament is not likely to do anything of the kind, because the
+experience of centuries has taught us that it is impossible to fix wages
+by statute. It was tried over and over again, first by enactments
+applying to the whole country, and then by regulations for each county,
+settled by the local justices of the peace; but, though the experiment
+was backed by all the forces of law, it broke down so utterly that in
+time it had to be got rid of.
+
+Even if the return could be secured of a majority to Parliament pledged
+to the proposal, would it be likely to be any more practicable to-day
+than it was in olden times? We are now an open market for the world. If
+hours were lessened and wages not reduced, imported articles from
+foreign countries would become much cheaper than our own goods, and
+would be bought to the detriment of English workers. Is it proposed by
+the promoters of a compulsory eight-hours working day that we should
+have Protection once more, and a prohibitory tariff placed upon all
+manufactured goods brought from abroad in order to keep up the price of
+English articles?
+
+And, further, if it were practicable, would it be just? It would be
+unjust to the employers, who would have to pay present prices for
+lessened work; it would be unjust to the toilers, in that it would
+prevent them from making a higher income by working more; and it would
+be unjust to the consumers, in making them give a greater price for the
+commodities they required. Those who propose the compulsory eight hours
+would presumably wish wages to be maintained at the present standard; it
+would hardly be a popular cry if it would have the effect of bringing
+wages down.
+
+If the Legislature is to interfere at all in this direction, the old
+proposal had better be put forward at once--
+
+
+     Eight hours' work, eight hours' play,
+     Eight hours' sleep, and eight shillings a day.
+
+
+This, at least, would have the merit of simplicity, and the more
+comprehensive proposal is as just and as practicable as the limited one
+now put forward. But even as to the limited one, it would be well to
+know how far and to what persons it would be applied. If the answer is
+"The working classes," the further question is "How are these to be
+defined?" Sailors, for instance, are working men, but no one would
+seriously propose to apply the eight hours' system to them. Granting
+they form an extreme exception, how are we to deal with shopkeepers and
+all whom they employ? The shopkeepers may be put aside as "capitalists"
+or "middle men," and, therefore, undeserving of sympathy or
+consideration; but those behind their counters are distinctly workers.
+Are they all to be included in the eight hours' proposal? If so, either
+one of two things: the shops will be shut sixteen hours out of the
+twenty-four, or their keepers will have to employ half as many hands
+again as they now do. "Good for the unemployed" may be replied, but who
+would have to pay for the additional labour? The consumers, of course,
+for no law is going to be passed keeping tea and sugar, hats and coats
+at their present price; and it would be those that live by weekly wages
+who would thereby suffer the most. And if, in order to obviate such
+consequences, all who work in shops were to be excluded from the
+benefits of an Eight Hours Act, it would be grossly unjust that tens of
+thousands of toilers, as much entitled to consideration as those
+employed in any factory or mill, should be kept at work in order to
+minister to the convenience of their fellows, set free from a portion of
+their labour by the action of Parliament.
+
+And this leads to a consideration of the proposal that all shops, with
+certain limited exceptions, shall be closed at a given hour. For the
+general reasons applicable to other employments, any such proposition
+ought to be strongly opposed. It would be a grievous hardship to the
+smaller tradesmen, with many of whom the best chance of making a living
+is after the great establishments have closed, and an intolerable
+nuisance to the working classes who can only shop at what a legislator
+might consider a late hour. If attempted to be put in operation, it
+would necessitate the creation of an army of informers and inspectors to
+see that it was not evaded, and it would create an amount of annoyance
+to honest and hard-working traders for which no expected benefits from
+it could compensate. The small tradesman, threatened by the co-operative
+society on the one side and the "monster emporium" on the other, has
+enough to do to live, without being harassed by a law which he would be
+tempted constantly to evade, and which, if not evaded, might prove his
+ruin.
+
+Much the same argument may be used concerning a point which, if the
+State interferes with the hours of labour, is certain to be raised, for
+it would have to be plainly stated whether all men would be forbidden
+under penalty to work overtime. If any such proposal is to be made, how
+is it to be carried out? Are we to have an additional body of
+inspectors, prying into every man's house to see whether extra work was
+being done; or is the hateful system of "the common informer" to be
+revived for the special benefit of working men?
+
+The argument is not weakened by the fact that, in various directions,
+not only has the Legislature passed enactments interfering with the
+amount and the price of labour, but that some of these continue in
+active operation. By means of the Factory Acts, for instance, it has
+directly intervened for the protection of women and children, and in so
+doing has been acting within that part of its duty which demands that it
+shall stand between the unprotected and overwhelming power. But there is
+no strict parallel between the case of the adult males of the working
+classes and that of those women and children who have to toil. The
+former have again and again shown their power of preserving their own
+interests by combination; and the evils of State interference where it
+can possibly be avoided appear sufficient to induce the belief that it
+is to combination that the working classes ought still to trust. If they
+cannot by this means put down overtime--and as yet they have not been
+able to do so--they cannot expect their countrymen to raise prices and
+run the risk of commercial ruin by doing for them what they ought to be
+able to do for themselves.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV.--SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE WITH PROPERTY?
+
+
+Having dealt with the manner in which the State interferes with labour,
+which to most is their only property, it is necessary to consider how it
+deals with capital, which is the fruit of labour, and how it thus
+interferes with some of what are termed "the rights of property."
+
+This has been done in order to avoid greater ills, as in the case of the
+fixing of fair rents by judicial courts in Ireland and certain districts
+of the Highlands of Scotland; in others to prevent endless dispute and
+loss, as in the disposal, in specified proportions, of the personal
+property of those who die without a will; in a further series to prevent
+a virtual monopoly from becoming tyrannous, as in the compulsion of
+railway companies to run certain third-class trains, and not to charge
+beyond a stated fare, or the restriction of the profits of gas companies
+to 10 per cent. unless a specified reduction in price is made to the
+consumers; in others, yet, for the supposed advantage of a class, as in
+the custom of primogeniture, which gives all real property (that is,
+land) to the eldest son of a father who dies intestate; and, in others,
+for the presumed benefit of the community, at the expense of individual
+efforts, as in the limitation of the duration of patents for inventions
+to seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years, and of copyright in books to
+forty-two years from the date of publication, or for the author's life
+and seven years after, whichever of these terms may be the longer.
+
+As to the first three points--the fixing of fair rents in Ireland and
+the Highlands, the due division of the personal property of those who
+die without a will, and the limitation of the power of virtual
+monopolies--there is no need at this day to argue, for all are
+irrevocable. As to the fourth, there is no practical disagreement among
+leading politicians on both sides regarding the desirability of doing
+away with the custom of primogeniture, as enforced by law. But as to the
+fifth, it may be submitted that the State goes too far or not far
+enough.
