What we believe of the Divine Love, thus dealing with human transgression, we may well believe of human love, when it is called by duty to chastise unrighteousness. I do not suppose that John Stuart Mill was actuated by hatred of Palmer or Pritchard or any other famous malefactor of his time when he said that there are some people so bad that they "ought to be blotted out of the catalogue of living men." It was the dispassionate judgment of philosophy on crime. When the convicted murderer exclaimed, "Don't condemn me to death; I am not fit to die!" a great Judge replied, "I know nothing about that; I only know that you are not fit to live"; but I do not suppose that he hated the wretch in the dock. Even so, though it may be our duty to love our enemies as our fellow-citizens in the kingdom of God, we need not shrink, when the time comes, from being the ministers of that righteous vengeance which, according to the immutable order of the world, is prepared for impenitent wrong-doing.



VI

HATRED AND LOVE

I lately saw the following sentence quoted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: "Hatred steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do." The enlightened conscience of humanity (to say nothing of Christianity) repudiates this sentiment as ethically unsound and historically untrue; and yet, erroneous as it is, it is worth pondering for the sake of a truth which it overstates.

However little we may like to make the confession in the twentieth century of the Christian era, hatred is a very real power, and there is more of it at work in civilized society than we always recognize. It is, in truth, an abiding element of human nature, and is one of those instincts which we share with the lower animals. "The great cur showed his teeth; and the devilish instincts of his old wolf-ancestry looked out from his eyes, and yawned in his wide mouth and deep red gullet." Oliver Wendell Holmes was describing a dog's savagery; but he would have been the first to admit that an exactly similar spirit may be concealed—and not always concealed—in a human frame. We have lived so long, if not under the domination, still in the profession, of the Christian ethic, that people generally are ashamed to avow a glaringly anti-Christian feeling. Hence the poignancy of the bitter saying: "I forgive him as a Christian—which means that I don't forgive him at all." Under a decent, though hypocritical, veil of religious commonplace, men go on hating one another very much as they hated in Patriarchal Palestine or Imperial Rome.

Hatred generally has a personal root. An injury or an insult received in youth may colour the feelings and actions of a whole lifetime. "Revenge is a dish which can be eaten cold"; and there are unhappy natures which know no enjoyment so keen as the satisfaction of a long-cherished grudge. There is an even deeper depravity which hates just in proportion to benefits received; which hates because it is enraged by a high example; which hates even more virulently because the object of its hatred is meek or weak or pitiable. "I have read of a woman who said that she never saw a cripple without longing to throw a stone at him. Do you comprehend what she meant? No? Well, I do." It was a woman who wrote the words.

The less abhorrent sort of hatred (if one can discriminate where all is abominable) is the hatred which has no personal root, but is roused by invincible dislike of a principle or a cause. To this type belong controversial hatreds, political hatreds, international hatreds. Jael is the supreme instance of this hatred in action, and it is only fair to assume that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had this kind of hatred in his mind when he wrote the sentence which I quoted above. But hatred, which begins impersonally, has a dangerous habit of becoming personal as it warms to its work; and an emotion which started by merely wishing to check a wrong deed may develop before long into a strong desire to torture the wrong-doer. Whatever be the source from which it springs, hatred is a powerful and an energetic principle. It is capable, as we all know, of enormous crimes; but it does not despise the pettiest methods by which it can injure its victim. "Hatred," said George Eliot, "is like fire—it makes even light rubbish deadly."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perfectly right when he says that hatred "steels the mind and sets the resolution." If he had stopped there, I should not have questioned his theory. Again and again one has seen indolent, flabby, and irresolute natures stimulated to activity and "steeled" into hardness by the deep, though perhaps unuttered, desire to repay an insult or avenge an injury. It is in his superlative that Sir Arthur goes astray. When he affirms that hatred "steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do," his psychology is curiously at fault. There is another emotion quite as powerful as hatred to "steel the mind and set the resolution"—and the name of this other emotion is love. It required some resolution and a "steeled" mind for Father Damien to give himself in early manhood to the service of a leper-struck island, living amid, and dying of, the foul disease which he set out to tend. It was love that steeled John Coleridge Patteson to encounter death at the hands of "savage men whom he loved, and for whose sake he gave up home and country and friends dearer than his life." There was "steel" in the resolve which drew Henry Martyn from the highest honours of Cambridge to preach and die in the fever-stricken solitude of Tokat; and "steel" in an earlier and even more memorable decision when Francis Xavier consecrated rank, learning, eloquence, wit, fascinating manners, and a mirthful heart, to the task of evangelizing India.

But it is not only in the missionary field, or in any other form of ecclesiastical activity, that the steeling effect of love on the human will is manifested. John Howard devoted the comforts and advantages which pertain to a position in the opulent Middle Class to the purely philanthropic work of Prison Reform; and Lord Shaftesbury used the richer boons of rank and eloquence and political opportunity for the deliverance of tortured lunatics, and climbing boys and factory slaves. If ever I knew a man whose resolution was "steeled," it was this honoured friend of my early manhood, and the steeling power was simply love. A humbler illustration of the same spirit may be supplied by the instance of one whom worldly people ridiculed and who "for fifty years seized every chance of doing kindness to a man who had tormented him at school"; and this though a boy's nature is "wax to receive, and marble to retain." The name of E. C. Hawtrey is little remembered now even by Eton men, but this tribute to the power of love ought not to be withheld.

I am only too painfully aware that we live just now in conditions in which love must take the aspect of severity; in which the mind must be "steeled" and the resolution "set" for a solemn work of international justice. But hatred will not help us; for hatred is fundamentally at variance with that moral law which we daily and hourly invoke as the sanction of our enterprise. Hatred is natural enough, and at least as old as the Fall of Man; but its doom was pronounced by a Teacher Who said to His disciples: "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another." Twelve men heard and heeded that new commandment, and they changed the face of the world. Are we to abjure the doctrine which wrought this change, and give heed to the blind guides who would lure us straight back to barbarism?

"What though they come with scroll and pen, And grave as a shaven clerk, By this sign shall ye know them, That they ruin and make dark;

"By thought a crawling ruin, By life a leaping mire, By a broken heart in the breast of the world, And the end of the world's desire;

"By God and man dishonoured, By death and life made vain, Know ye the old Barbarian, The Barbarian come again."[*]

[Footnote *: G. K. Chesterton.]



VII

THE TRIUMPHS OF ENDURANCE

"By your endurance ye shall make your souls your own." If the origin of this saying were unknown, one could fancy much ingenious conjecture about it; but no one, I think, would attribute it to an English source. An Englishman's idea of self-realization is action. If he is to be truly himself he must be doing something; life for him means energy. To be laid on one side, and to exist only as a spectator or a sufferer, is the last method of making his soul his own which would occur to him. Dolce far niente is a phrase which could never have originated on English soil. The greater the difficulties by which he is confronted, the more gnawing becomes the Englishman's, hunger for action. "Something must be done!" is his instinctive cry when dangers or perplexities arise, and he is feverishly eager to do it. What exactly "it" should be, and how it may be most wisely done, are secondary, and even tertiary, considerations. "Wisdom is profitable to direct"; but the need for wisdom is not so generally recognized in England as the need for courage or promptitude or vigour.

Some of the shallower natures find a substitute for action in speech. If only they talk loud enough and long enough, they feel that they are doing something valuable towards the desired end, and they find others, still weaker than themselves, who take their words at their own valuation. Who does not recall moments of the present war when the man-in-the-street has exclaimed, "That was a splendid speech of Blower's! I feel now that we are on the right line"; or, "After what Bellowell said last night, there can be no going back to the discredited policy"? The man-in-the-street did not realize that Blower's words are only articulated air, or that Bellowell could speak with equal effect whether his brief were to defend Belgium or to annex her. But alike the Englishman who acts and the Englishman who talks look askance on the people who think. Our national history is a history of action, in religion, in politics, in war, in discovery. It is only now and then that an Englishman can allow himself a moment for contemplation, for the endeavour to "see into the life of things," for contact with those spiritual realities of which phenomena are only the shadows. Burke did it, but then he was an Irishman. Lord Beaconsfield did it, but then he was a Jew. Gladstone did it, but then he was a Scotsman. May I add that the present Prime Minister does it, but then he is a Welshman? Englishmen, as a rule, are absorbed in action; it is to them a religion, and it takes the place of a philosophy.

