Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 738
Few except anarchists would deny these functions of government. But the case gets less clear, when we turn from roads and bridges to public parks and public libraries and museums and all the apparatus of culture. To Mill of course, as the child of books, whose kingdom was the mind, the case was clear. His wish outran his logic. The government, as he saw it, could properly purvey all these things to its citizens. Few people indeed will doubt this. But whether this is really a doctrine of liberty, or a rather different doctrine of social solidarity, or collective action, is not so certain.
Mill went further. He took in education and was all for the public school in the American sense of the school for everybody. Here again the case, as liberty, is not clear. If we make childless people pay taxes to send other people’s children to school, we seem to be off the track of liberty or at least not in the middle of the road. If we compel a parent to send his child to school and compel the child to go, when both of them object to it, then somebody’s liberty is violated. For the parent and the child, collectively, are the custodian of the child’s liberty; unless indeed the state replaces the mother and the father, which would open the door so wide to an inrush of follies that Mill’s doctrine would be blown out of the window. These difficulties one mentions to show how hard it is to follow consistently the thread of a single principle in a maze of circumstance.
But where Mill stands with his feet firm is on the right of the individual to his opinion, and his right to give it expression ... all that goes under the familiar phrases, liberty of conscience and free speech. These things of course had not waited for Mill to formulate them. They had found expression in the Constitution of the United States, where they were the basis of the original ten amendments. To what extent altered by our new mechanisms of communications, to what extent suspended in war and national emergency, will be discussed later on. But John Stuart Mill spoke for all time in his immortal dictum that there must be some “part of the life of every person within which the individuality of that person ought to reign uncontrolled ... some space in human existence thus entrenched around and sacred from authoritative intrusion.”
Autobiography. 1873.
H. Laski, Liberty in the Modern State. 1930. (Allen & Unwin.)
Political Economy, book v, chap. xi.
ANARCHISM AND WOOL-GATHERING
EVERY CURRENT HAS its eddies of counter current; every movement of thought its extremes and its reactions. So it was with the movement of democracy and liberty in the nineteenth century. It called forth opposing movements of reaction, conservatism and suppression; and it also bred the extreme of liberty known as anarchism, and the search for liberty in a different direction called socialism.
People have long since learned to connect anarchism with terrorism, assassination, the throwing of bombs and the sudden and appalling deaths of European sovereigns at the hands of terrorists. This was the hideous form and meaning given to anarchism by the Russian terrorist Michael Bakunin and his associates and imitators. The original anarchism was a philosophical doctrine bold in the academic sense but harmless as a professorial lecture. It is a theory of the absolute and complete liberty of the individual. We find it laid down first (about 1844) by an obscure young German, Caspar Schmidt (writing as Max Stirner), in a pamphlet called The Individual and His Property. Here is preached the terrific doctrine that the individual is entitled to do anything he is able to do. He is absolute lord of creation provided he can “make good”; “I am entitled,” said Stirner, “to overthrow God if I can.” Luckily he couldn’t. He probably didn’t expect to. His little pamphlet was meekly dedicated, “To my sweetheart,” as a pretty, lover’s gift. Yet this and other little rills made up a stream that presently turned to the hideous doctrine of selfishness and the power of might, voiced in the writings of the German philosopher, Nietzsche.
But “philosophical anarchism” is another matter. It claims that there is no need for government at all. If you and I want to do anything in common we can do it by voluntary agreement. Our neighbours can join in with us. If we need protection at night we can club together and hire a watchman. That scheme of course is admirable for arranging a picnic or a fraternity dance, but mere insanity as applied to the conduct of all society. Neighbours as friendly and jolly and united as that wouldn’t need a policeman anyway. They would just call in the thieves and get them to join, too. But it is the very fact that all people can’t agree, that some will, and some won’t, that forces the compulsion of authority.
Many prominent writers, it is true, have wanted to reduce government to a minimum, far less than that of Mill. The celebrated Wilhelm von Humboldt, a German writer of the closing eighteenth century, claimed that even state education is all wrong; that it stifles individual effort, obliterates variation and tends to run people to a type. What Humboldt forgot is that state education is at least better than no education, which is exactly what most people would get without it. Herbert Spencer, England’s great national philosopher of the Victorian days, was all against state interference. He thought that the government of necessity did everything badly; that even the post office would be better as a private competitive enterprise, like an express company, as we are told it used to be in China.
In America the very circumstances of settlement in a new country bred independence and the desire for a minimum of government control. Yet even in America governmental functions had to be greatly expanded almost from the start. A national bank was established; roads and canals were constructed; new lands were purchased; though not one of these powers did the United States Constitution directly confer upon Congress.
In short, any government must not only protect its citizens, but it must act positively in many ways for the general welfare. The doctrine of anarchism becomes meaningless when taken from the arm-chair of the philosopher and applied to large groups.
E. V. Zenker, Anarchism. 1898.
Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom. N.D. (Allen & Unwin.)
Life of Henry Clay. 1899. American Statesmen Series.