+
+Our legislators have been exceedingly tender towards every description
+of property except that created by certain of the highest phases of
+brain-power. If a man invents a machine which may save millions to the
+community, he loses all specific property in his invention after a given
+period of years; if he writes a book which may elevate mankind, his
+family are similarly condemned after a certain period to forfeit all
+claim upon the fruits of his labour. But if, instead of putting his
+brain to such uses, he merely makes a machine or lends a book for hire,
+there is no law to step in and deprive him of the profits if either
+machine or book lasts a century.
+
+Why this difference? The theory appears to be that the community is
+entitled to profit after a certain period by the brains of its members,
+when used in the creative or inventive direction; but if the claim be
+good, has not the State an equal right to profit after a similar period
+by the brains of its members when used in trading ways? Why should
+brains exercised in one direction be handicapped in comparison with
+those exercised in another? The answer may be that the inventor or
+author employs no capital, that the trader does, and that, therefore,
+whatever profit the former is allowed to make is a profit upon nothing,
+while in the latter case the profit is directly upon the capital
+employed, which ought not to be interfered with.
+
+But this is to adopt the fallacy that capital is necessarily the same
+thing as money. The capital of an inventor or an author is his brains,
+which he expends upon his invention or his book; and the community has
+exactly the same right to deprive the widow and the orphan of a fortune
+because it was made by a lucky speculation, for instance, forty-two
+years before, as of their property in a book because it was published
+that length of time previous. It is true that the State does not fully
+exercise this right, and protects the family of the mere money-maker
+while it despoils that of the brain-worker; but the principle is one
+which contains larger possibilities than the former have yet realized.
+
+The argument that it is for the benefit of the community that only a
+certain amount of time should be given to the inventor or the author in
+which to make a profit is dangerous, because it can so easily be applied
+to other species of property. Why not to the body of the machine as well
+as to its principle, why not to the pages of the book as well as to what
+they contain? And even if it is never pushed so far, there are certain
+species of property now protected by the law which will not improbably
+be attacked upon this same ground of "the benefit of the community"
+before very long; and it is difficult to see how they can be defended as
+long as the statutes affecting copyright and patents exist.
+
+The most striking of such kinds of property is that in minerals. A man
+buys an estate for farming, grazing, or, it may be, purposes of
+pleasure. Some time afterwards minerals are found beneath it, and,
+though he has neither placed them there nor may assist to get them out,
+he is privileged to charge "mining royalties" upon every ton that is
+raised as long as there is any to be obtained. Why should not his power
+in this direction be limited? He takes everything and gives nothing; the
+author or inventor gives everything and takes little. It would be as
+much for "the benefit of the community" to have the former's minerals
+after a given period, with no reward to himself, as to have the latter's
+books or machines. Why, then, should bullion be carefully protected and
+brains despoiled? If it be replied that when a man has bought a plot of
+ground it is his to the centre of the earth at one side and to the sky
+on the other, may it not be submitted that the former portion of the
+right ought to be restricted, while the latter certainly does not exist,
+for the law steps in at point after point to control his use of the land
+between the surface and the sky?
+
+The State, therefore, interferes with property, as it is, in a most
+material degree: instances of such interference have been scattered
+through these pages, and the tendency of the future is likely to be
+towards more than less interference. And there is hardly any that can be
+proposed, even of the extremest kind, for which it would not be possible
+to find a precedent.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV.--OUGHT THE STATE TO FIND FOOD AND WORK FOR ALL?
+
+
+The State thus interfering with both capital and labour, it is sometimes
+contended that its duties ought to be so extended as to find food and
+work for all. There is a captivating sound about the proposition which
+has commended it to many without a due weighing of the probable results.
+It is a matter upon which a hasty generalization, though springing from
+the purest motives, may do vast harm, and is one, therefore, which all
+ought most carefully to consider before expressing an opinion upon it.
+
+Cardinal Manning, in an article published in the winter of 1887, carried
+the theory of the public duty of feeding the hungry to its extremest
+point in these words--"All men are bound by natural obligations, if they
+can, to feed the hungry. But it may be said that granting the obligation
+in the giver does not prove a right in the receiver. To which I answer
+that the obligation to feed the hungry springs from the natural right of
+every man to life, and to the food necessary for the sustenance of life.
+So strict is this natural right that it prevails over all positive laws
+of property. Necessity has no law, and a starving man has a natural
+right to his neighbour's bread."
+
+With all deference, the last sentence must be stated to be false, both
+in logic and morals. If it were true, it would justify immediate raids
+by the starving upon the nearest baker's shop, and one wonders what the
+Cardinal would say if he happened to be the baker. Granting that every
+one has a right to live, there is no equivalent right to live at other
+people's expense. It is true that, by our Poor Law, a system has been
+created by which no one need starve, but that does not justify the theft
+of bread. There is a preliminary question to be put even in the case of
+the starving, and that is as to why they are in that condition. If it be
+because they have been idle, or drunken, or generally worthless, as in
+many cases it is, the mere fact that they are starving does not entitle
+them to sack a baker's shop. They will be fed by the Poor Law if they
+take the necessary steps, but if they are able-bodied they will have to
+work for their food; and as most human beings have to do the same, where
+is the hardship?
+
+It will be replied by some that the Poor Law works harshly towards the
+deserving poor, but that is an argument for amendment, not for abolition
+or indiscriminate extension. And if it be further said that the food
+supplied is meagre and the lodgings rough, it must be remembered that
+the poor-rate is paid by a very large number whose food is no more
+plentiful and whose lodgings are certainly worse. As for the argument
+that some people starve rather than "enter the house," it is not easy to
+see what relief could be given by the State without infringing that
+spirit.
+
+But there is a question most intimately affecting this matter which,
+though of the highest importance, cannot be discussed here as it
+deserves, and that is the question of population, concerning which Mill
+truly says, "Every one has a right to live. We will suppose this
+granted. But no one has a right to bring creatures into life, to be
+supported by other people. Whoever means to stand upon the first of
+these rights must renounce all pretension to the last. If a man cannot
+support even himself unless others help him, those others are entitled
+to say that they do not also undertake the support of any offspring
+which it is physically possible for him to summon into the world.... It
+would be possible for the State to guarantee employment at ample wages
+to all who are born. But if it does this, it is bound in
+self-protection, and for the sake of every purpose for which government
+exists, to provide that no person shall be born without its consent....
+It cannot, with impunity, take the feeding upon itself and leave the
+multiplying free."
+
+And so, while the Poor Law ought to be carried out in the humanest and
+most liberal fashion compatible with the interests of the poor who pay
+the rates as well as the poor who benefit by them, any movement for so
+extending it as to bring more persons under its operation, and thus to
+further pauperize the community, would be dangerous. We had enough of
+that under the system swept away by the Act of 1834, the hideous
+demoralization caused by which should be studied to-day by those who are
+eager for a freer dispensation of State relief.
+
+The arguments against the State going further than at present in the
+direction of giving food to all are equally good as against providing
+work for all. Relief works have ever been centres of corruption and
+waste of the worst type, while "national workshops" have not been so
+brilliant a success in the form of dockyards and arsenals as to warrant
+an extension of the system to all the trades we practise.
