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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Personal Volume

The State

The State.

Turning to another question. The State has the right to look after its own existence. Of course I admit that the State is not to interfere with individual liberty. (Cheers.) page 6 We must remember how the State has grown, and remember that it is not yet firmly planted, and that we cannot afford to do anything that would weaken its hands. Don't think that because in an English colony we have great liberty that all is plain sailing. There are dangers which threaten a democracy,—just as many as threaten despotism. (Cheers.) Just let me say that I am laying down for you some principles which the State, must keep in view if it intends to retain its own existence. They have been summarised by a very able American—Mr. Abbot. He say this: A State has a right to exist and perpetuate its own existence, and that the individual is the social unit. What does this admission mean that the individual is a social unit? It admits that the child has rights as well as the parent, and that the child has a right to have its rights preserved by the State as much as the parent. (Cheers.) And again, he says that the State has a right, in order to perpetuate its own existence, to establish universal suffrage. (Cheers.) And that it has a right to establish universal intelligence and social morality as a necessary condition of universal suffrage. I ask you to follow me carefully in the enunciation of these principles, because one hangs on the other. Next, he says, it has a right to establish universal education, as a necessary condition of universal intelligence, of social morality, and of universal suffrage. (Hear.) And it has a right to establish a system of public schools, in order that there may be established a system of universal intelligence, and that it has a right to see that use is made of its schools, or that children are otherwise educated. It is on these principles that the rights of State education exist, because I admit at once that if you carry out individualism to what I might term an extreme, you would sweep away State education, and you would sweep away something more, that practically hangs perhaps on the same principles, you would sweep away hospitals. You would have the State giving no aid to hospitals, and I will show you that there are, from one point of view, stronger reasons against the State giving aid to hospitals than to schools. Now, you may think that strange. Let us see about hospitals. If you go to a doctor who looks—I am not speaking of a typical doctor—who looks simply at the perfection of physical man, who has no other conception of a man than as a living man, as a physical man, a strong physical man—he will tell you that hospitals injure the race, he will tell you that all the medical scientific education has bad this effect, that it is tending to preserve weak lives, and tending to produce weak lives; and if we look simply at the physical man, if the physical man was to be the only perfect type of humanity, we would have no hospitals. But we look at something different from that. We have to look at the emotional side of man's nature, at the moral side of man's nature, and we see it would be injuring his emotional nature, and his moral nature, if the State or the community were to allow the sick to die without aid and assistance. Hence it is the State says this, although the physical man is injured, greater injury would result to the race to at once cease all aid, and to allow the sick and helpless to die. (Cheers.) A greater moral injury would be inflicted on the race than any permanent physical advantage to be gained. Let me apply this to the schools. I say that if this colony is to make any advance on the past we must have universal education. (Hear, hear.) We must recognise that it is a huge disgrace to have one of our fellow-colonista unacquainted with our literature, and even of some of our scientific facts.