At this moment all England is acting, from the King and the War Cabinet to the children who play at soldiers in the gutter. There is no distinction of class, or sex, or temperament. All alike feel that they must be doing something to win the war, and that they would die or go mad if they were restrained from action. Limitations, physical or mental, incapacities for effort, restrictions of opportunity, gall as they never galled before. To compare great things with small, the whole nation pulsates with the spirit of the fiercely contested cricket-match:

"Oh, good lads in the field they were, Laboured and ran and threw; But we that sat on the benches there Had the hardest work to do!"

Action, then, is the creed and the consolation of the English race, and God forbid that we should disparage that on which national salvation depends. The war must be won by action; but in the strain and stress of these tremendous days we are tempted to forget that there is something to be won or lost besides the war. It is possible to conquer on the Western front, and at the same time to be defeated on the not less important field of moral being. The promise which heads this paper was uttered in full view of an impending agony which should crush religion and civilization into powder. We can realize the consternation with which a patriotic audience heard those premonitions from the lips of a patriotic Teacher; but in the midst of all that was harrowing and heart-rending came the promise of triumph through endurance. "Ye shall make your souls your own." The gloomy and the cheerful prediction were alike made good.

"The East bow'd low before the blast In patient, deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again.

"So well she mused, a morning broke Across her spirit grey; A conquering, new-born joy awoke, And fill'd her life with day."

The Roman Eagles led a momentary triumph, but they fled before the newly discovered Cross. Endurance won.

And so it has been from that time to this. The triumphs of endurance have no end. The barbarism of the Caesars, the barbarism of Islam, the barbarism of Odin and Thor, all in turn did their uttermost to destroy the new religion. Persecution fell, not on armed men strong to resist, but on slaves and women and boys and girls. "We could tell of those who fought with savage beasts, yea, of maidens who stept to face them as coolly as a modern bully steps into the ring. We could tell of those who drank molten lead as cheerfully as we would the juice of the grape, and played with the red fire and the bickering flames as gaily as with golden curls." These were the people who by endurance made their souls their own; and, by carrying endurance even unto death, propagated the faith for which they gave their lives. It did not take Rome long to discover that "the blood of Christians is seed."

The victorious power of endurance is not yet exhausted; but, on the other hand, the peril of moral defeat must never be ignored. It was a strange coincidence that the most trying phase of a four-years' war should have occurred in the week which, for Western Christendom, commemorates the supreme example of endurance. As far as action is concerned, the national will is not in the slightest danger of collapse. The British nation will plan, and work and fight for ever, if need be. Our only danger is in the moral field. Though our power of action is undiminished, our power of endurance may ebb. We may begin to cry, in our impatience, "Lord, how long?"; to repine against the fate which condemns us to this protracted agony; to question within ourselves whether the cause which we profess to serve is really worth the sacrifices which it entails. It is just by mastering these rebellious tendencies that we can make our souls our own. If we went into the war believing in the sacredness of Freedom, Brotherhood, and Right against Might, it would be a moral collapse to emerge from it believers in tyranny, imperialism, and the rule of the strong. "He that endureth to the end shall be saved." On that "end" we must keep heart and eye unflinchingly fixed; and strive to add one more to the age-long triumphs of endurance.



VIII

A SOLEMN FARCE

Sweet to the antiquarian palate are the fragments of Norman French which still survive in the formularies of the Constitution. In Norman French the King acknowledges the inconceivable sums which from time to time his faithful Commons place at his disposal for the prosecution of the war. In Norman French the Peers of the Realm are summoned to their seats in Parliament which they adorn. In Norman French, the Royal Assent has just been given to a Bill which doubles the electorate and admits over six million women to the franchise. All these things are dear to the antiquary, the historian, and (perhaps we should add) the pedant, as witnessing to the unbroken continuity of our constitutional forms, though the substance of our polity has been altered beyond all recognition.

Another instance of Norman French which has lately emerged into unusual prominence is the "Conge d'elire." We can trace this "Licence to Elect" from the days of the Great Charter downwards; but it will suffice for my present purpose to recall the unrepealed legislation of Henry VIII. "It was then enacted that, at every future avoidance of a bishopric, the King may send to the Dean and Chapter his usual licence (called his 'Conge d'Elire') to proceed to election; which is always, accompanied by a Letter Missive from the King containing the name of the person whom he would have them elect; and if the Dean and Chapter delay their election above twelve days the nomination shall devolve to the King, who may then by Letters Patent appoint such person as he pleases.... And, if such Dean and Chapter do not elect in the manner by their Act appointed they shall incur all the penalties of a praemunire—that is, the loss of all civil rights, with forfeiture of lands, goods, and chattels, and imprisonment, during the Royal pleasure."

Such are the singular conditions under which the Church of England now exercises that right of electing her chief pastors which has been from the beginning the heritage of Christendom. It would be difficult to imagine a more dexterous use of chicanery, preserving the semblance but carefully precluding the reality of a free choice. We all know something of Deans and Chapters—the well-endowed inhabitants of cathedral closes—and of those "greater Chapters" which consist of Honorary Canons, longing for more substantial preferment. It would indeed require a very bold flight of fancy to imagine those worthy and comfortable men exposing themselves to the "loss of civil rights, the forfeiture of goods and chattels, and imprisonment during the King's pleasure," for a scruple of conscience about the orthodoxy of a divine recommended by the Crown. Truly in a capitular election, if anywhere, the better part of valour is discretion, and the Dean and Chapter of Hereford have realized this saving truth. But my view is wholly independent of local or personal issues, and is best expressed by these words of Arthur Stanton, true Catholic and true Liberal: "I am strongly in favour of Disestablishment, and always have been. The connexion between Church and State has done harm to both—more, however, to the Church. Take our plan of electing Bishops. In the early centuries they were elected by the people—as they ought to be. Now they are chosen, sometimes by a Tory, sometimes by a Radical Government. The Dean and Chapter meet and ask the guidance of the Holy Ghost to enable them to choose, knowing all the while they have the 'Letter Missive' in their pockets. To me this comes perilously near blasphemy."

But let us suppose an extreme case. Let us imagine a Dean and Chapter so deeply impressed by the unsuitableness of the Crown's nominee that they refuse to elect him. Here, again, the law dodges us. Except as a protest their refusal would have not the slightest effect. The Crown has nothing to do but issue Letters Patent in favour of its nominee, and he would be as secure of his bishopric as if the Chapter had chosen him with one consent of heart and voice. True, he would not yet be a Bishop; for the episcopal character can only be conferred by consecration, and at this point the Archbishop becomes responsible. To him the King signifies the fact that Dr. Proudie has been elected to the See of Barchester, requiring him to "confirm, invest, and consecrate" that divine. Should the Archbishop refuse compliance with this command, he exposes himself to exactly the same penalties as would be inflicted on a recalcitrant Chapter, only with this aggravation—that he has more to lose. When my good friend the Bishop of Oxford addressed the Archbishop of Canterbury, imploring him to withhold consecration from Dr. Henson, he made a valiant and faithful protest against what he holds to be a flagitious action on the part of the Crown; but, knowing the respected occupant of Lambeth as well as he does, I think he must have anticipated the reply which, as a matter of fact, he received.

Such being the absurdities and unrealities which surround the Conge d'Elire, one naturally asks, Why not abolish it? This question was raised in a pointed form by the late Mr. C. J. Monk, for many years Liberal M.P. for the City of Gloucester, who, in 1880, introduced a Bill to abolish the Conge and to place the appointment of Bishops formally, as it is really, in the hands of the Prime Minister. He urged the painful sense of unreality which clings to the whole transaction, and the injury to religion which is involved in thus paltering in a double sense with sacred forms and words. It is amusing to those who can recall the two men to remember that Mr. Monk was opposed by Lord Randolph Churchill, who thought he perceived in the proposal some dark design hostile to the interests of the Established Church; but the important speech was made by Gladstone. That great man, always greatest in debate when his case was weakest, opposed the abolition of the Conge. He deprecated any legislation which would interfere with one of the most delicate functions of the Crown, and he insisted that the true path of reform lay, not in the abolition of the form of election, but in an attempt to re-invest it with some elements of reality. This was well enough, and eminently characteristic of his reverence for ancient forms of constitutional action; but what was more surprising was that, speaking from long and intimate experience of its practical working he maintained that the Conge d'Elire, even under the nullifying conditions now attached to it, was "a moral check upon the prerogatives of the Crown," which worked well rather than ill. "I am," he said, "by no means prepared to say that, from partial information or error, a Minister might not make an appointment to which this moral obstacle might be set up with very beneficial effect. It would tend to secure care in the selections, and its importance cannot be overstated."

