Chapter VI: Part 6

But people who did not know him often failed to realise the profound humanity that lay underneath that shy and reserved exterior, and which accompanied--and profound humanity does not always accompany--great gifts of intellect. No one who worked with Lord Milner could ever forget this--that, in every social problem that he approached, whether at home or abroad, the question he always asked himself was this: "How can we help those who have to carry the burden and heat of the day, and how will what we propose to do affect those who have to work with their hands for their daily bread?" He believed that the right way towards social prosperity and the reorganisation of this country lay through the scientific organisation of our productive power, and it was his belief in the practicability of accomplishing this that made him always turn a deaf ear to those who argued that the first necessity of bringing about capacities for industrial production and competition was a lowering of wages and standards of life. He was always opposed to that. But it is probable that with his great intellectual gifts, and with a certain intellectual detachment, and from not having mixed for long or very freely with all classes of people in this country, he failed perhaps to realise the natural, dare I say obtuseness? of his fellow-countrymen--or, let us say, the difficulties owing to the English temperament of giving effect speedily to what he desired.

I think that in what he desired to do he was very largely right, because, whether you look at home or throughout the Dominions and Colonies, there is no doubt there is an immense amount to do in the way of scientific development and of co-ordination--much as I dislike that word co-ordination--both with regard to improving the productive capacity of the Empire, and no less with regard to co-ordinating, which is equally important, the scientific work which has been done in different parts of the Empire with regard not only to production, but with regard to health and sanitation. We have allowed our Empire for too long to proceed on haphazard lines. He felt that we were handicapped as against the world, compared with what we ought to be, by an unnecessary economic backwardness prevailing in so many parts of the Empire. To use his own words, he said "that such backwardness is a discredit alike to our generosity and to our intelligence."

* * * * * * * *

The word Imperialism still has to many people in this country a rather sinister meaning. They associate with it--wrongly in my view and in your view--the idea of exploitation, of riding roughshod over the world, of jingoism and of selfishness in public policy. It was not that to Lord Milner, and it is not that to us. It is rather this--the spreading throughout such parts of the world as we control, or in which we have influence, of all those ideas of law, order, and justice which we believe to be peculiar to our own race. It is to help people who belong to a backward civilisation, wisely to raise them in the scale of civilisation--an extraordinarily difficult task, and one which needs wisdom for its consummation. There is no country in the world upon whom that task has been imposed to the same degree as our own country, and it is undoubtedly by the way in which we fulfil that task that we shall be judged at the bar of history, not perhaps so much to-day, but by those who come after us of our own blood.

We have made a start, so far as our own Empire is concerned, by setting up an Imperial Economic Committee to try to bring about still closer bonds commercially between the Dominions and the Mother Country. All attempts to-day must be to a certain extent tentative. But I am quite convinced, having regard to the sentiment throughout the Empire, that we are approaching along a line that affords the best chance of our laying the foundation to-day for something upon which a far mightier edifice may be built in years to come. I am convinced, too, we are only at the beginning of what can be done by intelligent co-operation of the Mother Country with the Colonies and the Empire in developing them for the benefit not only of themselves and ourselves, but of the Empire as a whole.

It is upon that point I want to say a few words to you in Oxford. I often used to wonder whether it was possible that this world of ours had existed an unknown period, and mankind had struggled on in its upward course through countless generations of toil and tribulation, so that a few of us might be able to come to Oxford and Cambridge to enjoy ourselves and to pass on, taking the cream of civilisation. It always seemed to me that if all we have to show for what humanity is suffering was a little privileged generation in a corner of the world like this, the whole thing, creation and evolution, became something puny and ridiculous. It seemed to me that for us who have the enormous inestimable privilege of being born into this country in positions where we can come here, and where to a certain extent we choose what we do in the world, that really after all that has been given to us, and after all that we have enjoyed, and with a vivid recollection of what this world has passed through within the last ten years, there is nothing else for this generation to do than to devote itself as no generation has done in the past to the betterment of its millions of people who have not got our advantages.

We have, or we can have if we like, what the whole of this country is crying out for to-day, and that is education. Never was the need for educated men in each country of the Empire greater than it is to-day. The greatest loss that the war has imposed on this country is the loss of a whole generation of men who to-day would be between the ages of thirty and forty-five, able to carry on and take over the big jobs; and they were wiped out. Where many years ago there were men to be reckoned in dozens to take over responsible and arduous duties throughout the Empire and at home, now there are but handfuls, and never was the call to service and the demand for service more clamant than to-day. Now there are many kinds of service for which you can offer yourself; for those who have fitted themselves for it, if there is no immediate call for you into professions at home, think how the Empire needs you to-day to make the rough places smooth in all the corners of the world, to train and educate people lower than we are in the scale of civilisation, to go out to the great Dominions and help them in the problems set before them. And, apart from all those, what a field there is to-day for the best men that we can send to India, for this reason--for this and the next generation, the most difficult work in the Empire must necessarily be in that great country, work demanding sympathy, knowledge, courage, and intelligence of the highest order.

