Liberalism

The modern State accordingly starts from the basis of an authoritarian order, and the protest against that order, a protest religious, political, economic, social, and ethical, is the historic beginning of Liberalism. Thus Liberalism appears at first as a criticism, sometimes even as a destructive and revolutionary criticism. Its negative aspect is for centuries foremost. Its business seems to be not so much to build up as to pull down, to remove obstacles which block human progress, rather than to point the positive goal of endeavour or fashion the fabric of civilization. It finds humanity oppressed, and would set it free. It finds a people groaning under arbitrary rule, a nation in bondage to a conquering race, industrial enterprise obstructed by social privileges or crippled by taxation, and it offers relief. Everywhere it is removing superincumbent weights, knocking off fetters, clearing away obstructions. Is it doing as much for the reconstruction that will be necessary when the demolition is complete? Is Liberalism at bottom a constructive or only a destructive principle? Is it of permanent significance? Does it express some vital truth of social life as such, or is it a temporary phenomenon called forth by the special circumstances of Western Europe, and is its work already so far complete that it can be content to hand on the torch to a newer and more constructive principle, retiring for its own part from the race, or perchance seeking more backward lands for missionary work? These are among the questions that we shall have to answer. We note, for the moment, that the circumstances of its origin suffice to explain the predominance of critical and destructive work without therefrom inferring the lack of ultimate reconstructive power.

But these arguments admitted of great extension. If the child was helpless, was the grown-up person, man or woman, in a much better position? Here was the owner of a mill employing five hundred hands. Here was an operative possessed of no alternative means of subsistence seeking employment. Suppose them to bargain as to terms. If the bargain failed, the employer lost one man and had four hundred and ninety-nine to keep his mill going. At worst he might for a day or two, until another operative appeared, have a little difficulty in working a single machine. During the same days the operative might have nothing to eat, and might see his children going hungry. Where was the effective liberty in such an arrangement? The operatives themselves speedily found that there was none, and had from an early period in the rise of the machine industry sought to redress the balance by combination. Now, combination was naturally disliked by employers, and it was strongly suspect to believers in liberty because it put constraint upon individuals. Yet trade unions gained the first step in emancipation through the action of Place and the Radicals in 1824, more perhaps because these men conceived trade unions as the response of labour to oppressive laws which true freedom of competition would render superfluous than because they founded any serious hopes of permanent social progress upon Trade Unionism itself. In point of fact, the critical attitude was not without its justification. Trade Unionism can be protective in spirit and oppressive in action.

Now the average Liberal might have more sympathy with this view of life if he did not feel that for his part he is just a very ordinary man. He is quite sure that he cannot manage the lives of other people for them. He finds it enough to manage his own. But with the leave of the Superior he would rather do this in his own way than in the way of another, whose way may be much wiser but is not his. He would rather marry the woman of his own choice, than the one who would be sure to bring forth children of the standard type. He does not want to be standardized. He does not conceive himself as essentially an item in a census return. He does not want the standard clothes or the standard food, he wants the clothes which he finds comfortable and the food which he likes. With this unregenerate Adam in him, I fear that the Liberalism that is also within him is quite ready to make terms. Indeed, it incites him to go still further. It bids him consider that other men are, on the whole, very like himself and look on life in much the same way, and when it speaks within him of social duty it encourages him to aim not at a position of superiority which will enable him to govern his fellow creatures for their own good, but at a spirit of comradeship in which he will stand shoulder to shoulder with them on behalf of common aims.