Our subject then is the Progress of the Commonwealth or, in other words, the record of the course of the common life of mankind in the world. It is a theme which really underlies all the other subjects of discussion at this week's meetings: for it is only the existence of the Commonwealth and its organized efforts to preserve and sustain the life of the individuals composing it, which have made possible the achievements of mankind in the various separate fields of effort which are claiming your attention. Lord Acton spent a lifetime collecting material for a History of Liberty. He never wrote it: but, if he had, it would have been a History of Mankind. A History of Government or of the Commonwealth would be nothing less. Such is the nature of the invitation so kindly given to me and so cheerfully accepted. If you could wait a lifetime for the proper treatment of the subject I would gladly give the time; for, in truth, it is worth it.

What is the nature of this common life of mankind and with what is it concerned? The subjects of its concern are as wide as human nature itself. We cannot define them in a formula: for human nature overleaps all formulas. Whenever men have tried to rule regions of human activity and aspiration out of the common life of mankind, and to hedge them round as private or separate or sacred or by any other kind of taboo, human nature has always ended by breaking through the hedges and invading the retreat. Man is a social animal. If he retires to a monastery he finds he has carried problems of organization with him, as the promoters of this gathering would confess you have brought with you here. If he shuts himself up in his home as a castle, or in a workshop or factory as the domain of his own private power, social problems go with him thither, and the long arm of the law will follow after. If he crosses the seas like the Pilgrim Fathers, to worship God unmolested in a new country, or, like the merchant-venturers, to fetch home treasure from the Indies, he will find himself unwittingly the pioneer of civilization and the founder of an Empire or a Republic. In the life of our fellows, in the Common Weal, we live and move and have our being. Let us recall some wise words on this subject from the Master of Balliol's book on the Middle Ages. 'The words "Church" and "State"', he writes,

represent what ought to be an alliance, but is, in modern times, at best a dualism and often an open warfare.... The opposition of Church and State expresses an opposition between two sides of human nature which we must not too easily label as good and evil, the heavenly and the earthly, the sacred and the profane. For the State, too, is divine as well as the Church, and may have its own ideals and sacramental duties and its own prophets, even its own martyrs. The opposition of Church and State is to be regarded rather as the pursuit of one great aim, pursued by contrasted means. The ultimate aim of all true human activity must be in the noble words of Francis Bacon 'the glory of God and the relief of man's estate'.[53]

Bacon's words form a fitting starting-point for our reflections: for they bring vividly before us both the idealism which should inspire all who labour at the task of government and the vastness and variety of the field with which they are concerned. Looked at in this broad light, the history of man's common life in the world will, I think, show two great streams of progress—the progress of man over Nature, or, as we say to-day, in the control of his environment, and the progress of man in what is essentially a moral task—the art of living together with his fellows. These two aspects of human activity and effort are in constant contact and interaction. Studied together, they reveal an advance which, in spite of man's ever-present moral weakness, may be described as an advance from Chaos to Cosmos in the organization of the world's common life; yet they are so distinct in method and spirit that they can best be described separately.

Let us first, then, consider the history of Government, as a record of the progress of man's power over Nature.

Human history, in this sphere, is the story of man making himself at home in the world. When human history begins we find men helpless, superstitious, ignorant, the plaything of blind powers in the natural and animal world. Superstitious because he was helpless, helpless because he was ignorant, he eked out a bare existence rather by avoiding than controlling the forces in the little world by which he found himself surrounded. Human life in its earliest stages is, as Hobbes described it, nasty, brutish, and short. Man was the slave of his environment. He has risen to become its master. The world, as the prophetic eye of Francis Bacon foretold, has become 'The Kingdom of Man'.

How complete this conquest is, can best be realized perhaps by considering man's relation to the lower animals. When history opens, the animals are in their element; it is man who is the interloper. Two thousand years ago it was not the Society of Friends but wolves and wild boars who felt themselves at home on the site of Bournville Garden Village. To-day we are surprised when we read that in remote East Africa lions and giraffes venture occasionally to interfere in the murderous warfare between man and man. Man has imposed himself on the animals, by dint of his gradual accumulation of knowledge and his consequent power of organization and government. He has destroyed the conditions under which the animals prospered. He has, as we might say, destroyed their home life, exposing them to dangers of his own making against which they are now as powerless as he was once against them. 'It is a remarkable thing,' writes Sir E. Ray Lankester,

which possibly may be less generally true than our present knowledge seems to suggest—that the adjustment of organisms to their surroundings is so severely complete in Nature apart from Man, that diseases are unknown as constant and normal phenomena under those conditions. It is no doubt difficult to investigate this matter, since the presence of Man as an observer itself implies human intervention. But it seems to be a legitimate view that every disease to which animals (and probably plants also) are liable, excepting as a transient and very exceptional occurrence, is due to Man's interference. The diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses are not known except in domesticated herds and those wild creatures to which Man's domesticated productions have communicated them. The trypanosome lives in the blood of wild game and of rats without producing mischief. The hosts have become tolerant of the parasite. It is only when man brings his unselected, humanly-nurtured races of cattle and horses into contact with the parasite, that it is found to have deadly properties. The various cattle-diseases which in Africa have done so much harm to native cattle, and have in some regions exterminated big game, have per contra been introduced by man through his importation of diseased animals of his own breeding from Europe. Most, if not all, animals in extra-human conditions, including the minuter things such as insects, shellfish, and invisible aquatic organisms, have been brought into a condition of 'adjustment' to their parasites as well as to the other conditions in which they live: it is this most difficult and efficient balance of Nature which Man everywhere upsets.[54]

And Sir E. Ray Lankester goes on to point out the moral to be drawn from this development. He points out that

civilized man has proceeded so far in his interference with extra-human nature, has produced for himself and the living organisms associated with him such a special state of things by his rebellion against natural selection and his defiance of Nature's pre-human dispositions, that he must either go on and acquire firmer control of the conditions, or perish miserably by the vengeance certain to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great affairs. We may indeed compare civilized man to a successful rebel against Nature, who, by every step forward, renders himself liable to greater and greater penalties, and so cannot afford to pause or fail in one single step. Or again we may think of him as the heir to a vast and magnificent kingdom, who has been finally educated so as to take possession of his property, and is at length left alone to do his best; he has wilfully abrogated, in many important respects, the laws of his mother Nature by which the kingdom was hitherto governed; he has gained some power and advantage by so doing, but is threatened on every hand by dangers and disasters hitherto restrained: no retreat is possible—his only hope is to control, as he knows that he can, the sources of these dangers and disasters.

The time will come, not too long hence, as I believe, when men have realized, with the scientists, that the world is one kingdom not many, and these problems of man's relation to his non-human environment will be the first concern of statesmen and governors. In some of our tropical colonies they have, perforce, become so already. If you live on the Gold Coast, the war against malaria cannot help seeming more important to you than the war against German trade: and in parts of Central Africa the whole possibility of continued existence centres round the presence or absence of the tsetse fly which is the carrier of sleeping sickness. Some day, when means have been adopted for abating our fiercer international controversies, we shall discover that in these and kindred matters lies the real province of world-politics. When that day comes the chosen representatives of the human race will see their constituents, as only philosophers see them now, as the inheritors of a great tradition of service and achievement, and as trustees for their successors of the manifold sources of human happiness which the advance of knowledge has laid open to us.

If the first and most important of these sources is the discovery of the conditions of physical well-being, the second is the discovery of means of communication between the widely separate portions of man's kingdom. The record of the process of bringing the world under the control of the organized government of man is largely the record of the improvement of communications. Side by side with the unending struggle of human reason against cold and hunger and disease we can watch the contest against distance, against ocean and mountain and desert, against storms and seasons. There can be few subjects more fascinating for a historian to study than the record of the migrations of the tribes of men. He might begin, if he wished, with the migrations of animals and describe the westward progress of the many species whose course can be traced by experts along the natural highways of Western Europe. Some of them, so the books tell us, reached the end of their journey while Britain was still joined to the continent. Others arrived too late and were cut off by the straits of Dover. I like to form an imaginary picture, which the austerity of the scientific conscience will, I know, repudiate with horror, of the unhappy congregation, mournfully assembled bag and baggage on the edge of the straits and gazing wistfully across at the white cliffs of England, which they were not privileged to reach—tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore, 'stretching out their paws in longing for the further bank.'

