page 4

Liberty as a Political Ideal

The word "Liberty" is commonly used in two senses, and much confusion of thought has arisen there from. It may mean personal liberty, the liberty of the individual citizen in relation to the State in which he lives. Again it may mean national liberty or independence, the liberty of one State in relation to others. These two aspects of liberty are often found together, but often also apart. Thus Russia, under the Soviet Government, has national liberty or independence, but the individual Russian is virtually the slave of the State, exposed to arbitrary exaction, arbitrary imprisonment, and arbitrary execution, and deprived of all freedom of action. He has nothing he can call his own, and says what he thinks at his peril. India, on the other hand, has no independence, but the native Indian has a large measure of personal freedom. He can choose his own method of life, so far as social and religious custom allows him; he can be taxed only by law; in person and property he is protected from arbitrary interference, whether of neighbors or of officials. A recent American historian has pointed out that the object of the great American Revolution was not, as is often supposed, personal liberty, which already existed, but national independence. It is in the former sense that I shall use the term this evening.

Yet there is still danger of confusion. It is possible that "Liberty of the individual" may be used in more than one sense. "Many people," wrote Thring of Uppingham, the greatest British schoolmaster of the last half-century, "mean by liberty the power to force other people to do what they want them to do;" and here we come to the heart of the subject. The desire for freedom to pursue one's own life and develop one's own activities is not only a natural instinct, but an essential condition of all progress. The man who lacks this lacks an essential element of full manhood. But directly he begins to exercise this freedom he finds himself up against the similar activities of his fellows. At every turn, he finds that he can only do what he wants to do by preventing someone else from exercising the same freedom. In any society absolute unfettered freedom of self-expression for any individual or group of individuals is only possible by denying all freedom to the rest of the community, that is, by reducing them to a state of slavery. The only case of a single individual enjoying such power is that of an absolute despot, as in old Turkey, and even there, with the exception of the very greatest Sultans, absolute irresponsible liberty of action has always been in practice greatly circumscribed by custom and personal influence. Thus, where there is no servitude, a clash of wills inevitably arises, which can only be settled by mutual agreement. The rules according to which the settlement is effected in individual cases we call Law, and the spirit which inspires these page 5 rules Justice. It follows that Law and Justice are an essential condition of Liberty in the true sense of the word. Nevertheless, we find a common tendency, which seems on the increase, to regard Law and Justice as the enemies of Liberty. This is no doubt to be explained largely by the fact that laws, being made by fallible men, are apt to express not absolute justice, but an imperfect form of it. The most honest legislators cannot help being influenced, however unconsciously, by their own interests and prejudices, which generally reflect those of the class to which they belong. Thus an impression may be created that law is merely a device for ensuring the predominance or the legislators and their friends, that, in the words of Thrasymachus in "The Republic," "Justice is the interest of the stronger." All law fetters, and those who have little or no share in shaping the laws as they stand naturally feel themselves unduly fettered, and demand in the name of Liberty that these fetters should be struck off. Hence arises an apparently never-ending struggle between Liberty and Law, two principles which in the nature of things should be close allies. Every demand for a change in law, whether put forward by progressives or reactionaries, is made in the name of Liberty. A good illustration of this is furnished by the proclamations of the two Pretenders in Thackeray's humorous satire "The Next French Revolution," which contains some of the most delightful political fooling in the English language. The Bonapartist Pretender, John Thomas Napoleon, and the Legitimist, Henri V., put forward programmes of respectively Imperial Militarism and extreme clerical reaction, each in the name of Liberty. But let Thackeray speak for himself.

I. John Thomas Napoleon: "You have been promised Liberty, but you have had none. I will endow you with the true, the real freedom. When your ancestors burst over the Alps, were they not free? Yes! Free to conquer! Let us imitate the example of those indomitable myriads, once more trample over Europe, march in triumph into her prostrate capitals and bring her Kings with her treasures to our feet. This is the liberty worthy of Frenchmen.

Frenchmen! Up and rally! I have flung my banner to the breeze; 'tis surrounded by the faithful and the brave. Up, and let our motto be:—'Liberty, Equality, War all over the World."