I hope it may never be said that in any part of the Empire when the call comes for workers, the one part where the call is most urgent, where the work is most difficult, and the future is most obscure, could be the one part where the call is not answered. If that should be the case it would be a proof of what I deny, but what some people maintain, that the courage, the initiative, and the spirit of adventure of our people, to which we owe the Empire and all that we are--that that spirit, if not dead, is dormant. I will never believe that.

Let me tell you at this point one story of Lord Milner, which I expect will be new to most of you. I tell it to you, not only to show you, if you have any doubt, what manner of man he was, but to show you what the finest type of Englishman at his best can be; the type that all of us would wish to emulate. Twenty-two years ago Lord Milner had completed about two years of work in the restoration of South Africa, one of the most difficult tasks to which any man had ever been called upon to devote himself, and, by confession on all hands, he had accomplished a work which it is doubtful if anyone else could have accomplished. His praise was in all men's mouths. He was a man who loved his own home in his own country, never so happy as when in England, and there came to him at that moment an offer from Lord Balfour to come home as Secretary of State for the Colonies, a task for which he was peculiarly fitted, and in every way he would have delighted in the work. He declined--and why? He declined it because he knew that, in spite of the success he had achieved, there were coming years of the utmost difficulty in South Africa, years in which probably he would lose all the popularity he had won, years in which possibly his success might be turned into failure, and he said, "No, no, I am not going to go away from here and take the credit of accomplishments up to this point and leave someone else to come out now to face what must be years of difficulty and distress. I am going to see them through myself."

The public did not know that. That shows the finest temper, the finest spirit in which an Englishman could possibly do and face his work, and I would like to take to myself as an exemplar and a pattern that method of looking at my problems and facing my work. I would ask all of you, happy to have your lives before you, to keep a model of that kind ever present in your hearts and minds to be with you if you are ever called upon to face times of hardship and of difficulty. I make no apology to you when his loss is fresh, and I am sure is in all your hearts, and when it is weighing heavily on all of us who knew and loved him, for putting before an Oxford audience the inspiring example of one of her greatest sons, especially as the objects at which he aimed and the spirit in which he worked are the objects at which our party aims to-day, the spirit in which I hope and believe we work at a time like this, when the party to which we all belong is more united in its determination than it has ever been to follow in the steps of those who have set before everything the improvement of the material condition of our people, and of the whole of our Empire. Work to that end is to be achieved only by keeping in ourselves a bright and burning spiritual ideal, which alone can give us strength to perform the task to which we have set our hands.

LORD OXFORD

AT THE GUILDHALL

13_th May_, 1925

I propose to dwell, not on Lord Oxford the statesman, but on the Mr. Asquith whom we, in the House of Commons, whether we agree with him or not, have always respected and admired for a generation. For many years, as a humble back-bencher, I had my individuality, my hopes and my ambitions trampled under foot by those marching legions of which for so many years Mr. Asquith was the head. But all through that time I recognised, as all of us do, the stability of his character, the serenity of his temper, his freedom from jealousies and enmities, the magnitude of his mind and the plenitude of his utterance. We felt that in him we had a master of our tongue. In his speech he could be not only sonorous, but, what does not always go with it, luminous; not only massive at times, but really humorous. And he never supported his arguments with any extraneous helps, such as Dr. Johnson alluded to when he spoke of orators "who employ laboured gesticulation and think that they can impress themselves on audiences by rolling their eyes, puffing their cheeks, spreading abroad their arms, or stamping on the ground." There was with him always that reticence and reserve that belong essentially to the Roman and the Englishman rather than to the Greek and the Celt.

It is a curious thing that there was a Lord Oxford who preceded him by some two centuries, and if we look back on what was said about him by Swift, particularly, you get a not wholly imperfect picture of the Mr. Asquith whom we knew and respected so much. Listen to these few sentences, which, I think, might with very little change have been written to-day about Lord Oxford:

"Easy and disengaged in private conversation with such a weight of affairs upon his shoulders: of great learning, and as great a favourer and protector of it; intrepid by nature, as well as by consciousness of his own integrity; a despiser of money, a firm friend, and a placable enemy: sacrificing his justest resentment not only to the public good, but to the common intercession and acknowledgment. Yet with all these virtues"--here, I think, the truth will hold--"there is some mixture of human infirmity. His greatest admirers must confess his skill at cards and dice to be very low and superficial. Of horse-racing he is entirely ignorant."

