Needless to say however, this point of view, this new spirit, only gradually permeated the Christian Church itself, let alone the great world outside. We are not surprised to learn that it was a point of criticism among the opponents of the religion that among its adherents were still found masters and slaves. An ancient writer in reply to critics who cry out "You too have masters and slaves. Where then is your so-called equality?" thus makes answer:

Our sole reason for giving one another the name of brother is because we believe we are equals. For since all human objects are measured by us after the spirit and not after the body, although there is a diversity of condition among human bodies, yet slaves are not slaves to us; we deem and term them brothers after the spirit, and fellow-servants in religion[28].

Pointing in the same direction is the fact that the title "slave" never occurs on a Christian tombstone.

It is plain from this, and from similar quotations which might be multiplied, that the policy of Christianity in face of the first social problem of the day, namely slavery, was not violently to undo the existing bonds by which Society was held together, in the hope that some new machinery would at once be forthcoming—a plan which has since been adopted with dire consequences in Russia—but to evacuate the old system of the spirit which sustained it; and to replace it with a new spirit, a new outlook on life, which would slowly but inevitably lead to an entire reconstruction of the social framework.

Already too, within the Church this sense of brotherhood was making itself felt on the industrial side as well as where more directly spiritual duties were concerned. It seems to have been recognised in the Christian Society that every brother could claim the right of being maintained if he were unable to work. Equally it was emphasised that the duty of work was paramount on all who were capable of it. "For those able to work, provide work; to those incapable of work be charitable." This aspect of the matter finds a singular emphasis in a second century document known as "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," in which this sense of industrial brotherhood finds very significant expression. Speaking of visitors from other Churches it is directed that "if any brother has a trade let him follow that trade and earn the bread he eats. If he has no trade, exercise your discretion in arranging for him to live among you as a Christian, but not in idleness. If he will not do this, that is to say, to undertake the work which you provide for him, he is trafficking with Christ. Beware of men like that."

On this side of its life therefore, the Church came very near to being a vast Guild where with the highest sanction rights and duties were intermingled in due proportion, and that true social unity established, which while it refuses privileges bestows protection. On these foundations the organisation was reared, which like some great Cathedral dominated that stretch of centuries usually known as the Middle Ages. We could all of us hold forth on its drawbacks and evils, yet its benefits were tremendous. For one thing it created an aristocracy wholly independent of any distinction of blood or property. Anyone might become an Archbishop if only he had the necessary gifts. Still more anyone might become a Saint. The charmed circle of the Church's nobility was constantly recruited from every class, and was therefore a standing and effectual protest against the flimsier measurements of Society and the more ephemeral gradations of rank. Obviously this process found as great a scope in England as elsewhere. It was the Church which was the most potent instrument in bringing together Norman and Saxon as well as master and slave. For, as Macaulay has said with perfect truth, it

creates an aristocracy altogether independent of race, inverts the relation between the oppressor and the oppressed, and compels the hereditary master to kneel before the spiritual tribunal of the hereditary bondman.... So successfully had the Church used her formidable machinery that, before the Reformation came, she had enfranchised almost all the bondmen in the kingdom except her own, who, to do her justice, seem to have been very tenderly treated[29].

This makes it particularly deplorable that in consequence of the great reaction in religion from the corporate to the personal, to which I have alluded, the Church's power, as far as Britain was concerned, though so splendidly exercised in the preceding centuries, should have been almost non-existent just at the moment when it was most required, in the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution of comparatively modern times.

III

THE HOPE OF THE PRESENT SITUATION

I fear that a large portion of this lecture has been taken up with the past. But even so rough and brief a review as I have attempted is a necessary prelude to a just estimate, both of our present position and of our future prospects. It is often supposed, indeed, that the study of history predisposes a man's mind to a conservative view. He studies the slow development of institutions, or the gradual influence of movements, and the trend of his thought works round to the very antipodes of anything that is revolutionary or catastrophic. But there is another side to the matter. The study of history may so expose the injustices of the past and their intrenchments that the student reaches the conclusion that nothing but an earthquake—an earthquake in men's ideas at the very least—can avail to set things right; that the best thing that could happen would be an explosion so terrible as to make it possible to break completely with the past, and start anew on firmer principles and better ways. After all, as a great Cambridge scholar once said, "History is the best cordial for drooping spirits." For if on the one hand it exposes the selfishnesses of men, on the other it displays an exhibition of those Divine-human forces of justice and sacrifice and good will which in the long run cannot be denied, and which encourage the brightest hopes for the age which is upon us.

The fact is, we are in the midst of precisely such an explosion as I have indicated. The immeasurable privilege has been given to us of being alive at a time when, most literally, an epoch is being made. Contemporary observers of events are not always the best judges of their significance, yet we shall hardly be mistaken if we assert that without doubt we stand at one of the turning points of the world's long story, that the phrase used of another epoch-making moment is true of this one, "Old things are passing away, all things are becoming new." For history is presenting us in these days with a clean slate, and to the men of this generation is given the opportunity for making a fresh start such as in the centuries gone by has often been sought, but seldom found. We are called to the serious and strenuous task of freeing our minds from old preconceptions—and the hold they have over us, even at a moment like this when the world is being shaken, is amazing—the task of reaching a new point of view from which to see our social problems, and of not being disobedient to the heavenly vision wheresoever it may lead us.

That vision is Fellowship, and it is not new. Though the war is, in the sense which I have suggested, a terrific explosion which in the midst of ruin and chaos brings with it supreme opportunities, it is equally true to say that it forms no more than a ghastly parenthesis in the process of fellowship both between nations and classes which had already begun to make great strides.

"The sense of social responsibility has been so deepened in our civilisation that it is almost impossible that one nation should attempt to conquer and subdue another after the manner of the ancient world."

These words sound rather ironical. They come from the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They were written about seven years ago in perfect good faith, as a sober estimate of the forces of fellowship which could be then discerned. Save for the ideals and ambitions of the central Empires of Europe they were perfectly true. What the war has done in regard to this fellowship is to expose in their hideous nakedness the dangers which threaten it, and to which in pre-war days we were far too blind, but also to unveil that strong passion for neighbourliness which lies deep in the hearts of men, and an almost fierce determination to give it truer expression in the age which is ahead.

You will naturally ask what effect the war is likely to have on this problem of class distinction. How far will it hinder or enhance the social unity for which we seek?

We must of course beware of being unduly optimistic. The fact that millions of our men are seeing with their own eyes the results which can be achieved by naked force will not be without its effect on their attitude when they return to their homes. If force is so necessary and so successful on the field of battle why not equally so in the industrial field? If nations find it necessary to face each other with daggers drawn, it may be that classes will have to do the same.

Personally I doubt whether this argument is likely to carry much weight. It is much more likely in my view that our men will be filled with so deep a hatred of everything that even remotely savours of battle, that a great tide of reaction against mere force will set in, and a great impetus be given to those higher and more spiritual motor-powers which during the war we have put out of court.

On the other hand it is easy to cherish a rather shallow hope as to the continuation in the future of that unity of classes which obtains in the trenches. Surely, it is argued, men who have stood together at the danger point and gone over the top together at the moment of assault will never be other than brothers in the more peaceful pursuits which will follow. Yet it is not easy to foretell what will happen when the tremendous restraint of military service is withdrawn, when Britain no longer has her back to the wall, and when the overwhelming loyalty which leaps forth at the hour of crisis falls back into its normal quiescence, like the New Zealand geyser when its momentary eruption is over. Any hopefulness which we may cherish for the future must rest on firmer foundations than these.

Such a foundation, I believe, has come to light, and I must say a few words about it as I close.

Broadly speaking it is this. The war has taught us that it is possible to live a national family life, in which private interests are subordinated in the main to the service of the State; and further that this new social organisation of the nation has called forth an unprecedented capacity in tens of thousands both of men and women, not merely for self-denying service, but for the utmost heights of heroism even unto death.

Men have vaguely cherished this ideal of national life before the war, but now it has been translated into concrete fact, and the nation can never forget the deep sense of corporate efficiency, even of corporate joy, which has ensued from this obliteration of the old class distinctions, this amalgamation of all and sundry in a common service. The fact is that a new class distinction has in a measure taken the place of the old, a distinction which has nothing to do with blood or with money, but solely with service. The nation is graded, not in degrees of social importance but in degrees of capacity for service. The only superiority is one of sacrifice. And each grade takes its hat off to the other on the equal standing ground of an all pervading patriotism. The only social competition is not in getting but in giving. National advantage takes the place of personal profit, and there is a sense of neighbourliness such as Britain has not experienced for many a long day, possibly for many a long century.