I must confess, with the greatest respect for my old leader, that the "importance" of the Conge d'Elire as a restraint upon the actions of the Prime Minister can be very easily "overstated." Indeed, the Conge could only be important if the Capitular Body to which the "Letter Missive" is addressed have the courage of conscientious disobedience, and were prepared to face, for the sake of imperilled truth, the anger of the powers that be and the laughter of the world. Courage of that type is a plant of slow growth in Established Churches; and as long as my friends hug the yoke of Establishment, I cannot sympathize with them when they cry out against its galling pressure. To complainants of that class the final word was addressed by Gladstone, nearly seventy years ago: "You have our decision: take your own; choose between the mess of pottage and the birthright of the Bride of Christ."



IV

POLITICS



I

MIRAGE

"Operations had to be temporarily suspended owing to the mirage." This sentence from one of Sir Stanley Maude's despatches struck me as parabolic. There are other, and vaster, issues than a strategic victory on the Diala River which have been "suspended owing to the mirage." Let us apply the parable.

The parched caravan sees, half a mile ahead, the gleaming lake which is to quench its thirst. It toils along over the intervening distance, only to find that Nature has been playing a trick. The vision has vanished, and what seemed to be water is really sand. There can be no more expressive image of disillusionment.

To follow the "Mirage" of receding triumph through long years of hope deferred was the lot of Labour generally, and it was especially the lot of agricultural labour. The artisans gained their political enfranchisement in 1867, and, though they made remarkably little use of it, still they had the power, if they had the will, to better their condition. But the agricultural labourers remained inarticulate, unnoticed, unrepresented. A Tory orator, said—and many of his class agreed with him, though they were too prudent to say it—that the labourer was no fitter for the vote than the beasts he tended. But there were others who knew the labourers by personal contact, and by friendly intercourse had been able to penetrate their necessary reserve; and we (for I was one of these) knew that our friends in the furrow and the cow-shed were at least as capable of forming a solid judgment as their brethren in the tailor's shop and the printing-works. There was nothing of the new Radicalism in this—it was as old as English history. The toilers on the land had always been aspiring towards freedom, though social pressure made them wisely dumb. Cobbett and Cartwright, and all the old reformers who kept the lamp of Freedom alive in the dark days of Pitt and Liverpool and Wellington, bore witness to the "deep sighing" of the agricultural poor, and noted with indignation the successive invasions of their freedom by Enclosure Acts and press-gangs and trials for sedition, and all the other implements of tyranny.

"The Good Old Code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes, And each old English peasant had his Good Old English spies To tempt his starving discontent with Good Old English lies, Then call the British Yeomanry to hush his peevish cries."

To a race of peasants thus enthralled and disciplined the Mirage appeared in the guise of the first Reform Bill. If only that Bill could pass into law, the reign of injustice and oppression would cease, starvation and misery would flee away, and the poor would rejoice in a new heaven and a new earth. But no sooner was the Royal Assent given to the Bill than the Mirage—that deceitful image of joy and refreshment—receded into the dim distance, and men woke to the disheartening fact that, though power had been transferred from the aristocracy to the middle class, the poor were as badly off as ever. The visible effects of that disillusionment were Chartism, rioting, and agrarian crime, and there was a deep undercurrent of sullen anger which seldom found expression. As late as the General Election of 1868 an old man in the duke-ridden borough of Woodstock declined to vote for the Liberal candidate expressly on the ground of disappointed hopes. Before 1832, he said, arms had been stored in his father's cottage to be used if the Lords threw out the Bill. They had passed it, and the arms were not required; but no one that he knew of had ever been a ha'porth the better for it; and he had never since meddled with politics, and never would again. In this case the despondency of old age was added to the despondency of disappointment; but among younger men hope was beginning to dawn again, and the Mirage beckoned with its treacherous gleam. The Agricultural Labourers' Union, starting on its pilgrimage from the very heart of England, forced the labourer's wants and claims upon the attention of the land-owners, the farmers, and the clergy.

Those who had been brought by early association into touch with the agricultural population knew only too well how deep and just was the discontent of the villages, and how keen the yearning for better chances. To secure the vote for the agricultural labourer seemed to be the first step towards the improvement of his lot. The General Election of 1880 was, as nearly as our constitutional forms admit, a plebiscite on foreign policy; but to many a man who was then beginning public life the emancipation of the labourer was an object quite as dear as the dethronement of Lord Beaconsfield. It was not for nothing that we had read Hodge and His Masters, and we were resolved that henceforward "Hodge" should be not a serf or a cipher, but a free man and a self-governing citizen.

We carried our Bill in 1884, and as the General Election of 1885 drew on, it was touching to feel the labourer's gratitude to all who had helped him in the attainment of his rights. By that time Gladstone had lost a great deal of his popularity in the towns, where Chamberlain was the hero. But in the rural districts the people worshipped Gladstone, and neither knew nor cared for any other politician. His was the name to conjure with. His picture hung in every cottage. His speeches were studied and thumbed by hard hands till the paper was frayed into tatters. It was Gladstone who had won the vote for the labourer, and it was Gladstone who was to lead them into the Land of Promise. "Three Acres and a Cow," from being a joke, had passed into a watchword, though Gladstone had never given it the faintest sanction. And the labourers vaguely believed that the possession of the vote would bring them some material benefit. So they voted for Gladstone with solid enthusiasm, and placed their Mirage in his return to power. But alas! they only realized a new and a more tragical disappointment. In January, 1886, an amendment to the Address embodying the principle of "Three Acres and a Cow" was carried against the Tory Government; Gladstone became Prime Minister, and the disconsolate labourers found that the Mirage had cheated them once again. It is not easy to depict the sorrow and mortification which ensued on this discovery. The vote, after all, was only a Dead Sea apple. The energies which were to have been bestowed on the creation of better surroundings for English labourers were suddenly transferred to the creation of an Irish Parliament, and in wide areas of rural population the labourers sank back again into hopelessness and inactivity. Once bit, twice shy. They had braved the wrath of their employers and all the banded influences of the Hall and the Vicarage in order to vote Liberal in December, 1885. They had got nothing by their constancy; and in six months, when they were again incited to the poll, they shook their heads and abstained. The disillusionment of the labourers gave the victory of 1886 to the Tories, and kept the Liberals out of power for twenty years.



II

MIST

"Mistiness is the Mother of Wisdom." If this sarcastic dogma be true, we are living in a generation pre-eminently wise. A "season of mists" it unquestionably is; whether it is equally marked by "mellow fruitfulness" is perhaps more disputable.

My path in life is metaphorically very much what Wordsworth's was literally. "I wander, lonely as a cloud that floats on high, o'er vales and hills." I find hills and vales alike shrouded in mist. Everyone is befogged, and the guesses as to where exactly we are and whither we are tending are various and perplexing. While all are, in truth, equally bewildered, people take their bewilderment in different ways. Some honestly confess that they cannot see a yard in front of them; others profess a more penetrating vision, and affect to be quite sure of what lies ahead. It is a matter of temperament; but the professors of clear sight are certainly less numerous than they were three years ago.

We are like men standing on a mountain when the mist rolls up from the valley. At first we all are very cheerful, and assure one another that it will pass away in half an hour, leaving our path quite clear. Then by degrees we begin to say that it promises to be a more tedious business than we expected, and we must just wait in patience till the clouds roll by. At length we frankly confess to one another that we have completely lost our bearings, and that we dare not move a foot for fear we should tumble into the abyss. In this awkward plight our "strength is to sit still"; but, even while we so sit, we try to keep ourselves warm by remembering that the most persistent mists do not last for ever.