I would like to finish on the note on which I began. My own admiration for Lord Oxford arose primarily from the admiration I have for his speeches, and I can recall three outstanding ones, very different in their kind, but which, I think, every old House of Commons man will agree with me were instances of perfect speech. One was the speech Lord Oxford made on the death of Alfred Lyttelton. The second was the last speech he made in the House of Commons, a speech full of humour and Parliamentary skill, and one which led more than anything else directly to the fall of the late Government. Lastly, there was the great speech he delivered on 6th August, 1914, in which he put before this country and the world the principles of constitutional freedom as opposed to despotism in a manner in which they can never have been stated since the time of Edmund Burke.

He has taught us--those of us in the House of Commons and all students of politics to-day--not only to love our mother tongue more, if possible, than we have loved it in the past, but also the possibilities of that tongue when it is properly used. He has given us an example by which some of us, if we apply ourselves, and if we have the ability to profit by his example, may some day be able ourselves to speak English.

_ON THE NATION AND THE CHURCHES_

RELIGION AND POLITICS

FROM A SPEECH AT THE LANGHAM HOTEL

11_th February_, 1926

Many people, I fear, to-day fail to realise the very critical character of the period through which the world is passing. There is nothing the country needs so much as another Wesley or Whitefield. Those spiritual movements, such as occurred in the eighteenth century, led largely by Wesley, have come up from time to time in the history of the human race. Their spirit is always the same, though the form is different. Had Wesley been born four centuries earlier, he would have been Wesley just the same, but he would have worn a rough robe girded with a cord and have founded a great body of preaching friars. I confess I am not sure, if a Wesley or a St. Francis arose to-day, that to found a body of preaching friars would not be the best thing they could do for the world. To-day the world seems more irreligious than it has ever been in the Christian era. Irresponsible pleasure-seeking and prodigal luxury abound; church-going has lost the hold it had in our childhood; and candidates for the Ministry are less in number than in years past. But I believe this condition of affairs will pass. The side of Christianity which takes into view all kinds of activities for the social betterment of the people is the side which most appeals to the present generation. Undoubtedly there is as much philanthropic and altruistic work done by all kinds of people as has ever been done.

I find the study of the various types in the House of Commons a very interesting occupation. I find there, especially among the Labour Party, many men who fifty years ago would inevitably have gone into the Christian Ministry. They have been drawn into political life from a deep desire to help the people. Such men are common in all parties to-day. These are facts which relieve the darkness of the outlook. Things will change again. We must not let ourselves imagine, amidst the changes of the day, though the very foundations are cracking, that the things we hold most precious are going to pass away. I certainly agree with many observers that since the war the manifest forces of Satan have been more conspicuously at large. But the very manifestation of these forces is calling other forces into the field.

On this account I feel it to be so important that a Church like yours should send its quota of young men into politics to-day. Political work is of enormous importance at this time. We do not all realise in what a changed world we are living. Superficially it is a frivolous world, full of "jazzing" and pre-occupation with pleasure, but under the surface it is intensely serious. I believe the electorate is intensely anxious to listen to men who have sincerely at heart the uplifting of the nation.

Many of those who seem to be running most wild in their political views are men who have been led astray by insufficient education or experience, but are truly desirous of bettering their country. Therefore, I believe that men who will sincerely and honestly embrace political life with the idea of helping the community (no matter to what party they belong), are wanted in these days. This, coupled with the desire of service, will defeat the menacing forces which threaten us. If, in consequence of words spoken this night, some of the young men connected with the Wesleyan Methodist Church feel the call to political work, it will be of great advantage to the Commonwealth, for the political career properly viewed is really a kind of Ministry.

THE CHURCH ARMY

AT A MEETING OF THE CHURCH ARMY IN QUEEN'S HALL

7_th May_, 1925

I am afraid I have been talking too much during the last few days. On Tuesday I was talking to newspaper men about truth; on Wednesday I was talking to artists about beauty; and now I am at this great meeting, the note of which and the key to which are goodness, truth and beauty, which surely make a perfect trinity, since no man can be leading the ideal life unless he has these things combined in unity in himself.