Our historian would then go on to describe the early 'wanderings of peoples' (Voelkerwanderungen) how whole tribes would move off in the spring-time in the search for fresh hunting-grounds or pasture. He would trace the course of that westward push which, starting from somewhere in Asia, brought its impact to bear on the northern provinces of the Roman Empire and eventually loosened its whole fabric. He would show how Europe, as we know it, was welded into unity by the attacks of migratory warriors on three flanks—the Huns and the Tartars, a host of horsemen riding light over the steppes of Russia and Hungary: the Arabs, bearing Islam with them on their camels as they moved westward along North Africa and then pushing across into Spain: and the Northmen of Scandinavia, those carvers of kingdoms and earliest conquerors of the open sea, who left their mark on England and northern France, on Sicily and southern Italy, on the Balkan Peninsula, on Russia, on Greenland, and as far as North America. Then, passing to Africa and Asia, he would describe the life of the pack-saddle and the caravan, the long and mysterious inland routes from the Mediterranean to Nubia and Nigeria, or from Damascus with the pilgrims to Medina, and the still longer and more mysterious passage through the ancient oases of Turkestan, now buried in sand, along which, as recent discoveries have shown us, Greece and China, Christianity and Buddhism, exchanged their arts and ideas and products. Then he would tell of the great age of maritime discovery, of the merchant-adventurers and buccaneers, of their gradual transformation into trading companies, in the East and in the West, from companies to settlements, from settlements to colonies. Then perhaps he would close by casting a glimpse at the latest human migration of all, that which takes place or took place up to 1914, at the rate of a million a year from the Old World into the United States. He would take the reader to Ellis Island in New York harbour, where the immigrants emerge from the steerage to face the ordeal of the Immigration Officer. He would show how the same causes, hunger, fear, persecution, restlessness, ambition, love of liberty, which set the great westward procession in motion in the early days of tribal migration, are still alive and at work to-day among the populations of Eastern Europe. He would look into their minds and read the story of the generations of their nameless fore-runners; and he would ask himself whether rulers and statesmen have done all that they might to make the world a home for all its children, for the poor as for the rich, for the Jew as for the Gentile, for the yellow and dark-skinned as for the white.

Let us dwell for a moment more closely on one phase of this record of the conquest of distance. The crucial feature in that struggle was the conquest of the sea. The sea-surface of the world is far greater than its land-surface, and the sea, once subdued, is a far easier and more natural means of transport and communication. For the sea, the uncultivable sea, as Homer calls it, is itself a road, whereas on earth, whether it be mountain or desert or field, roads have first painfully to be made. Man's definitive conquest of the sea dates from the middle of the fifteenth century when, by improvements in the art of sailing and by the extended use of the mariner's compass, it first became possible to undertake long voyages with assurance. These discoveries are associated with the name of Prince Henry of Portugal, whose life-long ambition it was, to quote the words engraved on his monument at the southern extremity of Portugal, 'to lay open the regions of West Africa across the sea, hitherto not traversed by man, that thence a passage might be made round Africa to the most distant parts of the East.'

The opening of the high seas which resulted from Prince Henry's activities is one of the most momentous events in human history. Its effect was, sooner or later, to unite the scattered families of mankind, to make the problems of all the concern of all: to make the world one place. Prince Henry and his sailors were, in fact, the pioneers of internationalism, with all the many and varied problems that internationalism brings with it. 'In 1486,' says the most recent history of this development,

Bartholomew Dias was carried by storm beyond the sight of land, round the southern point of Africa, and reached the Great Fish River, north of Algoa Bay. On his return journey he saw the promontory which divides the oceans, as the narrow waters of the Bosphorus divide the continents, of the East and West. As in the crowded streets of Constantinople, so here, if anywhere, at this awful and solitary headland the elements of two hemispheres meet and contend. As Dias saw it, so he named it, 'The Cape of Storms'. But his master, John II, seeing in the discovery a promise that India, the goal of the national ambition, would be reached, named it with happier augury 'The Cape of Good Hope'. No fitter name could have been given to that turning-point in the history of mankind. Europe, in truth, was on the brink of achievements destined to breach barriers, which had enclosed and diversified the nations since the making of the World, and commit them to an intercourse never to be broken again so long as the World endures. That good rather than evil may spring therefrom is the greatest of all human responsibilities.[55]

The contrast between Constantinople and the Cape, so finely drawn in these lines, marks the end of the age when land-communications and land-power were predominant over sea-power. The Roman Empire was, and could only be, a land-power. It is no accident that the British Commonwealth is, as the American Commonwealth is fast becoming, predominantly a sea-power.

How was 'the greatest of all human responsibilities', arising from this new intercourse of races, met? Knowledge, alas, is as much the devil's heritage as the angels': it may be used for ill, as easily as for good. The first explorers, and the traders who followed them, were not idealists but rough adventurers. Breaking in, with the full tide of western knowledge and adaptability, to the quiet backwaters of primitive conservatism, they brought with them the worse rather than the better elements of the civilization, the control of environment, of which they were pioneers. To them Africa and the East represented storehouses of treasure, not societies of men; and they treated the helpless natives accordingly.

England and Holland as well as the Latin monarchies treated the natives of Africa as chattels without rights and as instruments for their own ends, and revived slavery in a form and upon a scale more cruel than any practised by the ancients. The employment of slaves on her own soil has worked the permanent ruin of Portugal. The slave trade with America was an important source of English wealth, and the philosopher John Locke did not scruple to invest in it. There is no European race which can afford to remember its first contact with the subject peoples otherwise than with shame, and attempts to assess their relative degrees of guilt are as fruitless as they are invidious. The question of real importance is how far these various states were able to purge themselves of the poison, and rise to a higher realization of their duty towards their races whom they were called by the claims of their own superior civilization to protect. The fate of that civilization itself hung upon the issue.[56]

The process by which the Western peoples have risen to a sense of their duty towards their weaker and more ignorant fellow citizens is indeed one of the chief stages in that progress of the common life of mankind with which we are concerned.

How is that duty to be exercised? The best way in which the strong can help the weak is by making them strong enough to help themselves. The white races are not strong because they are white, or virtuous because they are strong. They are strong because they have acquired, through a long course of thought and work, a mastery over Nature and hence over their weaker fellow men. It is not virtue but knowledge to which they owe their strength. No doubt much virtue has gone to the making of that knowledge—virtues of patience, concentration, perseverance, unselfishness, without which the great body of knowledge of which we are the inheritors could never have been built up. But we late-born heirs of the ages have it in our power to take the knowledge of our fathers and cast away any goodness that went to its making. We have come into our fortune: it is ours to use it as we think best. We cannot pass it on wholesale, and at one step, to the more ignorant races, for they have not the institutions, the traditions, the habits of mind and character, to enable them to use it. Those too we must transmit or develop together with the treasure of our knowledge. For the moment we stand in the relation of trustees, teachers, guides, governors, but always in their own interest and not ours, or rather, in the interest of the commonwealth of which we and they, since the opening of the high seas, form an inseparable part.

It has often been thought that the relation of the advanced and backward races should be one purely of philanthropy and missionary enterprise rather than of law and government. It is easy to criticize this by pointing to the facts of the world as we know it—to the existing colonial empires of the Great Powers and to the vast extension of the powers of civilized governments which they represent. But it may still be argued that the question is not Have the civilized powers annexed large empires? but Ought they to have done so? Was such an extension of governmental authority justifiable or inevitable? Englishmen in the nineteenth century, like Americans in the twentieth, were slow to admit that it was; just as the exponents of laissez-faire were slow to admit the necessity for State interference with private industry at home. But in both cases they have been driven to accept it by the inexorable logic of facts. What other solution of the problem, indeed, is possible? 'Every alternative solution', as a recent writer remarks,[57]

breaks down in practice. To stand aside and do nothing under the plea that every people must be left free to manage its own affairs, and that intervention is wicked, is to repeat the tragic mistake of the Manchester School in the economic world which protested against any interference by the State to protect workmen ... from the oppression and rapacity of employers, on the ground that it was an unwarranted interference with the liberty of the subject and the freedom of trade and competition. To prevent adventurers from entering the territory is impossible, unless there is some civilized authority within it to stop them through its police. To shut off a backward people from all contact with the outside world by a kind of blockade is not only unpracticable, but is artificially to deny them the chances of education and progress. The establishment of a genuine government by a people strong enough and liberal enough to ensure freedom under the law and justice for all is the only solution.... They must undertake this duty, not from any pride of dominion, or because they wish to exploit their resources, but in order to protect them alike from oppression and corruption, by strict laws and strict administration, which shall bind the foreigner as well as the native, and then they must gradually develop, by education and example, the capacity in the natives to manage their own affairs.

Thus we see that the progress in knowledge and in the control of their environment made by the civilized peoples has, in fact and inevitably, led to their leadership in government also, and given them the predominant voice in laying down the lines along which the common life of mankind is to develop. If we are to look for the mainspring of the world's activities, for the place where its new ideas are thought out, its policies framed, its aspirations cast into practical shape, we must not seek it in the forests of Africa or in the interior of China, but in those busy regions of the earth's surface where the knowledge, the industries, and all the various organizations of government and control find their home. Because organization is embodied knowledge, and because knowledge is power, it is the Great Powers, as we truly name them,[58] who are predominantly responsible for the government of the world and for the future of the common life of mankind.