The supreme problem before us, I take it, is how to conserve this relationship and carry it over from the day of war to the day of peace. To do it will call for just that same spirit of sacrifice and service which is its own most predominant characteristic.

For one thing we must be quite definitely prepared in every section of society for a new way of life. From the economic point of view this will mean that the rich will be less rich, and the poor will be enabled to lead a larger life. Already the wealthy classes have been learning to live a simple life, and to substitute the service of the country for their own personal enjoyment. A serious call will come to them to continue in that state of life when the war is over. In some degree at least the pressure of the financial burden which the nation will have to bear will compel them to do so.

To the workers too in the same way the call will come to a new and more worthy way of life. I am thinking now of the workers at home who have been earning unprecedented wages, and thereby in many cases are already assaying a larger life. They will be reluctant to give this up, but only a gradual redistribution of wealth can make it permanent. It is not of course merely or mainly a matter of wages. The only real enlargement of life is spiritual. It is an affair of the mind and the soul.

The more we bring a true education within reach of the workers the more will there arise that sense of real kinship which only equality of education can adequately guarantee.

And speaking at Cambridge one cannot refrain from remarking that the University itself will have to submit to a considerable re-adjustment of its life if it is to be a pioneer in this intellectual comradeship of which I speak. A University may be a nursery of class distinction. In some measure it certainly has been so in the past. The opportunity is now before it to lead the way in establishing the only kind of equality which is really worth having.

Then too there are obvious steps which can be taken without delay in a new organisation of industry.

I am not one of those who think that the industrial problem can be solved in five minutes or even in five years. None the less it should not be impossible in wise ways to give the workers a true share of responsibility, particularly in matters which concern the conditions of their work and the remuneration of their labour.

If the sense of being driven by a taskmaster, whether it be the foreman of the shop, or the manager of the works, could give place to a truer co-operation in the management, and a larger measure of responsibility for the worker, we should be well on the road to eliminating one of the most persistent causes of just that kind of class distinction which we want to abolish. The more men work together in a real comradeship, the more mere social distinctions fade into the background. Is this not written on every page of the chronicles of this war?

But the supreme factor in the situation, without which no mere adjustment of organisation will prevail, is that new outlook on life which can only be described as a subordination of private advantage to the service of the country.

It is this alone which can really abolish the almost eternal class distinctions which we have traced throughout our survey, the distinction between the "haves" and the "have nots." For, as this spirit grows, the "have nots" tend to disappear, and the "haves" look upon what they have not as a selfish possession for their own enjoyment, but as a means of service for the common weal. Property, that which is most proper to a man, is seen to be precisely that contribution which he is capable of making to the welfare of his fellows.

The crux, the very core of the whole problem, is to find some means by which this new outlook can be produced, and a new motive by which men can be constrained to turn the vision into fact.

Here will come in that power which, as I pointed out, has sometimes been so potent and sometimes so impotent, but which, if it is allowed its proper scope, can never fail. I mean of course religion.

If men can be brought to see that this new outlook with its corresponding re-adjustment of social life is not merely a project of reformers but the plan of the Most High God, the deliberate intention of the supreme Spirit-force of the universe, the Scheme that was taught by the Prince of men, then indeed we may hope that the class distinction of which He spoke will at last be adopted: "Whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many[30]."

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Encycl. Brit. xi. 604.

[20] Macaulay's History of England (Longman's, 1885), pp. 38, 39, 40.

[21] The Town Labourer, p. 205.

[22] Ibid., p. 212.

[23] G. K. Chesterton, Short History of England, p. 98.

[24] Stubbs' Lectures on Early English History, pp. 18, 19.

[25] Benjamin Kidd, Encycl. Brit. vol. xxv. p. 329.

[26] Lucian quoted by Harnack, Mission and expansion of Christianity, vol. I. p. 149.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Lactantius quoted by Harnack, Ibid. p. 168.

[29] History of England (Longman's, 1885), vol. I. p. 25.

[30] St Mark x. 43-45.



UNITY BETWEEN CLASSES



II

By the Right Hon. J. R. CLYNES, M.P.

I have not the advantage of knowing anything of the treatment of any part of this subject by any preceding speaker. I myself intend to deal with it from the industrial and social standpoint, for I think if we are to seek unity amongst classes it is most important in the national interest that unity should first be sought and secured in the industries of the country. That there is disunity is suggested and admitted in the terms of the subject. This disunity has grown out of conditions which range over a few generations. I believe that these conditions grew largely out of our ignoring the human side of industry and the general life conditions of the masses of our workers. Our economic doctrine ignored the human factor, and measured what was termed national progress in terms merely of material wealth without due regard to who owned the wealth, made mainly by the energy of the industrial population. Religious doctrines and religious institutions were not the cause of that unhappy situation, but they had suffered from it, until now we find a very considerable number of the population engaged in a struggle for life, in a struggle for the material means of existence, handicapped by belief that their own unaided effort alone can assist them, that they must not look for help to any other class, or to any other quarter. Moral precepts have not the influence which they ought to have upon our industrial relations. Workers are thrown back upon their own resources; and in the use of those resources, during the past fifteen years particularly, much has been revealed to us of what is now in the working class mind. I am not suggesting that to seek a settlement of conditions of disunity, or the trouble arising from those conditions, you must coddle the working classes, praise them and pay them highly, and try to keep them contented with conditions which in themselves cannot be defended. I do not mean that at all. What I mean is that if unity between classes in industrial and economic life is to be sought and secured, it can be got only at a price, paid in a two-fold form; that of giving a larger yield of the wealth of the nation to those who mainly by their energies make that wealth, and of placing the producing classes upon a level where they will receive a higher measure of respect, of thanks, and regard than they previously have received from the nation as a whole. I was asked among others some twelve months ago to share in the investigations then made by representatives of the Government to discover the immediate cause of the very serious unrest then displayed in the country, and we went for a period of many weeks into the main centres of the kingdom and brought a varied collection of witnesses before us in order that the most reliable evidence should be obtained, and one who favoured us with his views was the Rev. Canon Green, whom I am going to quote because of his great experience among the working class populations in various circumstances and over many years in Manchester and elsewhere. This is what Canon Green writes:

They (the working classes) do not see why their hours should be so long, and their wages so small, their lives so dull and colourless, and their opportunities of reasonable rest and recreation so few. Can we wonder that with growing education and intelligence the workers of England are beginning to contrast their lot with that of the rich and to ask whether so great inequalities are necessary?

There I believe you have put in the plainest and gentlest terms the working of the working class mind as it is to-day. The country has given them more opportunities of education. When they were less educated, or, if I may say so, more ignorant than they are now, they were naturally more submissive and content with conditions the cause of which they so little understood. You cannot send the children of the poor to school, and improve your State agencies for education, and increase the millions annually which the country is ready to spend in teaching the masses of the people more than they knew before, and expect those masses to remain content with the economic and social conditions which even disturbed their more ignorant fathers. In short, the more you educate and train the working classes, the more naturally you bring them to the point of revolt against conditions which are inhuman or unfair, or which cannot be brought to square with the higher standard of education which they may receive. I am sure when the community come to understand that it is a natural and even a proper sense of revolt on the part of the masses of the people they will not regret their education. Out of all this feeling of discontent in the minds of the industrial population there has in the last thirty odd years grown very strong organisation. The Trade Union movement, which I mention first as a very great factor in all these matters, is a most powerful and important factor, and the country will have to pay greater regard to the steps which Trade Unionism may take than the country has been disposed previously to do. The Trade Union movement was stimulated and developed by the conditions which it was brought into being to remedy. The Trade Union was not the growth of mere agitation. The average Briton must be convinced that there is something really wrong before he will try to remedy it at all, and you cannot by lectures, and by telling the people that they have been and are being oppressed, stir the people of this country to any resistance. Particularly you cannot get them to pay a contribution for it. It was because of the experience of the mass of the workers, their low wages and long hours and the bad conditions of employment, that they organised and used the might that comes from numbers, and paid contributions which in the sum total now amount to many millions of pounds in the way of reserve funds. No apology was needed for the working classes and no defence is required for this step taken by the workers to unite themselves in Trade Unions, and thereby secure by the unity of numbers the power which, acting singly, it was impossible for them to exercise. This Trade Union movement is quite alive to the division which exists among our classes, and I am going to suggest that the movement might be used, might be properly employed, in obtaining that unity of classes which we are here to consider.