In one section of society I hear voices of melancholy vaticination. "I don't believe," said one lady in my hearing—"I don't believe that we shall ever again see six-feet footmen with powdered hair," and a silent gloom settled on the company, only deepened by another lady, also attached to the old order, who murmured: "Ah! and powdered footmen are not the only things that we shall never see again." Within twenty-four hours of this depressing dialogue I encounter my democratic friend, the Editor of the Red Flag. He glories in the fact that Labour has "come into its own," and is quite sure that, unless it can get more to eat, it will cease to make munitions, and so will secure an early, if not a satisfactory, peace. In vain I suggest to my friend that his vision is obscured by the mist, and that the apparition which thus strangely exhilarates him is the creation of his own brain.

Then I turn to the politicians, and of these it is to be remarked that, however much befogged they may be, they always are certain that they see much more clearly than the world at large. This circumstance would invest their opinions with a peculiar authority, if only they did not contradict one another flat. We are doubling the electorate: what result will the General Election produce? Politicians who belong to the family of Mr. Despondency and his daughter, Muchafraid, reply that Monarchy will be abolished, Capital "conscripted" (delightful verb), debt repudiated, and Anarchy enthroned. Strangely dissimilar results are predicted by the Party-hacks, who, being by lifelong habit trained to applaud whatever Government does, announce with smug satisfaction that the British workman loves property, and will use his new powers to conserve it; adores the Crown, and feels that the House of Lords is the true protector of his liberties.

Again, there are publicists who (like myself) have all their lives proclaimed their belief in universal suffrage as the one guarantee of freedom. If we are consistent, we ought to rejoice in the prospect now unfolding itself before us; but perhaps the mist has got into our eyes. Our forefathers abolished the tyranny of the Crown. Successive Reform Acts have abolished the tyranny of class. But what about the tyranny of capital? Is Democracy safe from it?

I do not pretend to be clearer-sighted than my neighbours; but in the mist each of us sees the form of some evil which he specially dislikes; and to my thinking Bureaucracy is just as grave a menace to Freedom as Militarism, and in some ways graver, as being more plausible. We used to call ourselves Collectivists, and we rejoiced in the prospect of the State doing for us what we ought to do for ourselves. We voted Political Economy a dismal science (which it is), and felt sure that, if only the Government would take in hand the regulation of supply and demand, the inequalities of life would be adjusted, everyone would be well fed, and everyone would be happy. As far as we can see through the blinding mist which now surrounds us, it looks as if the State were about as competent to control trade as to control the weather. Bureaucracy is having its fling, and when the mist clears off it will stand revealed as a well-meant (and well-paid) imposture.

Closely related to all these problems is the problem of the women's vote. Here the mist is very thick indeed. Those who have always favoured it are naturally sanguine of good results. Women will vote for peace; women will vote for temperance; women will vote for everything that guards the sanctity of the home. Those who have opposed the change see very different consequences. Women will vote for war; women will vote as the clergyman bids them; women will vote for Socialism. All this is sheer guess-work, and very misty guess-work too.

And yet once more. There are (though this may to some seem strange) people who consider the Church at least as important as the State, and even more so, inasmuch as its concernments relate to an eternal instead of a transitory order. What are the prospects of the Church? Here the mists are thicker than ever. Is the ideal of the Free Church in the Free State any nearer realization than it was three years ago? All sorts of discordant voices reach me through the layers of cloud. Some cry, "Our one hope for national religion is to rivet tighter than ever the chains which bind the Church to the chariot-wheels of the State." Others reply, "Break those chains, and let us go free—even without a roof over our heads or a pound in our pockets." And there is a third section—the party which, as Newman said, attempts to steer between the Scylla of Aye and the Charybdis of No through the channel of no meaning, and this section cries for some reform which shall abolish the cynical mockery of the Conge d'Elire, and secure to the Church, while still established and endowed, the self-governing rights of a Free Church. In ecclesiastical quarters the mist is always particularly thick.

Certainly at this moment, if ever in our national life, we must be content to "walk by faith and not by sight." This chapter began with imagery, and with imagery it shall end. "I have often stood on some mountain peak, some Cumbrian or Alpine hill, over which the dim mists rolled; and suddenly, through one mighty rent in that cloudy curtain, I have seen the blue heaven in all its beauty, and, far below my feet, the rivers and cities and cornfields of the plain sparkled in the heavenly sunlight."

That is, in a figure, the vision for which we must hope and pray.



III

"DISSOLVING THROES"

I borrow my title from a poet.

"He grew old in an age he condemned; He looked on the rushing decay Of the times which had sheltered his youth; Felt the dissolving throes Of a social order he loved."

It seems odd that Matthew Arnold should have spoken thus about Wordsworth; for one would have expected that the man who wrote so gloriously of the French Revolution, "as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement," would have rejoiced in the new order which it established for all Europe. But the younger poet knew the elder with an intimacy which defies contradiction; and one must, I suppose, number Wordsworth among those who, in each succeeding age, have shed tears of useless regret over the unreturning past. Talleyrand said that, to know what an enjoyable thing life was capable of being, one must have been a member of the ancienne noblesse before the Revolution. It was the cynical and characteristic utterance of a nature singularly base; but even the divine Burke (though he had no personal or selfish interests in the matter) was convinced that the Revolution had not only destroyed political freedom, but also social welfare, and had "crushed everything respectable and virtuous in the nation." What, in the view of Burke and Talleyrand, the Revolution did for France, that, by a curious irony of fate, our attempt to defeat the Revolution did for England. Burke forced us into the Revolutionary War, and that war (as Gladstone once said in a letter to the present writer) "almost unmade the liberties, the Constitution, even the material interests and prosperity, of our country." Patriots like William Cobbett and Sydney Smith, though absolutely convinced that the war was just and necessary, doubted if England could ever rally from the immense strain which it had imposed on her resources, or regain the freedom which, in order to beat France, she had so lightly surrendered.

At a time when Manchester was unrepresented and Gatton sent two Members to Parliament, it was steadily maintained by lovers of the established order that the proposed enlargement of the electorate was "incompatible with a just equality of civil rights, or with the necessary restraints of social obligation." If it were carried, religion, morality, and property would perish together, and our venerable Constitution would topple down in ruins. "A thousand years have scarce sufficed to make England what she is: one hour may lay her in the dust." In 1861 J. W. Croker wrote to his patron, the great borough-monger Lord Hertford: "There can be no doubt that the Reform Bill is a stepping-stone in England to a republic, and in Ireland to separation. Both may happen without the Bill, but with it they are inevitable." Next year the Bill became law. Lord Bathurst cut off his pigtail, exclaiming: "Ichabod, for the glory is departed"—an exquisitely significant combination of act and word—and the Duke of Wellington announced that England had accomplished "a revolution by due course of law." In some sense the words were true. Political power had passed from the aristocracy to the middle class. The English equivalents of Talleyrand—the men who directly or in their ancestors had ruled England since 1688, had enjoyed power without responsibility, and privilege which alike Kings and mobs had questioned in vain—were filled with the wildest alarms. Emotional orators saw visions of the guillotine; calmer spirits anticipated the ballot-box; and the one implement of anarchy was scarcely more dreaded than the other.

Sixteen years passed. Property and freedom seemed pretty secure. Even privilege, though shaken, had not been overthrown; and a generation had grown up to which the fears of revolution seemed fantastic. Then suddenly came the uprising of the nations in '48; and once again "dissolving throes" were felt, with pain or joy according to the temperament of those who felt them. "We have seen," said Charles Greville, "such a stirring-up of all the elements of society as nobody ever dreamt of; we have seen a general saturnalia—ignorance, vanity, insolence, poverty, ambition, escaping from every kind of restraint, ranging over the world, and turning it topsy-turvy as it pleased. All Europe exhibits the result—a mass of ruin, terror, and despair." Matthew Arnold, young and ardent, and in some ways democratic, wrote in a different vein: "The hour of the hereditary peerage, and eldest sonship, and immense properties, has, I am convinced, as Lamartine would say, struck." Seventy years ago! And that "hour" has not struck yet!