In the exercise of this control the world has already, in many respects, become a single organism. The conquest of distance in the fifteenth century was the beginning of a process which led, slowly but inevitably, to the widening of the boundaries of government. Two discoveries made about the same time accentuated the same tendency. By the invention of gunpowder the people of Europe were given an overwhelming military superiority over the dwellers in other continents. By the invention of printing, knowledge was internationalized for all who had the training to use it. Books are the tools of the brain-worker all the world over; but, unlike the file and the chisel, the needle and the hammer, books not only create, but suggest. A new idea is like an electric current set running throughout the world, and no man can say into what channels of activity it may not be directed.

But neither travel nor conquest nor books and the spread of ideas caused so immense a transformation in the common life of mankind as the process beginning at the end of the eighteenth century which is known to historians as the Industrial Revolution. As we have spoken of the conquest of distance perhaps a better name for the Industrial Revolution would be the Conquest of Organization. For it was not the discovery of the steam-engine or the spinning-jenny which constituted the revolution: it was the fact that men were now in a position to apply these discoveries to the organization of industry. The ancient Greeks played with the idea of the steam-engine: it was reserved for eighteenth-century England to produce a generation of pioneers endowed with the knowledge, the power, the foresight, and the imagination to make use of the world-transforming potentialities of the idea. The Industrial Revolution, with its railways and steamships, telegraphs and telephones, and now its airships and submarines and wireless communication, completed the conquest of distance. Production became increasingly organized on international lines. Men became familiar with the idea of an international market. Prices and prospects, booms and depressions, banking and borrowing, became international phenomena. The organization of production led to an immensely rapid increase of wealth in Western Europe. The application of that wealth to the development of the world's resources in and outside Europe led to a correspondingly huge advance in trade and intercourse. The breakfast-table in an ordinary English home to-day is a monument to the achievements of the Industrial Revolution and to the solid reality of the economic internationalism which resulted from it. There is still poverty in Western Europe, but it is preventable poverty. Before the Industrial Revolution, judged by a modern standard, there was nothing but poverty. The satisfying physical and economic condition which we describe by the name of comfort did not exist. The Italian historian Ferrero, in one of his essays, recommends those who have romantic yearnings after the good old times to spend one night on what our forefathers called a bed. Mr. Coulton, in his books on the Middle Ages, has used some very plain language on the same text. And Professor Smart, in his recently published posthumous work, pointing a gentle finger of rebuke at certain common Socialist fantasies, remarks:

There never was a golden age of equality of wealth: there was rather a leaden one of inequality of poverty.... We should speak more guardedly of the riches of the old world. A careful examination of any old book would show that the most splendid processions of pomp and luxury in the Middle Ages were poor things compared to the parade of a modern circus on its opening day.[59]

Such prosperity as we enjoy to-day, such a scene as we can observe on these smiling outskirts of Birmingham, is due to man's Conquest of Organization and to the consequent development and linking-up, by mutual intercourse and exchange, of the economic side of the world's life.

So far we have been watching the progress of man in his efforts to 'make himself at home' in the world. We have seen him becoming more skilful and more masterful century by century, till in these latter days the whole world is, as it were, at his service. He has planted his flag at the two poles: he has cut a pathway for his ships between Asia and Africa, and between the twin continents of America: he has harnessed torrents and cataracts to his service: he has conquered the air and the depths of the sea: he has tamed the animals: he has rooted out pestilence and laid bare its hidden causes: and he is penetrating farther and ever farther in the discovery of the causes of physical and mental disease. He has set his foot on the neck of Nature. But the last and greatest conquest is yet before him. He has yet to conquer himself. Victorious against Nature, men are still at war, nay, more than ever at war, amongst themselves. How is it that the last century and a half, which have witnessed so unparalleled an advance in the organization of the common life of man on the material side, should have been an age of wars and rumours of wars, culminating in the vastest and most destructive conflict that this globe of ours has ever witnessed? What explanation could we give of this to a visitor from the moon or to those creatures of inferior species whom, as Sir E. Ray Lankester has told us, it is our function, thanks to our natural superiority, to command and control?

This brings us to the second great branch of our subject—the progress of mankind in the art of living together in the world.

Government, as we have seen, covers the whole social life of man: for the principles that regulate human association are inherent in the nature of man. But in what follows we shall perforce confine ourselves mainly to the sphere of what is ordinarily called politics, that is to the recognized and authoritative form of human association called the State, as opposed to the innumerable subordinate or voluntary bodies and relationships, which pervade every department of man's common life.

The progress of Government in this second sphere may be defined as the deepening and extension of man's duty towards his neighbour. It is to be reckoned, not in terms of knowledge and organization, but of character. The ultimate goal of human government, in the narrower sense, as of all social activity—let us never forget it—is liberty, to set free the life of the spirit. 'Liberty,' said Lord Acton, who could survey the ages with a wealth of knowledge to which no other man, perhaps, ever attained, 'Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private life.'[60] Government is needed in order to enable human life to become, not efficient or well-informed or well-ordered, but simply good; and Lord Acton believed, as the Greeks and generations of Englishmen believed before him, that it is only in the soil of liberty that the human spirit can grow to its full stature, and that a political system based upon any other principle than that of responsible self-government acts as a bar at the outset to the pursuit of what he called 'the highest objects of civil society or of private life'. For though a slave, or a man living under a servile political system, may develop many fine qualities of character: yet such virtues will, in Milton's words, be but 'fugitive and cloistered', 'unexercised and unbreathed'. For liberty, and the responsibilities that it involves, are the school of character and the appointed means by which men can best serve their neighbours. A man deprived of such opportunities, cut off from the quickening influence of responsibility, has, as Homer said long ago 'lost half his manhood'. He may be a loyal subject, a brave soldier, a diligent and obedient workman: but he will not be a full-grown man. Government will have starved and stunted him in that which it is the supreme object of government to develop and set free.

It is idle, then, to talk in general terms about the extension of government as a good thing, whether in relation to the individual citizen or to the organization of the world into an international State. We have always first to ask: What kind of Government? On what principles will it be based? What ideal will it set forth? What kind of common life will it provide or allow to its citizens? If the whole world were organized into one single State, and that State, supreme in its control over Nature, were armed with all the knowledge and organization that the ablest and most farseeing brains in the world could supply, yet mankind might be worse off under its sway, in the real essentials of human life, than if they were painted savages. 'Though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge: and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.' Government may be the organization of goodness, or the organization of evil. It may provide the conditions by which the common life of society can develop along the lines of man's spiritual nature: or it may take away the very possibility of such a development. Till we know what a Government stands for, do not let us judge it by its imposing externals of organization. The Persian Empire was more imposing than the Republics of Greece: Assyria and Babylon than the little tribal divisions of Palestine: the Spanish Empire than the cities of the Netherlands. There is some danger that, in our new-found sense of the value of knowledge in promoting happiness, we should forget what a tyrant knowledge, like wealth, can become. No doubt, just as we saw that moral qualities, patience and the like, are needed for the advancement of knowledge, so knowledge is needed, and greatly needed, in the task of extending and deepening the moral and spiritual life of mankind. But we cannot measure that progress in terms of knowledge or organization or efficiency or culture. We need some other standard by which to judge between Greece and Persia, between Israel and Babylon, between Spain and the Netherlands, between Napoleon and his adversaries, and between contending powers in the modern world. What shall that standard be?

It must be a similar standard—let us boldly say it—to that by which we judge between individuals. It must be a standard based on our sense of right and wrong. But right and wrong in themselves will not carry us very far, any more than they will carry the magistrate on the bench or the merchant in his counting-house. Politics, like business, is not the whole of life—though some party politicians and some business men think otherwise—but a department of life: both are means, not ends; and as such they have developed special rules and codes of their own, based on experience in their own special department. In so far as they are framed in accordance with man's spiritual nature and ideals these rules may be considered to hold good and to mark the stage of progress at which Politics and Business have respectively arrived in promoting the common weal in their own special sphere. With the rules of business, or what is called Political Economy, we have at the moment no concern. It is the rules of politics, or the working experience of rulers, crystallized in what is called Political Science or Political Philosophy, to which we must devote a few moments' attention.

We are all of us, of course, political philosophers. Whether we have votes or not, whether we are aware of it or not, we all have views on political philosophy and we are all constantly making free use of its own peculiar principles and conceptions. Law, the State, Liberty, Justice, Democracy are words that are constantly on our lips. Let us try to form a clear idea of the place which these great historic ideals occupy in the progress of mankind.