Well, then, we may, whilst not overlooking other helpful activities of a large number of people in this country, seek this unity among three main divisions of our people, viz. (a) in industries, (b) in agriculture, and (c) in businesses. Given unity of interest and oneness of purpose and aim in those three broad divisions of the nation, the rest must be attracted and brought into harmony by mere force of example, if nothing else, with the unity which might be secured in the three broad divisions to which I have referred. One of the hopeful things, the significant things, recently uttered in other quarters from which I am going to quote, is clearly seeking this tendency to unity instead of the different interests and classes being driven by the waste and folly of the disuniting lines upon which so far we have persisted. I observe that only a few days ago Lord Selborne, who is one of our principal mouthpieces on agricultural matters, presided at a new body called into existence within the past few weeks and to be known as the National Agricultural Council. Now, that is not a body which will consist of landowners, or of farmers, or of farm workers; it is a body to consist of all three. The landowners, the farmers, and the agricultural workers have come to recognise that they all have something in common touching agriculture, touching the trade or industry in which they are brought into close touch day by day. I know as a matter of fact that only a very few years ago the Farmers' Union would not tolerate the idea of the farm workers having a union, and the land workers looked with real dread upon the farmers having a union, and now all three have come to the stage when they agree to join in one Council, and, though it was admitted that the interests of those three classes were primarily in conflict, it was recognised that by holding meetings, by the representatives of all these quite distinct interests frequently coming together, much good might be done. For what? As they say, for agriculture. So, though none of them will forfeit any rightful interest anyone of them may have in the pursuit of a special claim, they will all recognise a higher sense of duty, and feel there is an obligation upon them to make agriculture in this country a greater thing not only for themselves as the three partners, but for the mass of the community at large. And if it is necessary to do that in the farmers' interest or the landowners' interest, it was at least as necessary to do it in the interest of the agricultural worker, and I put his claim first, not because he is the sole contributor to any yield that may come from the land, but because he is the most numerous body, and numbers in this as in other respects may well be the determining factor; and because if he withholds his labour there will be none of the fruit of the soil for which we look year after year. I follow up this statement by an authoritative one from another quarter. Lord Lee, who as we know was the Director of the Food Production Department at the Board of Agriculture, spoke some time ago on this aspect of the case, and said: "Take the agricultural labourer for example. Does anyone suppose, or suggest, that he should return from the trenches—where he has distinguished himself in a way unsurpassed by any other class in the community—to the old miserable conditions under which, in most parts of the country, he was under-paid, wretchedly housed, and denied almost any pleasure in life, except such as the public house could offer him? Those conditions were a disgrace to the country, and I shall never be content until they are swept away for ever. I do not say this only in the interest of the man himself; it is necessary these conditions should go, in the best interests not merely of the labourer but of the farmer and of agriculture." So it may be that unity and oneness of purpose and of action will be driven upon us as one of the bye-products of war conditions. For your simple plain agricultural worker will come back feeling that as he has fought for the liberties of his country he will be entitled to enjoy a little more of it than ever before, that if the land is to be freed from designs of the tyrant abroad it must be freed also from any wrong at home, and that he must have a larger share in the fruits of his labour than he has enjoyed before. My own view is that you will not on that account make the farm worker a less efficient harvestman, but you will make him a happier father, you will be making him a more contented citizen, and may make him a more profitable worker than he has ever been.

Various remedies have been tried or thought of to give effect to what are our common aspirations. One I have seen referred to frequently is one I would like to see always avoided. It is the remedy of placing before workmen as a necessity a greatly increased output from their manual labour in the future; not that I am opposed to an increased output, but I am not going to demand it as part of the bargain which should itself be arranged and carried out, even if it did not necessarily secure for us any greater sum total of wealth than we now enjoy; for poor as we may have accounted ourselves we have seen in the past few years how vastly we can spend and lend in support of any high purpose to which the country may devote itself. Poverty can never again be claimed by the nation as a whole whenever there is a proper and reasonable demand for any social change or reform which may be necessary and proper. Men are asking for a greater yield, for a greater output, for building up our wealth higher than ever before, so as to repair the ravages of the war, if for no other purpose. With all those objects I agree, but we must not make them as terms to the worker in exchange for those conditions of unity which we are asking our workers to arrange with us. Greater output, increased efficiency, a bigger and better return of wealth from industrial and agricultural energy, can well come out of a better working system, a better rearrangement of combined effort, a more extensive use of machinery, a more satisfactory sub-division of labour, a wider employment of the personal experience and technical skill of our industrial classes, a higher state of administrative efficiency and management in the workshops, the creation of a better and more humane atmosphere in the workshops. Out of all of these things a greater yield of wealth could be produced, and it is along those lines we must go in order not merely to convert but to convince the workman that he is not being used as a mere tool for some ulterior end for the benefit of some smaller class in the country. It has been said by some that Trade Union restrictions and limitations must go. I candidly admit there have been Trade Union regulations and conditions which perhaps have stood in the way of some increased output, but I am not here to apologise for Trade Union rules. Every class has its regulations and rules. The more powerful and the more wealthy the class the more rigid and stringent those rules have been. However, the class which was most in need of regulations and rules, the working class, was the first to set the example of setting them aside as a general war measure when the country called upon the workers to take action of that kind during 1915. We must, therefore, keep in mind the fact that workmen are naturally suspicious. That suspicion is the growth of the workshop system, into which I have not now the time to go, and we must avoid causing the workman to suspect that our unity, the unity we are seeking among classes, is a mere device for getting him to work harder and produce greater wealth and perhaps labour even longer hours than ever.

The first great step towards this unity is to secure the good will of the Trade Unions. Having secured that, the next thing is to proceed upon lines which will bring at once home to the individual workman in the workshop some sense of responsibility with regard to the response which he must make to the appeal which we put before him. In short, better relations must precede any first step that could effectively be taken to secure this greater unity, and better relations are impossible in industry until we have given the individual workman a greater sense of responsibility of what he is in the workshop for. Let me briefly outline how that might be secured. It was put, I think, quite eloquently if simply in an address to the Trade Union Congress a short time ago by the President of the Congress, who said that the workman wanted a voice in the daily management of the employment in which he spends his working life, in the atmosphere and in the conditions under which he has to work, in the hours of beginning and ending work, in the conditions of remuneration, and even in the manners and practices of the foremen with whom he had to be in contact. "In all these matters," said the President, "workmen have a right to a voice—even to an equal voice—with the management itself." I know that is a big, and to some an extravagant claim to make, but to set it aside or ignore it is to provoke and invite further trouble. Industry can no longer be run for the profit which it produces, or even because of the wealth which collective energy can make. That, indeed, was the mistake out of which, as I said at the beginning, this disunion, and this suspicion, and this selfishness, have grown. We have had greatly to modify our doctrines of political economy during the course of the war, and all the things which many teachers told us never could be done have come as natural to us under war conditions which we could not resist, and of which we were the creatures. Where now is the law of supply and demand? Indeed, if the law of supply and demand were operating at this moment, there are few workmen in the country who would not be receiving many, many pounds more a week than they are. The workman is not paid to-day according to the demand for his labour. A very much higher obligation decides for him what his remuneration is to be. I have in mind, of course, the fact that a considerable number of workers, who are employed upon munition services and so on, are enjoying very high wages, but that is not at all true of the masses of the industrial population, and we ought not to be deceived by these rare instances which are quoted of men coming out of the workshop with L20 or L30. Speaking of the industrial population in the main, what was the outstanding economic doctrine?—the doctrine that the demand for labour and the volume for supplying that demand determined the remuneration. That doctrine has had to go by the board like so many other things that could not exist under war pressure.

