POLITICS IN A DISSOLVING VIEW

Often when warring for he wist not what,
An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak,
Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek,
And cooled the lips so black and clammed and hot;

Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgot
The deed of grace amid the roar and reek;
Yet larger vision than the tongue can speak
He there has reached, although he has known it not

For natural mindsight, triumphing in the act
Over the throes of artificial rage,
Has thuswise muffled victory's peal of pride,
Rended to ribands policy's specious page
That deals but with evasion, code, and pact,
And war's apology wholly stultified.

1915.——————— Thomas Hardy: "Often When Warring."

I

In the life of the English generation which found its climax and catastrophe in the war, the last chapter opened on armistice day and closed with the signature of the German peace treaty on July 19th, 1919. As with the armistice terms, so with the treaty: no one doubted that it would be signed, but, until it had been signed, all efforts at reconstruction, all attempts to resume a normal life of peace were tentative and provisional. The House of Commons in effect declared a legislative moratorium and, in the absence of the prime minister, marked time to the command of Mr. Bonar Law with the disciplined noise and the calculated absence of progress inseparable from that part of infantry drill.

As the general election of the previous December had been won on the cry that a coalition was necessary to the conclusion of a lasting peace, it might have been expected that the supporters of the coalition would have influenced the course of the peace negotiations. Beyond an occasional question, however, which seldom brought enlightenment to the questioner, and an occasional telegram of protest which can never have brought satisfaction to the protester, coalition members gave the government a free hand. In part, there were comparatively few with any parliamentary experience; in part, there was none who could draft a desirable alternative ministry, if his dissatisfaction with the present prime minister stimulated him to effective revolt; and, in part, there has probably never, since 1832, been a House of Commons so bankrupt in public spirit, courage, independence or conscience. Since the end of 1918 the government has triumphantly carried its supporters against their inclinations through a dozen crises of which any single one would have seen any other ministry disowned and broken by a less servile house: the peace treaty with Germany, as mischievous as it was dishonourable, was flung at parliament with an air of "Take it—or leave it and take the consequences"; the treaty with Turkey established the Ottoman government in Constantinople with licence to misgovern and to massacre as freely as in the past; the Russian policy began with invective and threats of war against the bloody-handed soviet and ended with the cordial grip of a hand which had only become more bloody in the interval; Ireland drifted through pats of conciliation and dabs of coercion to a state of anarchy which ministers hoped to end by means of a new home rule bill abhorred by every section of Irishmen; and, while financiers protested that the country had reached its taxable capacity, the government continued to live beyond its means and the chancellor of the exchequer complained that it was not in his power to retrench effectively.

For a similar display of cynical incompetence and reckless disorder the historian must go back to the days of a great autocracy in dissolution. The government of Louis XVI or of the last Roman emperor, would perhaps shew an equal record of vacillations, lethargy and light-hearted misrule; but in both instances anarchy ended in downfall; and, if history be past politics, present politics are future history. It is hardly straining the parallel to suggest that such misgovernment is always attributable to one cause, the lack of an efficient opposition; a composite government unchecked by fear of overthrow and uninspired by any loftier ideal than a groping instinct of self-preservation, is no less tyrannical and prone to abuse than a single ruler.

"These various CÆsars and their successors and their women-kind," says H. G. Wells, "were probably no worse essentially than most weak and passionate human beings, but they had no real religion, being themselves gods; they had no wide knowledge on which to build high ambitions, their women were fierce and almost illiterate, and they were under no restraints of law or custom. They were surrounded by creatures ready to stimulate their slightest wishes and to translate their vaguest impulses into action. What are mere passing black thoughts and angry impulses with most of us became therefore deeds with them. Before a man condemns Nero as a different species of being from himself, he should examine his own secret thoughts very carefully."

It is less profitable to condemn the present government than to enquire why there has been no effective opposition to hold it in check. The political revolution which placed Mr. Lloyd George in power was described by Mr. Asquith as a "conspiracy"; it was generally regarded as a discreditable piece of trickery, and even the stalwarts of the new order were for the most part reduced to mumbling that the end must justify the means and that, without a change, the war would have dragged on for ever. It is possible to see now that a psychological crisis was reached in December 1916 and that after more than two years of unending and unended fighting the herd-instinct demanded that someone should be made responsible. To the bulk of the liberal party who stood by Mr. Asquith, forgiving his high-handed behaviour in resigning without an adverse vote and without consultation of his supporters, the December crisis seemed a trial of strength between two men; it was believed first that no alternative ministry could be formed and then that it could not endure; the opposition liberals would have been more than human if they had cherished no hope of revenge; and they could claim disinterestedly and honestly that the new prime minister was at least not superior to the old in scruple and was certainly inferior in ability.

However great their resentment, however, the new management had to be given a trial; any show of factiousness would have been doubtful patriotism and disastrous tactics; and the chief subject of discussion among the wire-pullers was how long the trial should continue. Much noise and dust accompanied Mr. Lloyd George's triumphal progress to No. 10 Downing Street; at last a "business government" had taken office, and Whitehall became filled with the unfamiliar forms of shipping-men and railway-men, newspaper-men and mining-men, all disciplined by practical experience at the head of great commercial enterprises, though unschooled to the teamwork of administration in which the pace and independence of each are regulated by his fellows. For a moment the political crisis seemed a successful bourgeois protest against the spirit and methods of Balliol: neither Mr. Lloyd George nor Lord Beaverbrook, neither Lord Northcliffe nor Lord Rothermere, neither Sir Eric Geddes nor Sir Joseph Maclay, neither Lord Rhondda nor Mr. Neville Chamberlain was a Balliol man; and in his strength and in his weakness, in his mechanical efficiency and blank want of imagination, in his intellectual aloofness and touching belief that others too observed an Oxford standard of honour, Mr. Asquith was a typical product of Balliol.[56]