The "dissolving throes" were lulled again, and I scarcely made themselves felt till 1866, when a mild attempt to admit the pick of the artisans to the electoral privileges of the middle class woke the panic-stricken vehemence of Robert Lowe. "If," he asked, "you want venality, ignorance, drunkenness, and the means of intimidation; if you want impulsive, unreflecting, and violent people, where will you go to look for them—to the top or to the bottom?" Well might Bishop Wilberforce report to a friend, "It was enough to make the flesh creep to hear Bob Lowe's prognostications for the future of England."

Next year the artisans got the vote, though the great Lord Shaftesbury, who knew more than most of his peers about working-men, plainly told the House of Lords that "a large proportion of the working classes have a deep and solemn conviction that property is not distributed as property ought to be; that some checks ought to be kept upon the accumulation of property in single hands; and that to take away by legislation that which is in excess with a view to bestowing it on those who have less, is not a breach of any law, human or Divine."

Yet once more. When in 1885 the agricultural labourers (of whom a Tory M.P. said that they were no fitter for a vote than the beasts they tended), were admitted to the franchise, the same terrors shook the squirearchy. We were warned that the land would soon be broken up into small holdings; that sport would become impossible; and that "the stately homes of England" must all be closed, for lack of money to keep them open. The country, we were told, had seen its best days, and "Merry England" had vanished for ever.

I only recall these "dissolving throes," real or imaginary, because I fancy that just now they are again making themselves felt, and perhaps with better reason than ever before in our history. People who venture to look ahead are asking themselves this question: If this war goes on much longer, what sort of England will emerge? Some are looking forward with rapture to a new heaven and a new earth; others dread the impending destruction "of a social order they loved." Can we not trace something of this dread in Lord Lansdowne's much-canvassed letter? He is one of the most patriotic and most experienced men in public life; he "looks on the rushing decay of the times which sheltered his youth"; and it may well be that he is striving to avert what seems to him a social catastrophe.



IV

INSTITUTIONS AND CHARACTER

As a rule, I call a spade a spade. When I mean The Times, I say The Times, and I condemn the old-fashioned twaddle of talking about "a morning contemporary." But to-day I depart from my rule and content myself with saying that I lately read in an important newspaper a letter dealing with Mr. Asquith's distinction between "Prussian Militarism" and "German Democracy." For my own part, I did not think that distinction very sound. The experience of the last three years has led me to the conclusion that the German democracy is to the full as bellicose as the military caste, and that it has in no way dissociated itself from the abominable crimes against decency and humanity which the military caste has committed. I hold that the German people, as we know it to-day, is brutalized; but when one thus frames an indictment against a whole nation, one is bound to ask oneself what it is that has produced so calamitous a result. How can a whole nation go wrong? Has any race a "double dose of original sin"? I do not believe it. Human nature as it leaves the Creator's hand is pretty much the same everywhere; and when we see it deformed and degraded, we must look for the influence which has been its bane. In dealing with individuals the enquiry is comparatively simple, and the answer not far to seek. But when we deal with nations we cannot, as a rule; point to a single figure, or even a group of figures, and say, "He, or they, did the mischief." We are forced to look wider and deeper, and we shall be well advised if we learn from Burke to realize "the mastery of laws, institutions, and government over the character and happiness of man." Let me apply Burke's teaching to the case before us.

The writer of the letter which I am discussing has a whole-hearted dislike of the Germans, and especially of the Prussians; charges them with "cruelty, brutal arrogance, deceit, cunning, manners and customs below those of savages"; includes in the indictment professors, commercial men, and women; recites the hideous list of crimes committed during the present war; and roundly says that, however you label him, "the Prussian will always remain a beast."

I dispute none of these propositions. I believe them to be sadly and bitterly true; but if I am to follow Burke's counsel, I must enquire into the "laws, institutions, and government" which have prevailed in Germany, and which have exercised so disastrous a "mastery over the character and happiness of man." In this enquiry it would be obvious to touch military ascendency, despotic monarchy, representative institutions deprived of effective power, administration made omnipotent, and bureaucratic interference with every detail of human life. Sydney Smith's words about unreformed England apply perfectly to modern Germany. "Of all ingenious instruments of despotism I most commend a popular assembly where the majority are paid and hired, and a few bold and able men, by their brave speeches, make the people believe they are free."

But for our present purpose I must concentrate attention on another institution which has had an even more direct and practical bearing on the character of the German people—and this is the enforcement of military service. This, like every other institution, must be judged by its effects on the character of those who are subject to it. The writer of the letter holds that "the only good thing about the German nation" is the "national service through which all men pass, and which makes soldiers of all not physically unfit, and which inculcates patriotism, loyalty, obedience, courage, discipline, duty." Now, these words, read in connexion with the description of the German people quoted above, suggest a puzzling problem. The Germans are cruel, brutally arrogant, deceitful, and cunning, and "the Prussian will always remain a beast." Yet these same people have all passed through a discipline "which inculcates patriotism, loyalty, obedience, courage, discipline, duty." Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? Does the same system make men patriotic and cruel, loyal and arrogant, obedient and deceitful, courageous and cunning, dutiful and beastly?

Perhaps it does. I can conceive some of these pairs of qualities united in a single character. A man might be a zealous patriot, and yet horribly cruel; loyal to his Sovereign, but arrogant to his inferiors; obedient to authority, yet deceitful among coequals; courageous in danger, yet cunning in avoiding it; dutiful according to his own standard of duty, and yet as "beastly" as the torturers of Belgium. But a system which produces such a very chequered type of character is scarcely to be commended.

Now, the writer might reply, "I only said that the military system inculcated certain virtues. I did not say that it ensured them." Then it fails. If it has produced only the "vile German race" which the writer so justly dislikes, unredeemed by any of the virtues which it "inculcates," then it has nothing to say for itself. It stands confessed as an unmixed evil.

It is right to expose a logical fallacy, but I am not fond of the attempt to obscure by logic-chopping what is a writer's real meaning. I will therefore say that, as far as I can make out, what this particular writer really believes is that the German people, through some innate and incurable frowardness of disposition, have turned the inestimable blessings of compulsory soldiership to their own moral undoing, and have made themselves wholly bad and beastly, in spite of a beneficent institution which would have made them good and even pleasant.

Here I take leave to differ, and to range myself on the side of Burke. Great, indeed—nay, incalculable—is "the mastery of laws, institutions, and government over the character and happiness of man." The system is known by its fruits. We may think as badly as we like of the Germans—as badly as they deserve—but we must remember the "laws, institutions, and government" that have dominated their national development. And this is not only a matter of just and rational thinking, but is also a counsel of safety for ourselves. If, as a result of this war, we allow our personal and social liberties (rightly suspended for the moment) to be permanently abolished or restricted; and, above all, if we bend our necks to the yoke of a military despotism; we shall be inviting a profound degradation of our national character. It would indeed be a tragical consummation of our great fight for Freedom if, when it is over, the other nations could point to us and say: "England has sunk to the moral level of Germany."



V

REVOLUTION—AND RATIONS

"A revolution by due course of law." This, as we have seen, was the Duke of Wellington's description of the Reform Act of 1832, which transferred the government of England from the aristocracy to the middle class. Though eventually accomplished by law, it did not pass without bloodshed and conflagration; and timid people satisfied themselves that not only the downfall of England, but the end of the world, must be close at hand.

Twenty years passed, and nothing in particular happened. National wealth increased, all established institutions seemed secure, and people began to forget that they had passed through a revolution. Then arose John Bright, reminding the working-men of the Midlands that their fathers "had shaken the citadel of Privilege to its base," and inciting them to give the tottering structure another push. A second revolution seemed to be drawing near. Dickens put on record, in chapter xxvi. of Little Dorrit, the alarms which agitated respectable and reactionary circles. The one point, as Dickens remarked, on which everyone agreed, was that the country was in very imminent danger, and wanted all the preserving it could get. Presently, but not till 1867, the second revolution arrived. Some of the finest oratory ever heard in England was lavished on the question whether the power, formerly exercised by the aristocracy and more recently by the middle class, was to be extended to the artisans. The great Lord Shaftesbury predicted "the destruction of the Empire," and Bishop Wilberforce "did not see how we were to escape fundamental changes in Church and State." "History," exclaimed Lowe, "may record other catastrophes as signal and as disastrous, but none so wanton and so disgraceful." However, the artisans made a singularly moderate use of their newly acquired power; voted Conservative as often as they voted Liberal; and so again belied the apprehensions of the alarmists.