Then, how are we to give effect to this general workshop aspiration for bringing the workman into closer unity with the conditions which determine that part of his life which is the bread-winning part, for which he has to turn out in the morning early and often return home late in the evening? There was established some time ago what can be described as a quite responsible committee to report upon how better relations not only between employers and employed through their associations, but in regard to employers and employed in the workshops, might be established. That committee issued the report commonly known to us now as the Whitley Report, of which I am quite sure more will be heard in a few years. The men who had to frame that report were drawn from the two extremes of the employers and trade unions. We had men with very advanced views, like Mr Smillie, on the one hand, and we had quite powerful employers of labour, like Sir Gilbert Claughton and Sir William Carter, on the other. I had the privilege of sitting on that committee, and for some months we laboured to frame some definite terms which might be accepted by those who were concerned in our recommendations. I very often hear the suggestion that people will have little of it because it is not ideal, not grand or great enough, but we have to come down to the earth upon these matters, and we have to recommend only what we feel is likely to be accepted lest our labour should be wasted. We must avoid, therefore, throwing our aims too high, and we must suggest only what practical business men and workmen are likely seriously to consider. Having decided to reach that conclusion, and feeling the sense of responsibility which, opposed as so many of us were to each other, drove us to reach a conclusion, we expressed ourselves in these terms: "We are convinced that a permanent improvement in the relations between employers and employed must be founded upon something other than a cash basis. What is wanted is that the workpeople should have a greater opportunity of participating in the discussion upon an adjustment of those parts of industry by which they are most affected. For securing improvement in the relations between employers and employed, it is essential that any proposals put forward should offer to workpeople the means of attaining improved conditions of employment and a higher standard of comfort generally, and involve the enlistment of their active and continuous co-operation in the promotion of industry." Previously, the view was that the workman had nothing whatever to do with this phase of the management of business, and that is a phrase still very much used. We make no claim in this report that workmen should have the right to interfere in the higher realms of business management, in, say, finance, in the general higher details of organisation, in the extension of works, in all those more important and urgent matters which must come before the board of managers or the manager himself. These are things which belong properly and exclusively to those who have the responsibility of managing our great industries, but in all the other things affecting the conditions of the workman, the manner in which he is to be treated, hours, wages, conditions of employment, relations between section and section, and working division and working division, all those things which were regarded previously as the private monopoly of the foreman or manager must in future become the common concern of the workmen collectively, and they must have some voice in how these things are to be settled. The country and its industries, of course, may refuse to hear that voice, but really we have to choose between reconciling workmen to a given system of industry or finding workmen in perpetual revolt against their conditions. And it will pay the country to concede a great deal, not only for peace in the workshop but for a higher standard of peace generally in the whole community. The appeal that must be made to the workman must be followed up by asking him to receive it in a very different spirit from the spirit sometimes shewn in certain workshops. I am not here by any means to pour praise altogether upon the working classes, and I am conscious of the mistakes and wrongs which have sometimes been done in their names, and I am therefore anxious that the spirit of the workshop should be so tempered and altered as to be fit to receive and make the best use of the approaches which are to be made to it to participate in workshop management upon the lines which I have indicated.

So this appeal which has been made by the Whitley committee, and which has been followed up by some other departments of government, is put as an appeal to the common-sense and reason of the men in the workshop, and does not rest upon any of the many agencies which have been employed previously in the pursuit of definite trade union ends. This spirit can be fostered only when the masses of workmen are reached by the consciousness that they themselves are being called upon to share in the undertakings of which they are so important a part. The importance of workmen has been revealed in a most startling way during the period of the war, and the war has shewn in many trades that recurring differences between capital and labour can be adjusted without strikes and without lock-outs if methods are provided in the workshop which are acceptable to both sides, and are made to operate fairly and satisfactorily between the different interests. Think how important the workman has become because of the war. Consider how much the workman is now pressed and drawn into all manner of services which previously he could either remain in or leave at his will. The war has made such a demand upon national industrial energy that there is no service now for which there is not a demand. Indeed, you have seen the effect in that services in the workshop include men who previously would have been ashamed to have had it known that they had ever soiled their hands at any toil at all, but who have been glad to get a place in the workshop because it was work of national importance. War experience has shewn us how high manual service stands in the grades of service which can be rendered for community interest. This new spirit does not appeal to force as a means of settling differences, nor to compulsory arbitration, nor to the authority of the State, nor to the power of organisation on either side. It is an appeal to reason, an approach to both sides to act in association on lines which will give freedom, self-respect, and security to both sides, whilst enabling each of them to submit to the other what it feels is best for the joint advancement of the trade and those engaged in it. In short, I would like to see inside the gates of every workshop the cultivation of the same spirit in British industry as has been hinted at already as the first essential for the future development of agriculture in England. Those processes of calling in the individual workman through committees, to which I will refer briefly in a moment, are not intended to take the place of the great organisations. They are to be supplementary to the Trade Unions, and are not intended to supplant them.

Trades Union leadership has changed hands to a great extent during the past year or two, and the virtual leaders of the men are now men themselves employed at the bench and in the mine. They are exercising very great authority and influence over masses of their fellow workmen, and often the authority, and decisions, and advice of executives and leaders are set aside and the advice of the men employed in the workshop, given to their fellow workmen as mates, is followed. So with this change, due to conditions into which we have not time to go, there must be recognised the need for applying new remedies in considering this question of improving the relations between employer and employed. It will not do now merely to have discussions between association and association. We might improve upon that and supplement it as I have said by having discussions direct in the workshop with the workmen themselves, who would be brought into touch at once with persons who were responsible for what action must be taken. So leadership having been to some extent transferred from the Trade Union to the workshop, the workman must be followed there and must be shewn how essential it is to recruit his good will and his aid in improving workshop conditions, not for the betterment of the management, but as much, if not more, for his own betterment as a workman in the shop. This may not touch certain industries in the country that are non-organised. Some of those trades, much to our shame, in former years were known as sweated industries, but even there it is found that the workers, men and women alike, are coming gradually into the trades unions, and should they not be in the trades unions to any great extent they are to be reached by other ways and means which this committee has developed. It is intended to apply to them, so as to establish the necessary machinery for better relations, the personnel of the Trades Boards Acts, those boards which, in the absence of trades unions, deal with the sweated conditions of thousands of workers employed in those sweated trades. So I have no fear myself of the non-organised trades being left altogether out of the range of the spirit to which I have referred. In addition to the committees there is to be in every district, it is proposed, a representative council, drawn from the employers and employed of the particular industry, and some scores of these councils are now being set up. In addition, there is to be in relation to every principal industry a national council, and many of us are now engaged in the creation of those several bodies. The public may not hear much about them, but they are the foundation upon which this structure of better relations is to rest, and, so far as we can spare some small margin of our time for those duties, considerable headway has been made in establishing these different organisations.

But I attach most importance to the workshop committees, and so I want to pursue this idea a little further. What are those committees to be? They would have to be free representative bodies, chosen by the men themselves. They could be empowered to meet the management, possessed of a sense of responsibility, to discuss in their own homely way matters which would have to be settled between them. Indeed, we know from experience that many of the big trade disputes in this country have grown out of trifles, out of small nothings comparatively, which could well have been settled inside the workshop gates by bringing master and man together, empowered to discuss matters which both understand as matters of personal experience. The committees when created, in this atmosphere and spirit to which I refer, would exist not in rebellion against the trade unions or against the trade union system, or exist as being in revolt against the management of the works, or the employer of labour. The committees would be vested with responsibility for negotiations. They would be able to use the personal knowledge derived from contact with the questions arising day by day. They would develop a sense of independence and a sense of just dealing, so that the doctrine of "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work" should apply not only to the wages but to the work to be done, a thing which sometimes does not occur. These committees could check the driving methods of some persons in authority, and, whilst getting the best from those who are above them, they could give the best, as I am sure they would provided the spirit is created, from the workmen in return for the fairer treatment they would enjoy. These committees could deal not only with manual service and ordinary work and wage questions; they could develop a better use of industrial capacity and technical knowledge in matters of workshop life. But the spirit is everything, and the best desires of equitable workshop management could find expression through those committees if they were created. The committees would give a chance to the many workmen who now talk a great deal about democracy to express that democracy through the persons of the workmen themselves. I fear there are many of our friends in the labour movement, as we term it, who are given freely to talking of democracy without clearly understanding all that is covered in that term. It is a term which, it is a pleasure to see, has recently found its way not merely into the phrases of statesmen, but into the King's speech itself. We are now speaking commonly of all the sacrifices that are being made, of all the blood and treasure that is being spilt, in order to have a wholesome democratic system of world government. Well, we must begin in the workshops, for you cannot have peace on a large scale the country over, or between nation and nation, unless you have peace in our places of employment. They are the starting points and there it is that your contented millions must first be found. If they are not happy and if they are not at ease in connexion with their national service, you cannot expect any of those larger results for which highminded statesmen are seeking the world over.