I think that perhaps we are awakening more and more to the deeper spiritual impulses and to their importance in the life of the country. When we read (or used to read) history, we find a great deal one hundred and two hundred years ago about politics, kings and battles, but very little about a man called John Wesley. Yet, as the years go by, historians have begun to say that it was the lives of men like Wesley and Whitefield, and what they taught the people of this country, that really were the significant factors in moulding the character of the people and of the leaders of the people, and that it is largely owing to the spirit which they, and men like them, breathed throughout England, that the immense impetus was given to the reforms--social and religious--which took place in the country during the last century, and which helped, in spite of a thousand difficulties and evil things on the other side, to make the rough path smoother and to kindle afresh the Divine spark in the hearts of men.

So, when the history of the nineteenth century comes to be written, I believe there will stand out the names of two men, William Booth and Wilson Carlile, who represent the spiritual revolt voiced before them by Ruskin and many another against the ugliness of life, and its sin and its blind devotion to nothing but material progress. I have always thought that if Mr. Carlile had lived many centuries ago, instead of to-day, he would have been one of the first of the Franciscans. He has shown the country what the Church of England can do, and there has been no risk for him of sharing the fate that fell to John Wesley, and of another schism being unnecessarily caused among the people of God in this land.

The record of the Church Army is a modern chapter in the Acts of the Apostles, and its work is as inspired as anything of which we read in the sacred Scriptures. The Church Army is a living testimony of what a life of Divine love can mean in the hearts of ordinary men and women. Whatever controversies rage--doctrinal, theological--among men who profess religion, they go on their way and combine to give a glorious demonstration of personal devotion in the service of men.

The activities of the Church Army are innumerable--in emigration, recreation and good, honest mirth, preaching--but, above all, coming to the rescue of fallen humanity. When I think of this I cannot help feeling, as I look around this room, that there can be no life on this earth in which men may be more sure to find real happiness than in this life of perpetual self-sacrifice. We may look in vain in the faces of those whose life is one constant search for illusive pleasures to see the radiant expressions which I have noticed in all parts of this great audience.

The work of many of you is not only among the poor and unfortunate, but among men and women who are the broken results of life in this age--men and women who, in many cases, have lost not only work and health, but what is far more difficult to make good, their spirit, temper, morale, courage and faith. Yet the Church Army goes out to its work preserving that spirit of health and happiness which is its motto. It shows that the more men will give their lives to service and the more impossible the tasks they try to achieve, the more is the grace given them in that fight, the brighter their faith burns, and the more they are able to radiate among those with whom they work that spirit of confidence, hope and happiness which the world needs and desires so much. I have watched your work with the deepest and most heartfelt sympathy and admiration, and I only wish that I personally was competent to do it. You look in the most unlikely places for that spark of the Divine which exists in every human soul. You search until you find it, and then you blow on it with the spirit of love till you have blown it into a flame, however feeble; and so you have one more to testify to the eternal truth that love alone in this world is the conqueror, and that by love alone can the nations be brought into the paths of peace, and that to pursue and attain love is the one thing needful.

CHRISTIAN IDEALS

AT THE NATIONAL FREE CHURCH CONFERENCE

12_th March_, 1925

You have taken the opportunity to waylay and entrap a singularly busy man on his way to make an ordinary political speech, and you have brought him to speak to you this afternoon for a few moments before an assembly distinctly representative of a great deal of the religious movement and religious thought of the country. Curiously enough, this is the first occasion, I think, on which I have ever addressed a body directly concerned with any of the churches. I have in the past always been reluctant to speak at those gatherings, possibly from the Englishman's fear of saying in the excitement of a public audience more than he really felt or really believed, knowing as a public man the temptation of winning easy applause by saying comfortable things, by saying things that perhaps are an exaggeration of what one really feels oneself, with the inevitable result, so often seen, that the more popular one becomes as a speaker the greater is the tendency to spiritual atrophy in the individual.

Now, the first thought that naturally occurs to me at an assembly of this kind is the difference between the work that lies before the politician and the work that lies before the Christian minister. I represent here and in this visit the State; you represent the Church. You are the Guelphs and I am the Ghibellines, and there are some marked points of difference that it may help us to dwell upon for a few moments. But, tempting as the theme would be, I have neither the time to-day nor even the inclination to dwell on the struggles, the secular struggles, that have taken place between Church and State, and the great part played in these struggles and the development of life in our country by the Free Churches of England.