II. Henri V. "Our afflicted country cries aloud for reforms The infamous Universities shall be abolished. Education shall no longer be permitted. A sacred and wholesome Inquisition shall be established. My faithful nobles shall pay no more taxes Convents and monasteries again shall ornament our country, the calm nurseries of saints and holy women. Heresy shall be extirpated with paternal severity, and our country shall be free once more."

Caricature, you will say. No doubt, but caricature in the hand of a great artist exaggerates, but does not invent.

But impatience with existing laws may go to the point of rejecting law altogether as a principle. This is the attitude of the Nihilist, and even unconsciously of some nearer home, who are not usually marked with that label. To these men justice has nothing to do with law, nor even with any general principle: pushed to its conclusion, it means getting what you want and doing as you like. I had myself an amusing experience of this page 6 state of mind a good many years ago. Shortly before Mr. Glad-stone capitulated to Parnell, I was travelling with a colleague, Dr. (now Sir James) Dobbie, in a third-class non-smoking compartment from London to Bangor. Up to Chester we had a carriage to ourselves, but there, just as the train was starting;, we were joined by a middle-aged man, apparently of the respect-able shopkeeper class, who forthwith pulled out a short clay pipe and proceeded to light it. We objected, and called his attention to the fact that it was a non-smoking carriage. He protested in a good Irish brogue, and argued that we ought not to interfere with him. After some ten minutes wrangling, I said to him: "Look here, Sir, it is no earthly use your going on like this. I object to your smoking here, on principle. I don't think it is fair to the public." "Ah," he remarked," That is just where it is. Englishmen always act on principle, and that is just why Ireland can never get justice from them. But "—slapping his knee—"when Parnell gets us Home Rule, I'II smoke in every carriage in the country!" To this good gentleman justice had nothing to do with principle, and freedom meant being able to-do as he liked in defiance of all rules to the contrary.

Here is an utterance of a very different character, which reveals the true nature of Liberty. Three years ago an American Minister in high office, in the course of a declaration on public policy, made use of these words: "The liberty we cherish for ourselves we desire for others, and we assert no rights for our-selves that we do not accord to others." There is the acid test. The man who claims rights for himself in the name of liberty that he is not prepared to concede to others does not believe in liberty; he believes in despotism, a despotism to be exercised by himself or his friends. The true spirit of liberty, indeed, is essentially unselfish, and cannot thrive except where a high moral standard is maintained. A profound truth lies embodied in Milton's well-known lines:—

"License they mean when they cry 'Liberty,'
For who loves that must first be wise and good."

You remember perhaps the gibe of an old Tory cynic: "The Whigs are so fond of liberty that they keep it all for themselves." This is the temptation against which all honest lovers of freedom have to be ever on their guard. Intolerance is just as common in Politics as in Religion, and just as mischievous. Macaulay's celebrated saying about religious persecution applies equally to politics:—"The attitude of the religious persecutor is this: When I am in power, I shall put you down by force, because it is the duty of truth to suppress error; but when you get the upper hand, you must not interfere with me, because error must not persecute truth.' "The true lover of liberty will shrink with as much horror from the idea of curtailing the legitimate liberty of others as the lover of justice will from that of encroaching on their just rights. The emphasis in each case is on the adjective; the test is reciprocity.