Upon two main lines, in my judgment, democracy will require the most sane guidance and most sagacious advice which its leaders are capable of giving to it. It will not do for leaders merely to say that the future of the world must be decided, not by diplomats or thrones or Kaisers, but by the will of peoples. The will of peoples can find enduring and beneficial expression only when that will seeks social change by reasonable and calculated instalments, and not by any violent act of revolution. Peaceful voters on their way to the ballot boxes and properly formulated principles will in the end go further than fire and sword in the internal affairs of a nation. I say this because of the loose talk we have heard from many labour platforms recently of revolution and its benefits. Revolution may well be in any country the beginning and not the end of internal troubles, often expressed in a more painful and more violent form than ever. We need only look at our former great partner, Russia, to find full confirmation of all I have now implied. The red flag marches with the machine gun and the black cap when a certain stage of physical revolt is reached. The theory of new methods of life can only find rational application when democracy is wisely guided in taking slow but sure steps peacefully to turn its theories into an applied system, wherein the people of a nation and not merely a section or a class shall find their proper place and security for service, and find an assured existence under conditions of comfort for themselves and advantage to the State. Democratic leaders must tell these things to the people time after time if need be. They must repeat them so that the masses may understand them, because the tendency in labour has been to narrow the meaning of democracy. Democracy is not, and ought not to be, limited to those who now constitute the industrial population. Democracy is not a sect or a trade union club. Democracy is wider than the confines of the manual worker. Democracy should strive to reach the highest level of morality in doctrine and aspiration. It is not a class formula. It is a great and elevating faith which may be shared by all who believe in it. Democracy stands for the general progress of mankind and means the uplifting of men, and the liberation and unifying of nations. It does not mean the dominion of one class over another, nor the violent wresting of position or authority by some dramatic act of physical force, which if used would still leave a nation in a state of unreconciled and contending factions. Democracy, again, is a spirit whereby vast social and economic change may be effected through a medium approaching common consent or at least by the application of the political power of the people acting through representative institutions and resting upon ideas which majorities accept and understand. The spirit which has already accepted vast political changes can be made to apply to vast economic and industrial changes. This spirit must be cultivated by the leaders of democracy. They have now opportunities as great as their responsibilities. The success of parties, in the old sense of the term, is a trivial thing to the success of the great ends to be secured. These ends will justify the use of any constitutional means for dethroning that form of power upon which privilege and the mere possession of wealth have rested. But democracy must not be duped by phrases, nor be swayed by any influence which does not lead to a lasting advance for the nation as a whole. Nor should its leaders think that fundamental and enduring changes in our social system can be reached by any short cut to which the great mass of the people have not been converted. Progress will be faster in the future if impatience and folly do not retard it.

Having said a little with regard to the position of the poorer people, let me before I close respectfully address a few words to the richer and more favoured in the country. Should all rich folk in the country work? That is a very plain and I dare say it will be regarded in some places as quite an impudent question. But really, rich people who have never had cause in any way to earn their living have always been a danger to the State, just as they have been the greatest instance of wicked waste to be found in any country. There is nothing more melancholy, and even degrading, to a country than the sight of educated people who have nothing to do. Wealth is the fruit of service and endeavour. Work is the only medium by which the ravages of the war can be made good. Ignorance and idleness present a most pitiable spectacle, but the most criminal of all sights is education and idleness combined. Finally, let me say that whilst I have addressed myself mainly in terms of appeal to the workers, I am not unmindful at all of the difficulties of the great employers of labour and those covered by the phrase "our Captains of Industry." I know that many of them work very hard under the greatest and most trying mental pressure, and have duties and trials unknown even to the workmen, but with those duties and trials come reliefs again unknown to the workmen—holidays, change, and rest, and the meeting of men of their own class whose very company is an intellectual joy, so that the worst off your employer of labour as a human being may be he is far better off than the average workman. Think of the housing conditions of so many thousands, hundreds of thousands, of workmen, and how intolerable it would be for you to live under those conditions, how discontented you would be, how discontented the rich would be were it their fate to drag on an existence in some of those places which are commonly described by the term "houses." Why, the very waiting room of the employer's ordinary office is a much more cosy and pleasant place than the homes of many of the most industrious workers of England. I plead that the elements of the human order should begin to pervade the relations of the workshop, that the workman should be less of a drudge and more of a human asset than he has been, that he should be brought into partnership in the undertaking and in the management; that incidentally he should have a more secure remuneration and not have to bear the penalties and ordeals of employment as he has had alone to bear them during times of trade depression and unemployment in previous years. The human side of the workshop has, therefore, to be built up, and you cannot hope to build it up upon any foundation of drudgery such as the workmen in the main have had to live under, and, as I have said, it will pay the country to conciliate the men on these terms. It is a high ideal, but it is attainable. I believe it is attainable because we have seen it in another sphere of sacrifice where it has already been secured. The war has brought all classes together. In the trenches, at sea, and in all theatres of danger, men of all classes are now labouring shoulder to shoulder. There you have had a sinking of individual interests. There you have had a common sacrifice, a common endeavour for a common cause. Surely, as all classes have been able to unite in their sacrifice and in their resistance of the aggression of a foreign foe, it is, I hope, not asking too much that when they come back and take their places in peaceful pursuits again, and become masters, workmen, managers, and foremen in our enterprises and businesses, when they return from danger and come back to take their places amongst us,—surely it is not too much to hope that those who are able to unite abroad will be able to unite for the ends of peace and joy here at home.



UNITY IN THE EMPIRE

By F. J. CHAMBERLAIN, C.B.E.

The word "unity" in relation to the Empire has a deeper meaning to-day than it had five years ago. Then it was a watchword, a theme for Imperial conferences and for speakers at demonstrations. The sanguine were sure, the pessimists and that great body of Britishers of moderate views and moderate faith regarded it as one of the things hoped for.

With dramatic suddenness the event clarified the situation, England awoke at war. There was no time for preliminary councils. The supreme test of the Empire had been reached. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole world watched with eagerness for the result. It was in that moment that the great discovery was made. The British Empire stood fast. From that day until now, from end to end of the world has been seen an object lesson of unity that has justified the sanguine, and been an inspiration to the Allies. That revelation has been more inspiring because the world is aware that it is in spite of the most sinister and subtle campaign against it, planned and brilliantly executed by an enemy under the cloak of friendship. I do not forget the tragic circumstances of one small nation within the Empire. But Ireland has given more evidence of her faithfulness to Empire on the fields of France and Flanders than of her treachery at home, and to-day we have more reason to count her ours than has the enemy. Examine the position in cold blood, if you can, and you are still aware of a substantial, solid, and effective unity running round the Empire, binding it in one as with a girdle of scarlet and gold.

The war is not responsible for the unity; it has only discovered or uncovered it. The storm does not establish foundations; it may reveal them. A century of building has created the structure that the storm has failed to destroy.

The British Empire is a successful experiment on the lines of the longed-for League of Nations. The race contains no more diverse elements than are found within its borders; one-third of the land surface of the world, and one-fifth of the inhabitants, have been held together in a living federation and have been kept until this day. Upon our generation rests the awful and splendid responsibility of proving to a questioning world that this unity can be made permanent, and of illustrating how a still larger unity may be achieved.

You will forgive one or two homely pictures of our unity that cannot fail to strike the imagination. It has been our privilege to meet thousands of men from the Overseas Dominions. How many times have boys, whose forefathers emigrated from England or Scotland, who were themselves born in Australia, or on the Western plains of Canada, said, "I have been wanting to come home all my life"? These islands are the "home" of the Empire, and there is no more wonderful word in the language.

Or think of Botha and Smuts, within the memory almost of the youngest of us, fighting with all their heart and mind against the Empire, and, to-day, dominant personalities proclaiming their loyalty, and proving it in unrivalled service.

Or picture, if you can, young India, pouring out her life-blood with pride and ready sacrifice, in France, in Egypt, and in Mesopotamia, for the "British Raj." The most moving scene in the history of the British Commons was on that evening in 1915, when the princes of India stood amidst the representatives of the people of the homelands and paid their homage.

How much such things mean will depend on the vision of those who hear them; but they have in them the stuff that holds the future.

This ghastly war, not of our choosing, has transferred the seats of learning for young Britain from their peaceful sites to the battlefield. If the object of education is the cultivation of the power of thought and observation, the kindling of imagination, and the extension of knowledge; then "over there" is a University set in full array, with ghostly as well as human tutors, a curriculum without precedent, and such a body of undergraduates as Cambridge or Oxford might covet.

It is not for nothing, as regards the Empire, that your sons, the children of the East End, and the boys of Canada, Australasia, and South Africa, are meeting and mingling with Gurkha and Sikh, and with each other. They are sharing a common discipline, a common adventure, making sacrifice together. They are seeing each other with eyes from which the scales are falling, and knowledge and understanding are growing out of their contact. The farthest reaches of Empire have been brought nearer to the Empire's heart by this brotherhood in arms, and the barriers between classes have been lowered until a man can step across them without climbing. The distance between East and West has been immeasurably shortened, whether we are thinking in terms of London, or of the Empire.

In our consideration of this whole subject we are to take the Christian standpoint. To us, the words "Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven," on Divine lips were more than a pious wish. They were a great intention, the expression of age-long purpose. We believe that the gains of the centuries—the harvest of the past which is worth conserving—have been secured by moral and spiritual conquest, rather than by military or political achievement. There may be elements in our present forms of unity which we may well allow to go by the board. The things that make for permanence will abide not only with an enlightened statesmanship, but with a growing understanding, an ever broadening interpretation of Christian teaching about

The Kingdom of God on earth, The Universal Fatherhood of God, and The brotherhood of man,

leading the nation to see that the knowledge of God and of His Christ is the rightful inheritance of every son of the Empire.