When the workman of the town had been enfranchised, it was impossible to keep his brother who worked on the land permanently in the position of a serf or a cipher. So we began to agitate for the "County Franchise"; and once again the cry of "Revolution" was heard—perhaps in its most typical form from the lips of a Tory M.P., who, as I said before, affirmed that the labourer was no fitter for the suffrage than the beasts he tended. Even ten years later, Lord Goschen, who was by nature distrustful of popular movements, prognosticated that, if ever the Union with Ireland were lost, it would be lost through the votes of the agricultural labourers. To those who, like myself, were brought up in agricultural districts, the notion that the labourer was a revolutionary seemed strangely unreal; but it was a haunting obsession in the minds of clubmen and town-dwellers.

So, in each succeeding decade, the next extension of constitutional freedom has been acclaimed by its supporters as an instalment of the millennium, and denounced by its opponents as the destruction of social order. So it had been, time out of mind; and so it would have been to the end had not the European war burst upon us, and shaken us out of all our habitual concernments. Now "the oracles are dumb." The voices, of lugubrious prophecy are silent. The Reform Act which has become law this year is beyond doubt the greatest revolution which has as yet been effected "by due course of law." It has doubled the electorate; it has enfranchised the women; it has practically established universal suffrage; it has placed all property, as well as all policy, under the control of a class, if only that class chooses to vote and act together. All these effects of the Act (except one) are objects which I have desired to see attained ever since I was a boy at Harrow, supporting the present Bishop of Oxford and the late Lord Grey in the School Debating Society; so it is not for me to express even the faintest apprehension of evil results. But I am deliberately of opinion that the change now effected in our electoral arrangements is of farther-reaching significance than the substitution of a republic for a monarchy; and the amazing part of the business is that no one has protested at any stage of it. We were told at the beginning of the war that there was to be no controversial legislation till it was over. That engagement was broken; no one protested. A vitally important transaction was removed from the purview of Parliament to a secret conference; no one protested. If we suggested that the House of Commons was morally and constitutionally dead, and that it ought to renew its life by an appeal to the constituencies before it enforced a revolution, we were told that it was impossible to hold a General Election with the soldiers all out of the country; but now it seems that this is to be the next step, and no one protests against it.

But these may be dismissed as constitutional pedantries. So be it. The Whigs, who made the Constitution, may be pardoned if they have a sneaking regard for their handiwork. Much more astonishing is the fact that no resistance was offered on behalf of wealth and privilege by the classes who have most of both to lose. The men of L100,000 a year—not numerous, according to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but influential—have been as meekly acquiescent as clerks or curates. Men who own half a county have smiled on an Act which will destroy territorial domination. What is the explanation? Was their silence due to patriotism or to fear? Did they laudably decline the responsibility of opposing a Government which is conducting a great war? Or did they, less laudably, shrink from the prospect of appearing as the inveterate enemies of a social and economic revolution which they saw to be inevitable? Let us charitably incline to the former hypothesis.

But there is something about this, our most recent revolution, which is even more astonishing than the absence of opposition and panic. It is that no one, whether friend or foe, has paid the least attention to the subject. In ordinary society it has been impossible to turn the conversation that way. Any topic in the world—but pre-eminently Rations,—seemed more vital and more pressing. "The Reform Bill? What Bill is that? Tell me, do you find it very difficult to get sugar?" "The Speaker's Conference? Haven't heard about it. I'm sure James Lowther won't allow them to do anything very silly—but I really cannot imagine how we are to get on without meat." Or yet again: A triumphant Suffragist said to a Belgravian sister: "So we've got the vote at last!" "What vote?" replied the sister. "Surely we've had a vote for ever so long? I'm sure I have, though I never used it."

When the real history of this wonderful war is written, methinks the historian will reckon among its most amazing features the fact that it so absorbed the mind of the nation as to make possible a 'silent revolution.'



VI

"THE INCOMPATIBLES"

My title is borrowed from one of the few Englishmen who have ever written wisely about Ireland. Our ways of trying to pacify our Sister Kingdom have been many and various—Disestablishment Acts, Land Acts, Arrears Acts, Coercion Acts, Crimes Acts, and every other variety of legislative experiment; but through them all Ireland remained unpacified. She showed no gratitude for boons which she had not asked, and seemed to crave for something which, with the best intentions in the world, England was unable to supply. This failure on the part of England may have been due to the fact that Gladstone, who, of all English statesmen, most concerned himself with Irish affairs, knew nothing of Ireland by personal contact. It is startling to read, in Lord Morley's Life this casual record of his former chief: "In October, 1878, Gladstone paid his first and only visit to Ireland. It lasted little more than three weeks, and did not extend beyond a very decidedly English pale.... Of the multitude of strange things distinctly Irish, he had little chance of seeing much."

One of the "strange things" which he did not see was the resolve of Ireland to be recognized as a nation; and that recognition was the "something" which, as I said just now, England was unable or unwilling to supply. Late in life Gladstone discovered that Ireland was a nation, and ought to be treated as such. As regards his own share in the matter, the change came too late, and he went to the grave leaving Ireland (in spite of two Home Rule Bills) still unpacified; but his influence has lived and wrought, not only in the Liberal party. The principle of Irish nationality has been recognized in legislative form, and the most law-abiding citizen in Great Britain might drink that toast of "Ireland a Nation" which aforetime was considered seditious, if not treasonable.

It was certainly a very odd prejudice of English Philistinism which prevented us, for so many centuries, from recognizing a fact so palpable as Irish nationality. If ever a race of men had characteristics of its own, marking it out from its nearest neighbours, that race is the Irish, and among the best of those characteristics are chastity, courtesy, hospitality, humour, and fine manners. The intense Catholicism of Ireland may be difficult for Protestants to applaud; yet most certainly those who fail to take it into account are hopelessly handicapped in the attempt to deal with Irish problems. The Irish are born fighters. One of the most splendid passages which even Irish oratory ever produced was that in which Sheill protested against the insolence of stigmatizing the countrymen of Wellington as "aliens" from England, and no policy could be more suicidal than that which deflects the soldiership of Ireland from the British cause.

Charles James Fox shares with Edmund Burke the praise of having brought the ideas which we call Liberal to bear on Irish government, and his words are at least as true to-day as when they were written: "We ought not to presume to legislate for a nation in whose feelings and affections, wants and interests, opinions and prejudices, we have no sympathy." Are "The Incompatibles" to be always incompatible, or can we now, even at the eleventh hour, make some effort to understand the working of the Irish temperament?

The incompatibility, as Matthew Arnold read it, is not between the two nations which Providence has so closely knit together, but between insolence, dulness, rigidity, on the one hand, and sensibility, quickness, flexibility, on the other. What Arnold lamented was that England has too often been represented in Ireland, and here also when Irish questions were discussed, by "the genuine, unmitigated Murdstone—the common middle-class Englishman, who has come forth from Salem House—and Mr. Creakle. He is seen in full force, of course, in the Protestant North; but throughout Ireland he is a prominent figure of the English garrison. Him the Irish see, see him only too much and too often"—and to see him is to dislike him, and the country which sent him forth.

Is there not a touch of Murdstone and Creakle in the present dealings of Parliament with Ireland? Forces greater than that of Salem House have decreed that Ireland is to have self-government, and have converted—for the astonishment of after-ages—Mr. Balfour and Lord Curzon into Home Rulers. Surely, if there is one question which, more conspicuously than another, a nation is entitled to settle for itself it is the question whether military service shall be compulsory. True, the legislative machinery of Home Rule is not yet in action; but legislative machinery is not the only method by which national sentiment can be ascertained. To introduce conscription into Ireland by an Act of the Imperial Parliament, after you have conceded to the Irish their claim to have a Parliament of their own, may not indeed be a breach of faith, but it surely is a breach of manners and good sense.