The great political thinkers of the world have always been clear in their own minds as to the ultimate goal of their own particular study. Political thought may be said to have originated with the Jewish prophets, who were the first to rebuke kings to their faces and to set forth the spiritual aims of politics—to preach Righteousness and Mercy as against Power and Ambition and Self-interest. Their soaring imagination, less systematic than the Greek intellect, was wider in its sweep and more farseeing in its predictions. 'As the earth bringeth forth her bud and as the garden causeth the things sown in it to spring forth', says Isaiah, in magnificent anticipation of the doctrine of Natural Law, 'so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.' 'Peace, peace, to him that is far off, and to him that is near, saith the Lord, and I will heal him: but the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, for the wicked.' 'Out of Zion shall go forth the Law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations and shall reprove many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.'[61]

It was, however, Plato and Aristotle who first made politics a branch of separate study: and, unlike many of their modern successors, they pursued it throughout in close connexion with the kindred studies of ethics and psychology. Their scope was, of course, confined to the field of their own experience, the small self-contained City-States of Greece, and it did not fall within their province to foreshadow, like the Jewish Prophets, the end of warfare, or to speculate on the ultimate unity of mankind. Their task was to interpret the work of their own fellow-countrymen on the narrow stage of Greek life. Their lasting achievement is to have laid down for mankind what a State is, as compared with other forms of human association, and to have proclaimed, once and for all, in set terms, that its object is to promote the 'good life' of its members. 'Every State', says Aristotle in the opening words of his Politics, 'is a community of some kind.' That is to say, States belong to the same genus, as it were, as political parties, trade unions, cricket clubs, business houses, or such gatherings as ours. What, then, is the difference between a State and a political party? 'If all communities', he goes on, 'aim at some good, the State or political community, which is the highest of all and which embraces all the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest good.'

Why is the State the highest of all forms of association? Why should our citizenship, for instance, take precedence of our trade unionism or our business obligations? Aristotle replies, and in spite of recent critics I think the reply still holds good: because, but for the existence of the State and the reign of law maintained by it, none of these associations could have been formed or be maintained. 'He who first founded the State was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when protected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and righteousness, he is the worst of all.' Or, to put it in the resounding Elizabethan English of Hooker: 'The public power of all societies is above every soul contained in the same societies. And the principal use of that power is to give laws to all that are under it; which laws, in such case, we must obey, unless there be reason showed which may necessarily enforce that the law of Reason or of God doth enjoin the contrary. Because except our own private and probable resolutions be by the law of public determinations overruled, we take away all possibility of social life in the world.'[62] The Greeks did not deny, as the example of Socrates shows, the right of private judgement on the question of obedience to law, or the duty of respect for what Hooker calls the Law of Reason or of God. Against the authentic voice of conscience no human authority can or should prevail. But Aristotle held, with Hooker, that obedience to law and faithful citizenship are themselves matters normally ordained by the law of Reason or of God and that, as against those of any other association ([Greek: koinonia]), the claims of the State are paramount. In other words, he would deny what is sometimes loosely called the right of rebellion, whilst not closing the door to that duty of rebellion which has so often advanced the cause of liberty. When Aristotle speaks of the State, moreover, he does not mean a sovereign authority exercising arbitrary power, as in Persia or Babylon: he means an authority administering Law and Justice according to recognized standards: and he is thinking of Law and Justice, not simply as part of the apparatus of government but as based upon moral principles. 'Righteousness', he says, 'is the bond of men in States and the administration of Justice, which is the determination of what is righteous, is the principle of order in political society.' 'Of Law', says Hooker,[63] here as elsewhere echoing the ancients, 'there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world.' The State takes precedence of the party or the trade union because, however idealistic in their policy these latter may be, the State covers all, not merely a section of the community, and is able not merely to proclaim but to enforce the rule of law and justice. Put in modern language, one might define the Greek idea of the State as the Organization of Mutual Aid.

The Greek States did not remain true to this high ideal. Faced with the temptations of power they descended almost to the level of the oriental monarchies with which they were contrasted. But even had they remained faithful to their philosophers' ideal of public service they would not have survived. Unable to transcend the limits of their own narrow State-boundaries and to merge their ideals with those of their neighbours, they were helpless in the face of the invader. First Macedonia and then Rome swept over them, and political idealism slumbered for many centuries. Rome gave the world, what it greatly needed, centuries of peace and order and material prosperity: it built up an enduring fabric of law on principles of Reason and Humanity: it did much to give men, what is next to the political sense, the social sense. It made men members of one another from Scotland to Syria and from Portugal to Baghdad. But it did not give them 'the good life' in its fullness: for it did not, perhaps it could not, give them liberty. Faced with the choice between efficiency and the diffusion of responsibility, the rulers of the Roman Empire unhesitatingly chose efficiency. But the atrophy of responsibility proved the canker at the heart of the Empire. Deprived of the stimulus that freedom and the habit of responsibility alone can give, the Roman world sank gradually into the morass of Routine. Life lost its savour and grew stale, flat and unprofitable, as in an old-style Government office. 'The intolerable sadness inseparable from such a life', says Renan, 'seemed worse than death.' And when the barbarians came and overturned the whole fabric of bureaucracy, though it seemed to educated men at the time the end of civilization, it was in reality the beginning of a new life.

Amid the wreckage of the Roman Empire, one governing institution alone remained upright—the Christian Church with its organization for ministering to the spiritual needs of its members. With the conversion of the barbarians to Christianity the governing functions and influence of the Church became more and more important; and it was upon the basis of Church government that political idealism, so long in abeyance, was reawakened. The thinkers who took up the work of Plato and Aristotle on the larger stage of the Holy Roman Empire boldly looked forward to the time when mankind should be united under one government and that government should embody the highest ideals of mankind. Such an ideal seemed indeed to many one of the legacies of the Founder of Christianity. The familiar petition in the Lord's Prayer: thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven sounded, in the ears of Dante and Thomas Aquinas and innumerable theologians and canonists, as a prayer and a pledge for the ultimate political unity of mankind on the basis of Christian Law. Such a belief was indeed the bedrock of mediaeval political thought. To devout Christians, brought up in the oecumenical traditions of the Roman Empire,

'every ordering of a human community must appear as a component part of that ordering of the world which exists because God exists, and every earthly group must appear as an organic member of that Civitas Dei, that God-State, which comprehends the heavens and the earth.[1] ... Thus the Theory of Human Society must accept the divinely created organization of the Universe as a prototype of the first principles which govern the construction of human communities.... Therefore, in all centuries of the Middle Age, Christendom, which in destiny is identical with Mankind, is set before us as a single, universal Community, founded and governed by God Himself. Mankind is one "mystical body"; it is one single and internally connected "people" or "folk"; it is an all-embracing corporation, which constitutes that Universal Realm, spiritual and temporal, which may be called the Universal Church, or, with equal propriety, the Commonwealth of the Human Race. Therefore, that it may attain its one purpose, it needs One Law and One Government.'[64]

But the mediaeval ideal, like the Greek, broke down in practice. 'Where the Middle Ages failed', says the Master of Balliol, continuing a passage already quoted, 'was in attempting ... to make politics the handmaid of religion, to give the Church the organization and form of a political State, that is, to turn religion from an indwelling spirit into an ecclesiastical machinery.' In other words, the mediaeval attempt broke down through neglecting the special conditions and problems of the political department of life, through declining, as it were, to specialize. While men were discussing the Theory of the Two Swords, whether the Emperor derived his power directly from God or indirectly through the Pope, or whether the sword should be used at all, the actual work of government in laying the foundations of the good life was neglected. Not only Liberty but Justice and Order were largely in abeyance and the range of State action which we to-day describe as 'social legislation' was not even dreamed of. Absorbed in theory or wrapped in ignorance, men forget the practical meaning of Statehood and its responsibilities. Central Europe languished for centuries, under a sham Empire, in the unprogressive anarchy of feudalism. 'The feudal system', it has been said,[65] 'was nothing more nor less than the attempt of a society which had failed to organize itself as a State, to make contract do the work of patriotism.' It is the bitter experience which Germany went through under the anarchy of feudalism and petty governments, lasting to well within living memory, which by a natural reaction has led the German people, under Prussian tutelage, to cling to the conception of the State as Power and nothing more.

The study of politics had to become secular before it could once more become practical, and, by being practical, ministering to practical ideals and enlisting practical devotion, become, as it were, sacred once more. Where the well-being of our fellow men is concerned it is not enough to be well-meaning. Government is an art, not an aspiration: and those who are concerned with it, whether as rulers or voters, should have studied its problems, reflected on its possibilities and limitations, and fitted themselves to profit by its accumulated experience.

Since the close of the Middle Ages, when politics became secular, the art of government has advanced by giant strides. Invention has followed invention, and experiment experiment, till to-day skilled specialists in the Old World and the New are at hand to watch and to record the latest devices for dealing with a hundred difficult special problems—whether it be the administration of justice or patronage, the organization of political parties, the fixing of Cabinet responsibility, the possibilities and limits of federalism, the prevention of war. There has, indeed, been as great an advance in the political art in the last four centuries and particularly in the last century, as in the very kindred art of medicine. The wonderful concentration of energy which the various belligerent powers have been able to throw into the present war is at once the best and the most tragic illustration of this truth. Man's common life in the State is more real, more charged with meaning and responsibility, more potent for good or for ill than it has ever been before—than our predecessors even in the time of Napoleon could have dreamed of.