As these great ideals of social life have been interpreted in the life of either sovereign peoples or subject peoples, so, we believe, and only so, have bonds been forged that can be trusted to stand the strain which time and changing condition and circumstances impose.

Unity, even the Empire itself ultimately, depends, as we believe, on a broad-based statesmanship, carrying up the main principles of our Government to their highest power in action, and, constantly throughout the Empire, mediating those doctrines to the peoples concerned as they are able to bear them, with ever-extending inspiration and encouragement to growth and development.

Our Imperial aims are neither antagonistic to nor inconsistent with our Christian programme. That should constitute a challenge to the Christian Churches, and is in itself a matter for high and solemn pride. The war has cleared the air. As stated during this period, the ideal of a federation of nations, free, independent, and at the same time interdependent, each working out its national destiny, each contributing, in terms of opportunity, to the well-being of the whole, bringing to bear on Imperial matters the heart, brain, will of the whole, gives us a picture of a Commonwealth in advance of any contemporary political programme, with the one conspicuous exception of that of the United States of America, between whom and ourselves is being established a Unity which may well be more valuable to the world at large and to ourselves than any formal Union.

Here, as we see it, is our opportunity. The Christian forces of the Empire have the onus of maintaining the national outlook at this high level. Our faith, our audacity, our leadership will be needed if lesser counsels are to have no chance of prevailing. There must be no swing of the pendulum back to smaller views.

With the coming of Peace, the temptation to the Nation to take off its armour, to come down from the pedestal, to revert to pre-war conditions, to re-act in self-indulgence from the strain of war, or to let materialism defeat idealism, will be well-nigh overwhelming. To give way to that temptation will be to rob victory of any permanent values. It will be a poor thing to have taught Germany her lesson, if we fail to learn our own.

We see no hope of successful resistance of that temptation apart from the mobilisation of the Christian forces within the Empire into an army committed to the sacred task of making the conscience of the Nation effectively Christian, leading the way in bringing about a closer approximation between the politics of the State and the programme of the Kingdom of God, and proclaiming that Kingdom at hand.

If we are agreed so far it behoves us to look for the practical implications of the position. These islands are still the heart and home of the Empire. This was the rock whence its younger peoples were hewn. Our nation has produced the men and the machinery that govern our commonwealth. The lonely places, farthest removed from us, will be peopled largely by and through the work of children of the Old Country. There, wherever her children go, is England.

England is a treasure house, where the very stones are eloquent. Her history, her buildings, her national and civic life, her denominations and movements are all of them of vital interest to her children. It is a place of pilgrimage and remembrance. It is more. They find here the mature growths from which their institutions have sprung. They love our historic places, they love our crowded cities, they love our seashores and our quiet country-side, for everywhere they go they find not only the story of our past, but that of their own. This is their spiritual home. Our art, our literature, our movements are parts of a common inheritance, and it is the pride of the Motherland that her children have never outgrown their love of the old home, their veneration for its sanctions and restraints, and that on their own homesteads they have reproduced in new settings and often in fresh forms so much that is native here.

One would like to see a larger share in this priceless inheritance offered to our peoples oversea. Think for one moment of our great Cathedrals, unique and wonderful. They can never be reproduced. They might be copied; but Canterbury and Westminster, Lincoln and Durham, York and the rest would still remain all that they are to us and to them. You cannot transplant history. In the homeland we are but trustees of these treasures, and we ought to make them the home and centre of our Imperial Christianity. In every one of them the priests of the Church in the Overseas lands should not only be seen but heard. Is there no room in Cathedral Chapters for Overseas representatives, so that in our daily services in a new and living way we may be linked together in sacrament, praise and prayer, and in the proclamation of Christian truth? One Canonry for each historic building would mean more to Unity than many resolutions at Congress. Perhaps that is as far as one ought to go in suggestion, but there are other splendid possibilities that one would love to discuss. No one thinking of Unity in the Empire can fail to rejoice in the growing desire manifest among Christian Denominations for Unity. I will not trench on another's subject beyond saying that the way to Union is Unity, and that it would be tragic if in these momentous days any stone was left unturned that would lead to better knowledge, deeper understanding and sympathy between those who name the Name that is above every name. And our people overseas have much to teach us in this matter. Over great areas of social opportunity and service the Catholic Church may act unitedly and must do so, if she is to enter on offensive warfare and not stand for another generation on the defensive. The war has made a difference here. Men, who in the conventional days of peace rarely met, have joined hands in service. Catholic and Protestant, Churchman and Free Churchman, have found joy in fellowship. That does not mean that differences have disappeared, it means that, recognising and estimating their differences, it has been possible to establish a basis of co-operation, in knowledge, understanding, and sympathy, and to recognise in one another the hall-mark of Christian faith and character. Is this to be a war measure only? or is it to be one of the great gains to be carried over into the days ahead?

One other question clamours for treatment: the problem of the evangelisation of the Empire. Christianity must be given its chance in every corner of the Empire. There may be divergent opinions as to the methods to be used, but if Christianity contains in its gospel the pearl of great price, there can be no two opinions as to the obligation that rests on us to bring to the nations federated with us this supreme gift. Nothing can release us from that responsibility. To postpone the presentation of the Christian gospel for any of the time-honoured excuses:

(1) our pre-occupation in matters of more urgent importance elsewhere,

(2) any fear of the effects of Christianity on our political or commercial interests,

(3) the desire to live down prejudice and establish confidence,

(4) the preparation of a people's mind by education before introducing a new religion,

—any one of these is treachery to the All-Father and to the family of man, and a vital praeparatio evangelica is being made. Let me illustrate.

It happened in a great marquee in France. On a summer evening in 1916 the place was crowded with Indians. There was a group playing Indian card games, there was a crowd round a gramophone with Indian records, at the writing tables with great torment of spirit men were writing to their homes. At the counter foods they loved were being provided. Against one of the poles of the marquee stood a stately Indian of some rank. He had been seen there often before. He rarely spoke but seemed intensely interested. On this particular night the time arrived for the closing of the tent. The little groups gradually disappeared and the tent curtains were being replaced when the leader of the work found himself addressed by the Indian:

Why do you serve us in this way? You are not here by Government orders. You come when you like and you go when you like. There is only one religion on earth that would lead its servants to serve in this way, Christianity. I have been watching you men, and I have come to the conclusion that Christianity will fit the East as it can never fit the West. When the war is over I want you to send one of your men to my village. We are all Hindus, but my people will do what I tell them.

One of the ghastly tragedies of the war is that two great nations nominally Christian are at each other's throats. In the world's eyes Christian civilisation has broken down. We know better, but our explanations will not carry far enough to correct the impression. Our defence must be an offensive.

It is certainly within the truth to say that we have not yet seen what Christianity can do for a community or a nation where, as I put it before, "it is given a chance." May it not be that in the Providence of God the first great revelation of what Christianity can do for a nation will be seen in one of the lands that have come under the Flag, and among a people living under less complex conditions than ourselves? If that is a possibility we ought to see that wherever the Flag flies, there comes, with the unfurling of the Flag, the Gospel of Christ.

This is directly in the interest of unity, and many problems that have so far remained insoluble to our statesmen might discover the solution in Christian leadership.

I shall be pardoned I know for suggesting that the highest purposes of unity may be served by the extension and development throughout the Empire of such international organisations as the Student Christian Movement, the Y.M.C.A., the Y.W.C.A., and, used at its highest values, the Boy Scout Movement. There are others, but these are typical. They are established movements built up on definite principles capable of universal application, and yet each of them able to develop its organisation on lines that recognise national psychology and character. Each of them may become and aims at becoming indigenous everywhere, giving freedom of method and action and free play to the moral and intellectual activities of the people concerned, while they have certain essential elements that are universally characteristic of them. In addition, they give large numbers of Christian people an opportunity of expressing their unity in service of the right kind.

What was said about the Cathedrals is equally true of our two ancient Universities. Mr Fisher's Education Bill may well mean more for Imperial unity than almost any other single factor. It will mean an ever increasing number of men to whom "Cambridge" and "Oxford" will be magic words. If our view of culture is broad enough we shall see to it that these two Universities become increasingly places where the children of the Empire who are fit to graduate in them shall not lack the opportunity of doing so. Because these ancient foundations link with the past, because of all they may mean to the present and to the future, the way to them should be made broad enough to admit the living stream of Greater Britain's children, who by dint of gifts and industry have proved their fitness to meet their peers in these delectable cities, where the very air breathes the romance of British culture. Their right of entry ought not to be won by the benefactions of private citizens, though all who love knowledge are grateful enough for these, but should be theirs by their citizenship in the Empire and their own tested fitness.