THE VISION OF SOCIALISM
VERY DIFFERENT IS socialism. If anarchy walks on one side of the road, socialism shadows the other. In a sense it is no new thing. Socialism has always been with us. But in its earlier forms, as in the Middle Ages among brotherhoods and such, it was a doctrine of the next world, not of this. Pious men pooled their property because all property was as grass. They taught that to work was to pray, not that to work was to make money. But modern socialism came in with the machine age. It takes its departure from the ground that such things as equality, the right to vote, and free competition will not of themselves warm the body or feed the stomach. More than that, it was argued, as by Karl Marx (1818-83), the great apostle of the socialists, that the more free the competition the more the weak are trampled by the strong. People with no property, he says, have to sell their labour power to people with property, who wouldn’t buy it unless it brought in more than they gave for it. Seen thus, individual liberty and equality are not bread but a stone. What does it profit a man to have the right to refuse work, if refusal means starvation?
Socialism, therefore, starts with the idea of all people working together, under their own joint management and sharing up the product. It is a beautiful picture. There is only one difficulty with it — that it has never yet worked.
Marx prepared the way for socialism by his gloomy picture of wage-slavery and of an impending social catastrophe. The rich and the poor were to draw further and further apart till the crash came and the world would be rebuilt. Since then socialism has appeared and reappeared in altering forms, written out with a hundred variations. It is presented as the “socializing” of all the nation into one productive machine, or as uniting the people in socialized municipalities, or joining them up into huge socialized industries, each a unit (syndicalism). It is presented as coming by catastrophe, by revolution, or by a single stroke of transformation (the government swallowing all the industries at once), or as coming so gradually that nobody need be afraid of it.
The most familiar picture of socialism shows a nation all organized into a disciplined army of workers, assigned to different trades and moved in and out according as to whether more of one thing or more of another is wanted. If the workers don’t like any one kind of job, such as coal-mining, then the hours are shortened and wages increased, till the whole thing fits like a simultaneous equation in algebra. The direction of what to do and when and how to do it, is left to a board of elected officials, generally pictured as wise old men, if need be with flowing beards.
The delusion that beards flow and that old men are wise dies hard. But the notion will intrude itself that some of the wise old men might be clean-shaven and crooked, and give the soft jobs and the high pay to their own crowd. For there at once the difficult question arises — How are wages regulated? Do all people get the same? Or do some people get more if they are more skilled or more industrious? It’s no use to say that under socialism people don’t use money. A “charge account” or a “book credit” or a “labour-hour-certificate” is the same thing. If all the pay is the same, then socialism only sets up a loafer’s paradise. The socialist harvester would doze beside a hedge, the socialist factory hand would feel a little tired and sleep until eleven. Even the benevolent old men would quit the office and go and play bridge in the club, if there was one.
The truth is, we are not so constituted as to work like that. Voluntary effort may last for a spurt of enthusiasm, may rise to heroic strength in emergency or danger or war, but as the day-to-day support of the world’s work it would break like a reed.
But worse still would be to make everybody work ... to have underneath the wise old men a set of inspectors and time checkers ... there’s no end to it. That’s back again to the galleys, to the slaves, to oriental despotism. The love of work is a glorious impulse, but there are sharp limits to it. People love to work on their own, for themselves and those near them; there is a “magic of property,” of having something to call your own. No community-share in a public park can have the meaning of one square rod of a backyard garden, all your own. To say that inventors and scientists and thinkers work for work’s sake is to be mixed as to what work is. They are not working; they are playing. So is a millionaire financier who never takes a holiday. He never needs one. It’s all holiday to him.
It is proper, however, to pay to the idea of socialism, not to the practice of it, the tribute which fittingly belongs to it. There can be no doubt of the underlying inspiration which explains its appeal to younger minds, to people entering upon life and cherishing high ideals. The notion of all people working together in cheerful comradeship sounds vastly better, after all, than the stingy maxim, “every man for himself.” The only difficulty with socialism, as said above, is that it doesn’t yet work; it is too good; if the day ever comes when we are good enough for such a system, then we shall need no system at all.
The difficulty has been that the world, especially the English-speaking world of Britain and America, too quickly accepted democracy, liberty and equality, as a closed chapter of history, a permanent advance from which no retrogression need be feared. We did not realize that for these great things there is a price to be paid, a constant vigilance which is the price of liberty and, for democracy, the constant presence of the inspiration which first inspired it. Without vigilance liberty is suppressed. Without inspiration democracy is just a form, an empty and deserted house for thieves to meet in.
B. Jarrett, Mediæval Socialism. N.D.
Capital. 1867. (Both English translations. Allen & Unwin.)