The greatest inventors and most skilful practitioners of the political art in the modern world have been the English, for it is the English who, of all nations, have held closest to the ideal of freedom in its many and various manifestations. Superficially regarded, the English are a stupid people, and so their continental neighbours have often regarded them. But their racial heritage and their island situation seem to have given them just that combination of experience and natural endowment necessary to success in the task of government. Taken as a whole, the English are not brilliant, but they are clear-headed: they are not far-sighted, but they can see the fact before their eyes: they are ill equipped with theoretical knowledge, but they understand the working of institutions and have a good eye for judging character: they have little constructive imagination of the more grandiose sort, but they have an instinct for the 'next step' which has often set them on paths which have led them far further than they dreamed; above all, they have a relatively high standard of individual character and public duty, without which no organization involving the free co-operation of man and man can hope to be effective. It is this unique endowment of moral qualities and practical gifts, coupled with unrivalled opportunities, which has made the English the pioneers in modern times in the art of human association. Englishmen, accustomed to what eighteenth-century writers used to call 'the peculiar felicity of British freedom', do not always remember how far their own experience has carried them on the road of political progress. They do not realize how many problems they have solved and abolished, as the art of medicine has abolished diseases. When they hear speak of the eternal conflict between Nationality and Nationality, they often forget that a war between England and Scotland has long since become unthinkable and that the platitudes of St. Andrew's Day are still paradoxes in Central and Eastern Europe. When they are told of States where the spontaneous manifestations of group-life, non-conforming sects, workmen's associations, and ordinary social clubs, are driven underground and classed as dangerous secret societies, they should realize how precious a thing is that freedom of association which is one of the dearest attributes of English liberty. So too when they read of monarchical and military supremacy in a country like Germany, which is still politically speaking in the stage of England under the Tudors, or of Russian autocracy, or of the struggle over the King's prerogative which has been taking place in Greece. If we believe, as we must, in the cause of liberty, let us not be too modest to say that nations which have not yet achieved responsible self-government, whether within or without the British Commonwealth, are politically backward, and let us recall the long stages of political invention by which our own self-government has been achieved. Representation, trial by jury, an independent judiciary, equality before the law, habeas corpus, a limited monarchy, the practice of ministerial responsibility, religious toleration, the freedom of printing and association, colonial autonomy—all these are distinctly English inventions, but time has shown that most of them are definite additions to the universal art of government. We can survey the Balkans, for instance, and say with confidence that one thing, amongst others, that those nations are in need of is toleration, both in the sphere of nationality and of religion: or declare of the United States that their industrial future will be menaced till they have freed Trade Unionism from the threat of the so-called law of Conspiracy: or ask of our own so-called self-governing Dominions whether they are content with a system that concedes them no responsible control over the issues of peace and war. This is not to say that our own governmental machinery is perfect. Far from it. It was never in greater need of overhauling. It is only to reaffirm the belief, which no temporary disillusionment can shake, that it is founded on enduring principles which are not political but moral. To compare a system which aims at freedom and seeks to attain that aim through the working of responsible self-government with systems, however logically perfect or temporarily effective, which set no value on either, is, as it were, to compare black with white. It is to go back on the lessons of centuries of experience and to deny the cause, not of liberty alone, but of that progress of the spirit of man which it is the highest object of liberty to promote.

We have no time here to discuss in detail the various English inventions in the art of politics, but we must pause to consider two of the most important, because they are typical of British methods. The first is the invention called the Principle of Representation. Representation is a device by which, and by which alone, the area of effective government can be extended without the sacrifice of liberty. It is a device by which the scattered many can make their will prevail over the few at the centre. Under any non-representative system, whether in a State or a Church or a Trade Union or any other association, men always find themselves set before the inexorable dilemma between freedom and weakness on the one hand and strength and tyranny on the other. Either the State or the association has to be kept small, so that the members themselves can meet and keep in touch with all that goes on. Or it is allowed to expand and grow strong, in which case power becomes concentrated at the centre and the great body of members loses all effective control. The ancient world saw no way out of this dilemma. The great Oriental monarchies never contemplated even the pretence of popular control. The city-states of Greece, where democracy originated, set such store in consequence by the personal liberty of the individual citizen, that they preferred to remain small, and suffered the inevitable penalty of their weakness. Rome, growing till she overshadowed the world, sacrificed liberty in the process. Nor was the Christian Church, when it became a large-scale organization, able to overcome the dilemma. It was not till thirteenth-century England that a way out was found. Edward I in summoning two burgesses from each borough and two knights from each shire to his model Parliament in 1295, hit on a method of doing business which was destined to revolutionize the art of government. He stipulated that the men chosen by their fellows to confer with him must come, to quote the exact words of the summons, armed with 'full and sufficient power for themselves and for the community of the aforesaid county, and the said citizens and burgesses for themselves and the communities of the aforesaid cities and boroughs separately, there and then, for doing what shall then be ordained according to the Common Council in the premises, so that the aforesaid business shall not remain unfinished in any way for defect of this power'. In other words, the members were to come to confer with the king not as individuals speaking for themselves alone, but as representatives. Their words and acts were to bind those on whose behalf they came, and those who chose them were to do so in the full knowledge that they would be so bound. In choosing them the electors deliberately surrendered their own share of initiative and sovereignty and combined to bestow it on a fellow citizen whom they trusted. In this way, and in this way alone, the people of Cornwall and of Northumberland could bring their wishes to bear and play their part, together with the people at the centre, in the government of a country many times the size of a city-state of ancient Greece. There had been assemblies before in all ages of history: but this was something different. It was a Parliament.

Representation seems to us such an obvious device that we often forget how comparatively modern it is and what a degree of responsibility and self-control it demands both in the representative and in those whom he represents. It is very unpleasant to hear of things done or acquiesced in by our representatives of which we disapprove, and to have to remember that it is our own fault for not sending a wiser or braver man to Westminster in his place. It is still more unpleasant for a representative to feel, as he often must, that his own honest opinion and conscience draw him one way on a matter of business and the opinions of most of his constituents another. But these are difficulties inherent in the system, and for which there is no remedy but sincerity and patience. It is part of the bargain that a constituency should not be able to disavow a representative: and that a representative should feel bound to use his own best judgement on the issues put before him. To turn the representative, as there is a tendency to do in some quarters, into a mere mouthpiece with a mandate, is to ignore the very problem which made representation necessary, and to presume that a local mass-meeting can be as well informed or take as wide a view as those who have all the facts before them at the centre. The ancient Greeks, who had a strong sense of individuality, were loth to believe that any one human being could make a decision on behalf of another. In the deepest sense of course they were right. But government, as has been said, is at best a rough business. Representation is no more than a practical compromise: but it is a compromise which has been found to work. It has made possible the extension of free government to areas undreamed of. It has enabled the general sense of the inhabitants of the United States, an area nearly as large as Europe, to be concentrated at Washington, and it may yet make it possible to collect the sense of self-governing Dominions in four continents in a Parliament at London. All this lay implicit in the practical instructions sent by the English king to his sheriffs; but its development would only have been possible in a community where the general level of character was a high one and where men were, therefore, in the habit of placing implicit trust in one another. The relationship of confidence between a member of Parliament and his constituents, or a Trade Union leader and his rank and file, is a thing of which public men are rightly proud: for it reflects honour on both parties and testifies to an underlying community of purpose which no passing disagreement on details can break down.

Representation paved the way for the modern development of responsible self-government. But it is important to recognize that the two are not the same thing. Responsible self-government, in its modern form, is a separate and more complex English invention in the art of government. A community may be decked out with a complete apparatus of representative institutions and yet remain little better than an autocracy. Modern Germany is a case in point. The parliamentary suffrage for the German Reichstag is more representative than that for the British House of Commons. The German workman is better represented in his Parliament than the British workman is in ours. But the German workman has far less power to make his will effective in matters of policy than the British, because the German constitution does not embody the principle of responsible self-government. Sovereignty still rests with the Kaiser as it rested in the thirteenth century with Edward I. The Imperial Chancellor is not responsible to the Reichstag but to the Kaiser, by whom he is appointed and whose personal servant he remains. The Reichstag can discuss the actions of the Chancellor: it can advise him, or protest to him, or even pass votes of censure against him; but it cannot make its will effective. We can observe the working of similar representative institutions in different parts of the British Commonwealth. The provinces of India and many British Colonies have variously composed representative assemblies, but in all cases without the power to control their executives. The self-governing Dominions, on the other hand, do enjoy responsible self-government, but in an incomplete form, because the most vital of all issues of policy are outside their control. On questions of foreign policy, and the issues of war and peace, the Parliaments of the Dominions, and the citizens they represent, are, constitutionally speaking, as helpless as the most ignorant native in the humblest dependency. Representative institutions in themselves thus no more ensure real self-government than the setting up of a works committee of employees in a factory would ensure that the workmen ran the factory. The distinction between representation and effective responsibility is so simple that it seems a platitude to mention it. Yet it is constantly ignored, both in this country by those who speak of Colonial self-government as though the Dominions really enjoyed the same self-government as the people of these islands, and by the parties in Germany whose programme it is, not to make Germany a truly constitutional country, but to assimilate the retrograde Prussian franchise to the broader representation of the Reichstag.