Nevertheless, whatever lip service we may pay her, it can hardly be doubted that Liberty, in the true sense, has of late been suffering something of an eclipse. Read John Stuart Mills' famous Essay, and you will be struck at once with a feeling how far we have drifted away from his moorings. We seem to be breathing a different atmosphere. Mills' political philosophy page 7 was in the main that of the Manchester School, the old Radicalism of Lilburne and the "Levellers" in the 17th century. Wilkes and Burdett in the 18th, and the Chartists in the early part of the 19th: the aim was the sweeping away of class privileges and the breaking down of social barriers, so that the individual might be left free to work out his own salvation. The State was merely an aggregate of individuals, and the function of law and legislation was purely protective, to prevent the individual being overborne by violence or fraud. The conception of the State as an entity with a corporate life of its own, distinct from that of the individuals composing it, was foreign to this school. They regarded it as a piece of mechanism rather than a living organism. Much water has flowed beneath the political bridges since Mill on Liberty was the textbook of the party of Progress. On the one hand, we have acquired a higher notion of the corporate life of a community; on the other, we have rather lost sight of the truth which obsessed the minds and filled the horizon of the older school, that moral excellence is rather individual than collective. We are apt to emphasise the importance of the community, to discourage private effort, and to regard the State as a kind of secondary Providence, which should improve on the original maxim by "helping those who do not help themselves" We might sum up the difference between the two attitudes by saying that to the old reformer the State was suspect, while to the new reformer the Individual is suspect a mighty change, suggesting a new source of inspiration. This new source is to be found in the French Revolution, The watch-word of that stupendous movement—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—has probably had profounder effects on political and social development in the last hundred years than any other ideal. It is an appeal that goes straight to the generous heart. If these three principles were accepted in their full implication, surely the social Millennium would be within reach. What is Fraternity but the Law of Love: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy-self?" It breathes the very spirit of Christianity, and stamps with a seal of consecration the two social principles which precede it. Yet this triad has been the occasion of the most ruthless bloodshed that has disgraced modern civilisation up to the outbreak of the Great War. Instead of the reign of Justice, we have the Revolutionary Terror, with tribunals in the later development of which the accused was not merely refused the aid of Counsel, as in the old English High Treason trials, but actually not allowed to speak his own defence. Instead of Fraternity and Peace, we have twenty years of almost continuous warfare, in the course of which every country in Europe except our own and Scandinavia was wasted with fire and sword and drenched in blood.

If we look closely, we shall find the explanation of this strange phenomenon in two causes: (1) First and foremost, the weakness of human nature; and (2) A new interpretation of Equality, which extended it from legal to personal and social status.

(1) We are apt to forget that institutions have to be worked by human beings, and that however excellent in design and construction, the kind of work they will turn out depends largely, perhaps mainly, on the skill and still more on the honesty of the men who control them. An aeroplane may be the last thing in page 8 engineering science, yet if it be entrusted to an ignorant man, or to a pure theorist without practical experience, it will crash in a few minutes. Poor political institutions worked by capable and high-minded men will generally produce more happiness and prosperity than far better ones in incompetent or dishonest hands. Now any violent political upheaval always tends to bring to the front two classes of men; first the pure theorist, and secondly, the criminal adventurer. The former, often a man of considerable imagination and thinking power, but without the corrective of practical experience, carried away by abstract phrases, which have a curiously intoxicating influence, with no conception of the immense complexity of the problem to be solved, will give up anything rather than his theory, Mr. Easy, you will remember, in Marryat's immortal novel, when presented with the alternative of sacrificing his theory or his son, like a good theorist sacrificed his son. Impatience with the folly, or ignorance of those who oppose his beneficent schemes may easily convert him into a ruthless tyrant. Robespierre, under the Monarchy, resigned a judgeship rather than sign death warrants. Lenin started as the apostle of non-resistance, and three years ago he protested indignantly against the slanders which painted Bolshevist rule in blood-red colours: there had only, he assured the world, been 13,000 odd executions! In four years' time this modest figure had swollen to the gigantic total of a million and three-quarters. The list, which professes to be compiled from official Soviet returns, was issued by the Serbian Government in 1921, and has been since published widely in the European Press, without eliciting, so far as I know, any serious challenge. It is divided into six or seven classes: the first consisting of 28 Bishops and Archbishops, the last of upwards of 800,000 peasants. It would seem incredible that such a programme could be got through in the time, involving as it does over 440,000 executions a year, or 1,200 a day, till it is remembered that executions were not carried out solely by the central "Cheka" or Terrorist tribunal; every town and most villages of any size had their own local "Cheka," which acted to a large extent independently. It is probable also that massacres of unarmed groups such as prisoners, peasants who disobeyed an order to surrender their crops, etc., were included in the Soviet returns.

Even if we were to divide this total by ten, the mind reels at the contemplation of a cold-blooded ruthlessness only to be paralleled by the doings of Attila or Genghis Khan. In the words of a recent review on Edmund Burke: "In politics those who take short cuts to Paradise usually find themselves in Hell."