VII

FREEDOM'S NEW FRIENDS

Many, said the Greek proverb, are they who bear the mystic reed, but few are the true bacchanals. Many, in the present day, are they who make an outward display of devotion to Liberty, but few, methinks, are her real worshippers. "We are fighting for Freedom" is a cry which rises from the most unexpected quarters; and, though 'twere ungracious to question its sincerity, we must admit that this generous enthusiasm is of very recent growth.

Liberty has always had her friends in England; but where she could count one, Authority could count two.[*] Five years ago, how many Englishmen really cared for Liberty, not rendering her mere lip-service, but honestly devoting themselves to her sacred cause? If you polled the nation from top to bottom, how many liberty-lovers would you find? At one election their number, as disclosed by the polls, would rise, at another it would sink. At the best of times, if you divide the nation into strata, you would find large sections in which Liberty had no worshippers and very few friends. It had long been one of the bad signs of the times that the love of Liberty had almost ceased to animate what are called, in the odious language of social convention, "the upper classes." For generations the despised and calumniated Whigs had maintained the cause of Freedom in their peculiarly dogged though unemotional fashion, and had established the political liberties of England on a strong foundation. But their day was done, their work was accomplished, and their descendants had made common cause with their hereditary opponents.

[Footnote *: I am speaking here of England only—not of Scotland, Ireland, or Wales.]

After the great split of 1886 a genuine lover of Freedom in the upper strata of society was so rare a character that people encountering him instinctively asked, "Is he insincere? Or only mad?" Deserted by the aristocracy, Liberty turned for her followers to the great Middle Class; but there also the process of apostasy had begun; and substantial people, whose fathers had fought and suffered for Freedom, waxed reactionary as the claims of Labour became more audible, and betook themselves to the side of Authority as being the natural guardian of property. If you make the division geographically, you may say, in the broadest terms, that the North stood firm for Freedom; but that London and the South were always unfriendly to it, and, after 1886, the Midlands joined the enemy.

If we apply a test which, though often illusory, cannot be regarded as wholly misleading, the Metropolitan Press was, in a remarkable degree, hostile to Freedom, and reflected, as one must suppose, the sentiments of the huge constituency for whom it catered. How many friends could Irish Nationalism count? How many could Greece, in her struggle with Turkey? How many the Balkan States? How many Armenia? How many, even in the ranks of professed Liberalism, opposed the annexation of the South African Republics? At each extension of the suffrage; at each tussle with the Lords; at each attempt to place the burden of taxation on the shoulders best able to bear it, few indeed were the friends of Freedom in the upper classes of society; in the opulent Middle Class; in London and the Midlands and the South; in the Church, alas!; in the Universities, the Professions, and the Press.

And yet, at the present moment, from these unlikely quarters there rises a diapason of liberty-loving eloquence which contrasts very discordantly with the habitual language of five years ago. To-day the friends of Freedom are strangely numerous and admirably vocal. Our Lady of Liberty, one thinks, must marvel at the number and the energy of her new worshippers. Lapses from grace are not unknown in the after-history of revivals, but we must, in charity, assume the conversion to be genuine until experience has proved it insincere. And to what are we to attribute it? Various answers are possible. Perhaps, as long as it was only other people's liberty which was imperilled, we could look on without concern. Perhaps we never realized the value of Freedom, as the chief good of temporal life, till the prospect of losing it, under a world-wide reign of force, first dawned on our imagination. Perhaps—and this is the happiest supposition—we have learnt our lesson by contemplating the effects of a doglike submission to Authority in corrupting the morals and wrecking the civilization of a powerful and once friendly people.

But, theorize as we may about the cause, the effect is unmistakable, and, at least on the surface, satisfactory. To-day we all are the friends and lovers of Liberty—and yet the very multitude of our new comrades gives us, the veterans in the cause, some ground for perplexity and even for concern. "He who really loves Liberty must walk alone." In spite of all that has come and gone, I believe that this stern dogma still holds good; and I seem to see it illustrated afresh in the career, so lately closed amid universal respect and regret, of Leonard, Lord Courtney.[*]

[Footnote *: Leonard, Henry Courtney (Lord Courtney of Penwith), died May 11, 1918, in his eighty-sixth year.]



V

EDUCATION



I

EDUCATION AND THE JUDGE

Not long ago a Judge of the High Court (who was also a Liberal) made what struck me as an eminently wise observation. While trying a couple of Elementary School-teachers whose obscenity was too gross for even an Old Bailey audience, and who themselves were products of Elementary Schools, the Judge said: "It almost makes one hesitate to think that elementary education is the blessing which we had hoped it was." Of course, all the prigs of the educational world, and they are not few, were aghast at this robust declaration of common sense; and the Judge thought it well to explain (not, I am thankful to say, to explain away) a remark which had been sedulously misconstrued.

Long years ago Queen Victoria recording the conversation at her dinner-table, said: "Lord Melbourne made us laugh very much with his opinions about Schools and Public Education; the latter he don't like, and when I asked him if he did he said, 'I daren't say in these times that I'm against it—but I am against it.'"

There is a pleasantly human touch in that confession of a Whig Prime Minister, that he was afraid to avow his mistrust of a great social policy to which the Liberal party was committing itself. The arch-charlatan, Lord Brougham, was raging up and down the kingdom extolling the unmixed blessings of education. The University of London, which was to make all things new, had just been set up. "The school-master was abroad." Lord John Russell was making some tentative steps towards a system of national education. Societies, Congresses, and Institutes were springing up like mushrooms; and all enlightened people agreed that extension of knowledge was the one and all-sufficient remedy for the obvious disorders of the body politic. The Victorian Age was, in brief, the age of Education; and the one dogma which no one ventured to question was that the extension of knowledge was necessarily, and in itself, a blessing.

When I say "no one" I should perhaps say "hardly anyone"; for the wisest and wittiest man of the time saw the crack in the foundation on which his friends were laboriously erecting the temple of their new divinity. "Reading and writing," said Sydney Smith, "are mere increase of power. They may be turned, I admit, to a good or a bad purpose; but for several years of his life the child is in your hands, and you may give to that power what bias you please. I believe the arm of the assassin may be often stayed by the lessons of his early life. When I see the village school, and the tattered scholars, and the aged master or mistress teaching the mechanical art of reading or writing, and thinking that they are teaching that alone, I feel that the aged instructor is protecting life, insuring property, fencing the Altar, guarding the Throne, giving space and liberty to all the fine powers of man, and lifting him up to his own place in the order of Creation."

That first sentence contain? the pith of the whole matter. "Reading and writing are mere increase of power," and they may be turned to a good or a bad purpose. Here enters the ethical consideration which the zealots of sheer knowledge so persistently ignored. The language about fencing the Altar and guarding the Throne might, no doubt, strike the Judge who tried the school-teachers as unduly idealistic; but the sentiment is sound, and knowledge is either a blessing or a curse, according as it is used.

Sydney Smith was speaking of the Elementary School, and, indeed, was urging the claims of the working classes to better education. But his doctrine applies with at least equal force to the higher and wider ranges of knowledge. During the Victorian Age physical science came into its own, and a good deal more than its own. Any discovery in mechanics or chemistry was hailed as a fresh boon, and the discoverer was ranged, with Wilberforce and Shaftesbury, among our national heroes. As long ago as 1865 a scientific soldier perceived the possibilities of aerial navigation. His vision has been translated into fact; but Count Zeppelin has shown us quite clearly that the discovery is not an unmixed blessing. Chemistry is, to some minds, the most interesting of studies, just because it is, as Lord Salisbury once said of it, the science of things as they are. Yet aconitine, strychnine, and antimony have played their part in murders, and chloroform has been used for destruction as well as for salvation. Dr. Lardner was one of the most conspicuous figures in that March of Mind which Brougham and his congeners led; and his researches into chemistry resulted in the production of an effluvium which was calculated to destroy all human life within five miles of the spot where it was discharged. This was an enlargement of knowledge; but if there had been Nihilists in the reign of William IV. they would have found in Dr. Lardner's discovery a weapon ready to their hand. Someone must have discovered alcohol; and my teetotal friends would probably say, invented it, for they cannot attribute so diabolical an agency to the action of purely natural causes. But even those who least sympathize with "the lean and sallow abstinence" would scarcely maintain that alcohol has been an unmixed blessing to the race.