In many ways, in that struggle, I think we may say that we have often been in religious life far in advance, as we ought to be, of political life. For, while it is true that in distant ages long past representatives of Christianity tried to drive mankind into their fold by stern measures, by execution and by fire, we have left those things far behind us, and it has remained in the last century for wild and extreme men in some parts of the world to apply, in trying to make mankind believe their political doctrines, weapons which have been given up by the Christian for more centuries than I like to think of.

I, in my capacity as a politician, have to deal with mankind in the mass. You, in the life of your churches, have to deal with the individual; and the difference lies in this, that the problems of life come to us wholesale, as it were. We have columns of figures before us of unemployment, for instance. You don't trouble about columns of figures, but you all, in your lives and in your ministry, when you think of unemployment, think of the man and the woman and the child; and while we are devising methods of helping, so far as we can, you have vividly before you the daily increase in the hopelessness, the daily increase in the lack of skill, the daily increase in the lack of morale. It may well be that you feel, as you must at times, impatient with those, to whatever party they may belong, who are attempting to govern this great country, for their inability at once to find something that will alleviate the troubles from which our people suffer to-day.

There is another aspect of this. Parliament represents all the citizens in a way that religious bodies cannot. Your membership is voluntary. We are all born members of the State, and you have an excluding discipline which we in politics have not. You can supply selective tests both to your members and to your ministers--tests of character, tests of knowledge, tests of belief--and you can make them obedient to a rule of life. I can do none of these things and, indeed, I have only to try to do the best I can with the tools I have, which means to work the existing institutions of the country so far as I conceive it to the best advantage of the multitudinous interests of her citizens. Then again, while you have, and all churches have, their rule of life, you cannot say that there is any definite code laid down for all political parties. My party have no political bible. Possibly you might find our ideals best expressed in one of Disraeli's novels, but I have no power to make people read them, and I have no power to compel them to belief.

It would ill become me to say what may be the bible, if there be such a book, of the Liberal Party. The party that can claim more than any of the others to have a religious code to-day is the Labour Party, because they still have the Marxian _Capital_, but, as a matter of fact, that book has been subject, as other books, to the higher criticism for some years past, and what will happen when the results of higher criticism percolate to the lower intelligence I have little idea.

There is yet a third difference: we of the State do possess--to a certain extent--the power of compulsion. We can enforce the law, and we can enforce it upon the unwilling. But the sense of the State in the minds and hearts of most men is still feeble and undeveloped. The State wears an extravagant guise to them, and they are apt to serve it with a grudging assent. In a supreme crisis men will lay down their lives for it, but they don't lay down their lives conscientiously so much for what we call the State as for the country behind it. We in politics--let me say politicians--even at the moment of the greatest popularity cannot, and perhaps ought not to, command the love and enthusiasm that the Church, if it is to be the instrument it might be, can command, and ought to command, from her sons and daughters.

But after looking for a few minutes at the obvious differences, one comes to the more congenial topic of how we are able to help one another.

What can the Christian Church do for the State? Now, here again we have many voices speaking to us to-day, and, while it would ill become me to say anything on any difference of opinion that may exist among you, I think I may take two typical voices in the Church of England which do express to-day two different lines of thought, and which yet seem to me to converge if you only go down underneath the surface. The Bishop of Durham and the Bishop of Manchester represent two very different schools of political thought. The Bishop of Durham stresses the individual appeal of the Gospel, and the Bishop of Manchester the social application of the Christian message. Those are two sides of the same thing, and I think we ought to look at both sides at once.

To my mind, the distinctive Christian motive is the individual transformation of character. The making of that character reacts on the national life, and I think the Bishop of Durham quite truly pointed out that, so little effect, looking at it historically, has the quality of the social order had on individual morality with all varieties of social organisation, that sometimes even the worst periods of history have been found compatible with and to co-exist with the very finest development of the Christian character. And I venture to agree with him when he stressed what I spoke of in my first sentence, the danger of people thinking they can satisfy their consciences by talking at large on sacred subjects and on general amelioration, and amelioration to be brought about by social improvements, unless at the same time they never lose sight of the fact that you must come back ultimately and all the time to the individual; and that you must not let the joy of beautiful visions or discussions on dogma or any other things make you forget that it is the ethic, it is the life, it is the transformation of life, that is the thing which really matters. Work up from that to the other, and don't try to work down from the other to that.

He also reminds us of what I think many need to be reminded, that this world is a much harder place to live in and do your duty in than we sometimes care to remember. It is so much more comfortable to make easy speeches. Browning has said, "How very hard it is to be a Christian," and he never said anything more true. But, of course, this does not express the whole truth. It is quite true that you cannot identify Our Lord with any academic theory or school, Tory, Manchester or Marxian, and when we try to do that I think we make a profound error; yet, living in this world, the bodies of Christian people, united by a common ideal, have to act not only as individuals but as corporate bodies and communities, and it is when they come to act in that way that their real difficulties, it seems to me, begin.