Wherein does the transition from representation to full responsibility consist? It came about in England when Parliament, instead of merely being consulted by the sovereign, felt itself strong enough to give orders to the sovereign. The sovereign naturally resisted, as the Kaiser and the Tsar will resist in their turn; but in this country the battle was fought and won in the seventeenth century. Since that time, with a few vacillations, Parliament has been the sovereign power. But once this transfer of sovereignty has taken place, a new problem arises. A Parliament of several hundred members, even though it meets regularly, is not competent to transact the multitudinous and complex and highly specialized business of a modern State. The original function of Parliament was to advise, to discuss, and to criticize. It is not an instrument fit for the work of execution and administration. Having become sovereign, its first business must be to create out of its own members an instrument which should carry out its own policy and be responsible to itself for its actions. Hence arose the Cabinet. The Cabinet is, as it were, a distillation of Parliament, just as Parliament itself is a distillation of the country. It consists of members of Parliament and it is in constant touch with Parliament; but its methods are not the methods of Parliament but of the older, more direct, organs of government which Parliament superseded. It meets in secret: it holds all the strings of policy: it has almost complete control of political and legislative initiative: it decides what is to be done and when and how: it has its own staff of agents and confidential advisers in the Departments and elsewhere whose acts are largely withdrawn from the knowledge and criticism of Parliament. A modern Cabinet in fact is open to the charge of being autocracy in a new guise. Such a charge would, of course, be a gross overstatement. But there is no doubt that the increasing complexity in the tasks of government has led to a corresponding growth of power and organization at the centre which has strengthened the Cabinet immeasurably of recent years at the expense of the direct representatives of the people. There are, however, powerful influences at work in the opposite direction, towards decentralization and new forms of representation, which there is no space to touch on here. Suffice it to say that here, as elsewhere, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

England, then, and all who enjoy the full privileges of British citizenship have been placed by the progress of events in a position of peculiar responsibility. The twentieth century finds us the centre of the widest experiment of self-government which the world has ever seen; for the principles of liberty, first tested in this island, have approved themselves on the soil of North America, Australasia, and South Africa. It finds us also responsible for the government and for the training in responsibility of some 350,000,000 members of the more politically inexperienced and backward races of mankind, or about one-fifth of the human race. The growth of the British Commonwealth, about which so astonishingly little is known either by ourselves or by other peoples, is not a mere happy or unhappy accident. It is one of the inevitable and decisive developments in the history of mankind. It is the direct result of that widening of intercourse, that internationalizing of the world, to which reference has already been made. It represents the control of law and organized government over the blind and selfish forces of exploitation. In the exercise of this control we have often ourselves been blind and sometimes selfish. But 'the situation of man', as Burke finely said of our Indian Empire, 'is the preceptor of his duty'. The perseverance of the British character, its habit of concentration on the work that lies to hand, and the influence of our traditional social and political ideals, have slowly brought us to a deeper insight, till to-day the Commonwealth is becoming alive to the real nature of its task—the extension and consolidation of liberty. If it has thus taken up, in part, the work of the mediaeval Empire and has had a measure of success where the other failed, it is because of the character of its individual citizens, because despite constant and heart-breaking failures in knowledge and imagination, we are a people who, in the words of a stern, if friendly, critic, 'with great self-assertion and a bull-dog kind of courage, have yet a singular amount of gentleness and tenderness'.[66]

* * * * *

We have come to the end of our long survey. Some of you may feel that I have fetched too wide a compass and given too wide an extension to the meaning of government. But if I have sinned I have sinned of set purpose. I refuse to confine government within the limits of what is ordinarily called politics, or to discuss the association called the State in isolation from other sides of man's community life. To do so, I feel, is to lay oneself open to one of two opposite errors: the error of those for whom the State is the Almighty, and who invest it with a superhuman morality and authority of its own; and the error of those who draw in their skirts in horror from the touch of what Nietzsche called this 'cold monster' and take refuge in monastic detachment from the political responsibilities of their time. We must be able to see politics as a part of life before we can see it steadily and see it whole. We must be able to see it in relation to the general ordering of the world and to connect it once more, as in the Middle Ages, with religion and morality. No thinking man can live through such a time as this and preserve his faith unless he is sustained by the belief that the clash of States which is darkening our generation is not a mere blind collision of forces, but has spiritual bearings which affect each individual living soul born or to be born in the world. It is not for us to anticipate the verdict of history. But what we can do is to bear ourselves worthily, in thought and speech, like our soldiers in action, of the times in which we live—to testify, as it were, in our own lives, to that for which so many of our friends have laid down theirs. We are met at a culminating moment of human fate—when, so far as human judgement can discern, the political destinies of this planet are being settled for many generations to come—perhaps for good. If the task of leadership in the arts of government remains with us, let us face the responsibility conscious of the vast spiritual issues which it involves, and let us so plan and act that history, looking back on these years of blood, may date from them a new birth of freedom and progress, not for ourselves in this country alone but throughout that kingdom of Man which must one day, as we believe, become in very truth the kingdom of God.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

1. Man's Control over Nature:

Ray Lankester, The Kingdom of Man, and other essays. 1912.

Demolins, Comment la route cree le type social.

Curtis (ed. by), The Commonwealth of Nations. Vol. i, 1916.

Murphy, The Basis of Ascendancy. 1909.

Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Greenwood and others). 1916.

2. Political Ideals:

The Jews: Todd, Politics and Religion in Ancient Israel. 1904.

Greece: Aristotle's Politics, translated by B. Jowett. 1908.

Dickinson, The Greek View of Life. 1909.

Barker, The Political thought of Plato and Aristotle. 1908.

Rome: H. Stuart Jones, The Roman Empire. (Story of the Nations.) 1908. Warde Fowler, Rome (Home University Series).

The Middle Ages: A. L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle Ages. 1911.

Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages (introduction by Maitland). 1900.

Miscellaneous: Wallas, Human Nature in Politics. 1908.

Acton, The History of Freedom, and other essays. 1909.

Lowell, The Government of England.

Buelow, Imperial Germany. 1916.

FOOTNOTES:

[53] A. L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle Ages, pp. 207-8.

[54] Lankester, Nature and Man, Romanes Lecture, 1905, pp. 27-9.

[55] The Commonwealth of Nations, edited by L. Curtis, Part I, p. 130.

[56] Ibid., p. 166.

[57] P. H. Kerr in An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 1915, p. 149.

[58] A still better name would be the Great Responsibilities.

[59] Second Thoughts of an Economist, 1916, pp. 17-18, 22.

[60] Freedom and other Essays, p. 22.

[61] Isaiah lxvi. 2; lvii. 19, 21; ii. 3, 4.

[62] Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, ch. xvi. 5.

[63] End of Book I of the Ecclesiastical Polity.

[64] Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, pp. 8 and 10.

[65] The Commonwealth of Nations, Part I, p. 73.

[66] Memoirs and letters of Sir Robert Morier, ii. 276.



VIII

PROGRESS IN INDUSTRY

A. E. ZIMMERN

In our study of Government we traced the upward course of the common life of mankind in the world. We saw it in the increasing control of Man over his physical environment, and we saw it also in his clearer realization of the ultimate ideal of government—the ordering of the world's affairs on the basis of liberty. We have now to turn aside from this main stream of social development to watch one particular branch of it—to survey man's record in the special department of economics. We shall no longer be studying human history, or the history of human society, as a whole, but what is known as economic or industrial history.

It is important to be clear at the outset that economic or industrial history is a tributary stream and not the main stream: for there are a number of people who are of the contrary opinion. There has been an increasing tendency of recent years to write human history in terms of economic or industrial progress. 'Tell me what men ate or wore or manufactured,' say historians of this school, 'and we will tell you what stage of civilization he had reached. We will place him in his proper pigeonhole in our arrangement of the record of human progress.' Did he use flint implements or fight with nothing but a bow and arrow? Did he use a canoe with a primitive pole which he had not even the sense to flatten so as to make it into a serviceable paddle? Then our sociologist will put him very low down on his list of the stages of human progress. For the modern sociologist is a confirmed plutocrat. He measures the character of men and races by their wealth. Just as old-fashioned people still think of the society of our own country as a hierarchy, in which the various classes are graded according to their social prestige and the extent of their possessions: so students of primitive civilization classify races according to their material equipment, and can hardly help yielding to the temptation of reckoning their stage of progress as a whole by the only available test. Thus it is common, especially in Germany and the United States, to find histories of what purports to be the progress of mankind which show man first as a hunter and a fisherman, then as a shepherd, then as a tiller of the soil, and then work upwards to the complicated industrial system of to-day. We are asked to accept the life of Abraham or David among the sheepfolds as the bottom of the ladder, and the life of a modern wage-earner under the smoky sky of a manufacturing area as the top; and when we complain and say, as men like William Morris and Stephen Graham are always saying, that we would far prefer to live in David's world, in spite of all its discomforts, we are told that we have no right to quarrel with the sacred principle of Evolution.

