A Short History of English Liberalism

by W. Lyon Blease

But the argument for Social Reform is not based only on the possibility of altering environment so that individuals who are unfit for it may maintain themselves so long as they live. Spencer was reasoning away from the facts. It is not only the incapable

who are poor. It is not only the imprudent who are overcome by distresses. It is not only the idle who starve. Bad conditions of life destroy not only the inefficient, but the efficient, and many of those whom they do not kill they maim. He is a very dull and stupid observer who supposes that all the slovenly, debauched, and criminal men and women whom he sees around him are what they are because of their innate qualities, or that all those who die of their own dirt, debauchery, and criminality are any worse. They were not all born criminals whom our great-grandfathers hung or transported for petty larceny, nor are they all born inefficients whom some modern eugenists would segregate or sterilize. A bad environment does not merely destroy the inefficient, it manufactures them; and it is as reasonable to oppose social reform, because it prevents the elimination of the unfit, as it would be to defend excessive eating and drinking, or sitting in wet clothes. Unhealthy living would no doubt destroy people with weak stomachs and livers, and a tendency to chalky deposits in the joints. But for every one who perished in this struggle with environment there would be ten who survived. Bad housing and bad wages produce the same results as bad habits. Of all the slum children who die of their surroundings, a large number would have lived to become valuable citizens if they had had better conditions of life in their early years. An ill-fed girl becomes the mother of weakly children. Inadequate housing produces disease, incest, and prostitution, besides killing a few undesirable infants. Casual labour kills only after it has given birth to an incalculable amount of laziness, vice, and mental disorder. Everywhere the good is kept back, even if some of the bad is prevented from development. The slum creates what the slum destroys, and it discharges upon the community much that it does not destroy. The elimination of the unfit is uncertain and capricious. The deterioration of the fit is certain and remorseless. Social Reform, if it is nothing else, is thus the only possible means of discovering which individuals are fit in the human sense. It is only when all have a chance of survival that we can distinguish the naturally inefficient from the accidentally inefficient. The

reformer need have no fear that his generous impulses are signs of an anti-social sentimentalism. He is in fact only Evolution conscious of itself. He marks a point in the great course of life, at which the cultivation of individuals ceases to be careless and wasteful, and becomes deliberate and economical, adapting its own environment to the achievement of its ideals.

When the necessity for Social Reform is admitted, the provision for its cost affords another opportunity for the conflict of Liberalism and Toryism. The Budget of 1909, which tempted a plutocratic House of Lords into a rashness which an aristocratic House of Lords had never ventured to display, was a clear expression of the new Liberal principles. Part of that Budget was merely an extension of the Finance Act of 1894. Another part was entirely new. It carried the principle of graduation to a further point, both in income tax and in death duties, and it imposed for the first time a tax upon the natural monopoly of land. To those who understand the meaning of Social Reform, the necessity of the Budget is clear. Money must be found for the purpose of relieving poverty. To raise it by a general taxation of rich and poor would be to lay a new burden upon the poor in order to remove an old burden, to increase by one act the poverty which the other was intended to diminish. Social Reform financed by Protection is an economic contradiction. The money required to improve the condition of the poor must be taken from the rich, if it is to be of any practical use. The heaviest of the new taxes were therefore placed, according to a graduated scale, upon the payers of income tax, the inheritors of large estates, and the recipients of unearned increments from land. These taxes had one principle in common. They were based, not upon the enjoyment of property, but the method of its acquisition. Those who drew incomes from permanent investments were taxed more heavily than those whose prosperity depended upon their personal exertions, and the owners of property, which was a natural monopoly and grew in value without any effort of their own, were compelled to pay charges, from which the owners of property of other kinds were exempted. Other taxes were imposed upon

the luxuries of the working classes. These would in any case be paid by those who could afford them, and would not deprive a poor man of anything which was a real necessity of life.

The arguments against the Budget were characteristic of their plutocratic origin. The class which had used Imperialist sentiment in the interest of its foreign investments, and had proposed at once to finance its military exploits and to increase its wealth by taxation of the common people, naturally resented this increase of its own fiscal burdens. The super-tax on incomes of more than £5,000 a year was described as a penalty upon thrift and enterprise, and it was urged with most patriotic zeal that these appropriations of surplus wealth would produce unemployment. The answer to the first argument is that incomes and accumulations of a size to be affected by the new taxes are not produced by thrift, in any real sense of the word, nor will the enterprise which produces them be checked by such trifling deductions. Enterprise was as vigorous and successful fifty years ago, when £10,000 a year was a very large income, as it is now, when incomes of £50,000 and £100,000, are almost as common. A certain definite inducement is required to stimulate a man to the utmost use of his capacity for producing wealth. Beyond that limit all that he earns is sheer waste, and uneconomic remuneration which evokes no further effort. Upon that surplus, and upon that only, do the new taxes operate. The argument from unemployment is more specious. It is that, deprived of the money required for income tax and death duties, the more prosperous citizens will be compelled to dismiss some of their servants. During the discussion of the Budget, the general public learnt, for the first time, that those wealthy persons who spent money on horses and dogs, motor-cars, jewellery, and china, shooting-boxes, racing stables, and rock-gardens were animated by no selfish love of their own ease and comfort, but by a disinterested passion for providing remunerative labour for the common people. The argument was partial. It dealt only with the taxes of the Budget, and ignored the alternative taxes of Tariff Reform. The problem was to raise money. Whatever form the taxation took, it must