This is a point which the Bishop of Manchester stresses, and, if I may say so with respect, quite rightly. His desire is to see the Christian Churches really influencing public life in this country, not taking sides, but raising the standard of the country's ideals, criticising, judging, with Christian charity where possible, but criticising and judging, that we may be told where we fall short of the highest ideals in trying to apply political and social remedies in this country.

It is quite right to tell us, and to tell us emphatically, that the Christian Churches should give themselves to helping in the elevation of the social condition of the country, and not be satisfied with things as they are. You have the double message, and I am sure you have it in all your Churches through your different teachers and different types--the cultivation of the spiritual life of the individual, the regeneration of the mass through the individual, and the reaction of the regenerated mass on the country at large.

That should be the process, and I think that in these days we all of us want, perhaps more than anything, and more than at any time, to be bound lightly and loosely to the luxuries and the good things of this world. We cannot all of us embrace poverty as St. Francis did, but we all know the difference between the man who cherishes the treasures of this world and the man who sits lightly to them, and it is only by sitting lightly to them that you have the right to say much that wants saying in these days; for it is only in that way that you can hope to influence those amongst whom you work, rich and poor alike. It is a spirit essential to-day in the present conditions of our country, and I believe and recognise with joy that it is more common to-day amongst those who are directly relieved from poverty than it was in the years before the War.

People often say that this is a materialistic age. There is much truth in that, but I do feel, too, that there has never been an age in which there are more people struggling, some with more success and some with less, to live to the highest ideals that are in them, and doing something to help to better the moral and the physical conditions of the people among whom they live. And it is only natural, in a time when you have active and strong the spirit of things that make for good, that you have co-existent with it the spirit that makes for evil no less active and strong. I think that that is possibly one of the reasons why you see the great contrast that you do see to-day, and that while it is true that there is throughout Europe a great deal of gross and crass materialism, you have at the same time all over Europe eager souls who are struggling to impress themselves on their day, to improve themselves and to improve the world.

Now, in that struggle we all have to take our part. That struggle exists everywhere, and is round us every day, and in that struggle what help to the country can the churches of England give? They stand reminders day by day of that truth in which they have been born--to teach us to shun the luxury that divides us so much from one another, to spread the education that ought to unite us, to supply us with an inspiration to sustain us. In ways such as this the churches of England can hold up the right arms of the politicians of England and join in the common work of making the crooked paths a little straighter and the rough places a little smoother for our own people.

I think it is well in an assembly like this to remember one other thing. Some people talk as though Christianity had done its work in the world--a singular lack of imagination in that remark, seeing that the work has hardly yet been begun. There is not one of you in an assembly like this who has not known at one time of your life a character which can only have been formed on the model of Our Lord and Master--some man, some woman, it may have been someone among the highly educated and fortunate in the world, it may have been a working person. But we have all known, at one time or another, such a one, and it has been a great help to us in our pilgrimage through life to look to that example and to walk to some extent in the light that they cast on their path as they passed along. Now churches may rise and churches may fall, but the influence of lives like that will go on for ever, and it is through the light of such lives that the redemption of this world will ultimately come; for they will survive persecution, and derision, and coldness, and apathy. We shall never see those times, nor our children, nor our children's children; but it will be by the succession of such lives as I have endeavoured to depict that some day the Kingdom of Heaven will come on earth. If we cannot hold fast in the most difficult times to an ideal of that kind, we shall find that we shall be suffocated in the daily toil which most of us have to undergo, and as a people we shall go down and perish for lack of vision.

_ON THE EMPIRE_

EMPIRE DAY MESSAGE, 1925

Twenty years ago Empire Day was first celebrated throughout His Majesty's Dominions. Twenty years hence the Prime Minister of Great Britain may be able to make his voice heard, not only--as I am to-day--to listeners in the home country, but to men, women and children in all parts of the Empire. We, too, in Great Britain may listen to Empire Day messages spoken by the Dominion Prime Ministers and by leaders of the Crown Colonies and the Dependencies. Such a consummation of scientific progress makes a strong appeal to the imagination. The direct interchange of speech would bring home to every dweller under the Flag a vivid sense of the unity of the British Empire. Yet, to my mind, the existence of that unity to-day, and in all past days since the foundations of our Empire were laid, is a far more impressive phenomenon.