C. E. M. Joad, Modern Political Theory. 1924.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward.
NATIONAL LIBERTY AND UNITY
LET US EXAMINE the difficulties that have impeded the progress of humanity in achieving the blessings of liberty that seemed so definitely on the way a hundred years ago. Liberty, as we have seen, when it broke on the modern world was both for the nation and the individual. Each became an inspiration. The right of every nation to govern itself is the broad basis of the Declaration of Independence. Revolutionary France offered its help to all nations struggling to be free. The call echoed over Europe. It awoke the nationalism that was to be the main impetus of European public life in the nineteenth century. It turned against the French themselves. Nations, not kings, cast down Napoleon. Germany had its war of Liberation. Italy awoke the sympathy of all the world in its effort towards national unity and liberty (1848-1871). Hungary revived its national consciousness and retaught itself its own language.
The circumstances of the era fortunately allowed this movement to proceed in large masses over large areas. Nationalism was not yet broken up by separatism and particularism, or at least the movement was towards union not partition, as it was later. Thus does a shifting ice-pack, moving with the varying wind, now join and now disintegrate. Hence no close inquiry seems necessary as to what a “nation” is. Yet evidently the idea is not a simple one. A “nation” in this political sense of union need not be all of one descent, as witness France or Britain; nor of one language, as witness Switzerland; nor one religion, as witness almost any country; nor must its territory be contiguous, as witness the Isles of Greece.
The real bond of union, the underlying bedrock on which the structure of a nation rests, is the willingness to unite, the unity of heart that takes the opportunity that is given. We can see it now as it could not be seen before, now when stress is laid not on unity but on differences, on the separate rights, and the particular privileges that are to safeguard minorities. National union in Europe has been shipwrecked on the rock of minority rights. Nor can any scheme of proportional representation avail, any more than a bandage can heal a broken limb that will not join itself.
E. R. Turner, Europe, 1789-1910. 1920.
THE UNITED STATES UNITED
HERE AMERICA, MEANING the United States, was happy. There was no disrupting minority. In the great formative days, let us say the sixty years, 1820-1880, the immigration from Europe was poured into the mould that the old colonial establishment had set and which independence had hardened. But those who came asked no better than to be Americans; and those who welcomed them asked no better than to have them so. Here was no question of special privilege of creed or race or language. Set in the mind of each newcomer was the “idea” of a republic, of a land of freedom where he would find, and help to extend, opportunity and equality. Thus was made a nation — without kindred of descent, or common language of the past, or common history. It was made by good will, the only force in the long run that makes anything politically.
In some happy day the present shadow will be withdrawn from the face of Europe. How it shall then manage to remake its nationalities into concordant states, seems more than the wisest of us can foresee. It may well be that in various European areas, otherwise united into one state, special provisions may be needed in regard to schools, to language used in the courts, etc. Such separatism as that implies can co-exist with perfect friendliness and content. This has long since been in Switzerland and in Canada. But no union can exist without the will and the spirit. Special rights and minority privileges that are the outcome of mutual distrust and ill-smothered animosity are pregnant with disaster. They make a house that is divided against itself and must fall. At the best they are a temporary structure, a trestle across a chasm waiting till time shall fill in something more enduring.
Thus does national unity appear to us much more difficult and complicated than it did to our grandfathers. Thus have the once triumphant notes of the song of national freedom that cheered its march grown harsh with discord. This does not deny its existence or its value. It only means that the road is longer than the world thought, the march more arduous.
A. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth. 1888.
INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY AND MASS INDUSTRY
THE SAME IS true of all that goes with individual liberty, with economic freedom, with equality and democracy. The goal is still the same but we have yet to reach it; nor must we be turned from the path because it is steeper than we thought. Take, for example, the very virtue and value of the elective principle itself. When the first fire of consecration to democracy began to burn low, it appeared that, in and of themselves, elections couldn’t make democracy, for democracy is a spirit. It appeared that free voters could be bribed, cajoled, bamboozled, that the people’s representatives could be crooked, and that the people themselves could be stampeded into sudden anger, misled into cruel injustice or victimized by their own ignorance. This last consideration merits attention. Modern social structure on its mechanical side (power projects and public utilities) is too technical for common comprehension. Nothing can avail but the selection of honest and able men by honest voters; which puts democracy back to where it started — inspiration or nothing.
Similar difficulties surround the problem of free thought and free speech in an altered world. There was an old Roman saying, “A word is no sooner spoken than it is gone never to be recalled.” They meant it to contrast with written words, which remain. But in our time it takes on a new meaning. A thing once said over the radio, or carried by the world-wide press, moves so fast, and so far that it never can be absolutely contradicted. The taint of an evil accusation still remains, nor can any penalty imposed afterwards altogether remove it. Hence all laws about libel and censorship and such things have to be reconsidered in this new light. In early days if a man was called a horse-thief and triumphantly proved in a court of law that he wasn’t, that settled it. He came out, as they used to say, “without a stain on his character,” in fact, something of a hero. But very different now. Call a man a public thief over the radio and away it goes like the Roman word. Most people never hear the contradiction, or merely say, “It was denied,” which is our up-to-date way of saying that perhaps a thing is true and perhaps not. Hence the case for censorship must be argued on new grounds. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech can be turned against liberty instead of enlisted in its service. Wealth in control of utterance can shout poverty down.