deprive the taxpayer of his power of spending money and employing labour. If £1,000 was paid by a man with £20,000 a year, his power to employ motormen and gardeners, jockeys, gamekeepers, and dealers in pictures and jewellery was reduced by precisely that amount. But if the same sum is paid by a thousand cotton operatives, their power to employ butchers, bakers, tailors, and bootmakers is equally reduced. The reduction of employment is precisely the same in each case, whether the £1,000 is taxed out of one rich man or out of a thousand poor men. But there is an infinite difference in the other consequences of the two systems of taxation. The rich man paying the £1,000 is not deprived of anything which contributes to his present efficiency, to his future security, or to his reasonable enjoyment of life.[^[359]] The poor men paying the same sum may suffer in any one of the three ways. A charge of sixpence a week upon an artisan who earns twenty-five shillings a week may be the difference between sufficiency and insufficiency. A charge of £1,000 a year upon the head of a family who earns, or receives without earning, £20,000 a year leaves him with everything which could be required for the fullest development of all his natural capacities. Taxation of poverty cripples life. Taxation of wealth does not. The new Liberalism, seeking to extend life, must draw upon abundance and superfluity.

In their economic proposals the Liberal Governments since 1906 have thus advanced along the old line towards the more complete emancipation of the individual. If they have interfered with liberty, they have interfered with liberty on one side only to enlarge it on another, and the money required for reform has been so provided as to reduce by as little as possible individual capacity for growth. Whatever the particular defects of these

social reforms may be, their general character has been as Liberal as that of the reforms of 1832 and 1868. In other matters they have met with varied success. Their repayment of debt and their refusal to continue the wasteful policy of borrowing for the construction of works have followed the best traditions of Peel and Gladstone, though Mr. Lloyd George's treatment of the surplus of 1912 affords a vicious precedent for less economical successors. The Irish University Act, the Home Rule Bill, and the Welsh Disestablishment Bill are partly recognitions of the principle of nationality, concessions to the demand that matters of local concern shall be regulated by local opinion. They also express the other Liberal principle, that sects shall be equal in the State. Recent demonstrations in Ulster, the persecution of Catholic and Liberal workmen in the shipyards of Belfast, and speeches which reveal a ferocity of religious bigotry equal to that of the seventeenth century, have confirmed rather than weakened Liberal belief in Home Rule. So long as one section of Irish society looks to England as the successor of an ancient enemy, and the other looks to her as a protector against the descendants of those whom their fathers kept beneath their heel, so long will incompatibility of temper exist. As soon as possible Liberals intend to put the inhabitants of Ireland in such a position that, ceasing to batten upon the exhumed remains of mediæval controversies, they may discover, in the course of managing their joint affairs, that they are only Irishmen after all. The various Education Bills seem to have only partially expressed Liberal principles. It is impossible, in a country where sharply divided sects exist side by side, to establish a system which shall completely satisfy any party. Denominationalists and undenominationalists must agree upon mutual concessions. No practical hardship is done where denominational schools, with teachers subjected to denominational tests, are confined to the instruction of children whose parents approve of such a system. The demand of some Nonconformists, that they should not be compelled to pay for denominational teaching, cannot be recognized unless the demand of some Churchmen and all Catholics,

that they should not be compelled to pay for undenominational teaching, is also recognized. Whatever logical answer there may be to the second, a Liberal State, accepting the equality of all sects as its first principle, must give them precisely the same liberty as the first. If a Churchman is not to count for more than a Dissenter, a Dissenter is not to count for more than a Churchman. Where the denominationalist case passes from a reasonable request for justice to the assertion of an insolent and intolerable claim to control the opinions of others is when it requires that any school, which was founded for denominational purposes, shall be maintained by public money as a denominational school, with denominational teachers, for the instruction of Nonconformist children. No Liberal can have regard to this claim, not to teach their own opinions to their own children, but to teach their own opinions to other people's children. Nothing can justify this part of the denominationalist case, which would not also justify a grant from the national Exchequer to the Church of England for a mission to convert Dissenters. So far as the recent proposals tend to overthrow this denominational control of schools to which the children of Nonconformist parents are compelled by circumstances to go, they are as purely Liberal as the repeal of the Test Act or the abolition of the Church monopoly of the Universities.