+
+The theory that the State is bound to provide work for all was never
+more concisely put than in the original draft of the French Republican
+Constitution after the Revolution of 1848, the seventh article of which
+ran thus: "The right of labour is the right which every man has to live
+by his labour. It is the duty of Society, through the channels of
+production and other means at its command, hereafter to be organized, to
+provide work for such able-bodied men as cannot find it for themselves."
+But even a Government imbued with Socialistic tendencies found this to
+be much too strong, and modified it thus: "It is the duty of Society by
+fraternal assistance to protect the lives of necessitous citizens,
+either by finding them work as far as possible, or by providing for
+those who are incapacitated for work and who have no families to support
+them." Yet the modified form was not found to work well in actual
+practice, and the history of the failure of the French National
+Workshops of 1848 remains as an eloquent testimony to the fact that the
+State ought to interfere as little as possible with industrial
+enterprises and private concerns.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI.--HOW OUGHT WE TO DEAL WITH SOCIALISM?
+
+
+Even the considerations already put forward do not exhaust the social
+question, for only in the briefest fashion have been touched the
+important points which that question involves. And there is yet left to
+be discussed the attitude which ought to be adopted towards that body of
+opinions upon public affairs vaguely known as "Socialism."
+
+The attitude of some is simply denunciatory, for there is a class of
+politician which always imputes base motives to those with whom it
+disagrees, and which is so proficient in abuse that it apparently thinks
+it a waste of time to argue. That class has been painfully in evidence
+in regard to the Socialists. It is considered that--so true is the old
+proverb that if you give a dog a bad name you may as well hang
+him--nothing more need be done respecting a new and therefore unpopular
+doctrine than to so label it as to ensure its repudiation by honest but
+unthinking men. And thus the name "Socialist" is applied as equivalent
+to thief; and men utterly ignorant of what the words imply link
+Socialist to Nihilist, Communist to Anarchist, as if each were equal to
+each, and all therefore equal to one another.
+
+This has been the favourite device of the opponents of all new
+doctrines, political or social, philosophical or religious. To be
+ridiculed, to be persecuted, even to be slain has been the fate of the
+would-be elevators of their kind, as the roll of fame, which includes
+the names of Socrates and Galileo, Luther and Savonarola, Voltaire and
+Roger Bacon, Mazzini and Darwin will testify. The Socialists now are
+hardly called worse names than were applied to geologists fifty years
+ago, and to Evolutionists but the other day. Atheists, of course, they
+have been named, for Atheist is the epithet customarily applied by
+ignorant and bigoted men, who have made God in their own image, to those
+more zealous in endeavouring to raise humanity.
+
+Against any such method of dealing with public questions all fair-minded
+men should strongly, and without ceasing, protest. And as Socialism is
+spreading among the masses, it is in the highest degree important that
+the fact should be studied calmly and without prejudice. Hard words
+break no bones, and contumely tends to strengthen any cause in which
+there is an atom of good.
+
+Socialism, therefore, should be dealt with in an inquiring and not an
+abusive spirit, and with the determination to accept from it whatever of
+good to the community we may find it to contain. There is another method
+which Prince Bismarck has been trying for years, and with the signal
+lack of success that always comes from trying to stamp out an opinion by
+force of law. In presumed defence of "society" and "order"--two
+excellent things, but often the excuse for despots to perpetrate cruel
+injustice upon the liberty-loving and the poor--he has secured law after
+law for the purpose of "putting down Socialism;" men have been torn from
+their homes because of their opinions; the right of public meeting has
+been placed at the mercy of the police; the press has been gagged, and
+every means taken to stamp out a body of opinions some of which even the
+German Chancellor himself cannot help sharing. And with what result?
+That, after ten years of this wretched work, the Socialists--though
+prevented from public meeting, speaking, or writing--are multiplying in
+Germany in an ever-growing proportion; that in Berlin, the capital of
+the empire, they number tens of thousands of electors as their
+adherents; and that Prince Bismarck is ever asking for extended powers
+to crush a force which, in its free state, as yielding to the touch as
+water, is mighty when compressed.
+
+With an even greater power of police, and no restriction at all from the
+laws, the Czar has failed as signally to extirpate Nihilism. Ideas
+cannot be killed in this fashion, though their holders can be and are
+rendered more dangerous. Mill certainly considered that "the dictum
+that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant
+falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into
+commonplaces, but which all experience refutes;" and he was of opinion
+that "no reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been
+extirpated in the Roman Empire." But it may be submitted that, when
+arguing about the persecution of ideas to-day, we must not forget the
+immense additional force given to them by means of printing. The secret
+presses of Germany and Russia "spread the light;" and there is nothing
+so certain as that the very charm which comes from the possession of
+that which is prohibited aids in strengthening a movement which is under
+the ban of the law.
+
+But, it may be said, the efforts of those who would attempt to put down
+Socialism are not to be considered in the light of political
+persecution, and are not to be compared with religious persecution, for
+they are directed solely to the suppression of "anti-social" doctrines,
+the adoption of which would be fatal not only to States as they now
+exist, but to society itself. A more precise definition must be asked,
+however, of the doctrines thus described. Though opposed to an eight
+hours' bill, to land nationalization, and to national workshops, leading
+points in the Socialist programme, I cannot conceive how, if they were
+all adopted within the next year, such dire results could from them
+flow.
+
+Every new body of doctrine which gives hope to the masses and threatens
+the domination of the privileged among men has been described with equal
+virulence by its antagonists. Read the charges upon which Christians
+were condemned under the Roman Empire; read those brought against Luther
+and his co-reformers when first Protestantism threatened the Church of
+Rome; remember those thrown at the Puritans when they tried to secure
+for Englishmen liberty of thought and action. They were in every case
+that the doctrines were anti-social; that if adopted they would wreck
+the then condition of society; and that they were in the highest degree
+perilous to the State. For it is the fate of all preachers of a new
+doctrine to be treated as rogues until their persecutors are proved to
+be fools.
+
+Admittedly there are some theories advanced by men calling themselves
+Socialists which, if adopted, would seriously conflict with the existing
+order of society; but to condemn every proposal put forward as Socialist
+because there are Socialists who have said strange, and sometimes
+stupid, things would be monstrous. It is a controversial trick of a
+peculiarly poor order to attempt to hold the leaders of any movement
+responsible for the hare-brained ideas of some of their followers. Not
+to repudiate them is not to signify agreement, or our party leaders
+would possess some of the most extravagant doctrines ever conceived by
+man.
+
+Besides, one must always sever the conventional beliefs from the real.
+No sensible person considers Christianity untrue because even the
+churches would regard him as a madman who literally adopted the
+injunction to sell all that he had to give to the poor. In any body of
+doctrines there are always some which its adherents hold, but do not
+stand by.