(2) The second class, that of the criminal adventurers, consists of men who have failed to make good, and regard existing society as their enemy. Sometimes able, generally courageous, always without scruple and without pity, at a time of social upheaval they naturally draw together in small groups, and by daring and organised violence cow the quieter type of citizen around them, who may outnumber them by as much as a hundred to one. The union of these two classes produces the terrorism which is a recurrent feature of social revolutions, the first supplying the watchwords, the second the force to translate them into action. Thus the will of a small minority may be im page 9 posed on an immense population by the union of the fanatic and the criminal. "Why did you tolerate those abominations?" a leading Frenchman was asked by an outside observer after the overthrow of the Terror. "Because we were cowards," was his answer. The fanatic may be defined as a man who substitutes for the true end of life some other and lower end, and whose idea of good and evil is thus perverted. We say that a certain course of action is good. What is our test? That it makes for the ultimate end, the elevation of the man who pursues it towards the divine ideal—love, and the accepted rules of morality are ultimately traceable to this basal principle. We condemn all that makes for the opposite—hatred. But to the fanatic some lower end takes the place of the law of love. E.g., he regards the perfection of human nature as depending on the establishment of some particular form of social organisation or the adoption of some particular theological creed, and is prepared accordingly to commit any act of cruelty or oppression to bring it about. The mediaeval inquisitor and the modern revolutionary are twin brethren. Incidentally it may be remarked that in a democratically-governed country the use of Terrorism at once brands its users as a minority; if they were a majority they could get their way constitutionally without resorting to "direct action."

Again, altogether apart from the imperfection of the beings who have to work the machinery of society, there is a potential source of trouble in the famous Triad itself. Its first two members embody an irreconcilable contradiction, not indeed in their original connotation, but in the expanded meaning of the second. Equality may be taken in two senses: (i) Legal equality, which requires that the law should be no respecter of persons or classes: (ii) Economic and social equality. It was in the first sense that it was originally used by the authors of the French Revolution ; and in this sense not only was there no opposition between liberty and equality, but the second was really the necessary complement of the first: for how can a man have reasonable freedom for self-development if the law regards him as less worthy of its protection than other members of the society to which he belongs, if the scales of justice are weighed against him when he comes into Court? Thus a Christian cannot enjoy political freedom under an orthodox Mohammedan Government, because by the law of Islam the evidence of an infidel in a Court of Justice has no weight against that of a true believer. Under the old regime in France the noblesse occupied a privileged position. They paid no taxes, they could command the services of their villain-tenants, they administered justice to them. These were all legal rights which the law had either created or at least upheld, and which the law could sweep away. And their abolition left everyone freer to choose his own line of life, even the noble himself. In its original connotation, therefore, the great Revolutionary Triad was consistent with itself. As to the Christian theologian every soul is of equal value in the sight of God, so to the political philosopher every citizen had equal rights in the eyes of the law. But matters did not long remain in this position. The complaint was soon raised that though privilege had been abolished, the vaunted equality was illusory. Legal inequality had gone, but social and economic inequality page 10 remained. Money is power. Was it right that in a free and equal Republic disproportionate power should be allowed to rest in individual hands, and those often the least worthy? Again, there are social privileges and inequalities the law knows nothing of, which are prescribed by the unwritten code of social opinion made nobody knows how, and enforced by intangible taboos and penalties. As society grows more complex, these inequalities tend to increase and to produce serious friction, and they are often more resented than positive legal disabilities. But they can only be wholesomely removed from within by change of heart, and this is the work not of law, but of education. Legal enactment can hardly effect it, and would be certain in the attempt to restrict personal liberty to a disastrous degree. You cannot by law force one set of people to be on intimate social terms with another set. Further, even were such an enforced equality possible, it would probably be unfavourable to social progress, which depends on differences in opinion and habits of life. There is truth in the old saying: "It takes all sorts to make a world."

