A Short History of English Liberalism

by W. Lyon Blease

The same characteristic difference between the desire to adapt an institution to the encouragement of individual growth and the desire to compel individual growth to the efficient working of an institution peeps out, even where the practical proposals of the two parties appear to be identical. A Liberal supports State education because it puts the poor man into fuller possession of himself. A Tory supports it because an ignorant poor man is likely to be turbulent and to make attacks upon the institution of property. A Liberal supports a Mental Deficiency Bill because it protects feeble-minded persons against their neighbours and against themselves. A Tory supports it because it discourages the breeding of types which he regards as useless to the State. While the general attitude of Toryism to the economic reforms of modern Liberalism has been hostile, a small

section of the Tory party has shown itself ready enough to support, and even to originate schemes which interfere with economic freedom and the rights of property. But the motives of the Liberal and the Tory social reformers are not the same. The one aims at private happiness, the other at public utility. "We would endeavour," said Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, "to secure to every man the best conditions of living, and so far as can be done by laws and customs, to secure him also an equal chance with others of a useful and happy life."[^[17]] "The essence of our policy," says Lord Willoughby de Broke, "is to give each individual the elements that will afford him an opportunity of at least living a free and a decorous existence, and the opportunity to raise himself or herself to the highest point of moral and material efficiency."[^[18]] The emphasis on happiness in the one passage and on efficiency in the other shows precisely the difference in the objects of the two men. The first is personal, the second instrumental. The Liberal conception of the State makes the development of the individual an end in itself. The Tory conception makes it a means of public advantage, of obtaining workers for national industries and soldiers for national armies, and it is accompanied by proposals for conscription, protection, and the maintenance of popular education at a low level, which are redolent of restriction and subordination. A Tory journalist puts the matter more precisely: "If Unionism is to recover the confidence of the masses it must recognize their claim to a fuller and a happier life. Only in this way can it serve the great causes which it has at heart. We stand for the Empire. An Imperial people cannot be built up in squalor and poverty, when every thought is absorbed by the provision of the daily bread. We cannot get a hearing for Imperial causes until we have brought happiness into the homes of the people."[^[19]] The Tory makes its inhabitants happy for the sake of the Empire. The Liberal has no use for the Empire unless it makes its inhabitants happy.

Modern Toryism is identified with Imperialism, and, except for the relics of old controversies between sects, most of the antagonism of Liberal and Tory centres to-day about the Empire. The most definite opposition is to be observed in original conceptions. To the Tory, the Empire seems to be something in itself; he is impressed with its size, its wealth, its population; the mere existence of such a huge fabric, efficiently maintained, under the national flag, satisfies him. The Liberal is more concerned with what the Empire represents, with its maintenance of individual liberty, with its development of the subject peoples which it contains, with its encouragement to exploitation, with its implied antagonism to foreign peoples, with its increase of the cost of armaments, and with its effect upon the temper of domestic government. He is not, as a practical statesman, concerned to evacuate any part of this vast inheritance. "The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty." But he looks with suspicion upon any attempt to increase it, he encourages every transfer of control to local authorities, he insists that where races of an inferior civilization are incorporated their affairs shall be managed in their interest and not in that of the conquering race, and he views with constant apprehension the inclusion of such races because he knows that their despotic government must threaten the existence of his own free institutions. If the Empire is justified at all, it is justified by the ideals which it expresses, and by nothing else.

The better Imperial idea was thus described a few years ago by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain: "We, in our Colonial policy, as fast as we acquire new territory and develop it, develop it as trustees of civilization for the commerce of the world. We offer in all these markets over which our flag floats the same opportunities, the same open field, to foreigners that we offer to our own subjects, and upon the same terms. In that policy we stand alone, because all other nations, as fast as they acquire new territory—acting, as I believe, most mistakenly in their own interests, and, above all, in the interests of the countries that they administer—all other nations seek at once to secure the

monopoly for their own products by preferential and other methods."[^[20]] These are noble and generous words. The conception of a rich and powerful race extending the blessings of order, good government, and industrial enterprise into the backward parts of the earth for the universal benefit of all mankind is a magnificent conception. But if it ever was Imperialism it is not the Imperialism of to-day. In less than ten years the speaker denied himself. The trustees of civilization became national egoists, subordinating all others to their own ascendancy. The free and open market was made a national monopoly, and British subjects arrogated to themselves all the exclusive privileges which had been "most mistakenly" reserved to themselves by other nations. The deterioration of generosity has seldom been so swift and so complete. In 1912 Mr. Chamberlain's successor in the leadership of Protectionist Imperialism makes the exclusion of the foreigner the very essence of Empire. "Co-operation in war was a vital necessity; but there could never be real co-operation in war unless there first had been co-operation in peace. It was for that reason that Unionists had advocated, and intended to advocate, the policy of Imperial preference. All the Dominions had urged the Mother Country to adopt in trade—and in everything else—that principle which would enable one portion of the Empire to treat all other portions of the Empire on better terms than were given to the rest of the world." The whole basis of the Empire is thus made to be hostility towards foreign peoples, and instead of war being a hateful necessity, undertaken to preserve the ideals for which the Empire stands, it becomes itself the first object of the Empire, to which all its other possibilities must be sacrificed.

The Empire, as conceived by modern Imperialists, is in fact the negation of Liberalism. Domestic liberty, local independence, economic freedom, the development of inferior races, all must be sacrificed to the idea of an isolated and mechanically efficient unity. "The Unionist policy is a policy of union and strength. The Unionists say: As we are faced by great dangers,

let us hold to the tried and proved national organization which was devised to meet such dangers in the past. And they say also: Let us have peace between the classes, for division in that way is even more dangerous than the division of the United Kingdom into its separate tribes or parishes.... We must keep united or we will be destroyed. But the Unionists go farther, and they say: We must be united not only as a United Kingdom but as a British Empire. Old England by herself may not have the strength to face the enormous forces now being arrayed against her. In the same way the Dominions by themselves have not the strength to maintain their freedom against possible attacks. Let us therefore combine, and then we shall be like the bundle of faggots, impossible to break. Now this policy of Imperial union cannot be achieved by sentiment alone. Sentiment is an excellent thing; but as part of the Empire is Dutch and part French, and as even British colonists tend to forget the Mother Country and look upon their own new country as the centre and the boundary of their patriotism, we need the perpetual unifier of material interest. Where a man's treasure is, there shall his heart be also." Therefore we must tax imported foodstuffs in order to give a preference to the Colonies. If we do not, "What are we to offer to Canada in the way of a material interest strong enough to make her foreign policy identical with ours?"[^[21]]

This is the subordination of everything to organization. Ireland is to be governed against its will, the poorer classes are to be kept down by force or by indulgence, the industrial and commercial freedom of the Colonies and the Mother Country is to be fettered by artificial bonds of trade, in order that

Germany may be kept in her place. The illustration of the bundle of faggots will serve for the Liberal as well as for the Tory. What the Liberal wants is not a bundle of dead wood, but a group of living and growing trees about a parent stem, each planted freely in the soil and drawing from it its own sustenance.