Nothing again is more hopeful in the present situation than the manifest desire, widely felt and expressed, that the old class-antagonisms should never be revived. Surely this is the strategic moment in which we may make the War once more contribute to a better state of things. Our politicians are awake to the need and are inventing every kind of machinery for bringing Capital and Labour together in Council Chambers as co-partners in the Commerce of the Empire. But there are sinister forces also at work, and this machinery can only run if it is controlled by men of resolute good will.

The War has been a great bridge-builder linking up in the fellowship of discipline and sacrifice people between whom chasms yawned before. There are knowledge and understanding and sympathy to-day amongst us. Yet many of us are convinced that no purely political machinery can be made effective in achieving so great a task as the making permanent of this new and better condition. We need a new and abiding spirit of conciliation, a deeper determination than political action can produce, that things shall not relapse, that the forces of re-action shall not triumph. The one hope of carrying over into permanence this new understanding and appreciation lies in the nation becoming impregnated with those spacious spiritual ideals that the Churches together represent. Nothing is impossible to faith, and faith in God and man will be kept astretch in the discipline that will be demanded of us all, in the breaking down of false barriers that have grown up through the years and the destruction of long-lived prejudices that will die hard.

The Empire itself is a unity. It is not easy for English people to realise all that is implied here. My great name-sake urged us in this country to "think Imperially." Another voice asks us "What do they know of England who only England know?" but it is hard for us to think except in terms of England. For example, I have referred to this country as the great treasure house of the Empire's history, and to the care and devotion shewn by our kinsmen from Overseas in their study of our country and its institutions. All of us realise how right that is, but ought we not to reciprocate their devotion and regard, by much more intense interest and study of their life and the developments of their institutions?

Our unity demands this wider culture, this reciprocity. The Motherland must not only teach, she must be prepared to learn. She may lead, but she must be prepared to follow. We have much to contribute, but in Religion, in political and social ideals, and in commerce there is much we need to receive.

If our land is the great treasure house, are not these other lands great laboratories where we might see, if we would only look, how some of our accepted ideas, and notions, and watchwords are tested in a larger arena?

Are we so sure of ourselves that we are prepared to hold on to our own experience as the final test of the truth and value of our theories? Or are we big enough in the light of Imperial experience to revise our judgment, to sift our theories, and to go forward carrying those which stand the test of the wider arena, and being prepared to surrender those which only seemed right and proper in the conventional setting of these small islands?

In conclusion, the Empire has come to power and unity on certain great principles. Our Imperial ideals have been evolved out of experience all over the world, and with all kinds of people, under the guidance of distinguished leaders of many-sided gifts. In an Empire so diverse in its constituent parts, including peoples at varied stages of development, it is impossible that those ideals should be everywhere expressed at their highest power. In many places our methods of government must be tentative, but everywhere they must be progressive, placing upon subject peoples the burden of government as rapidly as they are able to bear it, providing every inspiration that can call them upwards and onwards. Our tentative methods must never be allowed to become permanent. We may be tutors, we must never become tyrants. We may lead, direct, even control, but we may never be content until our people are free, self-governing, rejoicing in the liberty that enables them to choose whole-heartedly to remain in that Commonwealth of free peoples we call the Empire. Along this path lie permanence and closer unity. In our Imperial destiny it is the part of those who would be the greatest to become the servants of all.

Thank God for all who have laboured in this spirit to build our goodly heritage.



UNITY BETWEEN NATIONS

By the Rev. J. H. B. MASTERMAN, M.A.

In the previous lectures of this course you have been considering the problem of home reunion. My task to-day is to remind you of the fact that beyond the reunion of the Churches at home there lies the larger problem of the realisation of the Christian ideal of a universal brotherhood. How can this ideal be realised in a world divided into nations? I am going to treat the subject historically; firstly because I find myself incapable of treating it in any other way, and secondly because you can only build securely if you build on the foundation of the historic past. The State may ignore the lessons of the past, the Church can never do so.

How can we deal with the apparent antagonism between the centrifugal force of nationality and the centripetal force of the Catholic ideal? There are two possible answers that we cannot accept. It is possible for religion to set itself against the development of national life, and claim that a world-religion must find expression in a world-state. That is the mediaeval answer.

Or it is possible for religion to become subordinate to nationality at the cost of losing the note of Catholicity, so that the consecration of national life may seem a nobler task than the gathering of humanity into conscious fellowship in one great society. This is the modern answer.

With neither of these solutions can we be satisfied. The existence of nations as units of political self-consciousness within the larger life of humanity does, we believe, minister to the fulfilment of the purpose of God. Whatever may be the case hereafter, the establishment of a world-state, at the present stage in the evolution of human institutions, would mean the impoverishment of the life of humanity. Yet a Church that is merely national or imperial has missed the true significance of its mission.

At the beginning of the Christian era, the greatest attempt ever made to gather all peoples into a universal society was actually in progress. The Roman Empire was founded on the basis of a common administrative system, and a common law—the jus gentium. It needed a common religion. The effort to supply this passes through three stages. The earliest of these is the stage of universal toleration which was made possible by polytheism. A second stage soon follows. The various religions of the Empire overflow one another's frontier-lines and a synthesis begins, leading to the Stoic idea of the universal truth expressed in many forms. But the popular mind was unable to rise to this high conception, and the third stage begins towards the end of the first century in the formal adoption of the worship of the Emperor as the religious expression of the unity of the Empire. It was the opposition of the Christian Church that did most to bring to naught this effort to give a religious foundation to the unity of the Empire, and the attempt of Constantine and Theodosius to make Christianity an Imperial religion came too late to save the Empire from disintegration.

For the unity of the Christian Church had been undermined. When Christianity shook itself free from the shackles of Jewish nationalism, it came under the influence of Greek thought. The theology and language of the early Church were Greek. Even in Rome the Church was for at least two centuries "a Greek colony." Hence the growth of Christianity was slow in those western parts of the Empire that had not come under the influence of Greek culture—Gaul, Britain, Spain, North Africa. Latin Christianity found its centre in North Africa, where Roman culture had imposed itself on the hard, cruel Carthaginian world. It is Carthage, not Athens, that gives to Tertullian his harsh intolerance and to St Augustine his stern determinism. So the way was prepared for what I regard as the supreme tragedy of history—the falling apart of Eastern and Western Christianity. Then, in the West, the unity of the Church is broken by the conversion of the Teutonic peoples to Arianism, so that the contest between the dying Empire in the West and the tribes pressing on its frontiers is embittered by religious antagonism. The sword of Clovis secured the victory of orthodoxy, but at what a cost!

When the storm subsides, there emerges the august conception of the Holy Roman Empire. For the noblest expression of the ideal of a universal Christian Empire, read Dante's De Monarchia. The history of the Holy Roman Empire is too large a subject to enter upon. It is important to remember that the struggles between the Popes and the Emperors that fill so large a space of mediaeval history were not struggles between Church and State. Western Europe was conceived of as one Christian Society—an attempt to realise the City of God of St Augustine's great treatise—and the question at issue was whether the Pope or the Emperor was to be regarded as the supreme head of this great society.

The unity of Western Christendom found a crude, but real, expression in the Crusades, and it is significant that the decline of the crusading impulse coincides in time with the rise of national feeling in the two western states, England and France. What was to be the attitude of the Catholic Church towards this new national instinct? In the 14th and 15th centuries the question becomes increasingly urgent, and the Council of Constance may be regarded as the last sincere effort to find an answer. The answer suggested there, to which the English Church still adheres, was the recognition of a General Council of the Church as the supreme spiritual authority. Such a General Council might gather the glory and honour of the nations into the City of God, and might even, it was hoped, restore the broken unity between East and West. How the Council failed, how Constantinople was left to its fate, how a Papacy growing more and more Italian in its interests brought to a head the long-simmering revolt of the nations—all this you know. The Reformation was, in part, a struggle of the nations to give religious expression to their national life. The threefold bond that had held together the Church of the West—the bond of common language, law and ceremonial—was broken.

At the threshold of the new order stand the figures of Luther and Machiavelli, as champions of the supremacy of the State. True, Luther thinks of the State as a Christian society, while Machiavelli is the father of the modern German doctrine of the non-moral character of state action. But the Augsburg compromise, cujus regio, ejus religio, was a frank subordination of the Church to secular authority. The Tudor sovereigns adopted the doctrine with alacrity, and imposed on the Church of England a subjection to secular authority from which it has not yet been able to disentangle itself.

