Chapter III: Liberty and Social Power (1)

I

In these pages, I have taken the view that liberty means that there is no restraint upon those conditions which, in modern civilization, are the necessary guarantees of individual happiness. There is no liberty without freedom of speech. There is no liberty if special privilege restricts the franchise to a portion of the community. There is no liberty if a dominant opinion can control the social habits of the rest without persuading the latter that there are reasonable grounds for the control. For, as I have argued, since each man’s experience is ultimately unique, he alone can fully appreciate its significance himself; he can never be free save as he is able to act upon his own private sense of that interpretation. Unfreedom means to him a denial of his experience, a refusal on the part of organized society to satisfy what he cannot help taking to be the lesson of his life.

But no man, of course, stands alone. He lives with others and in others. His liberty, therefore, is never absolute, since the conflict of experience means the imposition of certain ways of behaviour upon all of us lest conflict destroy peace. That imposition, broadly speaking, is essential to liberty since it makes for peace; and peace is the condition of continuity of liberty. The prohibitions, therefore, that are imposed are an attempt to extract from the experience of society certain principles of action by which, in their own interest, men ought to be bound. We cannot, indeed, say that all the principles a given government imposes are those it ought to impose. We can only say that some principles, by being imposed, are bound up with the very heart of freedom.

That is the paradox of self-government. Certain restraints upon freedom add to a man’s happiness. Partly, they save him from the difficulty of going back to first principles for every step he has to take; they summarize for him the past experience of the community. Partly, also, they prevent every opposition of desire from resulting in conflict; they thus assure him of security. In a sense, he is like a traveller who reaches a sign-post pointing in many directions. Law helps him by telling him where one, at least, will lead; and it invites him to assume that its direction is also, or should be, his destination. Clearly this will not always be the case. For it to be so, the end of the law must be his as well, its experience must not contradict his own. For that contradiction, as a rule, means punishment for him since, at the end of the road he takes, if it is not the path of the law, he will find a policeman waiting for him. We must, that is to say, find ways of maximizing our agreement with the law.

I sought earlier to show that this maximization can only take place when the substance of law is continuously woven from the fabric of a wide consent. Here I propose to inquire into certain essential conditions which determine whether that consent can be obtained. I propose to inquire, in other words, into that weird complex of prejudice, judgment, interest, which we call public opinion and to seek the terms of its adequate relationship to liberty. For if my argument be valid that a man’s citizenship is the contribution of his instructed judgment to the public good, and that right action, for him, is action upon the basis of that judgment, clearly, the factor of instruction is of decisive importance. Instructed judgment is considered and not impulsive, ultimate and not immediate. It is a conclusion arrived at after an attempt to penetrate behind the superficial appearance to what is truth-seeming. It is a decision made after evidence has been collected and weighed, distortion allowed for, prejudice discounted. If, for instance, I am to oppose the State in a matter like military service, I ought not to do so until I have rigorously examined the facts upon which I build my principles. And, _mutatis mutandis_, that is true of every aspect of social activity. The first urgency is assurance that the facts upon which I base my action are valid.

Now the world of facts which impinge upon each of us is difficult and complex and enormous. None of us can know all of that world. A large part of it, it may be in some context a fundamental part, we have to take on trust from other persons. Obviously, it is of primary importance that the things we take on trust should correspond with the reality on which alone a right judgment can be made. My view of the proper peace-terms that should be made with Germany will be one thing if I believe that Germans, when at leisure, crucify innocent Belgian citizens, rape their women, and cut off the breasts of their young girls; and quite another thing if I believe that the Germans are rather like other people, decent, kindly, respectable, wanting much the same things in life as I do myself. My attitude to the nationalization of the mines will obviously profoundly depend upon, first, the facts in the mining industry itself, and, second, the facts about the operation of nationalization in other fields. I cannot, in the vast majority of the problems I have to decide, make my own inquiries into the facts. Somewhere, sometime, I have to halt and say, “This man’s report, or this paper’s account, is a thing I can trust.”

It is because opinion is so vitally dependent upon the truthfulness of facts that observers have come more and more to insist on the connexion between liberty and the news.[41] For a judging public is unfree if it has to judge not between competing theories of what an agreed set of facts mean, but between competing distortions of what is, at the outset, unedifying and invented mythology. Things like the incident of the _Maine_, the Pekin Massacre which never occurred, the Zenoviev letter, make an enormous difference to what Mr Lippmann has happily termed my “stereotype” of the environment about which I have to make up my mind. I bring already to its interpretation a mass of preconceptions which tend to distort it. If there is prepared for me “evidence” which has been distilled through the filter of a special interest the distortion may become so complete as to make a rational judgment impossible. The English journalist who invented the word “dole” has built into the minds of innumerable people of the comfortable classes a picture of the unemployed in England as a mass of work-shy persons, comfortably lazy and anxious at all costs to live parasitically upon the taxpayer; the proven fact that less than a fraction of one per cent really avoids the effort to work is unable to penetrate the miasma of that stereotype. The newspapers which belong to the Power Trust in America, the subsidized press in Paris, the journals which must satisfy Mussolini or suffer suppression, the government newspapers of Communist Russia, these are all efforts to dictate an environment to the citizen in order that the stereotype he forms may serve some interest their owners, or controllers, are anxious to promote. Men may actually go out to die for purposes in which they profoundly believe, though the cause which, as they judge, embodies those purposes has not, in fact, the remotest connexion with it.

We have, in short, the difficulty that the control of news by special interests may make prisoners of men who believe themselves to be free. The Englishman who has to form an opinion about a miners’ strike is not likely to be “free” in any sense to which meaning can be attached if the facts which he encounters have been specially doctored in order to make it as certain as possible that he conclude in favour of the mine owners. A Chinaman who hears that the “Liberal” party in Rumania has won a victory at the polls, an American who is informed that London is governed by Municipal “Reformers”, approaches the discovery of the facts with a body of preconceptions, derived from quite alien experience, which will make a true judgment of those facts a very complex matter. In the Conference of The Hague upon reparations in August 1929, the Italian newspapers continued to paint Mr Snowden as the Shylock withholding from Italy its due share, while the English Press was equally unanimous in painting him as the protagonist against a continental effort to make Great Britain the milch-cow of Europe. The Italian, or the Englishman, who wished to obtain a just view of the issues really at stake there, would have had to engage in arduous researches into technical material about which he might lack competence and for which he would certainly not easily find leisure.

Let us remember, too, that our stereotype of the contemporary environment is only the last phase, so to speak, of the problem. The psychologists are unanimous in telling us how important for our future are the impressions we gather in our early years. Clearly, from that angle, the things we are taught, the mental habits of those who teach us, are of quite primary urgency. It may make all the difference to the intellectual climate of a people whether, for instance, the history learned by children in schools is wide and generous, or parochial and narrow, whether its teachers cultivate the sceptical mind, or the positive mind. People who are imprisoned in dogmas in childhood will have an agonizing struggle to escape from its stereotypes, and they may well have been so taught that they either, after effort, succumb, or do not even know that it is necessary to struggle at all. I do not know how to emphasize sufficiently the quite inescapable importance to freedom of the content of the educational process.

Teach a child year in and year out that the American Constitution is the ultimate embodiment of political wisdom and you increase tenfold the difficulty of rational and necessary amendment by the generation to which that child belongs. Set him under teachers like those of whom Professor Harper tells us that seventy-seven per cent “contended that one should never allow his own experience and reason to lead him in ways that he knows are contrary to the teaching of the Bible”, and fifty-one per cent that “our laws should forbid much of the radical criticism that we often hear and read concerning the injustice of our country and government”, and the openness of mind upon which reason depends for its victories will be well-nigh unattainable.[42] Those only who realize the importance of education will understand how a Southern audience could go wild with anger over an account, in large outline untrue, of German atrocities, and yet listen with indifference to the description of a lynching in their own community so revolting in its detail as to be unfit almost for transcription. And we must add to the school influence in childhood, that of the home, the church, the streets, in the terrible certainty that there are few impressions which do not leave their trace.

It is necessary, if I may so phrase it, to urge men to live dangerously. To the degree that their happiness depends upon making their decisions conform to the facts, they cannot avoid danger. It is dangerous to leave a child in the hands of teachers who believe that all experience and reason must be abandoned which does not square with that recorded in the partly mythical annals of a primitive Semitic tribe several thousand years ago, or who equate patriotism with a fervid acceptance of the present political system. The adult is endangering his happiness if he believes that truth is what Karl Marx said, or Mussolini tells him, or the inferences of Mr Baldwin which the latter has in turn drawn from material prepared for him by the Research Department of the Conservative Central Office. Happiness depends upon being able to approach with an open mind facts which have been prepared by independent persons who have no interest in seeing that their incidence is bent in some particular way. Anything else imprisons the mind in dogmas which only work so long as that mind does not travel beyond the narrow confines within which the dogmas work. Once it goes beyond, unhappiness is the inevitable outcome.

How are we to get independent fact-finding and the open mind? The answer, of course, is the tragic one that there is no high-road to it. Partly, it lies in the development of particular techniques, but, most largely, it lies in the kind of educational methods we use, and this, in its turn, in the purposes for which those methods are employed. I entirely agree that a multiplication of independent fact-finding agencies, as disinterested and impartial about wages and other social conditions as a medical man in the making of a diagnosis, will take us some distance.[43] Not, I think, very far; for between the finding of facts by independent agencies and the driving of them home to the public are interpolated just those factors of special interest which are the enemies we confront. I agree, too, that freedom is partly better served than when a great public organ falls into the hands of one who, like C. P. Scott with his _Manchester Guardian_, determines to make news and truth coincide. But men like Mr Scott are rare enough to make reliance upon their emergence a very dubious ground of hope. Nor need we deny that the growth of a professional spirit among journalists, their organization into a profession with standards of entrance and performance, will add greatly to the chances of solving the problem. So, also, will the development of specialized journals of opinion, and new inventions like the wireless. To some extent--not, I think, a great extent--competitive fact-finding makes for truth. Outrageous propaganda kills itself; men do not believe the “papers” because they have found them lying at some point where the facts forced themselves upon attention.

And so, too, with a training for the open mind in schools. People may come to see that where the quality of intelligence is concerned, the second-rate, the dull, the incurious, the routineer, simply will not do. They may be prepared to make education a profession sufficiently well paid to attract the highest ability, and sufficiently honourable to satisfy the keenest ambition. Even now we cannot over estimate the influence exerted in his generation by a great teacher. Do what we will, let him teach what he please, the minds with which he is in contact will go along with his mind, they will learn his enthusiasms, share his zest in inquiry. It may be Huxley in London, William James in Harvard, Alain in Paris. Students who have lived with such men are their spiritual children not less than those who have learned the habits of a gentleman at Eton or a proper respect for the Emperor of Japan in Tokio. And, equally, we may learn that a narrow patriotism in history and politics has social results less admirable than a quick scepticism built from the sense that our country has not always been right, our institutional standards not invariably perfect. Our governors may be willing to admit that one inference from the rebellion of Washington is the possible legitimacy of rebellion, one inference even from the new theology of Jesus, that we are sometimes justified in the making of new theologies. It is even possible that the value of the power to think may become so much more widely recognized, that we shall not ask that those who are able creatively to teach this supreme art, be dismissed because we dislike either what they teach or the opinions they profess outside the practice of their profession. We may come to insist upon security of tenure for the teacher even when his principles of faith do not coincide with those for which we desire the triumph.

Yet these possibilities do not, in themselves, seem to me to confer a right to optimism if they stand alone. If it pays to spread false news, let us be sure that false news will be spread. If some special interest gains by corrupting the facts, so far as it can, the facts will be corrupted. If a poor educational system strengthens the existing foundations of power, it will tend to remain poor; if its extension is costly, those who are to bear the cost will find good reason either not to extend it, or to proceed at such a snail’s pace that the new way has no chance of affecting mankind except in terms of geological time. Our difficulty is the twofold one that propaganda can produce immense results in a brief space of time and that creative educational change takes something like a generation before its results are manifest upon a wide scale. The forces at work to prevent the emergence of truth, the forces, also, which have every reason to dislike the development of the mind which seeks for truth, are many and concentrated and powerful. They do not want the general reporting of experience, but only of that experience which favours themselves. They do not want the general population so trained as to prize truth, but only so trained that they believe whatever they read. In our own day it would not be an unfair description of education to define it as the art which teaches men to be deceived by the printed word. Those who profit by that deception are, at the moment, the masters of society.

For we must remember that in these matters we have to concern ourselves with short-term values and not long-term values. We do not legislate for some conceivable Utopia to be born in some unimaginable time, but for the kind of world we know ourselves, for lives like our own lives. The freedom we ask we have to make. Every postponement we accept, every failure before which we are dumb, only consolidates the forces that are hostile to freedom. They themselves realize this well enough. They have, in the past, fought every step on every road to freedom because they have seen that the accumulation of small concessions will, in the end, be their defeat. Everywhere they have been guilty of definite error, or wrong, they have denied the error or wrong, lest it upset faith in their own right to power. Not the least powerful to silence, you will recollect, which persuaded even those who thought Sacco and Vanzetti innocent was their fear that proof of that innocence might disturb popular faith in the Massachusetts Courts. The same was true in the Dreyfus case. The same, on a lesser plane, was true of Mr Winston Churchill when he sought to deceive the House of Commons over the treatment of Lady Constance Lytton in prison.[44] Those in power will always deny freedom if, thereby, they can conceal wrong. And any successful denial only makes its repetition easier. Had California released Mooney in 1916, when the world knew he was innocent, it would have been easier for Massachusetts to have acted justly ten years later. The will to freedom, like the will to power, is a habit, and it perishes of atrophy.

The inference I would draw is the quite basic one that in any society men only have an equal interest in freedom when they have an equal interest in its results. Where those results are already possessed by some, they seldom have the imagination to see the consequence of their denial to others. They will persuade themselves that those others are contented with their lot, or made differently in nature, so that they are unfit to enjoy what others possess. There is no myth we are not capable of inventing to lull our conscience. We see the futility of action on our part, because we are so unimportant. We see that it would be dangerous in this particular case, because we have an influence that, in other cases, might be exerted to useful purpose. We do not think the time has come for action. We think that action here might lead to other and quite unjustifiable demands. We would have associated ourselves with the demand, but those who are making it, or the way in which it is being made, unfortunately renders this impossible. Life is so complex and tangled and full, that those who desire to abstain from the battle for freedom can always find ample excuse. The workman may be afraid for his job; Babbitt may shrink from being shunned by the group whose fellowship is his life; it may be the handful of silver, the riband for the coat, the love of power, the loathing of what freedom may bring. Whatever the motive of abstention, let us remember that men think differently who live differently, and that, as they think, so they build principles of action to remedy what, in their lives, they find bitter or unjust, to preserve what they find pleasant or right.

We cannot, of course, remedy all experience which makes for a sense of bitterness or injustice. Things like the betrayal of friendship are, only too often, beyond the power of organization to affect. But the sense of bitterness or injustice that comes from bad housing, low wages, or the denial of an adequate political status, these we are able to remedy by social action. Or, rather, we are free to move to their remedy, if we have an equal interest in doing so. If our interest is unequal, our sense of a need to share with others in action will be small. Other things will seem more significant or more urgent; and the need itself will shrink as it obtrudes. The less we live in the experience of our neighbours, the less shall we feel wrong in the denial of their wants. Trade unionists appreciate a demand for higher wages more keenly than employers: the wealthy rentier reads of a strike in the cotton trade as a newspaper incident, of a railway dispute, whatever its grounds, as a threat to the community. The sense of solidarity comes only when the result of joint action impinges equally on the common life.

We are in the difficulty that every step we take towards freedom is a step towards the equalization of privileges now held unequally. Those who hold them are not anxious to abandon what they entail; sometimes they can even persuade themselves that the well-being of society depends upon a refusal to surrender them. For them, therefore, the honest publication of facts, the making of free minds, are simply paths to disaster. Why should they surrender their weapons of defence? Why, the more, when many of them do not even suspect that they fight with poisoned weapons? To explain to a loyal Roman Catholic that he should tell his children that there is grave reason to deny the truth of all he believes is to invite him to shatter the foundation upon which he has built his life. To suggest to the average citizen who took part in the Great War that his school-books should abandon the legend that his particular state entered it with the whole-souled motive of serving justice would appear scandalous simply because he is honestly unconscious of any other motive. To urge even upon the public-spirited heir to a great estate the possible duty of acting upon the principle of Mill’s argument about the laws of inheritance is, at the best, an adventure in the lesser hope. There was good reason for the unpopularity of the Socratic temper in Athens.

II

I conclude, therefore, that whatever our mechanisms and institutions, liberty can hope to emerge and to be maintained in a society where men are, broadly speaking, equally interested in its emergency and its maintenance. I accept the insight Harrington had when he insisted that the distribution of economic power in a state will control the distribution of its political power. I think James Madison was right when he argued that property is the only durable source of faction. I think the perception of the early socialists entirely justified when they urged that a society divided into a small number of rich, and a large number of poor persons, will be a society of exploiters and exploited. I cannot believe that, in such an atmosphere, liberty will be a matter of serious concern to the possessors of power.

What will concern them is how they can best maintain their power. They will permit anything save the laying of hands upon the ark of their covenant. They will allow freedom in inessentials; but when the pith of freedom is attack upon their monopoly they will define it as sedition or blasphemy. For if the form of social organization is a pyramid, men are bound to struggle towards its apex. In a society of economic unequals, gross unequalities make conflict inherent in its foundations. The possession of wealth means the possession of so much that makes for a happy life, beautiful physical surroundings, leisure to read and to think, safeguards against the insecurity of the morrow. It is, I think, inevitable that those to whom these things are denied should envy those who possess them. It is inevitable, also, that envy should be the nurse of hate and faction. Those who are so denied struggle to attain, those who possess struggle to preserve. Justice becomes the rule of the stronger, liberty the law which the stronger allow. The freedom that the poor desire in a society such as this is the freedom to enjoy the things their rulers enjoy. The penumbra of freedom, its purpose and its life, is the movement for equality.

And it is equality that is decried by those who rule. It means parting with the exercise of power and all the pleasures that go with its exercise. It means that their wants do not define the ends of production, their standards do not set the objects of consideration, their right to determine the equilibrium of social forces is no longer recognized. Equality, in fact, is a denial of the philosophy of life which is bred into their bones by their way of living. It does not seem to me remarkable that they should fight against this denial. Who of us, on these terms, but would find it difficult to accept as valid experience which contradicts our experiences, a system of values which attempts the transvaluation of our own? Who of us but would not feel that a freedom which seeks radical alteration of the contours of existence is perverse and dangerous and worthy only to be suppressed? The Pagan felt that of the Christian, the Catholic of the Protestant, the landowner of the merchant. The new power which seeks its place in the sun is inevitably suspected by the old with whom it claims equal rights.

The equality will be denied, and, with it, the freedom to claim equality. Inevitably, also, the right to freedom will be maintained, and the two powers will, sooner or later, mass their forces for battle. I know no instance in history in which men in possession of power have voluntarily abdicated its privileges. They say that reason and justice prevail; but they mean their reason and their justice. They are prepared to coerce in the hope of success, and they are prepared to die fighting rather than to surrender. It is the result of such a way of life that the ideal of freedom is inapplicable to matters upon which there is urgent difference of opinion between the rulers and their subjects. It is impossible for reason to prevail if men are prepared to fight about the consequences of its victory. And if they are prepared to fight there is no room in the society for freedom since this is incompatible with habits of violence.

Any society, in fact, the fruits of whose economic operations are unequally distributed will be compelled to deny freedom as the law of its being; and the same will be true of any society in process of forcible transition from one way of life to another. Cromwellian England, Revolutionary France, Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, each of these, of set purpose, made an end of the pretence that freedom was a justifiable object of desire. In each, it was proposed to maintain some particular form of social organization at any cost; to inquire into the cost might result in doubt of the value of the effort; and the value of that freedom which releases reason was therefore denied. A revolutionary state, of course, makes the position peculiarly clear. But it is not merely true of the revolutionary state.

In England, or France, or Germany, there is no freedom where the fundamentals of the society are called into question, if their rulers think that this may cause danger to those questions. The government may decide that William Godwin is innocuous; but it will not hesitate to convict Tom Paine--in truth far less drastic--of high treason. The cause of this attitude is, I think, beyond discussion. If freedom seeks to alter fundamentals, freedom must go; and freedom can hardly help but concentrate on fundamentals in a society distinguished by economic inequality. I do not need to point out to you the extraordinary timidity of society before subversive discussion of property-rights, nor to insist upon the complicated legal precautions that are taken for its defence. You have only to examine the attitude in which Labour combinations are approached by those who possess economic power, as instanced, for example, by the use of the injunction by American judges,[45] to realize that the main purpose of limitations on freedom is to prevent undue encroachments upon the existing inequalities. We announce that we are open to conviction in matters of social arrangement. But we take the most careful steps to see that our convictions are not likely to be overthrown.

For the chance that reason will prevail in an unequal society is necessarily small. It is always at a disadvantage compared with interest, for, to the latter, especially in property matters, passion is harnessed, and in the presence of passion people become blind to truth. They see what they want to see, and they select as truth that which serves the purpose they desire to see prevail. The preparation of news for the making of opinion is, indeed, extraordinarily like the old religious controversy in which men hurled text and counter-text at one another. The real problem was one of proportions; but the protagonists altered the proportions that the material might the better serve their cause. Some years ago, a Labour Delegation returned from Russia with a statement about its character from Peter Kropotkin. A leading capitalist newspaper in London printed all those parts of it which attacked the Russian régime; and the leading Labour newspaper printed those parts of it favourable to the Bolshevik experiment. The readers of the first were, therefore, satisfied with the knowledge that an eminent anarchist heartily disliked Bolshevism; and the readers of the second were heartened by discovering that so eminent a friend of freedom was nevertheless prepared to support a Dictatorship as favourable to freedom. You will remember that Luther and Calvin were always prepared to abide by the plain words of Scripture; but each was careful, at critical points, to insist that his own interpretation alone possessed validity. In that atmosphere, a solution which strikes opposing controversialists as just is not, at least easily, to be found.

This, I suggest, is the kind of environment any plea for freedom must meet in the modern state. Discussion of inessentials can be ample and luxurious; discussion of essentials will always, where it touches the heart of existing social arrangements, meet at least with difficulty and probably with attack. It will find it extraordinarily hard to organize supporters for its view, if this opposes the will of those in authority. In wartime, any plea for reasonableness is at a discount; and it was at a discount in England during the general strike when the government sought at once for the conditions of a belligerent atmosphere. Attack an interest, in a word, and you arouse passion; arouse passion, especially where property is concerned, and the technique of _raison d’état_ will sooner or later be invoked. But liberty and _raison d’état_ are mutually incompatible for the simple reason that _raison d’état_ is a principle which seeks, _a priori_, to exclude rational discussion from the field. It seeks neither truth nor justice, but surrender.

It is a technique, I think, which almost always comes into play when dangerous opinion is challenged by the state. A good instance of this is afforded by the trial of the British Communists in 1925. No one could seriously claim that their effort constituted a serious menace to the state, for they were a handful among millions, and there was not even evidence that their propaganda met with any success. Yet their condemnation was a foregone conclusion, granted the terms of the indictment. And the habits of power were interestingly illustrated by the judge who presided over the trial. He had conducted the case with quite scrupulous fairness, and had shown no leaning to one side or the other until the jury had rendered its verdict. He then made an offer to the defendants that if they would abandon their belief in Communism he would adjust the sentence in the light of that abandonment. He made the offer, I do not doubt, in the utmost good faith and an entirely sincere conviction that Communist opinions are morally wicked. But that attitude was precisely similar to the Roman offer to the early Christians: they could avoid the arena if they would offer but a pinch of incense on the pagan altar. It was precisely similar to the willingness of the Inquisitor to mitigate his sentence where there is confession of heresy and repentance. Mr Justice Swift seemed to have no realization at all that the defendants were Communists in the light of an experience of social life which, for them, was as vivid and compelling as the Christian revelation to its early adherents; that the offer he made to them was mitigation of punishment in return for the sacrifice of their sincerity; that the state, for him, was Hobbes’ “moral God” at whose altar they must do reverence. His views, of course, were the natural expression of his own experience of life, and, without doubt, sincerely held; but they implied an inability imaginatively to understand alien experience which is pathetic in the limitation it involves. And perhaps the supreme irony in the situation was the fact that to be tried as Communists was, for the defendants, perhaps the supreme test of truth to which their faith could be submitted.

When Plato, in the _Laws_, set out a revised version of his ideal policy for application to the real world about him, he surrendered his demand for the complete communism which had distinguished his Utopia. But he was still emphatic enough about the need for equality to lay it down that no member of his state should possess property more than four times in amount of that owned by the poorest citizens. The ground of that drastic conclusion was quite clear in his mind. Great economic inequalities are, as he saw, incompatible with a unity of interest in the community. There is no common basis upon which citizens can move to the attainment of kindred ideals. The lives of the few are too remote from the lives of the many for disagreement about social questions to be possible in terms of peace, if the ultimate organization of the society is not to be changed. The remoteness means that the few will always fear the invasion of their privilege, and the many will envy them its possession. It is not only, as I have said, that men think differently who live differently; it is, essentially, that men think antagonistically who live so differently. That antagonism is bound to result in violence unless the domination of the many by the few is almost complete, or is tempered by so continuous a flow of concession as results, in the end, in the effective mitigation of the inequality. There cannot, in a word, be democratic government without equality; and without democratic government there cannot be freedom.

For the real meaning of democratic government is the equal weighing of individual claims to happiness by social institutions. A society built upon economic inequality cannot attempt that sort of measure. Consciously or unconsciously, it starts from the assumption that there is a greater right in some claims than in others. It cannot be said that response to claims is made in terms of justice. The nature of economic inequality is a compulsion to respond to effective demand, and this pays no regard to science on the one hand, or to need upon the other. It thinks only of the presence of purchasing power and not of its connotation in terms of social purpose. The whole productive scheme is thereby tilted to the favour of those who possess the power to make their wants effective. There is cake for some before there is bread for all. The palace neighbours the slum. And those who find that their wants do not secure attention are, inevitably, tempted to an examination of the moral foundations of such a society. Their interest drives them to demand its reconstruction in terms of those wants. Liberty means, in such a context, the power continuously to exercise initiative in social reconstruction. The whole ethos which surrounds their effort is that of equality. They search for freedom for no other end but this.

I do not need to remind you that most observers who have sought to estimate the significance of the democratic movement have seen that equality is the key to its understanding. That was the case with Tocqueville; it was the case with John Stuart Mill; and, in a famous lecture which reads now as though it was the utterance of a prophet,[46] it was the case, also, with Matthew Arnold. Broadly, their insight converged towards a recognition of three important things. They realized, first, that in any society where power is gravely unequal, the character and intelligence of those at the base is unnaturally depressed. The community loses by this in two ways. The energy and capacity of which it might make use are not released for action; and the concentration of effective power in a few hands means that the wishes, opinions, needs, of the majority do not receive sufficient consideration. An aristocracy, whether of birth, or creed, or wealth, always suffers from self-sufficiency. It is inaccessible to ideals which originate from without itself. It tends to think them unimportant if they are urged tactfully, and dangerous if they are urged with vigour. It is so accustomed to the idea of its own superiority, that it is resentful of considerations which inquire into the validity of that assumption. It may be generous, charitable, kind; but the surrounding principle of those qualities is always their exercise as of grace and not in justice. An aristocracy, in a word, is the prisoner of its own power, and that the most completely when men begin to question its authority. It does not know how to act wisely at the very moment when it most requires wise action.

It is not only that any aristocracy becomes unduly absorbed in the consideration of its own interests. Its depression of the people has the dangerous effect of persuading the latter of its necessary inferiority. It is unable to carry on its own affairs with order and intelligence. It does not know how to represent its wants with decision. It develops a sense of indignation because its interests are neglected; but it does not know how to attach its indignation to the right objects or, when so attached, how to remedy the ills from which it suffers. An aristocracy, in a word, deprives its subjects of character and responsibility; and as the revolutions of 1848 so clearly demonstrated, while they can destroy, they have never been taught how to create. The success of the Puritan Rebellion and the American Revolution was built upon the fact that, in each case, the exercise of power had been a habit of the general population; in the one case in the management of Nonconformist Churches, in the other in the governance of local legislatures and township meetings. In each case, a blind government confronted men who knew how to formulate their wants, and to organize their attainment. But, in general, aristocracies do not provide their subjects with this opportunity. Their own effort is substituted for popular effort, their own will for the popular will. The development of the total resources at their disposal is postponed to the preservation of their interest and convenience. They dwarf the masses that they may the better contemplate the stateliness of their own state. But that, in the end, always means that the vital power of the people is absent at the moment when it is most required.

The third weakness of aristocracies is their inevitable impermanence. There is no method known of confining character and energy and ability to their own ranks. These, where they emerge in the people, will always seek the means of their satisfaction. From this angle, few things are so significant as the history of the British Labour Party. It rose to power largely because there was no room in the leadership of the historic parties for self-made men who had not sought success either as lawyers or as business men. The result was that the knowledge at the disposal of Liberals and Conservatives, the significant experience upon which they could draw for the making of their policy, was always more narrow than the area of the problems they had to meet. The lives of the typical Labour leaders of the second generation, Keir Hardie, Mr Ramsay MacDonald, Mr Arthur Henderson, invariably show a period where the regretful decision has to be taken against further co-operation with a party which cannot see the needs they see, which does not desire service to the ideals they seek to serve.[47] And men such as these make articulate in the minds of all who have a sense that their interests are neglected not only the fact of negligence, the demand, therefore, for satisfaction, but also the search for the principles whereby satisfaction can be attained. Their insight into an emphasis to which little attention has been paid grows by the volume of the experience they encounter into a movement; and those who have permitted the interest to be neglected find that the old battle-cries no longer attract its allegiance even when they are given new form.

It is curious to note that not even the impact of defeat gives this lesson its proper perspective to the defeated. English Liberalism has suffered eclipse because, broadly speaking, it was unable to discover an industrial philosophy suitable to the wants of the new electorate. It served admirably the requirements of the manufacturer and the shopkeeper who were enfranchised in 1832. It gave them freedom of trade, liberty of contract and full religious toleration. But it never understood either the fact of trade unionism or the philosophy of trade unionism. Its attitude to citizenship was atomic in character. It saw the community as a government on the one side, and a mass of discrete individuals on the other. It assumed that each of these, given liberation from the special privilege of the _ancien régime_, had the full means of happiness at his disposal; it accepted, in a word, the principles of Benthamite radicalism as absolute. But its error was not to see that the community is not merely a mass of discrete individuals. Jones is not merely Jones, but also a miner, a railwayman, a cotton operative, an engineer. As one of these, he has interests to be jointly promoted and jointly realized. A philosophy of politics that is to work must find a full place in the state for organized workers to whom freedom in the industrial sphere is, in its fullest implications, as urgent and as imperative as freedom in the sphere of politics or religion.

The Liberal Party did not see this until it was too late. Built largely on the support of the Nonconformist business man, the interests it understood were essentially his interests; and to recognize the implications of trade unionism, as Keir Hardie and his colleagues did, was to invade the interests upon which it was able to count for allegiance. It was forced, obviously unwillingly, into concessions like the Trades Disputes Act of 1906; but its policy, as the detailed history of the process of social legislation from 1906 to 1914 makes clear was, so far as it could, to mitigate social inequality by recognition of individual claims, and to build machinery for their satisfaction which continued to neglect the fact of trade unionism. When, after the war, the remarkable growth of the Labour Party showed how vast was the decline of the Liberal hold upon the working-classes, the Liberal leaders were driven, by the need of self-preservation, to the invention of industrial principles likely to prove attractive to trade unionists. But these wore the air of being produced for the occasion; and they did not fit into the character of Liberal Leadership. For the latter was quite unable to attract to its ranks either working-men candidates or trade union support; and the emphatic declaration of a Liberal politician that his party could not join the ranks of Labour because the latter was built upon the trade unions showed how unreal was the body of industrial principles which Liberalism had developed.[48] It remained an atomic philosophy applicable to a world in which employer and worker confronted each other, as individuals, on equal terms. The assumption was unjustified; and the way lay open for the consolidation by Labour of its growing hold upon the workers. Liberalism remained a middle-class outlook, admirable in its exposition of basic principle, but incapable of adjusting principle to a medium with which its supporters were largely unacquainted.

In an interesting passage[49] Lord Balfour has drawn attention to the fact that the success of the British Constitution in the nineteenth century--it is worth adding the general success of representative government--was built upon an agreement between parties in the state upon fundamental principles. There was, that is, a kindred outlook upon large issues; and since fighting was confined to matters of comparative detail, men were prepared to let reason have its sway in the realm of conflict. For it is significant that in the one realm where depth of feeling was passionate--Irish home rule--events moved rapidly to the test of the sword; and the settlement made was effected by violence and not by reason. That was the essence of the Russian problem. The effort to transform a dull and corrupt autocracy into a quasi-constitutional system came, like the efforts of Louis XVI at reform, too late to affect men who had already passed beyond any possibility of compromise with the idea of monarchical power. The concessions which the autocracy was prepared to offer did not touch the fringe of what the opposition regarded as nominal. Nor was that all. Post-war Russia illustrated admirably the truth of Mill’s insistence that “a state which dwarfs its men in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands, even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”[50]

III

I conclude, therefore, that the factor of consent is not likely effectively to operate in any society where there is a serious unequality of economic condition; and I assume, further, that the absence of such consent is, in the long run, fatal to social peace. I do not deny that men will long postpone their protest against that absence; there are few wrongs to which men do not become habituated by experience, few, therefore, which, after the long passage of time, they will not be persuaded are inherent in nature. But such habituation is never permanent; sooner or later someone arises, like the child in the fairy-story, to point out that in fact the emperor is naked. If attention is drawn to some need which is widely experienced, the denial that the need is real by those who have not experienced it, will not prove effective. Workingmen never found it easy to believe that long hours of work or low wages were the essential conditions of industrial leadership in the nineteenth century. Few Nonconformists sympathized with Burke’s attitude to parliamentary reform. Few American trade unionists see in the use of the injunction by the courts a method of preserving social peace in terms of a strict impartiality between capital and labour. Opponents of Mussolini are not moved by his plea that he thinks only of the well-being of Italy. Russian working-men have probably been often tempted to the view that their Bolshevik masters mistake Communist dogma for social truth.

To satisfy experience, in short, we must weigh experience as we move to the making of decisions. We cannot rule it out because it is not ours; that is the error of autocracy which insists upon the _a priori_ rightness of its own experience. We have to regard experience as significant in itself and seek to come to terms with it. If it is mistaken in the implications it assumes, we have to convince it of its error. Our business, hard as it is, is the discovery of that need in the experience which must be satisfied if successful government is to be possible. For successful government is simply government which satisfies the largest possible area of demand. It is not mysterious or divine. It is simply a body of men making decisions which, in the long run, live or die by what other men think of them. Their validity as decisions is in that thought if only because its content is born of what the decisions mean to ourselves. All of us are inescapably citizens, and, at some point, therefore, the privacy in which we seek escape from our obligation as citizens, will seem unsatisfying. A crisis comes which touches us; a decision is made which contradicts something we happen to have experienced as fundamental; we then judge our rulers by the fact of that denial, and act as we think its terms warrant.

This, as I think, is the real pathway to an answer to the kind of problem which students of public opinion like Mr Lippmann have posed. They are right in their analysis of the constituent factors in its making, especially in their emphasis of the difficulties we confront in making that opinion correspond to the realities it must satisfy. They are right, further, I believe, in their emphasis upon the vital connexion between truthful news and liberty; nor do I doubt that some of the remedies they propose would have the valuable effect of increasing the degree of truth in the news. But all of them, I think, miss out the vital fact that truthful news is dangerous to a society the actual contours of which its presentation might seriously change. It would have been a different war in 1914 without propaganda; the history of political parties would have been different if the principles they announced were measured by their application to total and not to partial experience. It only pays to print the truth when the interest responsible for publication is not prejudiced thereby. My point has been that in an unequal society that prejudice is inevitable.

And that prejudice, in its basic implications, is incompatible with liberty. For what it does is to emphasize some experience at the expense of other experience, to enable one need to make its way while another need remains unknown. The policy of censorship during the war meant that everyone anxious for its prosecution to the end had ample opportunity to express his view; the pacifist, the Christian, the believer in peace by negotiation, found it extraordinarily difficult to speak. Clamant opinion was, as always, taken for actual opinion; and policy, particularly in the making of peace, was built upon the assumption that no other opinion existed save that which made itself heard. To any observer with a grain of common sense, it was obvious that no treaty would be possible of application save as it impressed Germany as just, and that where, when the glow of war had gone, Germany resisted its application, a public opinion would not easily be found to demand the imposition of penalties. Nothing is more dangerous in the taking of decisions than to assume that because people are silent, they have nothing to say.