To interpret human history in this way is, of course, to deny its spiritual meaning, to deny that it is a record of the progress of the human spirit at all. It is to read it as a tale of the improvement, or rather the increasing complication, of things, rather than of the advance of man. It is to view the world as a Domain of Matter, not as the Kingdom of Man—still less, as the Kingdom of God. It is to tie us helplessly to the chariot wheels of an industrial Juggernaut which knows nothing of moral values. Let the progress of industry make life noisy and ugly and anxious and unhappy: let it engross the great mass of mankind in tedious and uncongenial tasks and the remainder in the foolish and unsatisfying activities of luxurious living; let it defile the green earth with pits and factories and slag-heaps and the mean streets of those who toil at them, and dim the daylight with exhalations of monstrous vapour. It is not for us to complain or to resist: for we are in the grip of a Power which is greater than ourselves, a Power to which mankind in all five continents has learnt to yield—that Economic Process which is, in truth, the God, or the Devil, of the modern world.

No thinking man dare acquiesce in such a conclusion or consent to bow the head before such fancied necessities. The function of industry, he will reply, is to serve human life not to master it: to beautify human life not to degrade it: to set life free not to enslave it. Economics is not the whole of life: and when it transgresses its bounds and exceeds its functions it must be controlled and thrust back into its place by the combined activities of men. The soul is higher than the body, and life is more than housekeeping. Liberty is higher than Riches, and the welfare of the community more important than its economic and material progress. These great processes, which the increase of man's knowledge has set in motion, are not impersonal inhuman forces: Men originated them: men administer them: and men must control them. Against economic necessity let us set political necessity: and let the watchword of that political necessity, here as always, be the freedom and the well-being of mankind.

With this caution in mind, then, let us approach our subject.

What is Economics? Economics is simply the Greek for 'house-keeping'. If writers and thinkers on the subject had only kept this simple fact in mind, or used the English word instead of the Greek, the world would have been saved much misery and confusion. Political economy is not, what Mill and other writers define it to be, 'the Science of Wealth'. It is the art of community-housekeeping, and community-housekeeping, as every woman knows, is a very important if subsidiary branch of the art of community-management or government.

Housekeeping, of course, is not a selfish but a social function. Housewives do not lay in bread and cheese simply to gratify their own desire to be possessors of a large store, but for the sake of their household. The true housekeeper or economic man is the man who is consciously ministering to the real needs of the community. Like the ruler or minister in the political sphere, he is a man who is performing a public service.

This is equally true whether the housekeeper has a monopoly of the purchase of bread and cheese for the household, or whether he or she has to compete with others as to which is to be allowed to serve the public in that particular transaction. Just as, under the party system, which seems to be inseparable from the working of democratic institutions, men stand for Parliament and compete for the honour of representing their neighbours, so in most systems of industry men compete for the honour of supplying the public. Competition in industry is practically as old as industry. In the earliest picture that has come down to us of Greek village life we read of the competition between potter and potter and between minstrel and minstrel—a competition as keen and as fierce, we may be sure, as that between rival shopkeepers to-day. For the opposite of competition, as has been truly said, is not co-operation but monopoly or bureaucracy: and there is no short and easy means of deciding between the rival systems. Sometimes the community is better served by entrusting one department wholly to one purveyor or one system of management—as in the Postal Service, or the Army and Navy. Sometimes it is clearly better to leave the matter open to competition. Nobody, for instance, would propose to do with only one minstrel, and seal the lips of all poets but the Poet Laureate. Sometimes, as in the case of the organized professions and the liquor trade, a strictly regulated system of competition has been considered best. No doubt the tendency at the present time is setting strongly against competition and towards more unified and more closely organized systems of doing business. But it is important to make quite clear that there is nothing immoral or anti-social about the fact of competition itself, and nothing inconsistent with the idea of service and co-operation which should underlie all social and economic activity. It is not competition itself, as people often wrongly think, which is the evil, but the shallow and selfish motives and the ruthless trampling down of the weak that are too often associated with it. When we condemn the maxim 'the Devil take the hindmost', it is not because we think we ought to treat the hindmost as though he were the foremost—to buy cracked jars or patronize incapable minstrels. It is because we feel that there is a wrong standard of reward among those who have pushed to the front, and that the community as a whole cannot ignore its responsibility towards its less fortunate and capable members.

It is, indeed, quite impossible to abolish competition for the patronage of the household without subjecting its members to tyranny or tying them down to an intolerable uniformity—forcing them to suppress their own temporary likes or dislikes and to go on taking in the same stuff in the same quantities world without end. For the most serious and permanent competition is not that between rival purveyors of the same goods, between potter and potter and minstrel and minstrel, but between one set of goods and another: between the potter and the blacksmith, the minstrel and the painter. If we abolished competition permanently between the British railways we could not make sure that the public would always use them as it does now. People would still be at liberty to walk or to drive or to bicycle or to fly, or, at the very worst, to stay at home. Competition, as every business man knows, sometimes arises from the most unexpected quarters. The picture-house and the bicycle have damaged the brewer and the publican. Similarly the motor-car and the golf links have spoilt the trade in the fine china ornaments such as used to be common in expensively furnished drawing-rooms. People sit less in their rooms, so spend less on decorating them. The members of the household always retain ultimate control over their economic life, if they care to exercise it. 'Whoso has sixpence,' as Carlyle said, 'is sovereign (to the length of sixpence), over all men; commands Cooks to feed him, Philosophers to teach him, Kings to mount guard over him,'—to the length of sixpence. Passive resistance and the boycott are always open to the public in the last resort against any of their servants who has abused the powers of his position. A good instance of this occurred in the events which led to the so-called Tobacco riots in Milan in 1848. The Austrians thought they could force the Italians in their Lombard provinces to pay for a government they hated by putting a heavy tax on tobacco. But the Italians, with more self-control than we have shown in the present war, with one accord gave up smoking. Here was a plain competition between a monopoly and the consumer, between tobacco and patriotism: between a united household and an unpopular servant: and the household won, as it always can unless its members are incapable of combined action or have been deprived by governmental tyranny of all power to associate and to organize.

We are faced then with a community or household which has certain wants that need to be supplied. The individual members of the community are justified, within the limits of general well-being,[67] in deciding what are their own wants and how to satisfy them. They claim the right to demand, as the economists put it, the goods and services they require, bread and cheese, poetry, tobacco, motor-bicycles, china ornaments. In order to meet those demands, which are stable in essentials but subject to constant modification in detail, there is ceaseless activity, rivalry, competition, on the part of the purveyors—on the side of what economists call supply. The business of housekeeping, or what is called the economic process, is that of bringing this demand and this supply into relation with one another. If the members of the household said they wanted to eat the moon instead of sugar, their demand would not be an economic demand: for no housekeeper could satisfy it. Similarly on the supply side: if the baker insisted on bringing round bad epics instead of bread and the grocer bad sonatas instead of sugar, the supply, however good it might seem to the baker and the grocer, and however much satisfaction they might personally have derived from their work, would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper, acting on behalf of the household, would not take it in. But if the demand was for something not yet available, but less impossibly remote than the moon, the housekeeper might persuade the purveyors to cudgel their brains till they had met the need. For, as we know, Necessity, which is another word for Demand, is the mother of invention. Similarly, if a purveyor supplied something undreamed of by the household, but otherwise good of its kind, he might succeed in persuading the household to like it—in other words, in creating a demand. The late Sir Alfred Jones, by putting bananas cheap on the market, persuaded us that we liked them. Similarly Mr. Marvin, who deals in something better than bananas, has persuaded us all to come here, though most of us would never have thought of it unless he had created the demand in us.

Economic Progress, then, is progress both on the side of demand and on the side of supply. It is a progress in wants as well as in their means of satisfaction: a progress in the aspirations of the household as well as in the contrivances of its purveyors: a progress in the sense of what life might be, as well as in the skill and genius and organizing powers of those to whom the community looks for help in the realization of its hopes. It is important that this double aspect of our subject should be realized, for in what follows we shall have no opportunity to dwell further upon it. Space compels us to leave the household and its wants and aspirations out of account and to direct our attention solely to the side of supply; although it must always be remembered that no real and permanent progress in the organization of production is possible without improvements in the quality and reduction in the number of the requirements of what is called civilization.[68] What we have to watch, in our study of progress in industry, is the history of man as a purveyor of the household: in other words, as a producer of goods and services: from the days of the primitive savage with his bark canoe to the gigantic industrial enterprises of our own time.