While Lutheranism tended to treat religion as a department of the State, Calvinism claimed for the Church an authority that threatened the very existence of the State. Calvinism represents the second attempt to give practical expression to St Augustine's Civitas Dei, as the Holy Roman Empire was the first. It failed, in part, because it lost its catholic character, and became (as, for example, in Scotland) intensely national. The disintegration of the Catholic Church in the West was helped by two influences. The first was the return to the standards and ideals of the Old Testament. The appeal of the reformers to Holy Scripture involved the elevation of the Old Testament to the same level of authority as the New. The crude nationalism of Judaism obscured the Christian idea of a universal brotherhood—St Paul's secret hidden from the foundation of the world, to be revealed in the fulness of time in the Christian gospel. Even now we hardly realise how largely our ideas of religion are derived from the imperfect moral standards of the Old Testament. The other influence was the identification of the Papacy with the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation—the Protestant answer to the Roman excommunication of heretics. The idea of a common Christianity deeper than all national antagonisms hardly existed in the Europe of the later half of the 16th century.

Nearly a century of wars of religion was followed by seventy years of war in which the national idea played the leading part. The internationalism of the 18th century was a reaction against both religion and nationality. The Napoleonic struggle, and the Romantic revival, with its appeal to the past, re-awakened the national instinct. In France, Spain, Russia, Prussia, and Eastern Europe, national self-consciousness was stirred into life. In Russia and Spain, and among the Balkan peoples, this national awakening took a definitely religious character. But it was Italy that produced the one thinker to whom the real significance of nationality was revealed. Mazzini recognised, more clearly than any other political teacher of the time, how Nationalism founded on religion might lead to the brotherhood of nations in a world "made safe for democracy." The last century has been an epoch of exaggerated national self-consciousness. Against the aggressive tendencies of the greater nations, the smaller nations strove to protect themselves. Italy, Poland, Bohemia, Serbia, Greece, strove with varying degrees of success to achieve national self-expression. Nation strove with nation in a series of contests, of which the present war is the culmination.

The influence of Christianity was impotent to prevent war; though it was able to do something to restrain its worst excesses. Where the centrifugal force of nationality comes into opposition to the centripetal force of the Christian ideal, it is generally the former that wins. How is this impotence to be accounted for? Four reasons at least maybe noted. (1) The "inwardness" of Lutheranism, combined with the cynicism of the Machiavellian doctrine of the non-moral character of public policy led, especially in Germany, to an entire disregard of the principles of Christianity in the public policy of the State. Nations did not even profess to be guided by Christian principles in their dealings with each other. The noble declaration of Alexander I remained a piece of "sublime nonsense" to statesmen like Metternich and Castlereagh, and their successors. (2) The internal life of the nations was, and is, only partially Christianised. Nations cannot regulate their external policy on Christian principles unless those principles are accepted as authoritative in their internal affairs. (3) The influence of Christianity has been hindered, to a degree difficult to exaggerate, by the unhappy divisions that, especially in England and in the United States, have made it impossible for the Church to speak with a united voice. (4) The idea of the Sovereignty of the State and its supreme claim on the life of the individual, with which Dr Figgis has dealt with illuminating insight in his Churches in the Modern State, has prevented the idea of the Churches as local expressions of a universal society from exercising the corrective influence that it ought to exercise on the over-emphasis of State independence.

The State is only one of the various forms in which national life expresses itself. It is the nation organised for self-protection. And wherever self-protection becomes the supreme need, the State, like Aaron's rod, swallows all the rest. But in many directions, the world has become, or is becoming, international. Science and philosophy, and, to a lesser degree, theology and art, have become the common possession of all civilised nations. The effort to make commerce the expression of international fellowship, with which the name of Cobden is associated, failed, largely as the result of the German policy of high tariffs, but its defeat is only temporary, and the commercial interdependence of nations will reassert its influence when the present phase of international strife is over. The function of the Church is to express the common life and interests of nations, as the State expresses the distinctive character of each. So the Church holds to the four universal things—the authority of Holy Scripture; the Creeds; the two Sacraments, and the historic episcopate. We believe that the retention of the historic Episcopate is essential to the maintenance of the Catholic ideal of the Church. For the bishop is the link between the local and the universal Church; the representative and guardian of the Catholic ideal in the life of the local community; and the representative of the local community in the counsels of the Catholic Church. I have often wished that at least one bishop from some other Church than our own could be associated with the consecration of all bishops of the Anglican Church. For by such association we should bring into clearer prominence the fact that the historic episcopate is more than a national institution.

So we reach the final question: What can the Churches do to promote the unity of the nations?

An invitation was recently issued by the Archbishop of Upsala for a conference of representatives of the Christian Churches, to reassert, even in this day of disunion, the essential unity of the Body of Christ. For various reasons, such a conference at the present juncture seems impracticable, but the time may come when, side by side with a Congress of the nations, a gathering of representatives of the Churches may be called together to reinforce, by its witness, the idea of international fellowship.

For a League of Churches might well prepare the way for a League of Nations. Such a League of Churches would naturally find expression in a permanent Advisory Council—a kind of ecclesiastical Hague tribunal. Historical antagonisms seem to preclude the selection of Rome or Constantinople as the place of meeting of this Council. Surely there is no other place so suited for the purpose as Jerusalem. Here the appointed representatives of all the Churches, living in constant intercourse with one another, might draw together the severed parts of the One Body, till the glory and honour of the nations find, even in the earthly Jerusalem, their natural centre and home. Thus, and thus only, can the spiritual foundation for a League of Nations be well and truly laid.

Two things are involved in any such scheme for a League of Churches. No one Church must claim a paramount position or demand submission as the price of fellowship; and all excommunications of one Church by another must be swept away.

Christ did not come to destroy the local loyalties that lift human life out of selfish isolation. These loyalties only become anti-Christian when they become exclusive. The early loyalty of primitive man to his family or clan was deemed to involve a normal condition of antagonism to neighbouring families or clans. Turn a page of history, and tribal loyalty has become civic loyalty. But civic loyalty, as in the cities of Greece or Italy or Flanders, involves intermittent hostility with neighbouring cities. Then civic loyalty passes into national loyalty, and again patriotism expresses itself in distrust and antipathy to other nations. And this will also be so till we see that all these local loyalties rest on the foundation of a deeper loyalty to the Divine ideal of universal fellowship that found its supreme expression in the Incarnation and its justification in the truth that God so loved the world.

To the Christian man national life can never be an end in itself but always a means to an end beyond itself. A nation exists to serve the cause of humanity; by what it gives, not by what it gets, will its worth be estimated at the judgment-bar of God.

"Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" must have seemed a hard saying to those to whom it was first spoken; and "whoso loveth city or fatherland more than me is not worthy of me" may seem a hard saying to us to-day; yet nothing less than this is involved in our pledge of loyalty to Christ. Christian patriotism never found more passionate expression than in St Paul's wish that he might be anathema for the sake of his nation; yet passionately as he loved his own people, he loved with a deeper passion the Catholic Church within which there was neither Jew nor Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free. It is because the idea of the Catholic Church has become to the majority of Christian people a matter of intellectual assent rather than of passionate conviction that the Church seems impotent in international affairs.

The last four centuries of European history have had as their special characteristic the development of nations. It may be that after this war we shall pass into a new era. The special feature of the period now closing has been the insecurity of national life. Menaced with constant danger, every nation has tended to develop an exaggerated self-consciousness that was liable to become inflamed and over-sensitive. If adequate security can be provided, by a League of Nations, or in some other way, for the free development of the national life of every nation, the senseless over-emphasis of nationality from which the past has suffered will no longer hinder the growth of a true Internationalism. I believe that the real alternative lies not between Nationality and Internationalism but between an Internationalism founded, like that of the 18th century, on non-Christian culture and materialism, and an Internationalism founded on the consecration of all the local loyalties that bind a man to family, city and nation, lifting him through local spheres of service to the service of the whole human race for whom Christ died. The tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations grows only in the City of God. The Christian forces in the world are impotent to guide the future, because they are entangled in the present. Yet it is in the Holy Catholic Church that the one hope for humanity lies. It may be that that hope will never be realised; that the Holy Catholic Church is destined to remain to the end an unachieved ideal. But it is by unachieved ideals that men and nations live; and what matters most for every Christian man is that he should keep the Catholic mind and heart that reach out through home and city and country to all mankind, and rejoice that every man has an equal place in the impartial love of God.

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. B. PEACE, M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS