Fable of the shield—Progress and conservatism—English and French colonisation—Law-abidingness—Irish land question—True conservative legislation—Ultra-conservatism—Law and education—Patriotism—Jingoism and parochialism—True statesmanship—Free trade and protection—Capital and labour—Egoism and altruism—Socialism and laissez faire—Contracts—Rights and duties of landlords—George’s theory—State interference—Railways—Post Office—Telegraphs—National defence—Concluding remarks. A well-known fable tells how in the olden time two knights were riding in opposite directions along a green road overarched by the trees of an ancient forest. It was a bright morning in early summer, with the green leaves freshly bursting in contrasted foliage; the sun had just risen over the tops of the trees in clouds of golden and crimson glory; dewdrops were glittering like diamonds on every twig and blade of grass; and the joyous birds carolling their loudest song to greet the opening day.
Everything was fresh and cheerful as of a new-born earth, and so were the spirits of the two youthful knights, who were pricking forth in search of adventures. He whose face was turned towards the West, where the rising sun had last set, wore a primrose scarf over his cuirass, and had on his shield a quaint device, which,[228] on closer inspection, might be seen to be a tombstone with the inscription,
‘I was well, would be better, and here I am.’
He rode along musing on the heroic legends of the past, and wishing that he had been a knight of Arthur’s round table to ride out with the blameless king against invading heathen.
The second knight, whose face was turned towards the rising sun, bore an azure shield with a different device. On it was depicted the good Sir James Douglass charging the serried Paynim army, and, as he charged, flinging before him into the hostile ranks the casket containing the heart of Robert Bruce, and shouting for battle-cry—
Go thou aye forward, as was thy wont.
As he rode his fancy wrought the fairy web of a day-dream, in which he saw himself delivering the fair princess Liberty from the fiery dragon Prejudice and the stolid giant Obstruction.
The knights met just where an ancient oak of mighty bulk stretched overhead a huge branch across the path, as some aged athlete might stretch out an arm rigid with gnarled and knotted muscles, to show younger generations how Olympian laurels were won when Pollux or Hercules plied the cestus. From this branch a shield hung suspended.
‘Good morrow, fair knight,’ said he of the primrose scarf; ‘prithee tell me if thou knowest what means this golden shield suspended here.’
‘I marvel at it myself, good Sir Knight,’ responded the other; ‘but you mistake in calling the shield golden; it is of silver.’
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‘Your eyes must be of the dullest,’ said the first knight, ‘if you mistake gold for silver.’
‘Not so dull as yours,’ retorted the other, ‘if you mistake silver for gold.’
The argument waxed hot, and, as usual in such cases, as tempers grew weak adjectives grew strong. Soon, like the old Homeric heroes when Greek met Trojan
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,
winged words of fire and fury darted from each mouth, and epithets were exchanged, of which ‘stupid old Tory’ and ‘low, vulgar Radical’ were among the least unparliamentary. At length the fatal words ‘You lie’ escaped simultaneously from both, and on the instant spears were couched, steeds spurred, and, red with rage, they encountered each other in full career. Such was the momentum that both men and horses rolled over, even as the Templar went down before the spear of Ivanhoe within the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch. But, like the redoubted knight Brian de Bois-Guilbert, each sprang to his feet and drew his sword, eager to redeem the fortune of war in deadly combat. Like two surly boars with bristling backs and foaming tusks quarrelling for the right of way in Indian jungle, or tawny lions in Numidian desert tearing one another to pieces for the smiles of a leonine Helen, the heroes clashed together, cutting, slashing, parrying, foyning, and traversing, until at length, bleeding and breathless, they paused for a moment, leaning on their swords to recover second wind.
Just then an aged hermit appeared on the scene, drawn thither by the sound of the combat.
‘Pause, my sons,’ he said, ‘and tell me what is the cause of this furious encounter.’
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‘Yonder false villain protests,’ said the one, ‘that the shield which hangs there is of gold.’
‘And that lying varlet persists that it is of silver,’ said the other.
The hermit smiled, and said, ‘Hold your hands, good sirs, for a single moment, and use your remaining strength to exchange places and look at the opposite side of the shield.’
They obeyed his words, and found to their confusion that they had been fighting in a quarrel in which each was right and each wrong.
‘Father,’ they said, ‘we are fools. Grant us thy pardon for our folly and absolution for our sin.’
‘Absolution,’ said the hermit, ‘is soon granted for faults which arise from the innate tendency of poor human nature. Wiser and older men than you are prone to see only their own side of a question. Come, then, with me to my humble hermitage; there will I dress your wounds and offer you my frugal fare; happy if from this lesson you may learn for the rest of your lives, before indulging in vehement assertions and proceeding to violent extremities, to “look at the other side of the shield.”’
The application of this fable to the polarity of politics will be obvious to every intelligent reader. As the earth is kept in its orbit by the due balance of centripetal and centrifugal forces, so is every civilised society held together by the opposite influences of conservative and progressive tendencies. The conservative tendency may be likened to the centripetal force which binds the mass together, while the progressive one resembles that centrifugal force which prevents it from being concentrated in a rigid and inert central body without life or[231] motion. As Herbert Spencer truly says, ‘from antagonistic social tendencies there always results not a medium state, but a rhythm between opposite states. Now the one greatly preponderates, and presently, by reaction, there comes a preponderance of the other.’ So it is with the antagonism of conservative and liberal tendencies. In the societies of the ancient world, and to the present day in the East, the conservative tendency unduly preponderates, and they crystallise into inert masses in the form of despotisms, and of sacerdotal or administrative hierarchies. At times the pent-up forces which make for change accumulate, and, as in the French Revolution, explode with destructive violence, shattering the old and bringing in new eras. But unless the balance between liberty and order is tolerably preserved in the individual citizens whose aggregate forms the society, after a period more or less prolonged of violent oscillations they crystallise anew into fresh forms, in which another military dynasty, or it may be administrative centralisation under the name of a republic, again asserts the preponderance of the centripetal force.
The happiest nations are those in which the individual character of individual citizens supplies the requisite balance. An ideal society is one in which every citizen is at the same time liberal and conservative; law-abiding, and yet with a strong instinct for liberty of thought and action, for progress and for individual independence. It is among the Teutonic races, especially when they are placed in favourable conditions as in new countries, or in old countries where for ages
Freedom has widened slowly down,
From precedent to precedent,
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that this happy ideal is most nearly realised. Hence it is that these races are more and more coming to the front and surviving in the struggle for existence.
The contrast of English and French colonisation affords a striking instance of this difference of races. A century and a half ago France stood as well as England in the race for colonial supremacy. She had the start of us in Canada, and her pioneers had explored the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and a large part of the continent of North America west of the Rocky Mountains. To-day there are sixty millions of an English-speaking population in that continent, while French is scarcely spoken beyond the single province of Quebec. Political events had doubtless something to do with this result; but it has been mainly owing to the innate qualities of the two races, for even the genius of Chatham might have failed to establish our supremacy if it had not been backed by the superior intelligence, energy, and staying power of the English colonists. The ultimate cause of the triumph of the English over the French element in America and India is doubtless to be found in the stronger individualism of the former. The character of the French is eminently social, they like to live in societies, and shrink from encountering the hardships and still more the isolation of the life of early settlers. They like to be administered, and shrink from the responsibility of hewing out, each for themselves, their own path in the relations of civil life or in the depths of prim?val forests.
It is so to the present day, and they fail conspicuously in creating a large French population even at their own doors in Algeria; while in their more distant colonies they conquer and annex, but to see their commerce[233] fall into the hands of English, Germans, and Chinese, as in Cochin China, or to stagnate as in New Caledonia. As a witty French writer puts it, the trade of a remote French colony may be summed up as—imports, absinthe and cigars; exports, stamped paper and red-tape. Individualism in this case has been fairly pitted against Socialism, and has beaten it out of the field by the verdict of Fact, which is more conclusive than any amount of abstract argument.
To return, however, to the field of politics. Where the essential quality of being law-abiding is wanting in individuals, it is hopeless to look for real liberty. The centripetal force in societies, as in planets, must be supplied somehow, or they would fly into dissolution; and if not by the integration of the tendencies of the individual units, then by external restrictions. Socialists may be allowed to make inflammatory harangues in a non-explosive atmosphere, but hardly to let off their fireworks in a powder-magazine. In order, however, that a nation shall be law-abiding, it is essential that the great majority should feel that, on the whole, the law is their friend. It is not in human nature to love that which injures, or to respect that which is felt to be unjust. The volcanic explosion of the French Revolution was due to the feeling of the French nation, with the exception of a few courtiers, nobles, and priests, that the existing order of things was their enemy, and law a tool in the hands of their oppressors. Even among English-speaking races we find, in the unfortunate instance of Ireland, that under specially unfavourable circumstances the same effects may be produced by the same causes. What has English law practically meant for centuries to an average peasant of[234] Kerry or Connemara? It has meant an irresistible malevolent power, which comes down on him with writs of eviction to compel him to pay a high rent on his own improvements. More than half the population of Ireland consists of tenants and their families occupying small holdings, paying less than 10l. a year of rent. Of an immense majority of these small holdings two things may be safely asserted: first, that the total gross value of the produce is insufficient, after paying the rent, to leave a decent subsistence for the cultivator. Secondly, that this rent is levied to a great extent on the improvements of the tenant or his predecessors. Throughout the poorer parts of Ireland the greater part of the soil, in its natural state of bog or mountain, is not worth a rent of a shilling an acre; but some poor peasant, urged by the earth-hunger which results from the absence of other sources of employment, squats upon it, builds a wretched cottage, delves, drains, fences, and reclaims a few acres of land so as to bear a scanty crop of oats and potatoes. When he has done so the landlord or landlord’s agent comes to him and says, ‘This land is worth ten or fifteen shillings an acre, according to the standard of rents in the district, and you must pay it or turn out;’ and the law backs him in saying so by writs of eviction and police. Put yourself in poor Pat’s place, and say if you would love the law and be law-abiding.
It would take me too far from the scope of this volume into the field of contemporary politics if I attempted to point out who is to blame for this state of things, or what are the remedies. It is enough to say that this is the real Irish problem, and to point to it as an instance of the calamitous effects which inevitably[235] follow when the instincts of a whole population are brought by an unfavourable combination of circumstances into necessary and natural antagonism with the laws which they are bound to obey.
Conservative legislation, by whatever party it is introduced, really means making the law correspond with the common sense and common morality of all except the criminal and crotchety classes, so that the majority may feel it to be their friend. For instance, the most truly conservative measure of recent times was probably that which legalised trades’ unions and gave working-men full liberty to combine for an increase of wages. The old legal maxim, that such combinations were illegal as being in restraint of trade, was so obviously an invention of the members of the upper caste who wore horsehair wigs, to give their fellows of the same caste who employed labour an unfair advantage, that it could not fail to cause feelings of discontent and exasperation among the masses of working-men. By its repeal the sting has been taken out of Socialism, and the British working-man has come to be, in the main, a reasonable citizen, on whom incitements to violence in order to inaugurate Utopias, fall as lightly as the howlings of the barren east wind on the chimney-tops. It has led also to reasonable and peaceful adjustment of disputes between employers and labourers by arbitration and sliding-scales instead of by strikes and lock-outs. In the United States of America the law-abiding instinct is even stronger. We find that strikes attended with violence are almost always confined mainly to the foreign element of recently imported immigrants, and that the native-born American citizen[236] considers the laws as his own laws, and is determined to have them respected.
The balance between the conservative and progressive tendencies is, however, at the best, always imperfect, and inclines too much sometimes in one and sometimes in the other direction. In England the conservative tendency has had on the whole too much preponderance. I do not speak of political institutions, for in these of late years the balance has been pretty equally preserved; but in practical matters there is still a good deal of old-fashioned stolid obstruction. This is most apparent in law and in education. The common or judge-made law, though on the whole well-intentioned and upright, is fettered by so many technicalities and musty precedents, that it fails in a great many instances to be, what civil law ought to be, a cheap, speedy, and intelligible instrument for enforcing honest dealings between man and man. One of our greatest railway contractors once said to me, ‘If I want to make an agreement which shall be absolutely binding, I make it myself on a sheet of note-paper; if I want to have a loophole, I send it to my lawyer to have it drawn up in legal language and engrossed on sheets of parchment.’ Another man of large experience in commercial and financial matters laid down this axiom: ‘If you want to know what is the law in a doubtful case, reason out what is the common-sense view of it, and assume that the direct opposite is probably the law.’ These may be extreme instances, as all such epigrammatic sentences generally are, but it is undeniable that they have a considerable basis of substantial truth; and that law, with its dilatory processes, its enormous expense, and its uncertain conclusions, may[237] be, and often is, not an instrument of justice, but a weapon in the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer or of a dishonest rich man, to extort blackmail or to defeat just claims.
Again, what nation but England would tolerate so long a system of land law, so bristling with antiquated technicalities, so tedious, and so expensive, as almost to amount to a prohibition of the transfer of land in small quantities; or could let the private interests of a mere handful of professional lawyers stand in the way of a codification of laws and a registration of titles?
Education is another subject which shows how difficult it is to move the sluggish ultra-conservative instincts of the English mind in the direction of progress, when not stimulated by political conflict. What is education? The word tells its own story; it is to draw out, not to cram in; to unfold the capacities of the growing mind, strengthen the reasoning faculty, create an interest in the surrounding universe; in a word, to excite a love of knowledge and impart the means of acquiring it. For the mass of the population, education is necessarily confined in a great measure to the latter object. The three R’s—reading, writing, and arithmetic—are indispensable requisites, and the acquirement of these, with perhaps a few elements of history and geography, absorbs nearly all the time and opportunity that can be afforded for attendance at school. For any culture beyond this the great majority must depend on themselves in after life. But there are a large number of parents of the upper and middle classes who can and do keep their children at school for eight or ten years, and spend a large sum of money in giving them what is called a higher education. What is there to[238] show for this time and money, even in the case of the highest schools, which ought to give the highest education? On the credit side, a little Latin and less Greek, plenty of cricket and athletics, good physical training, and, best of all, on the whole a manly, honourable, and gentlemanlike spirit. But on the debit side, absolute ignorance, except in the case of a few unusually clever and ambitious boys, of all that a cultivated man of the nineteenth century ought to know. No French, no German, and, what is worse, no English. The average boy can neither write his own language legibly nor grammatically, and, if he goes straight from a public school into a competitive examination, stands an excellent chance of being plucked for spelling. And, what is worst of all, he not only knows nothing, but cares to know nothing; his reasoning faculty has never been cultivated, and his interest in interesting things has never been awakened. What is the first lesson he has had to learn? ‘Propria qu? maribus dicantur mascula dicas,’ that is, words appropriated to males are called masculine—a lesson which elicits as much reasoning faculty, and creates as much interest, as if he had been made to commit to memory that things made of gold are called golden. Suppose instead of this that the lesson had been that two volumes of hydrogen combine with one volume of oxygen to form water. The exercise to the memory is the same, but how different is the amount of thought and interest evoked, especially if the experiment is made before the class and each boy has to repeat it for himself! How many new subjects of interest would this open up in the mind of any lad of average intelligence! How strange that there should be airs other than the air we breathe, which can be[239] weighed and measured, and that two of them by combining shall produce their exact weight of a substance so unlike them as water! Or if the exercise of a class were to look through a microscope at the leaf of a plant or wing of an insect, and try who could best draw what they had seen and write a description of it in a legible hand and in good English, how many faculties would this call into play compared with the dull routine of parsing a Latin sentence or writing a halting copy of Greek iambics! Even grammar, the one thing which is supposed to be taught thoroughly, is taught so unintelligently that it awakens no interest beyond that of a parrot learning by rote. From ‘propria qu? maribus’ the scholar passes to ‘as in pr?senti perfectum format in avi,’ without an attempt to explain what language really means, how it originates from root-words, and how these inflections of ‘as’ and ‘avi’ are part of the devices which certain families of mankind, including our own, have invented as a mechanism for attaching shades of meaning, such as present and past, to the primitive root. Even the alphabet intelligently taught opens up wide fields of interesting matter as to the history of ancient nations, and their successive attempts to analyse the component sounds of their spoken words, and to pass from primitive picture-writing to phonetic symbols. But the instructors of the budding manhood of the élite of the nation, like Gallio, ‘care for none of these things,’ and the organisation of our higher schools seems to be stereotyped on the principle that they are made for teachers rather than for scholars, and that their chief raison d’être is to enable a limited number of highly respectable gentlemen from the Universities to realise comfortable incomes with a maximum of holidays[240] and a minimum of trouble. And the parents support the system because so many of them really reverence rank more than knowledge, and are willing to compound for their sons growing up ignorant, idle, and extravagant, if by any chance they can count a lord or two among their acquaintance.
Mr. Francis Galton, in the course of his interesting inquiries as to the effect of heredity and education on character and attainments, took the very practical course of addressing a set of questions to some hundred and eighty of our most distinguished men as to the hereditary qualities of their ancestors, and the various influences which they considered had done most to promote or to retard their success in life. Of course he received a variety of answers, ‘quot homines tot sententi?,’ but upon one point there was a striking unanimity. ‘They almost all expressed a hatred of grammar and the classics, and an utter distaste for the old-fashioned system of education. There were none who had passed through this old high and dry education who were satisfied with it. Those who came from the greater schools usually did nothing there, and have abused the system heartily.’
And yet the system goes on, and the Eton Latin grammar will probably be taught, and hexameters written, for another generation. Surely the needle swings here too strongly towards the negative or obstructive pole.
The instances are so numerous in social and practical life in which it is necessary to look at both sides of the shield that the difficulty is in selection. Take the case of patriotism. Patriotism is beyond all doubt a great virtue—in fact, the fertile mother of many of the[241] higher and heroic virtues. Who does not sympathise with the legends of Wallace and William Tell, and scorn with Walter Scott
the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself has said,
This is my own, my native land?
And yet how thin a line of partition separates it from narrow-minded arrogance and insolent ignorance! Reflected in the latter form from Paris, in hysterical shouts now of ‘à Berlin, à Berlin!’ and now ‘à bas perfide Albion!’ we call it ‘Chauvinism,’ and recognise it as an unlovely exhibition. But call it ‘Jingoism,’ and let it take the form of the bellowings of some stupid bull, as the red flag, now of a French and now of a Russian scare, crosses his line of vision, and we are blind to its deformity. Still there is another side to the shield, for even ‘Jingoism,’ which is only another word for patriotism run mad, is more respectable than the opposite extreme of a sordid and narrow minded parochialism, which shrinks behind the ‘silver streak,’ measures everything by the standard of pounds, shillings, and pence, and, with what Tennyson calls
The craven fear of being great,
groans over the responsibilities of extended empire. The growth of such a spirit among prominent politicians of the advanced Liberal school seems to me one of the most alarming symptoms of the day; but I take comfort when I reflect that the most democratic community in the world, that of the United States, is precisely the one which has shown most determination to maintain its national greatness, if necessary by the sword, and has made the greatest sacrifices for that object. If[242] the ‘copperheads’ were a miserable minority in America, why should we be afraid of our ‘English copperheads’ ever becoming a majority in Old England?
In this, as in all similar cases, it is evident that true statesmanship consists in hitting the happy mean, and doing the right thing at the right time; and that true strength stands firm in the middle between the two opposite poles, while weakness is drawn by one or other of the conflicting attractions into
The falsehood of extremes.
When Sir Robert Peel some forty years ago announced his conversion by the unadorned eloquence of Richard Cobden, and free trade was inaugurated, with results which were attended with the most brilliant success, every one expected that the conversion of the rest of the civilised world was only a question of time, and that a short time. Few would have been found bold enough to predict that forty years later England would stand almost alone in the world in adherence to free-trade principles, and that the protectionist heresy would not only be strengthened and confirmed among Continental nations such as France and Germany, but actually adopted by large and increasing majorities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other English-speaking communities. Yet such is the actual fact at the present day. In spite of the Cobden Club and of arguments which to the average English mind appear irresistible, free trade has been steadily losing ground for the last twenty years, and nation after nation, colony after colony, sees its protectionist majority increasing and its free-trade minority dwindling.
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It is evident there must be some real cause for such a universal phenomenon. In countries like France and Russia we may attribute it to economical ignorance and the influence of cliques of manufacturers and selfish interests; but the people of Germany, and still more of the United States, Canada, and Australia, are as intelligent as ourselves, and quite as shrewd in seeing where those interests really lie. They are fettered by no traditional prejudices, and their political instincts rather lie towards freedom and against the creation of anything like an aristocracy of wealthy manufacturers. And yet, after years of free discussion, they have become more and more hardened in their protectionist heresies.
What does this prove? That there are two sides to the shield, and not, as we fancied in our English insularity, only one.
Free trade is undoubtedly the best, or rather the only possible, policy for a country like England, with thirty millions of inhabitants, producing food for less than half the number, and depending on foreign trade for the supplies necessary to keep the other half alive. It is the best policy also for a country which, owing to its mineral resources, its accessibility by sea to markets, its accumulated capital, and the inherited qualities, physical and moral, of its working population, has unrivalled advantages for cheap production. Nor can any dispassionate observer dispute that in England, which is such a country, free trade has worked well. It has not worked miracles, it has not introduced an industrial millennium, the poor are still with us, and it has not saved us from our share of commercial depressions. But, on the whole, national wealth has greatly increased, and, what is more important, national well-being[244] has increased with it, the mass of the population, and especially the working classes, get better wages, work shorter hours, and are better fed, better clothed, and better educated than they were forty years ago.
This is one side of the shield, and it is really a golden and not an illusory one. But look at the other side. Take the case of a country where totally opposite conditions prevail: where there is no surplus population, unlimited land, limited capital, labour scarce and dear, and no possibility of competing in the foreign or even in the home market with the manufactures which, with free trade, would be poured in by countries like England, in prior possession of all the elements of cheap production. It is by no means so clear that protection, to enable native industries to take root and grow, may not in such cases be the wisest policy.
Take as a simple illustration the case of an Australian colony imposing an import duty on foreign boots and shoes. There is not a doubt that this is practically taxing the immense majority of colonists who wear and do not make these articles. But, on the other hand, it makes the colony a possible field for emigration for all the shoemakers of Europe, and shoemaking a trade to which any Australian with a large family can bring up one of his sons. Looking at it from the strict point of view of the most rigid political economist, the maximum production of wealth, which is the better policy? The production of wealth, we must recollect, depends on labour, and productive labour depends on the labourer finding his tools—that is, employment at which he can work. A labourer who cannot find work at living wages is worse than a zero: he is a negative quantity as far as the accumulation of wealth is concerned. On the[245] other hand, every workman who finds work, even if it may not be of the ideally best description, is a wealth-producing machine. What he spends on himself and his family gives employment to other workmen, and the work must be poor indeed if the produce of a year’s labour is not more than the cost of a year’s subsistence. The surplus adds to the national capital, and thus capital and population go on increasing in geometrical progression. The first problem, therefore, for a new or a backward country is to find ‘a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work,’ for as many hands as possible. The problem of making that employment the most productive possible is a secondary one, which will solve itself in each case rather by actual practice than by abstract theory.
This much, however, is pretty clear, that in order to secure the maximum of employment it must be varied. All are not fit for agricultural work, and, even if they were, if the conditions of soil and climate favour large estates and sheep or cattle runs rather than small farms, a large amount of capital may provide work for only a small number of labourers. On social and moral grounds, also, apart from dry considerations of political economy, progress intelligence and a higher standard of life are more likely to be found with large cities, manufactures, and a variety of industrial occupations than with a dead level of a few millionaires and a few shepherds, or of a few landlords and a dense population of poor peasants. If protection is the price which must be paid to render such a larger life possible, it may be sound policy to pay it, and the result seems to show that neither it nor free trade is inconsistent with rapid progress, while, on the other hand, neither of them[246] affords an absolute immunity from the evils that dog the footsteps of progress, and from the periods of reaction and depression which accompany vicissitudes of trade.
Here, as in other cases, there are two sides of the shield, and true statesmanship consists in seeing both, and doing the right thing, at the right place, and at the right time. If free trade is, as we believe, ultimately to prevail, it will be an affair of time. The real trial of protection comes when it has stimulated production to a point which gluts the home market and leaves a surplus which must be exported. Exports of articles the cost of which has been artificially raised by protection, cannot compete in the world’s market with the cheaper products of free-trade............