Our Empire grew from the adventurous spirit of our fathers. They went forth, urged by the love of adventure, by the passion for discovery, by the desire for a freer life in new countries. Wherever they went, they carried with them the traditions, the habits, the ideals of their Mother Country. Wherever they settled they planted a new homeland. And though mountains and the waste of seas divided them, they never lost that golden thread of the spirit which drew their thoughts back to the land of their birth. Even their children, and their children's children, to whom Great Britain was no more than a name, a vision, spoke of it always as Home. In this sense of kinship, the Empire finds its brightest glory and its most essential strength. The Empires of old were created by military conquest and sustained by military domination. They were Empires of subject races governed by a central power. Our Empire is so different from these that we must give the word Empire a new meaning, or use instead of it the title of Commonwealth of British Nations. The great Dominions are free self-governing States; in their freedom they render unshakeable allegiance to the Throne. The ties that bind them to each other and to us are, in the eloquent words of Burke, "light as air, but strong as links of iron." Each is a daughter in her mother's house, and mistress in her own.

We British are supposed to be a dull, unimaginative race. But I am sure that none among us can think upon this Commonwealth of British nations, which men and women of our own race have created, without a stirring of our deepest feelings. If anyone should ask for proof that the unity of the Empire is a reality, let him cast his mind back to the hour when the living structure of Empire was put to the supreme test. When war came the response of the Empire was instant, spontaneous and whole-hearted. You and I can never forget how our hearts were uplifted by the messages which came, in those critical days of August 1914, from the great Dominions; and not only from them, but also from India and the Colonies which were still under our rule. The Empire came through the ordeal of a long and exhausting war, strengthened, confirmed in its loyalty.

To-day our minds are engrossed with the problems of restoration after war. What brighter hope have we, in the solution of these formidable problems, than our intimate union with countries of great achievement and still greater potentialities? These are not times when we can afford to belittle the material side of partnership in Empire. If we, in these crowded industrial islands, can serve the interests of newer countries; and if they, in turn, with their fertile spaces and unlimited natural resources, can serve our interests, we are more than justified in making common cause with them in repairing the waste of war. This sense of a common purpose, this desire for mutual aid, gives a practical touch to the ideal of Empire as a family of nations. When each member of the family seeks to give its aid, freely, ungrudgingly, for the good of all, the fabric of the Commonwealth is more and more closely knit.

It is the task of statesmen in this country and throughout the Empire to devise the ways and means by which the progress of the British family may be directed and encouraged. Each one of us, from the highest to the lowest, has nevertheless an individual share in this great responsibility. The Empire is not only our master hope; it is our greatest heritage, the widest opportunity for patriotic service. It is something infinitely precious which we hold in trust from our forefathers and for our children. To be worthy of that trust, we cannot be merely passive admirers of its achievement and its promise. We must all, in our several degrees, be active learners in the school of Empire. Over and over again our friends from overseas complain of the ignorance displayed by people at home regarding the Dominions, Colonies, and Dependencies. I think that our ardent and friendly critics are inclined to overlook the difficulty which our busy folk experience in gathering clear and comprehensive knowledge of all parts of the Empire. It is no little task for people to know all that goes on in our great Dominions, to understand the problems confronting our Crown Colonies, and to enter into the life of the Indian Empire and the Dependencies, where a handful of our countrymen labour for the benefit of millions of native races in all stages of culture. But the difficulty of the duty is no reason why we should neglect it. Rather is it a stimulus to exert ourselves to widen our knowledge of the countries and the nations which share with us in the obligations of Empire.

I feel sure, however, that since the opening of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley last year, this affectionate grumble from our brothers overseas has lost much of its point. The Exhibition enabled, and still enables, our people to learn in a few days much which could not otherwise be appreciated save by a tour of the Empire. No one can adequately measure the value of such a demonstration of the arts and industries of the Commonwealth of British nations. In more than one sense the Empire came home to us at Wembley. There are many ways, apart from such exhibitions, by which we can study our Empire at second hand. But nothing, to my mind, can prove so enlightening as personal visits overseas, and personal intercourse with dwellers in our Dominions and Colonies. We are accustomed to look upon the oceans as dividing us from our brothers and sisters in the Imperial family. I prefer to regard the seas as highways which unite us. The progress of communication has made it possible for us to visit Canada, South Africa, Egypt, the West Indies, and other portions of the Empire with less trouble and expense than our fathers incurred in making their Continental tours. It should be the ambition of all of us to pay at least one visit, however brief, to Britain overseas.

