page break

Chapter XVIII.

The Progress of Reform.

"New occasions teach new duties.
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward
Who would keep abreast of truth.
Lo! before us gleam her camp fires;
We ourselves must pilgrims be.
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly
Through the desperate winter sea."

The history of social progress is glorious. To look backward across the ages, and "the beacon moments see, which, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through oblivion's sea," is a grand inspiration of confident hope for the future. British people especially have cause for pride. Their Homeland has been the theatre of many stirring events, by which humanity was leveraged up. It has suffered no cataclysm like the French Revolution. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity have risen to supremacy by the slower but surer method of evolution. The British Constitution, with its House of Commons, its unimpeachable system of justice, is the outcome of the steady and continuous operation of causes, the weight of whose accumulated effects crushed down tyranny without any sudden and violent rending of the existing social order. The French peasants and artisans, bowed with the burden of centuries of unmitigated oppression, groaning under the load of unequal exactions by Priest and Noble, restrained at every point by privilege and caste, revolted savagely, and, with the hoarse yell of despair, burst through the bonds with which their superiors had bound them. Over the face of France they stampeded with torch and sword, leaving conflagration, ruin, and murder in their wake. The Nobility had been sowing the wind for ages; in terrible fashion it reaped the whirlwind. The nation was reduced to chaos, and, as Carlyle says, the attempt was made—futile, of course—to construct an ark of salvation out of the driftwood.

Britain has had her partings of the ways where blood has been freely spilled. Her Constitution, however, has always provided a safety valve against the worst excesses of reforming energy. Such has been the wisdom of our ancestors that steam has never been pent up to the point of disastrous explosion. Our country has ever united a spirit of conservatism with the spirit of innovation. Whilst looking forward to posterity, she has ever had regard to the teachings of the past. She has thus been saved from many catastro- page 138 phies. She has had her revolutions, but, for the most part, hers has been the steady, majestic progress which betokens a natural evolution. Reform has come with her rather like the growing light of the dawn than the heavy tread of the army of invasion. One cannot read, indeed, the history of the British people without being inspired with a glowing hope. A people that has achieved so much must move on to further conquests. Amazing as are the problems which the social system of to-day presents, a people with such a heritage cannot fail to encounter them with success. Swiftly let us run along the highway of progress, marking the milestones of advance.

There is in the blood of the Anglo-Saxon an inherent intolerance of injustice and oppression. Long before the founders of the race migrated from the coast lands of Germany to the shores of Britain they had shown their mettle against the legions of Rome. Almost centemporaneous with the shimmering of Bethlehem's star in the East three Roman legions at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest were annihilated and their General. Varius, driven to suicide by the Teutons from whom we sprang. The onward march of Rome was permanently checked. Arminius, the Victor, not only became the rsaviour of his country, but he and his people became the progenits of the most powerful and cultured nations of the modern world. Long before English history properly begins the pen of Tacitus reveals to us our forefathers in their old homeland of Northern Germany beating back the Roman Army. They were the only people who did not bend the neck to those "lords of all the wo who did not bend the neck to those "lords of all the world besides."

This spirit followed them to the British Isles. This spirit nerved them in their fierce and bitter struggle with King John and wrested from nerved them in their fierce and bitter struggle with King John and wrested from him at Runnymede the Great Charter of British liberties. This spirit enabled Simon de Montfort to call together the first House of Commons. This spirit enabled Britain to gather the maximum of gain from the Renascence.

Let us halt for a moment before this Phenomenal uprising of the world's mind called the Renascence, and try to feel its seething. In 1453 Constantinople was sacked by the Turk. At that time it was the capital of the ancient Byzantine Empire and an asylum for scholars. The barbarous Turk scattered the savants and their their books. They fled to all quarters of Europe, and became germinating seeds of learning. The mind of Europe quickened into amazing activity. It awoke, as it were, from a long, deep slumber to a sense of the narrow confines of its knowledge and life. There was engendered an appetite for instruction, which in many cases became the ruling passion. " I have given up my whole soul to Greek learning," writes Erasmus, "and as soon as I get any money I shall buy Greek books—and then I shall buy some clothes." This passion grew into a devouring tide of intellectual energy, which swept over every institution and belief without mercy or respect. page 139 The grey hairs of ancient beliefs, the furrowed brow of aged institutions were no defence against the relentless criticism of an electrified intelligence. As field after field of enterprise opened out before it the human mind seemed to gather fresh vigour and stronger powers. Old doctrines were abased and the altar of new ones exalted. It was at this time that reason was emancipated from the thraldom of authority. It was at this time that men arraigned every time-honoured practice and creed at the bar of reason. Authority, that great shield of intellectual sloth, that instrument for consecrating deep-seated prejudice, was overthrown. The Renascence lifted the mind of Europe to the mountain top, and gave it a telescope and a microscope. It saw further and it saw more minutely. Strong in the consciousness of its newly discovered power it flashed its imperious eyes around, searching systems of religion and of Government. In the person of Luther it dared to challenge the infallibility of the Pope. Passionate Savanarola mounted the pulpit in Florence and with a fearlessness begotten of burning conviction denounced the follies, quackeries, and crimes of an effete ecclesiastical government. His words, heated with zeal and barbed with satire, shot through Europe, burning and ripping all shams and hypocrisies.

This was the age when the art of printing was discovered. The writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero were scattered broadcast. Soon the Bible found its way into the artisan's home. It was about this time that gunpowder was invented, which, as much as anything else, blew to atoms the military power of the nobility and the strength of feudalism. The armour of the knight and the towers of his castle were of no avail against this destructive force.

But follow the spirit of inquiry as it turns seaward. At the end of the fifteenth century a Portuguese fleet sailed 1,500 miles south of the Line, and, for the first time, European men gazed up at the star-sown vault of the Southern Hemisphere. True, a Papal Bull was issued proclaiming the earth an oblong plane, twice as long from east to west as from north to south, and surrounded by a wide strip of ocean but as this decree went forth Columbus sat with the book of Seneca open before him, reading with voracious mind the wondrous prophecy by the great Roman of a vast continent on the other side of our spherical world. As he read, he dreamed, and as he dreamed the driftwood and carvings of an unknown land were washed up to his feet on the shores of the Madiera. He felt himself a providential man. He embarked; four times he braved the tempests of unknown seas.

In this age the Portuguese mariners doubled the Cape of Good Hope and anchored in the bays of India. Sebastian Cabot, one of many intrepid adventurers that hailed from British shores, threaded the icebergs of Labrador into Hudson Bay. The power of the magnetic needle to guide navigation had just been discovered. Equipped with the compass, seafaring acquired an assurance it had page 140 never known before. To add majesty to these stupendous strides in discovery and knowledge, Copernicus penetrated to the staggering secerets of the universe and revealed its intoxicating immensity.

It was a time of daring enterprise, daring thought, and daring action, which discovered a new world, propounded a new theology, and wrested the sceptre of tyranny from a king. The Renascence drew in its train the religious reformation and the great political revolt. The enfranchisement of the mind developed in Britain the spirit of protest which overthrew, first, papal domination, and then kingly misrule; the seventeenth century especially was big with deeds for freedom.

That century was a glorious span of crowded life—when prisons rang with the hymns of martyrs, and were sanctified by the custody of the greatest giants of civic righteousness that ever trod the earth; when Pym made the halls of Westminster resound with his patriotism, as he unloosed the bolts of his fiery denunciation on the perpetrators of injustice and tyranny; when Hampden, at the call of his country, spilt his life's blood on the heath of Chalgrove that men of Britain might be free; when Cromwell was "disembowelled from the modern Trojan Horse" to repel the attack upon the stronghold of British liberty and demonstrate that invincible valour was still the heritage of men.

Oh! that was a century of heaven-climbing thought when Milton, that organ-voiced seer, with a mind bathed in the sunlight of knowledge, with a heart lacerated by his country's woes, with a pen nibbed with the incisiveness and brilliance of a diamond, sent his strong song of liberty, like a fiery flood, through the heaving multitude. It was the century whose irresistible vehemence led one king to the block and another into exile. It was the century which hesitated not to pour out its richest blood and spend its highest energies in exalting the common people and investing them with wide political franchises.

The reforming forces of that century of storm were focussed in the phenomenon of Puritanism, which found the expression of its highest sentiment in Milton and of its highest activity in Cromwell In these men we have Puritanism dramatised into heroic flesh and blood. Democracy, with its rapidly unfolding possibilities owes its birth to them. The ascendency of the principles of religiur and political liberty was the sine qua non of Democratic progress, and the betterment of the social and economic conditions of the masses. This ascendancy is the triumph of Puritanism, and we must pause for a moment to take the measure of its stature.

It was a phase of ardent religious belief which most profoundly has affected the destiny of our race. Its momentun is still felt. Much there was in it accidental and superficial but much page 141 has wrought itself into our fibre. The fabric of our character the current of our thought, the liberal ideals of our politics bear testimony to the constraining and enduring influence of the mighty religious force. Puritanism poured the strength of its spirit into everything, and transformed everything. It claimed the prerogative to govern all the relations of life. From the hands of the un godly it wrested the sceptre of secular government, sent armies into the field of blood singing psalms, discrowned a king, and enthroned a commonor. Its inspiration it drew from the Bible its radicalism from that Prince of Democrats, Christ. The printing press had placed the sacred Scriptures on the table of every cottage. Tens of thousands knew no other book, but they bent daily over this one. Britain became the people of one book. The result was the emergence of that most potent type of reformer, the Puritan.

He was invincible in his zeal against oppression and injustice because of the convictions which governed him. Every Puritan looked upon himself as the product of an act of God; his life as a breath of God and his mind as a thought of God. His individuality was merged in that of the Most High. Before God he was utterly abased. But this self-abasement before God became a lofty pride before men. He was the elect of God. Beside him the powerfullest king of the world, if unregenerate, was but a child of the Devil. Hence when Cromwell and his Ironsides charged the Royalists they were charging the children of Iniquity, and they rushed forward crying "Let the Lord arise and let His enemies be scattered." In the energy and intensity of his belief the Puritan was unconquerable. I the most trivial af fairs of life he never forgot he was a man of God, and a weapon of the Omnipotent. Here is the explanation of the imperious, into erant flash he turned upon the vicious principles and practices of kings and aristocrats. He may have shrunk a Macaulay says, from a surplice and a mince-pie as from a crime; yet to him we owe the political franchises now so deeply cherished.

Yes! Puritanism, that in its grotesque form so often moves us to laughter, is a name to conjure with. It spells unconquerable force, constraining earnestness. It, perforce, casts the soul upon its knees in homage. At its mention, the burial places of British history seem to give up their most honoured dead. Across the stage walk Pym, Hampden, Elliot, Milton. Through the memory halls of mind rings again the noise of battle as the great warrior-statesman leads against the foe his Ironsides at Marston Moor or Naseby. We bend the ear to the seventeenth century and catch again the deep, solemn, fervent strains of the Puritan prayer meeting. We stand within the House of Commons, awe-stricken at the stupendous conflict, where peasant and tradesman dare to rebuke a king.

page 142

What a wonderful century! "It dawned amid the dense fog of royal despotism; in tlie mid-day of its career it was overhung with the thick, black clouds of tempest, the thunders rolled and the lightnings flashed; but, towards eve, the atmosphere cleared and the sun of that century of storm and maelstrom set, shedding forth the brilliant rays of the. Bill of Rights and the Act of Succession. These measures, securing freedom from taxation without representation, exemption from the delays and inequalities of justice, and immunity from the exercise of arbitrary power, were the fitting trophies of the unprecedented struggle of a nation for self-government and religious liberty. In them the sublime energy of Crom well and his co-adjutors "burst full-blossomed on the thorny stem of time." Such, in brief, is the story of that conflict from which emerged a reformed religion and democracy.

"The best that history gives us, "says Goethe, "is the enthusiasm it arouses." This colossal struggle, with its grand issue, is enough to excite a very delirium of enthusiasm. It kindles emulative ardour and engenders lively contempt of low ideals. There wonderful optimism in the march of progress. The path of history is strewn with, burning faggots to fire our patriotism and stimulate to renewed fervour zeal for the betterment of man. The problems of the present age are not beset with difficulties comparable with those of past times. The masses have the power. Their hands grasp the sceptre. Monarchy has yielded to the supremacy of democracy. Once for all, we are freed from that eternal curse of despotism by which unlimited calamity may be drawn down upon millions by the caprice of one man. This is the grand heritage of our generation. It is ours rightly to use the power which the blood and energy of our forefathers have bequeathed to us.

And in passing let a note of warning be sounded. May Labour leaders, Socialists, and aspirants after leadership in the forward and aspirants after leadership in the forward movements of society manifest a tendency towards atheism Reforming zeal, divorced from God and defiant of Him, has more than once heaped up calamities upon a people. Britain owes her franchises to religious zeal. France was deluged with blood and covered with dishonour because her revolutionary ardour was untempered by godly sentiment and uncontrolled by godly Principle. Let those Socialists who stand upon a sort of sublimated Paganism remember what the toiling masses owe to Cromwell and Knox, to Wesley and Shaftesbury, to Gladstone and General Booth. Well might we tremble for the future of Democracy if the teachings of the first and greatest Democrat, the Christ, are not only to be innored, but spurned.

Contemplate now the characteristic feature of the social movement to higher levels. It is the evolution of freedom from irksome restraints. We are ever moving towards greater freedom of thought, page 143 action and life Men, at one time, were bound in their bodies to iters; they were slaves. This bondage was sanctioned by many of the wisest of ancient philosophers. It receded before the advance of the doctrine of human brotherhood. Right away back in the winning of English history Bishop Wulfstan stood regularly in the slave market of Bristol denouncing the traffic in men and women. Slavery vanished and villeinage took its place. This was a form of territorial servitude. The peasant was bound to the soil, had onerous duties to discharge, but otherwise was free. Imprisonment and branding on the forehead with a hot iron was the lot of the fugitive. From the time of Watt Tyler's revolt villeinage languished and decayed like a cut branch and the land of Britain became the home of free men. It became a proud boast that the chains fell from the limbs of the slave when he touched British soil.

The emancipation of the body consummated, progress ran along the lines of emancipation of the mind and soul. From free bodies we passed to free thought, free speech, free Press, free religion. As late as the reign of Henry VIII. men were persecuted not only for what they said, but for what they thought. By every cunning expedient, the recesses of a man's bosom were dived into to discover his most secret opinions. Freedom of speech was gained only at heavy cost and a long roll of martyrs. Their names are legion who have languished in prisons because of fearlessness of utterance.

Freedom of religion was procured only at a larger sacrifice. The world has been deluged with the blood of religious persecutions. What can equal the horrors of St. Bartholomew's days? Or follow the Duke of Alva on his murderous mission to stamp out freedom of religious thought in the Netherlands. Women shouldered the musket to defend creed and home. The gallant William of Orange, in his extremity, flung back upon his country's oppressor the bold defiance that his people would fight to the end, and, if need be die in the last ditch. Or go down into the dungeons of the Inquisition in Spain. Or become a spectator at the Smithfield fires in England of Mary and of Elizabeth. And you cannot fail to be sensible of the rich legacy of freedom of religious thought and expression our forefathers bequeathed to us.

Men are now free to speak or write whatever opinions they choose so long as no one's character is defamed and public morals are not scandalised. The bodies of men are free, their thoughts are free, their tongues are free, their creed is free. Last century progress manifested itself in the extension of the political franchise, in the diffusion of primary education, and in the organisation of Labour for collective bargaining with employers and for industrial warfare.

page 144

In the morning of this twentieth century the masses stand fully equipped with all the powers requisite to a successful assault upon the present industrial system, with its unequal burdens and unequal privileges. So far, reforming energy has been occupied with the machinery of democratic government, and although that machinery is by no means perfect for the expression of the popular will, the popular mind can nevertheless assert itself effectively. The time has come for setting this machinery in motion for the redress of economic injustices. Hitherto the course of freedom has been in the removal of fetters and the transference of political power. Now something is to be attempted by the enfranchised mass which will effect a more equal distribution of the world s wealth. For centuries the people have been engaged in getting the power, now they are going to use it. If well advised, they will use it to secure further freedom, free commerce, free land, and they will use it to make men free from the fetters of intemperance and other immoral and weakening practices. Free body, free thought, free speech, free religion, free Press, free vote, free labour, free education, free trade, free land, free will, uncoerced by appetite—this is the path of progress.

Never was there greater need for earnest thought on social and political questions. The air resounds with battle cries and the clash of opinion. Nothing but the immediate, thorough, and earnest amendment of the laws of distribution can avert the crash of industrial revolution. There is an unconquerable energy in toil's enfranchised might, and it is assuming an attitude of challenge to every social and industrial institution. Social forces, new, and altogether immeasurable, are at play in our midst. The impetuous and appalling rush with which the human intellect moved forward in the career of innovation during the fifty years which followed the separation of Luther from Rome seems about to be repeated. The storm of it all already roars in on one. To avoid misdirection of enthusiasm and waste of effort, withhold outraged Labour from running amuck, to reconcile infinitude of noisy discrepancies, we must lay hold of the grand principle of progress. Greater and ever widening freedom, larger opporunity, fuller scope for labour and enterprise, this is the principle which emerges from the history of the past. This is the channel along which the zealot for humanity must pour his energy. We want not a contracted but an extended horizon. Labour not want coddling, but freeing. Throw off its burdens, ease it weight of unequal and hampering taxation, give it unencumbered access to land, the basis of all industry. By readjustment of conditions of distribution of wealth, sap monopoly of its power luxurious idleness of its privilege. By making higher education free to all, enrich the understanding, and what is not less less tant, level up the wages of the drawers of water and hewere of wood. Wage uncompromising war on institutions which flourish on human wreckage. Down with intemperance and up with man page 145 In short, let Labour be freed and protected from robbery Give to it the fruits of its labour, undiminished by tolls exacted by idle privilege, and save it from consuming its body in the fires of appetite.

Reform of some kind cannot be delayed. The masses are restive. Their temper is not such as to submit stolidly to the perpetuation of inequalities which advancing civilisation is daily accentuating. Universal education and universal franchise have made such submission impossible.

John Morley recently said there was no remedy for the unemployed difficulty. In other words, the problems of want which confront modem society baffle him. The masses refuse to believe there is no remedy, and rightly so. The amazing enlargement of productive power is a final answer to the fatal necessity of poverty. Chevalier tells us that in many manufacturing industries "one man could do as much in a day in 1855 as 700 men in 1769." Atkinson informs us that four men can grow and bring to market flour to feed 1,000 men. The aggregate steam power of the world in 1877 was equal to the power of 25,000,000 horses, and as each horse consumes as much food as three men, the steam power was the saving of food for 75,000,000 men." But these facts are nothing compared with the conquests which science and invention are in this age making. In 1886 the machinery in the United States was equal to 3,500,000 horse power, and was operated by 4,000,000 men. To have turned out the same product without the aid of machinery would have required the labour of 21.000,000 men. A hand-loom weaver could formerly make 42 to 48 yards of common shirting in a week; now one weaver, tending six power looms, can weave 3,000 yards in a week. From the Bureau of Statistics, Berlin, we have it that in 1887 the power of the world's steam engines was equal to the power of 200,000,000 horses, or the power of 1,000,000,000 men. This number represents at least three times the number of the working population of the world. Steam alone has made the productive capacity of the world three times greater than it would otherwise have been.

Science! She is harnessing the resources and vigour of Nature, drawing together the ends of the earth, electrifying the night with light, transmitting messages from continent to continent along the lambent air, and animating mammoth workshops. And we seem ta have caught only the first faint rays of the dawn of her triumph in compelling Nature to co-operate with man in the production of wealth. Surely in the face of this limitless expansion of productive capacity we cannot despair of the possibility of solving the problem of poverty.

Hitherto, however, it is questionable whether the masses have received any corresponding benefit from the marvellous scientific page 146 progress of the past century Indeed, they have received no advantage at all commensurate with the amazing strides in industrial progress. The conditions of labour have been improved, but the rigour of the struggle for existence has in no degree abated. Amid all our profusion poverty was never more persistent. A chronic uncertainty of being able to make ends meet gnaws ceaselessly at the hearts of the world's toilers. Life, destined for high thought, is consumed in the animal struggle for existence. Although progressive betterment has marked the conditons of Labour for many generations past, it is inconsiderable in comparison with the progressive productiveness. Indeed, according to Thorold Rogers, the lot of the worker six hundred years ago in the clays of Henry III. was better than it is now. An agricultural labourer received wages which, measured by the present-day standard of value, he tells us, was equal to £154 a year. The enfranchised, educated toiler is contemplating the spectacle. Remember, he is no longer stolid an! illiterate; he can read and think. He is no longer noosed and gagged and powerless; the sovereignty of the secret ballot is in his hands. Having emerged from the long silent centuries of social and political serfdom, he stands on the threshold of a new era with equipment strong and ample for breaking the cords of industrial serfdom under which he still suffers. The yellow blood of a cheerless existence pours its shrunken flow along the arteries of millions of the halfpaid slaves of our itch to be rich without labour The burden of production falls upon the shoulders of the poor, and they stagger under it as with the weight of an Atlas. The fruit! of production are enjoyed by those that toil not nor spin. The spirit which effectually secured our liberties against the encroachment of kingly power has swung round upon this problem.

It would be vain to attempt to cast the horoscope of democracy. Our prescience is not sufficient to dogmatise about the ultimate reaches of progress. If we understand our own age and the next, and bring to the solution of the problems which press upon us the guidance of the past, we shall be saved from all futility of effort. We must ever look backward and forward, keep an ope eyeball, and court the full light. The past, it is true, must not be allowed to be our jailer. We are wiser than our fathers we have outgrown the laws that in their day were expedient and defensible, Our institutions are but "the tents of a night to be stricken whenever truth puts the bugle to her lips" and sounds a march to a level of living. We see further than those who have gone before us. We stand on the inheritance of their achievements. Even were we pigmies as compared with them, standing on the shoulders of the giants of old, we should see further ahead. Again we must grown into capacity for a larger measure of reform. Reform must needs come by instalments; progress must needs come by the goal is not attained by flight, but by steady and patient accumulating their effects. Nevertheless, we have a right accelerating rapidity of movement towards the ideal. This is a page 147 law of Nature like the gathering momentum of a falling stone. It is exemplified in the increasing velocity of the advance of science. In these days, therefore, of invention, travel and enlightenment, social epochs and climaxes should follow more speedily than in the former years when a stride of progress seemed to be measured by a generation of thirty of or forty years.

And progress will be faster. This indestructible new element m the polity of nations—the political power of the overwhelm by its ardour the cold sluggishness of the wealthy classes and their sullen resistance to innovation. Something must be done to assuage the black, desperate struggle of men against whole condition and environment of modern industrialism. Something must be done to obviate the growing need of charitable in stitutions. Something must be clone to apportion more justly reward m tegration. Something must be done to arrest the forces of disintegration at work upon the columns of our national character. And something will be done. Discontent prevails The sprit of intolerance of existing evils is abroad. There is no cause however, for mutable principle of political economy are recognised. The danger alarm so long as the lessons of history are observed, and the immutable principles of political economy are recognised. The danger is that enfranchised Labour maddened by its wrongs, may spend its energy in rolling stones uphill, in rioting over the surface of a problem without touching its roots.

But let zeal for human improvement run in the right channels, and speedy deliverance awaits the labourer from his industrial burdens. The future is bright with hope. The evils of society are not irremediable, its wrongs are not beyond redress. The past has left us rich legacies of emancipating effort. Freedom has a noble ancestry; without doubt it shall have a nobler posterity.