To turn from material to mental discoveries, I hold that a great many additions which have been made to our philosophical knowledge have diminished alike the happiness and the usefulness of those who made them. "To live a life of the deepest pessimism tempered only by the highest mathematics" is a sad result of sheer knowledge. An historian, toiling terribly in the muniment-rooms of colleges or country houses, makes definite additions to our knowledge of Henry VIII. or Charles I.; learns cruelty from the one and perfidy from the other, and emerges with a theory of government as odious as Carlyle's or Froude's. A young student of religion diligently adds to his stock of learning, and plunges into the complicated errors of Manicheans, and Sabellians, and Pelagians, with the result that he absorbs the heresies and forgets the Gospel. In each of these cases knowledge has been increased, but mankind has not been benefited. We come back to what Sydney Smith said. Increase of knowledge is merely increase of power. Whether it is to be a boon or a curse to humanity depends absolutely on the spirit in which it is applied. Just now we find ourselves engaged in a desperate conflict between materialism and morality—between consummate knowledge organized for evil ends, and the sublime ideal of public right. Education has done for Germany all that Education, divorced from Morality, can do; and the result has been a defeat of civilization and a destruction of human happiness such as Europe has not seen since the Middle Age closed in blood. What shall it profit a nation if it "gain the whole world" and lose its own soul?



II

THE GOLDEN LADDER

Education is an excellent thing, but the word has a deterrent sound. It breathes pedantry and dogmatism, and "all that is at enmity with joy." To people of my age it recalls the dread spirits of Pinnock and Colenso and Hamblin Smith, and that even more terrible Smith who edited Dictionaries of everything. So, though this chapter is to be concerned with the substance, I eschew the word, and choose for my title a figurative phrase. I might, with perfect justice, have chosen another figure, and have headed my paper "The Peg and the Hole"; for, after nearly a century of patient expectation, we have at last got a Square Peg in the Square Hole of Public Instruction. In simpler speech, England has at length got a Minister of Education who has a genuine enthusiasm for knowledge, and will do his appointed work with a single eye to the intellectual advancement of the country, neither giving heed to the pribbles and prabbles of theological disputants, nor modifying his plans to suit the convenience of the manufacturer or the squire. He is, in my judgment, exactly the right man for the office which he fills; and is therefore strikingly differentiated not only from some Ministers of Education whom we have known, but also from the swarm of Controllers and Directors and salaried busybodies who have so long been misdirecting us and contradicting one another.

When I say that Mr. Fisher will not give heed to theological disputants, I by no means ignore the grievance under which some of those disputants have suffered. The ever-memorable majority of 1906 was won, not wholly by Tariff Reform or Chinese Labour, but to a great extent by the righteous indignation of Nonconformity at the injury which had been inflicted on it by the Tory Education Acts. There were Passive Resisters in those days, as there are Conscientious Objectors now; and they made their grievance felt when the time for voting came. The Liberal Government, in spite of its immense victory at the polls, scored a fourfold failure in its attempts to redress that grievance, and it remains unredressed to this hour. Not that I admired the Liberal Education Bills. My own doctrine on the matter was expressed by my friend Arthur Stanton, who said in 1906: "I think National and Compulsory Education must be secular, and with facilities for the denominations to add their particular tenets. My objection to this Bill" (Mr. Birrell's Bill) "is that it subsidizes undenominationalism." And again in 1909, when another of our Liberal practitioners was handling the subject: "I object altogether to the State teaching religion. I would have it teach secular matters only, and leave the religious teaching entirely to the clergy, who should undertake it at their own expense. This is the only fair plan—fair to all. The State gives, and pays for, religious teaching which I do not regard as being worth anything at all. It is worse than useless. Real religious teaching can only be given by the Church, and when Christ told us to go and teach, He did not mean mathematics and geography."

That was, and is, my doctrine on religious education; but in politics we must take things as they are, and must not postpone practicable reforms because we cannot as yet attain an ideal system. So Mr. Fisher, wisely as I think, has left the religious question on one side, and has proposed a series of reforms which will fit equally well the one-sided system which still oppresses Nonconformists and the simply equitable plan to which I, as a lover of religious freedom, aspire.

I see that some of Mr. Fisher's critics say: "This is not a great Bill." Perhaps not, but it is a good Bill; and, as Lord Morley observes, "that fatal French saying about small reforms being the worst enemies of great reforms is, in the sense in which it is commonly used, a formula of social ruin." Enlarging on this theme, Lord Morley points out that the essential virtue of a small reform—the quality which makes it not an evil, but a good—is that it should be made "on the lines and in the direction" of the greater reform which is desiderated.

Now, this condition Mr. Fisher's Bill exactly fulfils. I suppose that the "greater reform" of education which we all wish to see—the ideal of national instruction—is that the State should provide for every boy and girl the opportunity of cultivating his or her natural gifts to the highest perfection which they are capable of attaining. When I speak of "natural gifts" I refer not only to the intellect, but also to the other parts of our nature, the body and the moral sense. This ideal involves a system which, by a natural and orderly development, should conduct the capable child from the Elementary School, through all the intermediate stages, to the highest honours of the Universities.

The word "capable" occurs in Mr. Fisher's Bill, and rightly, because our mental and physical capacities are infinitely varied. A good many children may be unable to profit by any instruction higher than that provided by the Elementary School. A good many more will be able to profit by intermediate education. Comparatively few—the best—will make their way to really high attainment, and will become, at and through the Universities, great philosophers, or scholars, or scientists, or historians, or mathematicians.

At that point—and it ought to be reached at a much earlier age than is now usual—the State's, concern in the matter ends. The child has become, a man, and henceforth must work out his own intellectual salvation; but in the earlier stages the State can and must exercise a potent influence. The earliest stage must be compulsory—that was secured by the Act of 1870. In the succeeding stages, the State, while it does not compel, must stimulate and encourage; and above all must ensure that no supposed exigencies of money-making, no selfish tyranny of the employing classes, shall be allowed to interfere with mental or physical development, or to divert the boy or the girl from any course of instruction by which he or she is capable of profiting. This ideal Mr. Fisher's Bill, with its plain enactment that education shall be free; with its precaution against "half-time"; with its ample provision for Continuation Schools, goes far to realize. Even if it is a "small" reform—and I should dispute the epithet—it is certainly "on the lines and in the direction" of that larger reform which the enthusiasts of education have symbolized by the title of "The Golden Ladder."[*]

[Footnote *: Happily for Education, Mr. Fisher's Bill is now an Act.]



III

OASES

My title is figurative, but figures are sometimes useful. Murray's Dictionary defines an oasis as "a fertile spot in the midst of a desert"; and no combination of words could better describe the ideal which I wish to set before my readers.

The suggestion of this article came to me from a correspondent in Northumberland—"an old miner, who went to work down a mine before he was eight years old, and is working yet at seventy-two." My friend tells me that he has "spent about forty years of his spare time in trying to promote popular education among his fellow working-men." His notice was attracted by a paper which I recently wrote on "The Golden Ladder" of Education, and that paper led him to offer some suggestions which I think too valuable to be lost.

My friend does not despise the Golden Ladder. Quite the contrary. He sees its usefulness for such as are able to climb it, but he holds that they are, and must be, the few, while he is concerned for the many. I agree. When (following Matthew Arnold at a respectful distance) I have urged the formation of a national system by which a poor man's son may be enabled to climb from the Elementary School to a Fellowship or a Professorship at Oxford or Cambridge, I have always realized that I was planning a course for the exceptionally gifted boy. That boy has often emerged in real life, and the Universities have profited by his emergence; but he is, and always must be, exceptional. What can be done for the mass of intelligent, but not exceptional, boys, who, to quote my Northumbrian friend, "must be drilled into a calling of some kind, so as to be able to provide for themselves when they grow up to manhood"? When once their schooling, in the narrow sense, is over, must their minds be left to lie fallow or run wild? Can nothing be done to supplement their elementary knowledge, to stimulate and discipline their mental powers?