Apart from that, we can do something to foster the interchange of visits for educative ends. The Empire Parliamentary Association has done invaluable work in bringing together legislators from different parts of the Empire. Recently a number of Australian school children visited Great Britain, and public interest was awakened to the value of similar visits by our children to the Dominions. All such movements deserve the fullest encouragement.

Empire Day affords us an opportunity for joining with other parts of the Empire in expressing our common pride in our Imperial heritage, and our common determination to build worthily upon the foundations which the great Empire-builders so well and truly laid. If I were to attempt to crystallise its message in a phrase, I might take the words, "Know Thyself," in which the ancients expressed the duty of the individual man, and widen it to embrace the duty of the British citizen of to-day--"Know Your Empire."

DEMOCRACY AND THE EMPIRE

FROM A SPEECH TO THE JUNIOR IMPERIAL LEAGUE

3_rd May_, 1924

Your generosity in your reception of me to-night is no less than the generosity which you showed me when, immediately after defeat in the country, and before my leadership had been ratified by the party in London, you asked me to come here to-night as your guest. You are, indeed, the friends that I would have--friends in bad times as well as in good, and we shall see the good times together. I think I will begin by saying a few words to you following on something that I said yesterday in the Albert Hall, because by your very presence here you show your keenness, you show your desire to do something for your party and for the country, and I want to say something, if I can, that may be of help to you in the work that you have to do.

I spoke about the difficulty of a democracy keeping an Empire. Now, democracy is a word often used very loosely, but it is really only a certain form of government, and it is the form of government which exists in our country to-day. I think it is very important for all those who are entering on politics and the study of politics to realise, as I have said before on other occasions, that there is very little difference in space between tyrannies, autocratic governments, popular governments, complete democracies like our own, and governments of licence and anarchy. In other words, you may represent the forms of government which mankind have tried as lying round the circumference of a wheel with tyranny at the top, and working round, as I have described, to anarchy, which inevitably leads back once more to tyranny; and human governments are always moving imperceptibly in that course. From that fact it has been truly said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance; and that is what you have to exercise, to maintain your liberty on the one hand that we may never slip back into tyranny, and to guard that liberty with your lives, if need be, against that licence that leads to anarchy and to unreason, which inevitably, after having destroyed the Empire, would come back to tyranny for its life.

Democracy is the most difficult form of government, and therefore the more worthy of our giving our lives to make it a success. Let us remember that many kings have been ruined by the tongues of well-meaning courtiers. Let our statesmen take care that our people are never ruined by the tongues of able and inspiring friends of democracy. Democracy is no new thing. More than two thousand years ago, in one of the most famous democracies that ever existed, a very great poet, in a play, put these words into the mouth of one of his political characters: "If two orators proposed, one to build ships of war, and the other to increase official salaries, the salaries-man would beat the ships-of-war-man in a canter." Within a generation of the day on which those words were written, that democracy, whose power was based on the sea, perished.

In the British House of Commons there have been found members who have voted, within the last few weeks, both against the construction of new cruisers and in favour of free railway passes. There is nothing new under the sun, and there is nothing that I have ever heard or read of that can be uttered by the extremest of our opponents in any party in their attempt to catch votes that has not already been said in the plays of Aristophanes. Now the instances to which I alluded yesterday as showing incapacity to take a long view, which is so often the great weakness of leaders of a democracy--that incapacity has been shown in the last few days by the decision of the Government in the case of Singapore, and in the case to which Lord Plymouth alluded of certain items of preference with the Dominions. It is a want of imagination and the fear of taking the risk of what could only be a temporary and a local unpopularity, but it is that very cowardice that, in the long run, does so much harm to this form of government. A good motive to my mind can hardly be a sufficient excuse for an act of unwisdom.

Now you here show by your very title that you care sufficiently for your ideals to make sacrifices for them, and to try to induce other people to make sacrifices too. You are not afraid of the word "Empire." I know that there are people who dislike it. They think that it has a militaristic tinge. We may call it a Commonwealth of Nations, a fine title, if we will, but let us remember that the Empire, as we know it, is different from any that has existed hitherto; for it has not been the creation of conquering armies, although armies have played their part, but our Empire arose from the bone and sinew of our people. It was in the first place commercial adventurers who won our Indian Empire, and how much of our Dominions has not been called into being by men and women who, for reasons of conscience, or desire to find a country in which they could lead a wider, freer life, left our shores voluntarily in a high spirit of adventure? Thus were the beginnings of our Empire created of our own people and by our own people. And that is why it is our work, and the work of our own people of all classes, to see that that heritage is preserved.