+
+And, therefore, charity as well as common sense demands that the tall
+talk on both sides--for there is not a great deal to choose between them
+in this respect--should cease; but the trick is too easily learned to be
+quickly dropped. The idea of the well-to-do that all would go smoothly
+if it were not for "agitators" and "mob-orators" is as absurd as the
+contention of the Socialist that most of our ills are due to the
+"profit-monger." Your "agitator" or your "mob-orator" would have not the
+least influence if he did not voice the feelings, the longings, and the
+hopes of his silent friends. And as for the "profit-monger," is not the
+workman who is better off than the poorest among his fellows deserving
+the name?
+
+Let us have fair play all round to ideas as well as to men. If, in the
+supposed interests of society, every movement designed to upraise the
+poor is suppressed, the tendency must be to force men towards Anarchism
+and Nihilism, by causing them to wish to destroy that order of things
+which to them acts so unjustly. Despair is a fatal counsellor, and those
+who would identify the welfare of the State with that of the mere
+money-getter are its frequent cause. It is easier to raise the devil
+than to lay him, and appeals to the merely animal instinct in
+man--whether to protect his own property or to take that of others,
+with a complete ignoring of his duties as well as his rights--must end
+in ruin and shame.
+
+"There is among the English working classes," once observed Sir Robert
+Peel, "too much suffering and too much perplexity. It is a disgrace and
+a danger to our civilization. It is absolutely necessary that we should
+render the condition of the manual labourer less hard and less
+precarious. We cannot do everything, but something may be effected, and
+something ought to be done." Though nearly forty years have passed since
+that statesman's death, we are still groping blindly for the something
+which ought to be done for the poor; and such strength as Socialism
+possesses is derived from the general spread of the feeling which Peel
+put into words, and which no politician--much more no statesman--can
+afford to neglect.
+
+And that is why the politics of the future will be largely affected by
+the social questions now coming to the front. From the opinions of many
+who are pressing them forward one may profoundly differ, but justice
+demands that all they advance should be examined without prejudice, and
+with the determination to accept that which is good, from whatever
+quarter it may come.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII.--WHAT SHOULD BE THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME?
+
+
+While the social problem, however, is developing, we have the political
+problem to face; and, therefore, the immediate programme of the Liberal
+party now demands consideration. In some detail have been presented the
+arguments from a Liberal point upon all the great public questions which
+are either ripe or ripening for settlement. It has not been possible to
+go minutely into every point involved; a broad outline of each subject
+has had to suffice; but it may be trusted that each has been
+sufficiently explained for us now to consider which should occupy the
+forefront in the Liberal platform.
+
+Mr. Bright observed, in days not long since, when he was honoured by
+every man in the party as one of its most trusted leaders, that he
+disliked programmes. What he preferred, it was evident, was that when
+some great question--such as the repeal of the Corn Laws or the
+extension of the suffrage, with both of which his name will be ever
+identified--should thrust itself to the front by force of circumstances,
+it should be faced by the Liberal party and dealt with on its merits;
+and what he opposed, it was equally evident, was the formulation of any
+cut-and-dried programme, containing a number of points to be accepted as
+a shibboleth by every man calling himself Liberal or Radical, and by its
+hide-bound propensity tending to retard real progress.
+
+The Irish question is one of those great matters which has thrust itself
+to the front by force of circumstances, which should be faced by the
+Liberal party and dealt with on its merits, and which, until it is so
+faced and dealt with, will stand in the path of any real reforms. The
+evil effects of the discontent of four millions of people at our very
+doors are not to be got rid of by shutting our eyes to them; and the
+intensification of those evil effects which is to-day going on is a
+matter which must engage the attention of every Liberal.
+
+But, out of dislike for any cut-and-dried programme of several measures
+to be accepted wholesale and without question, the party must not be
+allowed to drift into aimlessness. As long as it exists it must exist
+for work, and its fruit must not be phrases but facts. Liberalism can
+never return to the days when it munched the dry remainder biscuit of
+worn-out Whiggery. A hide-bound programme may be a bad thing, but
+nothing worse can be imagined than the string of airy nothings which
+used to do duty for a policy among the latter-day Whigs. Take the
+addresses issued by them at the general election of 1852 as an instance,
+and which have been effectively summarized thus:--"They promised (in the
+words of Sir James Graham) 'cautious but progressive reform,' and (in
+those of Sir Charles Wood) 'well-advised but certain progress.' Lord
+Palmerston said he trusted the new Liberal Government would answer 'the
+just expectation of the country,' and Lord John Russell pledged it to
+'rational and enlightened progress.'"
+
+Now, in these days, we want something decidedly more definite than that,
+and, if our leaders could offer us nothing better, we should have either
+to find other leaders or abandon our aims. Happily we need do neither,
+for the Liberal chiefs, with Mr. Gladstone at their head, are prepared
+to advance with the needs of the times, and to advocate those measures
+which the circumstances demand and their principles justify.
+
+In the forefront of our efforts at this moment stands, and must continue
+to stand until it is settled, the question of self-government for
+Ireland. Stripped of all quarrel upon point of detail, the Liberal party
+is pledged, while upholding the unity of the Empire and the supremacy of
+the Imperial Parliament, to give the sister country a representative
+body sitting in Dublin to deal with exclusively Irish affairs. The day
+cannot be long delayed when an attempt must be made to place the local
+government of Ireland upon a sounder and broader basis than at present.
+When it arrives, the Liberal party has its idea ready. Details can be
+compromised; the principle cannot be touched. For Liberals are convinced
+that, by whatever name it may be called, and by whatever party it may be
+introduced, Home Rule must come, and that, for the sake of all the
+interests involved, Imperial and Irish, it will be in the highest degree
+desirable to grant it frankly and fully, with due regard to the
+interests concerned.
+
+Linked with this point is another regarding Ireland upon which the
+Liberal party will entertain not the smallest doubt. The Coercion Act
+has been used for partisan purposes by dependent and often incompetent
+magistrates, and it must be repealed. Upon this point there can be no
+compromise. Every man hoping to be returned by Liberal votes at the next
+election must pledge himself to the immediate, total, and unconditional
+repeal of the Crimes Act of 1887.
+
+The next item in the accepted Liberal programme is the disestablishment
+of the Church in Wales, as well as of the Scottish Kirk. Each is a
+purely domestic matter which ought to be settled according to the wishes
+of the majority of the people affected. As to the wishes of Wales, no
+one can have a doubt; and though the declaration of Scotland, through
+its representatives, is not so emphatic, it is sufficiently clear for
+Liberals to support the demand.
+
+But, after all, these points touch only Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.