But once we have reached this point, it is plain that our Triad has landed us in an antinomy. For in spite of the American Declaration of Independence—a strange manifesto, by the way, for a people amongst whom slavery was a social institution—we are not "born free and equal." This was a common-place of eighteenth century philosophy. The perfection of Man was to be sought in a state of nature before he had been corrupted by the luxury and injustices of civilisation. The nineteenth century with its new doctrine of evolution shattered this fond imagination to fragments. For us the perfection of nature is the terminus ad quern, not the terminus a quo. Equality forsooth! Si argumentum requiris, circumspice! A University is the last place where the proposition that men are born equal can be maintained. Every class list that comes out is direct proof of the contrary. You all know what every examiner has convincing proof of year after year, that some are born with First Class brains, some with Second Class brains. If any doubt should remain on the subject we have high political authority for it, the word of an Ex-Prime Minister himself, Mr. Lloyd George: some, alas! even have to be content with Pass brains. In mental endowment men are born shockingly unequal. Now, this being so, it is clear that if they are left to carve out their own fortunes, this inequality is bound to show itself in the results they achieve. A society in which freedom is the first consideration will be a society from which anything like equality in the social signification is banished. Liberty and Equality in short are like two buckets in a well; as one goes up, the other goes down. At the Communist extreme the Liberty bucket is at zero: where individualism rules, inequality is in excelsis. In practical life we strike a balance between the two, and keep both swinging in mid-air. Here let it be noticed that private property in some form seems an essential condition of personal freedom: for it is simply stored-up power, and without it the individual would have nothing to fall back upon and would be obliged to live from hand to mouth, which would involve absolute dependence on those who provided him page 11 from day to day with food and shelter. He would be a slave of the community, living at the mercy of a bureaucracy which, as it controlled all the means of living and directed all the activities of the whole population would itself be inevitably above control. Thus it is that all men in whom the desire for freedom is strong have an instinctive feeling that private property is a necessity for them. The idea that private property is the invention of the capitalist for his own selfish ends, which one sometimes hears, is on a par with that which formerly had some vogue, that religion was invented by the priest with a similar object. The truth is that as man is by nature an incurably religious animal, so is he likewise an incurable property-owning animal. Of this the primitive communities that form themselves out West in the United States for ranching or gold-mining afford indisputable evidence. There the unforgivable offence is stealing, horse-stealing in the one case, gold-stealing in the other; the penalty is death. The murderer is left to private vengeance, every man being supposed to keep his own head, but the thief is run to earth by the whole community and strung up to the nearest tree. Let me give two examples:—

The Ranch. Here are some grimly humorous lines (of Bret Harte, I think) which I remember being given at school to turn into Latin verse:—

How It Happened In Texas
He found a rope and picked it up
And with it walked away;
It happened that to t'other end
A horse was hitched, they say.
They found a rope and fastened it
Over a swinging limb,
It happened that the other end
Was somehow hitched to him.

Gold-mining. In a recent book of Memoirs, Lord Ernest Hamilton describes his experiences in the Yukon. "Just inside the entrance to each tent at a mining camp we visited, about six miles from Atlin, there stood one or more zinc buckets full to the brim with gold-dust or nuggets, and apparently offering exceptional opportunities to anyone with shop-lifting tendencies. I remarked as much to my companion, an old rugged miner."

"Yes," he replied, with suitable expectoration. "We had one in this camp not long back with socialistic views as to the distribution of accumulated wealth. I reckon he was swinging from that pine tree yonder almost before his pockets were clear of the gold he'd pinched."

To sum up, the maintenance of a due balance between these two antagonistic principles, Freedom and Equality, is perhaps the most fundamental question in modern politics and will be found at the root of most of the problems that social legislation has to solve. The absolute individualism of the old Manchester School has been generally abandoned, nor does there seem even a remote probability that it will be revived, at least in our time. In this sense it is true to say with Sir William Harcourt: "We are all socialists nowadays." But we are most of us still further away from absolute collectivism. Between these two extremes there are endless gradations. If our race remains true to its page 12 political genius, there will be no rebuilding of Society on a new plan, but each case will be treated separately as it arises on the principle of compromise. Each social prescription will always contain the two elements of Freedom and Equality, Individualism and Collectivism, but they will be rarely mixed in the same proportions. It will be pure Empiricism—we are not a logical people—but it will probably work.