We can best do so by dividing our subject into two on somewhat similar lines to the division in our study of government. Let us consider industry, first as an activity involving a relationship between man and Nature; secondly, as involving what may be called a problem of industrial government, a problem arising out of the co-operation between man and man in industrial work. In the first of these aspects we shall see man as a maker, an inventor, an artist; in the second as a subject or a citizen, a slave or a free man, in the Industrial Commonwealth.

Man as a maker or producer carries us back to the dawn of history. Man is a tool-using animal and the early stages of human history are a record of the elaboration of tools. The flint axes in our museums are the earliest monuments of the activity of the human spirit. We do not know what the cave men of the Old Stone Age said or thought, or indeed whether they did anything that we should call speaking or thinking at all; but we know what they made. Centuries and millenniums elapsed between them and the first peoples of whom we have any more intimate record—centuries during which the foundations of our existing industrial knowledge and practice were being steadily laid. 'One may say in general,' says Mr. Marvin,[69]

that most of the fruitful practical devices of mankind had their origin in prehistoric times, many of them existing then with little essential difference. Any one of them affords a lesson in the gradual elaboration of the simple. A step minute in itself leads on and on, and so all the practical arts are built up, a readier and more observant mind imitating and adapting the work of predecessors, as we imagined the first man making his first flint axe. The history of the plough goes back to the elongation of a bent stick. The wheel would arise from cutting out the middle of a trunk used as a roller. House architecture is the imitation with logs and mud of the natural shelters of the rocks, and begins its great development when men have learnt to make square corners instead of a rough circle. And so on with all the arts of life or pleasure, including clothing, cooking, tilling, sailing, and fighting.

How did this gradual progress come about? Mr. Marvin himself supplies the answer. Through the action of the 'readier and more observant minds'—in other words, through specialization and the division of labour. As far back as we can go in history we find a recognition that men are not all alike, that some have one gift and some another, and that it is to the advantage of society to let each use his own gift in the public service. Among primitive peoples there has indeed often been a belief that men are compensated for physical weakness and disability by peculiar excellence in some sphere of their own. Hephaestos among the Greek gods was lame: so he becomes a blacksmith and uses his arms. Homer is blind: so instead of fighting he sings of war. They would not go so far as to maintain that all lame men must be good blacksmiths or all blind men good poets: but at least they recognized that there was room in the community for special types and that the blacksmith and the poet were as useful as the ordinary run of cultivators and fighting men. The Greek word for craftsman—[Greek: demiourgos]—'worker for the people,' shows how the Greeks felt on this point. To them poetry and craftsmanship were as much honourable occupations or, as we should say, professional activities as fighting and tilling. Whether Homer took to poetry because he could not fight or because he had an overwhelming poetic gift, he had justified his place in the community.

Specialization is the foundation of all craftsmanship and therefore the source of all industrial progress. We recognize this, of course, in common speech. 'Practice makes perfect,' 'Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,' are only different ways of saying that it is not enough to be 'ready' and 'observant', but that continued activity and concentration are necessary. A perfect industrial community would not be a community where everybody was doing the same thing: nor would it be a community where every one was doing just what he liked at the moment: it would be a community where every one was putting all his strength into the work which he was by nature best qualified to do—where, in the words of Kipling:

No one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame, But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star, Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of Things as They Are.

Progress in industry, then, on this side, consists in increasing specialization and in the perfection of the relationship between the workman and his work. Man in this world is destined to labour, and labour is often described as the curse of Adam. But in reality, as every one knows who has tried it, or observed the habits of those who have, idleness is far more of a curse than labour. Few men—at any rate in the temperate zone—can be consistently idle and remain happy. The born idler is almost as rare as the born poet. Most men, and, it must be added, most women, are happier working. If holidays were the rule and work the exception the world would be a much less cheerful place than it is even to-day. Purposeful activity is as natural to man as playing is to a kitten. From a purely natural point of view, no one has ever given a better definition of happiness than Aristotle when he defined it as an activity of the soul in the direction of excellence in an unhampered life. By excellence, of course, in this famous definition, Aristotle does not mean simply virtue: he means excellence in work. It is impossible, as we all know, to be good in the abstract. We must be good in some particular directions, at some particular thing. And the particular thing that we are good at is our work, our craft, our art—or, to use our less aesthetic English word, for which there is no equivalent in Greek, our duty. If happiness is to be found in doing one's duty, it does not result from doing that duty badly, but from doing it well—turning out, as we say, a thoroughly good piece of work, whether a day's work or a life work. There is a lingering idea, still held in some quarters, that the more unpleasant an activity is the more virtuous it is. This is a mere barbarous survival from the days of what Nietzsche called slave-morality. We are each of us born with special individual gifts and capacities. There is, if we only knew it, some particular kind or piece of work which we are pre-eminently fitted to do—some particular activity or profession, be it held in high or in low repute in the world of to-day, in which we can win the steady happiness of purposeful labour. Shall we then say that it ministers to human progress and to the glory of God deliberately to bury our talent out of sight and to seek rather work which, because it is irksome and unpleasant to us, we can never succeed in doing either easily or really well? No one who knows anything of education or of the training of the young, no one, indeed, who has any love for children, would dare to say that we should. Our State educational system, miserably defective though it is in this regard, is based upon the idea of ministering to the special gifts of its pupils—of trying by scholarships, by Care Committees, by the institution of schools with a special 'bias', to meet the needs of different kinds of young people and to set them in the path on which they are best fitted to travel.

In doing this the modern State is only trying to carry out the principle laid down in the greatest book ever written on education—Plato's Republic. Plato's object was to train every citizen to fill the one position where he could lead the best life for the good of the State. His aim was not to make his citizens happy but to promote goodness; but he had enough faith in human nature—and who can be an educational thinker without having faith in human nature?—to be convinced that to enable men to 'do their bit', as we say to-day, was to assure them of the truest happiness. We of this generation know how abundantly that faith has been confirmed. And indeed we can appeal in this matter not only to the common sense of Education Authorities or to the philosophy of the ancients, but to the principles of the Christian religion. The late Professor Smart, who was not only a good economist but a good man; has some very pertinent words on this subject. 'If for some reason that we know not of,' he remarks,[70]

this present is merely the first stage in being; if we are all at school, and not merely pitched into the world by chance to pick up our living as best we can ... it seems to me that we have reason enough to complain of the existing economic system.... I imagine that many of our churchgoing people, if they ever get to the heaven they sing about, will find themselves most uncomfortable, if it be a place for which they have made no preparation but in the 'business' in which they have earned their living.... A man's daily work is a far greater thing towards the development of the God that is in him than his wealth. And, however revolutionary the idea is, I must say that all our accumulations of wealth are little to the purpose of life if they do not tend towards the giving to all men the opportunity of such work as will have its reward in the doing.

And of his own particular life-work, teaching, he remarks, in words that testify to his own inner peace and happiness, that 'some of us have got into occupations which almost seem to guarantee immortality'.

Let us, then, boldly lay it down that the best test of progress in industry and the best measure of success in any industrial system is the degree to which it enables men to 'do their bit' and so to find happiness in their daily work, or if you prefer more distinctively religious language, the degree to which it enables men to develop the God that is in them. Let us have the courage to say that in the great battle which Ruskin and William Morris fought almost single-handed against all the Philistines of the nineteenth century, Ruskin and Morris, however wrong they may have been on points of practical detail, were right in principle. Let us make up our minds that a world in which men have surrendered the best hours of the day to unsatisfying drudgery, and banished happiness to their brief periods of tired leisure, is so far from civilized that it has not even made clear to itself wherein civilization consists. And when we read such a passage as the following from a leading modern economist, let us not yield to the promptings of our lower nature and acquiesce in its apparent common sense, but remember that economists, like all workmen, are bounded by the limits of their own particular craft or study. 'The greater part of the world's work,' says Professor Taussig,[71] the leading exponent of Economics at Harvard,

is not in itself felt to be pleasurable. Some reformers have hoped to reach a social system under which all work would be in itself a source of satisfaction. It is probable that such persons are made optimistic by the nature of their own doings. They are writers, schemers, reformers; they are usually of strongly altruistic character, and the performance of any duty or set task brings to them the approval of an exacting conscience; and they believe that all mankind can be brought to labour in their own spirit. The world would be a much happier place if their state of mind could be made universal. But the great mass of men are of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or any loftiness of character. Moreover, most of the world's work for the satisfaction of our primary wants must be of a humdrum sort, and often of a rough and coarse sort. There must be ditching and delving, sowing and reaping, hammering and sawing, and all the severe physical exertion which, however lightened by tools and machinery, yet can never be other than labour in the ordinary sense of the word.