"If law be centralized, it always lingers far behind men's needs." This obiter dictum of Francis Newman's, spoken nearly sixty years ago, strikes one as more true to-day even than when he originally gave voice to it. For if there is one thing truer than another, it is that half the wrongs to which we are heir to-day, are due to centralization. This may be due in part, no doubt, to the enormous increase of population; but certainly one overwhelming reason is that class with class has lost in very great measure all sense of cooperation, all sense of sympathy, all sense of their real intimate connection and relationship with each other. Instead of provincial legislature, we have our one parliamentary centre, instead of treating our own local matters ourselves, we hale them up before a central bureaucracy—a bureaucracy already so overcrowded with business that it is absolutely and practically unable to deal with all the questions which come up for settlement. So that instead of imperative local matters being dealt with first hand, private bill after private bill swarms through the doors of Parliament, and it becomes a veritable impossibility to go into detail with respect to the pros and cons which they bear upon their pages, much less grasp the whole drift of the question with justice in its entirety.
Far wiser was the old system of provincial legislature, in which the people were really represented, a system in which personality counted for much and men were brought into familiar and friendly relations with each other, not kept apart by the rubicon of red-tapeism, and liable to have the door of the Closure slammed in their faces at some critical juncture of discussion, and the subject shelved. It is true that since Francis Newman's day we may have made some effort after local councils, but it is also true that these local councils do not really bring class and class together. Each class is by no means adequately represented in them, nor is it the council's object that this should be the case. To compare the England of to-day—the agricultural England, at any rate—with the England of the past, brings all true thinkers to the same conclusion, that class demarcations are as insistent, as absolute as ever they were, even in the culminating early Victorian days. [Footnote: "We must mainly refer our practical evils to the demoralization of the State which the restoration of the Stuarts caused…. Then began the estrangement of the Commonalty from the Church of the aristocracy."—Francis Newman.] One has but to go abroad to be convinced how "classy" we are as a nation, for class prejudices and insularity are produced by provincial England, and indigenous to the soil, and alas! this crop never fails. There are, unfortunately, no lean years. There are, it is true, plenty of organizations in which the more fortunate class tries to ameliorate the lot of the less fortunate one, plenty of organizations in which the more cultured class tries—often devotes its whole life to this trying—to make better conditions for the less cultured one, and all honour and praise is due to self-denying work of the kind, but it is not enough. The truest, purest Christian socialism [Footnote: I use the word in its truest ancient sense.] requires that helper and helped meet on absolutely equal ground; that there is banished that indescribable stalking figure which follows close in the wake of most meetings between rich and poor in England, the Gentleman-hood (or Lady-hood, for I have seen that often quite as insistently in evidence) of the class which, so to speak, "stoops to conquer," the limitations of the less fortunate classes, in its work for the people.
I remember coming across the word "gentleman" interpreted in a far different sense in an old fifteenth-century book. Many words change their meaning with time, but this word has changed from its fifteenth-century interpretation more than any. The sentence ran thus: "Jesus Christ was the first Gentleman." Anything further from the original conception of its meaning as set forward in this sentence than our English idea of what is meant to-day by "gentleman" it would be difficult to find. For He went among the people as one of themselves, was born among them, and was educated as they were. There was no hint of patronage, no suggestion of any social demarcation. He Who was the world's Redeemer was yet a Socialist [Footnote: I cannot but add here that, in my opinion, the much- abused word "Socialist" has changed in character in the same way as the word "gentleman," and the modern interpretation is very far from being the true, admirable, original thing signified.] in the highest and best sense of the term.
We have come far since those days, but we have not come beyond the need to deprive birth and riches of some of that arbitrary power by which they have assumed more authority than is their due in the matter of legislation, influence, disposal of land, and economic local conditions in the provinces.
As regards decentralized government and the "immense importance of local liberties," I cannot do better than quote first from the preface written by Francis Newman to his lectures on Political Economy, when he issued them in a printed form in 1851:—
"Of the immense importance of local liberties, and their actual deficiencies among us, I became fully convinced during six years' residence in Manchester; but it is only from Mr. Toulmin Smith's works (the most important political work, as to me appears, which the nineteenth century has produced in England) that I have learnt the immense resources of the Common Law of England, and that nothing but the arbitrary encroachments of Parliament at this moment hinders a vigorous local legislation and local government under the fullest local freedom which can be desired."
The lectures themselves, notably the twelfth, are in my opinion a counsel of perfection which we should do well to follow to-day in very many respects. For instance, he urges very strongly that "every town in England, and every county, ought to have the feelings of a little State, as in fact it once had" [the italics are my own]. "Our own history for many centuries shows that this is quite consistent with the existence of a central power—a Crown Parliament—for all purposes truly national; and if the action of the central power were strictly limited to such things, the provinces would, now more than ever, have abundant room for high ambition." He shows how all organization has been lost in large provincial towns, even though meetings are held from time to time, and men seem to come together for counsel and combination of ideas; the only really fixed "moral union" being that narrow tie of family life which does but make a number of separate entities in the big whole of citizenship. There is no corporate union which makes each citizen the charge, to all intents and purposes, of his neighbour. Each family holds together. It rises and falls by itself. It holds to its heart no innate real sense of responsibility of a wider citizenship. That is lost—undeniably lost.
[Illustration: TOULMIN SMITH
ENLARGEMENT FROM A PHOTO. BY KIND PERMISSION OF MISS TOULMIN SMITH]
The question arises naturally: When was this splendid link of "Each for All" broken and mislaid? For nothing is more imperatively necessary among the ranks of workers to-day.
Mr. Toulmin Smith tells us: "The link which has been broken and mislaid was the "English Guild" (or "gild," as seems the more correct spelling). He tells us—and it is generally conceded that he is our great authority on this subject—that as a system of practical and universal institutions, a English Guilds are older than any kings of England." [Footnote: "They were associations of those living in the same neighbourhood, who remembered that they had, as neighbours, common obligations.">[ And as another authority on medieval life—Dom Gasquet—says: "The oldest of our ancient laws—those, for example, of Alfred, of Athelstan, and Ina—assume the existence of guilds to some one of which, as a matter of course, everyone was supposed to belong."