+England is the largest portion of this kingdom, and its claims must not
+be ignored. A great Parisian editor used to say that the description of
+a woman run over on the Boulevards was of more interest to his readers
+than that of a battle on the Nile. It would be well if politicians would
+take this idea to heart. Little use is it to talk of the despotism
+practised in Ireland, of the hardships endured by the crofters in
+Scotland, and of the injustice done to the tithepayers in Wales, if we
+are not prepared to apply the same principles to London as to Limerick,
+to Chester as to Cardigan, and to Liverpool as to the Lews. The average
+man will not be satisfied of the sincerity of those who keep their eyes
+fixed upon distant places, and are full of sympathy for the oppressed
+who are afar off, but can spare no time for the grievances existing at
+their doors.
+
+And as, therefore, if Liberalism is to be again in the ascendant in the
+councils of the Empire, England must be won, it is well to emphasize the
+contention that England will never be won by a party which ignores her
+wants. Home Rule for Ireland, disestablishment for Scotland and Wales,
+are good things, and they will have to be granted when our majority
+comes; but what will that majority do for England?
+
+Without attempting to lay down a programme, it may be said that there is
+one English problem to which Liberalism will have at once to apply
+itself, and that is the problem of the land. The time is past for
+talking comfortable platitudes upon this matter, for we find that Tories
+can do that as glibly as Liberals, and with the same lack of good
+result. The very least that can be demanded--in addition to the
+abolition of the custom of primogeniture and an extensive simplification
+of the process of transfer--is a thorough reform of the laws affecting
+settlement, the taxing of land at death in the same proportion as other
+descriptions of property, the placing of the land tax upon a basis more
+remunerative to the Exchequer, and a large measure of leasehold
+enfranchisement. And when candidates talk in future of being in favour
+of "land reform," they must be definitely pinned down as to their views
+upon such points as these.
+
+That Free Trade will remain a plank in the Liberal platform, not to be
+dropped or tampered with, goes without saying. It is a point as much
+beyond question as the existence of Parliament itself, and concerning it
+as much cannot be observed as regarding the latter. For, while our trade
+system must remain free, both Houses stand in need of reform. The Lords,
+in Mr. John Morley's phrase, must be mended or ended, and the path of
+legislative progress in the Commons made more smooth. The laws in every
+way affecting the return of members to the latter likewise stand sorely
+in need of reform, and that reform cannot be ignored by the Liberal
+party.
+
+Further, Liberals are agreed that localities shall have greater power in
+various directions, and upon the liquor traffic in especial, of
+deciding upon their own affairs. The tendency of recent days has been to
+take these out of the hands of those most intimately concerned, and to
+vest supreme power in a body of Government clerks at Whitehall. That is
+a tendency which must be reversed. We are advocating decentralization in
+regard to Ireland; we are being led to advocate it in regard to Wales
+and Scotland; England must similarly be benefited, and the red-tape of
+Whitehall unwound from our purely local concerns.
+
+Peace and Retrenchment must continue to be inscribed on the Liberal
+banner as well as Reform. Preference for international arbitration over
+war must distinguish our party; a determination to be as free as
+possible from all entangling engagements with foreign powers must always
+be with us. And there must ever be displayed a resolve to place the
+Government service upon the same business-like and efficient basis as
+private concerns, to get rid of the notion that it is work to be lightly
+undertaken and highly paid, and to emphasize the contention that the
+taxbearer shall have full value from every one of his servants for the
+wages he pays.
+
+Above all, the greatest care must be taken by every Liberal to
+preserve--aye, and to extend--individual liberty. Men cannot dance in
+fetters, and all enactments which unnecessarily hinder the development
+of private enterprise, and all traditions which interfere with the
+fullest enjoyment of the rights of speech and action, must be swept
+away.
+
+While thus giving our attention to the more purely political questions
+as they arise, Liberals must never forget that the poor we always have
+with us. Ours is a gospel of hope for the oppressed; it must equally be
+a gospel of hope for the hard-working. We want our working men to be
+civil, not servile; our working women to use courtesy, and not a
+curtsey. We wish to see the end of a system by which a bow is rewarded
+with a blanket and a curtsey with coal. The man who too frequently bends
+his back is likely to become permanently affected with a stoop, and the
+old order of hat-touching, bowing, and scraping must disappear. We do
+not deny that it is right that men should respect others, but it is
+often forgotten that it is equally right that they should respect
+themselves.
+
+In dealing with things social, as well as things political, we must
+always remember that it is flesh and blood with which in the result we
+have to deal. Some thinkers ignore sentiment, do not believe in
+kindness, and treat men like machines, forgetting that even machines
+require oil. It is not for philosophers with homes and armchairs and a
+settled income to ask whether life is worth living; that question is for
+the poor and the lowly and the down-trodden, to whom the struggle for
+existence is not a matter for theorizing or moral-drawing, but is a
+never-ending, heart-breaking, soul-destroying reality.
+
+So, if Liberalism is to live, it must be liberal in fact as well as in
+name. A Liberal who talks of equal rights on the platform and swears at
+his servants at home, who waxes wroth against a national oppressor and
+treats those poorer than himself like serfs, is as little deserving of
+respect as a Liberal policy which solely considers the externals of
+either liberty or life. A programme based upon such a policy must fail,
+and deserves to fail; and if we are to have a platform at all, it must
+be one upon which the rich man and the son of toil can stand side by
+side.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII.--HOW IS THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME TO BE ATTAINED?
+
+
+It is natural to ask how, when the Liberal programme has been framed, it
+is to be attained. Measures no more come with wishing than winds with
+whistling; and if our principles are to be put into practice, it will
+only be by our joining those of similar mind.
+
+Not every politician, even if his ideas be sound, is a practical man.
+The disposition to insist that no bread is better than half a loaf is
+one that commends itself to me neither in business nor in daily life,
+but it is one upon which many a man of Liberal leanings acts, to the
+detriment of the principles he professes to hold dear. Insistence upon
+the one point to the exclusion of the ninety-nine, and readiness to join
+enemies who disagree on the whole hundred rather than friends who
+disagree on only the one, are qualities unpleasantly prominent in many
+otherwise worthy men. It cannot too often be urged that politics, like
+business or married life, can only be carried on by occasional
+give-and-take. The partner who persists in always having his own way;
+the husband who is ever asserting authority over his wife; and the
+politician who will never yield an iota to his friends--all are alike
+objectionable, and deserve no particle of consideration from those
+around them.
+
+A spurious independence is another hindrance in the path of progress.
+Faith without works is occasionally worth commendation in public life;
+but one must be certain that the faith is genuine, and for most
+political "independence," that cannot be claimed. Diseased vanity,
+disappointed ambition, and deliberate place-hunting have more to do with
+that kind of thing than devotion to principle. "The fact is that
+individualism is very often a mere cloak for selfishness; it is the name
+with which pedants justify the pragmatic intolerance which will not
+yield one jot of personal claim or unsatisfied vanity to secure the
+triumph of the noblest cause and the highest principles." When Mr.
+Chamberlain wrote those words he was undoubtedly right.
+
+Whenever, therefore, one is called upon to admire some outburst of
+independence which splits a political party or hinders the progress of a
+cause, he should look very closely at the history of those concerned. He
+should not forget that, just as there are people who are much too
+independent to touch their hats for civility, though they would for a
+sixpence, there are politicians who are far too spirited to stick to
+their party but not to bid for place. Happily these latter seem never
+able to avoid using certain stock phrases, which should put others on
+their guard. When a man says he prefers country to party, or vaunts that
+his motto is "measures not men," he lays himself open to just suspicion,
+because he talks as political impostors have long been accustomed to
+talk; when he proclaims his readiness to recognize the virtues of his
+enemies, you may be certain that he will speedily show himself keenly
+alive to the failings of his friends; and a politician never begins to
+boast that he is a representative and not a delegate until he has ceased
+to represent the opinions of those who sent him to Parliament.
+
+More estimable than these, but still people who must not be allowed to
+hamper the operations of the Liberal party, are the constitutional
+pedant and the rigid doctrinaire. Nothing is more lamentable than the
+endeavours of the former to prove by precedent that nothing ought to be
+done in the nineteenth century differently to how it was done in the
+seventeenth; and nothing more filled with the promise of disappointment
+than the theorizings of the latter as to what measures would secure us a
+perfect State.
+
+It is with persons as well as with principles that we have to deal, and
+in politics we must not despise the humblest instruments. History, like
+the coral reef, is made grain by grain and day by day, and often by
+agents as comparatively insignificant. The old idea that the people's
+leaders must come from "the governing classes," or, better still, "the
+governing families," does not harmonize with democratic institutions. As
+to "the governing families" part of it, that may be brushed aside at
+once as being as absurd in theory as it is untrue to all recent English
+history; for who have been our most brilliant and successful statesmen
+since the present fashion of constitutional government was established?
+Who were Walpole, Pitt, Burke, Fox, Canning, Peel, Cobden, Gladstone,
+and Disraeli? Even as this book is written the Tories in the House of
+Commons are nominally led by Mr. Smith, and practically by Mr. Goschen.
+The instinct of the people has taught them the best leaders, as it has
+taught them the best principles.
+
+A clear-headed working man is a better political counsellor than a
+muddle-minded peer. There are plenty of working men who are not
+clear-headed, as there are plenty of peers who are not muddled of mind;
+but the instinct of the mass is far more likely to be sound than that of
+the class. In the course of English history the masses have usually been
+right and the classes wrong. The former have been less selfish, more
+ready to redress injuries, and keener to oppose tyranny. And even where
+the masses have been in the wrong, it has often been because their
+instinctive sense of right has led them to sympathize with a man or a
+cause, undeserving of regard, but apparently exposed to the persecutions
+of the great.
+
+Thus, in order to make the Liberal cause succeed, zeal must be combined
+with unity and toleration with courage, and our energies must be so
+concentrated by organization as to make them most effective when battle
+is joined. For the private soldiers in the great army of progress, there
+is no advice so sedulously to be rejected as that of Talleyrand, "Above
+all, no zeal." If there is not within Liberals a burning desire to
+forward their principles, they have no right to complain if those
+principles stand still. A Liberal who is lukewarm is like a joint
+half-cooked--of no practical service until possessed of more heat; and
+it is the duty of every earnest man among us to keep the political oven
+at baking point.
+
+But with zeal there must be unity. Differences on details must not be
+allowed to separate friends. There is not always a sufficiency of
+tolerance displayed towards those who do not see eye to eye with the
+others. Agreement in principle is the pass-key which should open to all
+Liberals the door to unity with their brethren; divergence on detail
+should be settled inside. "Take heed," said Cromwell, "of being sharp,
+or too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object
+little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning
+matters of religion." To no modern Liberal can his principles be dearer
+than was his religion to Cromwell, and the great champion of liberty's
+words ought to be laid to heart by each one of us.
+
+With all toleration, there must be no lack of courage. It is not asked
+of most to make sacrifices in the Liberal cause, far less to become
+martyrs in its behalf; but unless the martyr-spirit remains to the
+party, ready for action should occasion arise, Liberalism will wither
+into wastedness. But even courage will fail of its result without
+concentration, for the undisciplined mass is no match for the
+disciplined army. To succeed, there must be organization; and if
+Liberals will not associate for common purposes they will deserve to be
+beaten. All holders of progressive principles ought to attach themselves
+to the Liberal Association of their own constituency; if there is a
+Radical Club as well, they cannot do better than join it; for the more
+links that exist between all sections of the party, the stronger will be
+the bond uniting them. Personal likes or dislikes ought not to affect
+men in the matter. A Liberal is not worthy the name who, because he is
+not asked to the house of the president of the local association,
+declines to join; and equally unworthy of it is he who, because he does
+not ask the president of the Radical Club to his own house, objects to
+put up for membership. Personal and social considerations of this kind
+are out of place in politics, and a man's freedom from them may almost
+be taken as a test of the reality of his Liberalism.
+
+There are many ready to criticize those who do a party's work, but who
+never lift a finger to assist their efforts. These are the beings who,
+at election times, hinder the helpers by carpings, who are never slow to
+assume a share of credit in case of victory, and are ever eager to throw
+the blame upon others in event of defeat. Battles are not won by such as
+these. Every Liberal to whom his principles are dear should show it by
+joining with his fellows, striving his hardest in his own constituency,
+and never ceasing to display in his life and by his works that
+Liberalism to him is not a name but a principle, increasingly dear as it
+is hampered by desertion, threatened with danger, or in peril of defeat.
+If he did that, there would be needed no further answer to the question,
+"How is the Liberal Programme to be attained?" for what was required
+would have been accomplished.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX.--IS PERFECTION IN POLITICS POSSIBLE?
+
+
+It is sometimes asked whether, after all the struggling of public life,
+perfection in politics is possible. But in what department of human
+affairs _is_ perfection possible? Is it in medicine? Mark the proportion
+of those born who die before they are five years old. Is it in science?
+The scientist is still engaged, as Newton was, in picking up shells on
+the shore of a vast ocean of knowledge which he is unable yet to
+navigate. Is it in religion? Ask the Christian and the Confucian, the
+Mahommedan and the Buddhist to define the word, before giving an answer.
+When medicine, and science, and religion have reached universally
+acknowledged perfection, politics may be hoped to follow in their wake;
+but until that period it is needless to expect it.
+
+The very idea that it is possible has been the cause of many delusions,
+and delusions are dangerous. Read Plato's "Republic," More's "Utopia,"
+and Harington's "Oceana," and you will perceive how far the ideal is
+removed from any conceivable real. It may be that from these works good
+has flowed, since the evident impossibility of making the whole plan of
+use has not prevented political thinkers taking from them such ideas as
+were practicable, and grafting these upon existing institutions, with
+benefit to the State. But the dreamy schemes of the eighteenth century,
+the influence of which has not yet died away, were of a different order.
+For, in the endeavour to change society at a stroke, blunders were made
+which have caused lasting injury; and these should teach us that the
+true ideal in politics is that which does not attempt to bend men, or
+break them if necessary, to suit the machine, but makes the machine to
+fit the men. The philosopher is a useful personage, but the attempt to
+rule men from a library customarily results in disaster. The problem of
+life cannot be solved like a proposition in Euclid; there, squares
+always are squares and circles never anything else; but in every-day
+existence the square is often forced to be circular by the rubbing off
+of the angles. And too often it will be found that the philosopher,
+because of his lack of practical acquaintance with his fellow men,
+exaggerates both what he knows and what he does: he blows a bubble and
+calls it the globe; lighting a candle, he thinks it the sun.
+
+All history teaches that the road to heaven does not lie through Acts of
+Parliament, and that under the best laws the saints would not be many
+and the sinners would be far from few. No more pernicious nonsense is
+talked than that all our social misery, crime, and degradation is due to
+bad laws. The political student cannot doubt that much misery may be
+mitigated, crime prevented, and degradation made impossible by good
+laws, and it is that knowledge which should stimulate every Liberal to
+lose no opportunity of improving the conditions under which we live. But
+it is to display an ignorance of human nature that is really lamentable,
+or a desire to flatter human weakness that is beneath contempt, to tell
+the people that, if only certain changes were made in the constitution
+of the State or of society, all would be well, none would suffer, and
+crime and poverty would be known only as traditions of the past.
+
+It is not necessary to assert the old theological dogma that, left to
+himself, man is irredeemably bad, in order to believe that a great many
+bearing the name are very far from good. There is, unhappily, hardly a
+family in the country that has not one black sheep--or, at the best, one
+speckled specimen--to deplore. Do we not all know the idle worthless son
+of good and hard-working parents, a curse to his own and to all with
+whom he comes in contact? The laws affecting him are the same as those
+which affect his brothers: they prosper, he fails. Why? Because they
+are worthy, he is worthless; and there is no conceivable state of
+society in which he could be, or ought to be, served as well as they.
+Certainly there are bad men who flourish, and good who wither away; but
+the political system which should prevent the possibility of this has
+not yet been invented--and never will be.
+
+Therefore it is one of the most dangerous of political delusions to
+believe that any possible reform can make all men prosperous and
+contented. It is just as likely as that this would be brought about by
+the universal practice of the old distich--
+
+
+     Early to bed and early to rise
+     Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,
+
+
+as if chimney sweeps, milkmen, and market gardeners had a monopoly of
+those excellent qualities. The possession of an ideal is a good thing,
+as long as it is not allowed to overshadow the real; and those whose
+ideal causes them to ignore the indolence and vice of their fellows are
+blind guides who would lead us into a ditch.
+
+Therefore, while perfection in politics will never be realized, and the
+belief that it can be is fraught with danger, it should be urged upon
+all to think out the possibilities of the future, and to have a
+political ideal at which to aim. Mine is a State in which all men shall
+be equal before the law, every one have a fair chance according to his
+virtues, his talents, and his industry, and none be advanced because of
+hereditary or legalized privilege. A State in which all men are free,
+and wherein there is a fair field and no favour, is that for which
+Liberals should strive. Even when it is secured we shall still have with
+us the idle and the vicious, for those specimens of humanity will never
+perish from out the land; but the workful and the sober-minded will have
+a better chance of success than they have to-day, and the State will be
+benefited thereby.
+
+Extension of individual liberty, abolition of inherited or other
+privilege--those points really sum up the Liberal ideal. If it be said
+that it does not promise to fill the people's stomachs, it must be
+replied that stomach-filling is not the special concern of political
+life. That is a matter for the people to accomplish; let us remove every
+legalized hindrance to their doing it by their own capacities, but when
+we have done that they must do the stomach-filling for themselves. The
+State may and does feed the unfortunate, but, if it is to feed the idle,
+it will have to make the idle work for their food. There is no necessity
+either in law or in morals to tax those who work for the advantage of
+those who do not; and the most perfect State will be that in which the
+lazy and worthless will be made to labour, and the toilers be protected
+from being by them despoiled.
+
+What we ask is equality of opportunity, and we have much to do before
+that can be obtained. There are some who say that they do not believe in
+elevating the working classes, because it would leave the ground floor
+of the social edifice untenanted. But the tenants are tired of being on
+the ground, and wish to see how the upper story justifies its existence,
+and in that they are right. With equality of opportunity, many to whom
+we are now called upon by convention to bow will sink to their proper
+level, while the men who work by brain or hands will acquire their
+rightful position in the social state. But without the fullest political
+liberty, this will never be attained, and we must strive jointly for
+both.
+
+The political ideal at which we should aim is embraced in the words of
+Lincoln--"that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
+shall not perish from the earth," and to that may be added that equality
+of opportunity shall be conceded to each one of us. Let us gain this,
+and as perfect a State as imperfect human nature can design or deserve
+will be ours.
+
+
+
+
+XL.--WHERE SHALL WE STOP?
+
+
+When the late Lord Shaftesbury was in the House of Commons, and was
+engaged in the apparently endless task of attempting to reform the
+factory laws, he brought in a bill to regulate the labour of children in
+calico-print works. He had already done much, but he wished to do more,
+and on being asked by his opponents, "Where will you stop?" he replied,
+"Nowhere, so long as any portion of this gigantic evil remains to be
+remedied."
+
+In the same spirit may be answered the question sometimes asked as to
+where Liberals will be prepared to stay the reforming hand. A period
+cannot be put to progress any more than a limit to literature, or to
+science a stopping-place. True, we have got rid of the greater
+tyrannies: divine right of kings, personal rule, borough-mongering--all
+are dead. We have got rid of the greater inequalities: purchase in the
+army, nomination in the civil service, have gone the way of the separate
+form at school, the distinctive tuft at the University, for the sons of
+peers. We have got rid of the old Tory idea that the people have nothing
+to do with the laws except to obey them; we now possess household, we
+may soon possess adult, suffrage. But are we, therefore, to do no more?
+Because we travel faster than our fathers, do we frown upon all
+improvements in locomotion? Because we no longer suffer from the Plague,
+the Sweating Sickness, and the Black Death, do the doctors sit with
+folded arms? No; for the motto of the race is progress, and until every
+tyranny, every iniquity, and every inequality which trouble us in
+public life are vanquished, we cannot in our conscience cease from
+attack.
+
+Remember always the saying of Turgot, the great French economist, "It is
+not error which opposes the progress of truth: it is indolence,
+obstinacy, the spirit of routine, everything that favours inaction."
+Much that hinders our advance comes from forgetfulness of what
+Liberalism has done, and what, therefore, it is still capable of doing.
+A politician once remarked, "Suppose that for but a month after the
+passing of any great measure of reform, such as the repeal of the Corn
+Laws, the extension of the suffrage, or the establishment of a national
+system of education, only the Liberals could have gained the benefit and
+the Tories been left outside, wouldn't the Tories have joined us in a
+hurry to help reap the advantage the Liberals had secured?" There is no
+doubt as to the answer; but even as the sun shines upon the unjust as
+well as upon the just, so the beneficent stream of Liberal legislation
+fertilizes the waste lands of Toryism equally with the possessions of
+those who have prepared its course.
+
+Yet it is this forgetfulness against which we have mainly to contend.
+The age in which we live is so distinguished for progressive sentiment,
+so noteworthy for the number and the magnitude of its reforms, that even
+Liberals are occasionally in danger of letting slip some of the good
+effects which struggle has won by nodding contentedly at the strides
+that have been taken, heedless of the enemy ever anxious to push back
+the shadow on the dial. Fortunately for the preservation of our
+liberties, the drowsiness is seldom allowed to glide into sleep, for an
+awakening is furnished by the premature shouts of triumph of those whose
+highest interest would be to remain silent, for it is only thus that
+success to them is possible.
+
+But while in the calm of supposed security, while, for instance,
+enjoying the belief that the Crown, as a governing power, is now in
+England non-existent, we are suddenly aroused by the argument that the
+possible feelings of the Sovereign with regard to a probable Irish
+Ministry are to be considered in antagonism to Home Rule; while we are
+indulging the hope that Free Trade rests upon as firm a basis as
+parliamentary government, we see the Conservative party coquetting with
+Protection; while we regard equality before the law as practically
+admitted by all, we have constantly brought to our notice the belief of
+the county magistrate that that which done by his son would be food for
+laughter, done by his hind deserves hard labour; while sunning ourselves
+with the thought that religious liberty has been absolutely secured, we
+have witnessed a member of Parliament, thrice elected by a free
+constituency, thrice rejected by the House of Commons, and even thrown
+by the police from its doors, upon theological grounds and theological
+grounds alone; and while imagining that freedom of speech, of action,
+and of the press was beyond challenge even by the Tories, men in London
+have been wounded and imprisoned for asserting the right of public
+meeting, and many sent to gaol in Ireland for doing that which in
+England, Wales, and Scotland would be as perfectly legal as it was
+perfectly right: when we see such things we are brought to recognize
+that our liberties, after all, hang by a thread.
+
+It is well, however, that we should have these rude awakenings in order
+to teach us that Toryism is not dead, that it is as ready as ever to
+seize every opportunity for depriving the people of their liberty, to
+rivet the yoke of ascendency upon their shoulders, and to subvert that
+freedom which only slowly and by prolonged struggle has been wrested
+from the great. The adherents of proscription and privilege do not in
+these days talk of the divine right of kings--though even that doctrine
+peeps out when they have occasion to flatter a monarch or an
+heir-apparent; but the equally false doctrine of the divine right of
+Parliaments is persistently put forward, and with the audacious pretence
+that to dispute it is treason to the democracy. We are told that a House
+of Commons once chosen can do as it likes for seven years, and no one
+dare say it "nay;" that its majority may break the pledges upon which it
+was elected, may practise coercion where it promised conciliation, may
+deprive us of every single liberty it was returned to support and
+extend, and that it is the duty of every good subject to sit with folded
+arms, to quietly submit to be despoiled of his rights, and to wait with
+patience until such time as the Prime Minister is sufficiently gracious
+to permit a dissolution, or the Septennial Act closes the Parliament's
+life. The doctrine is fatal to liberty, disguise it by what pretence of
+love for the democracy its upholders may. And is the danger which lurks
+beneath it imaginary? Read the promises upon which the present majority
+in the House of Commons obtained its power; study the fashion in which
+these have been broken; and then consider whether a denial of the divine
+right of Parliaments is, as the Tories contend, treason to the
+democracy.
+
+Liberalism, at all events, will have neither act nor part in any denial
+of popular rights; rather it will be ever on the move towards a fuller
+extension of them. When it is said that the Tories of to-day are to be
+trusted because they go farther than the Liberals of twenty years ago,
+it can be fairly replied, "Even if true (which, if the spirit of things
+be examined, is doubtful), what does it prove? Words change their
+meaning as the world grows older; what yesterday was revolution is
+to-day reform, and to-morrow will be called reaction."
+
+"Onward, and ever onward," must be the motto of the Liberal party. As
+the conditions change, so must our institutions be changed to fit them.
+It cannot be too strongly repeated that in these days we have so much of
+liberty, compared with our forefathers, that some of us are tempted to
+fold our hands, to rest, and to be thankful, and to lose by sloth that
+which has been gained by struggle. The tendency to think that we possess
+all the freedom that the heart of man can desire is one that may act
+upon us as the wish for repose does upon those toiling through the
+snowdrifts, and, in the guise of slumber, may bring death. The heights
+of liberty are not yet scaled; much remains to be done before perfect
+freedom is attained. Let each be able to say with Erskine, "I shall
+never cease to struggle in support of liberty. In no situation will I
+desert the cause. I was born a free man, and I will never die a slave."
+
+The very reason of a Liberal's existence is that, if there is an abuse
+in Church or State which argument and agitation can remove, all honest
+endeavours shall be made to remove it. Many abuses have been abolished
+by these means, but many remain, and it is at the extinction of these
+that Liberals should aim. Let them not lose themselves in fruitless
+longing after a perfect State; let them use their best endeavours to
+make the State we possess as perfect as is possible. In all things let
+them aim at the practical, and let them remember that compromise is not
+necessarily cowardly, and that minor differences should count for little
+when great ends are to be achieved.
+
+The task I allotted myself has now been accomplished. Something has been
+told of the beneficent results of Liberalism, but with the qualification
+that Macaulay added to his description of what has been effected by the
+Baconian system--"These are but a part of its fruits, and of its
+first-fruits; for it is a philosophy which never rests, by which
+finality is never attained, which is never perfect. Its law is progress.
+A point which yesterday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be
+its starting-point to-morrow." The future also has been attempted to be
+sketched--how imperfectly no one knows better than the author. But as
+clearly and concisely as was possible have been stated the principles
+and the aims of the Liberal party. It is to that party that modern
+England owes its liberties, and it is to that party alone that it can
+look for their preservation and extension. Clouds may overshadow its
+immediate future, old friends may drop away, the enemy may be pressing
+at the gate, but Liberalism will live, will thrive, and will make the
+hearts of our descendants glad that there are those who remain faithful
+to it to-day in the midst of dangers and discouragements, which cause
+sinking of heart only to the faint of spirit, and doubt only to the weak
+of soul. Resolved to broaden and strengthen the bounds of freedom, we
+who continue attached to the principles of our party will never swerve
+from the straight course, will never be daunted by the virulence or the
+violence of our opponents, will never forget to strive for that ideal of
+Liberalism--liberty of thought, equality of opportunity, and fraternity
+of aim.
+
+
+UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism
+of To-day, by Alfred Farthing Robbins
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