Nevertheless, when the dust and noise of removal had abated, there were found to be at least as many defects of administration as before; the wizard's wand failed to charm food from air or to conjure up men from the vasty deep in place of those who were being sent to rot in Salonica; the German front remained impregnable in the west; the new war-cabinet, for all its dash and fire, was "too late" to prevent the Russian revolution; and German submarine-commanders, perhaps in ignorance of the change that had taken place, continued to sink allied and neutral shipping. No improvement was observable until the United States entered the war; and the warmest panegyrist of the new government has never suggested that the credit for this decision should be given to the new prime minister. Those who look for a single principle or detail in which the second coalition varied the policy of the first are rewarded with an encomium on the blessings of a unified command; but official rhetoric did not conceal that the French were being given, with much advertising display, what was waiting for them whenever they chose to ask for it; and, if this be Mr. Lloyd George's sole innovation, the assertion that he won the war stands in need of revision, the more so since the publication of the memorandum in which Lord Milner, who was sent to "report," is shewn to have carried out the unification of command on his own responsibility and without reference to the prime minister.[57] Liberals of the rank and file, growing weary of phrases about "instant daily decisions" and the advantage of "doing it now," over "waiting and seeing," found so little improvement abroad and so much calamitous disorder at home that within six months the new management seemed to have had a long enough trial: in that time cabinet rule had been abolished, nothing had been put in its place and the empire was at the mercy of half-a-dozen men who were alike only in the distrust which they aroused. From time to time the more ardent liberal skirmishers criticised the government; but their enthusiasm was damped by consistent failure to "make the red-hats go over the top"; it was finally destroyed by the faint-hearted attack of their leaders when at last they called ministers to account in 1918.

The "Maurice Debate" is of party importance in registering the death of the liberal party; it had indeed breathed its last eighteen months before, but the certificate was only written when Mr. Asquith was defeated on a division which challenged the honour of the prime minister and certain of his colleagues. Since the party meeting at the Reform Club on December 8th 1916 some of the more enterprising had snatched at office, others awaited their turn; of those who still sat on the opposition benches several were transferring their energies to commerce; and the division lists shewed that all but a faithful ninety-nine voted with the government or abstained from voting. For the next and last six months of the parliament's life, Mr. Lloyd George had nothing to fear in the House of Commons from the man whom he had supplanted.

Following up his advantage, he took care in December that he should have nothing to fear from Mr. Asquith in the country. He that was not with the prime minister was against the man who had won the war and who aspired now to win the peace; there was no room for independence or qualification; a candidate went to victory with a "coupon" or to defeat without it. At such a time there was no lead or guidance from "old gang" headquarters; no alternative programme was offered; and the bemused elector was left to imagine that the liberals who refused the "coupon" without putting forward a policy of their own were plotting an assassin's war against a man whom they dared not fight openly. The coalition swept the country; the old liberal ministers were hurled from seats which some had occupied for a generation; and, as empty benches have their value in a division, the ministerial majority was strengthened by every vacant place once filled, before the Sinn Fein landslide, by a nationalist. So complete was the rout that, when Sir Donald Maclean and his scarred following of "Asquithian liberals" took their seats, the labour party challenged his right to be considered the leader of the opposition.

II

Since the general election a few seats have been won by "old gang" candidates; the liberal associations in the country have denounced Mr. Lloyd George, his followers and all their works; and Mr. Asquith has returned to the House as member for Paisley. The liberal party, however, is more deeply divided than ever; and an autocratic ministry has established itself so firmly that, while no one can defend its misgovernment, no one can shake it from its seat. The coalition liberals who parted from their old leader in despair or disgust cannot be detached; the party which was so wantonly shattered cannot be reconstructed; and, while the opposition remains numerically small and impotent in all but voice, the strange bed-fellows of the coalition cling comfortably to what they have lest a worse fate overtake them. Efforts have been made to "fuse" liberals and conservatives into one permanent union; and, though the organizations outside the House refuse to blend, the ministers within have contrived to discard the old shibboleths which in other days set men and parties in antagonism.

The personnel of the ministry demands a moment's scrutiny. It was composed of liberals and conservatives, of the older statesmen and the young, in roughly equal numbers; it included one or two men, such as Mr. Fisher and Sir Robert Horne, who were new to political life and who were first-rate administrators rather than first-rate party men: while a coalition is fortunate in being able to draw upon two sources of political talent, it is less fortunate in having to recognise two party debts instead of one, and Mr. Lloyd George's second ministry contained probably more men of third-rate ability than any in modern history; the experiment of giving office to "business men" was not an unqualified success, and before long only Sir Eric Geddes remained in an embryonic department where he was spared the perhaps inevitable friction that occurs when a business man is brought in contact with civil servants. Labour has withdrawn from the coalition; the Irish members, with the exception of Sir Edward Carson, never entered it. When the first cabinet was formed in 1916, two of the appointments most strongly criticised were those of Lord Curzon and Lord Milner, who were felt to have failed in India and South Africa respectively and to be antagonistic to those ideals of democracy and nationalism for which, in theory, the war was being fought; it was added that Lord Milner was of German extraction. No one criticises them now, for nationalism and democracy have lost in public interest; but the cynic, with a recollection of former party divisions, may smile at the spectacle of Lord Curzon of Kedleston holding office under Mr. Lloyd George of Criccieth.

The government has proved itself more varied than strong; but pure conservatism, pure liberalism and pure labour have been unable to organise an alternative. The attempt to perpetuate the coalition by fusing liberals and conservatives into a "centre party" was perhaps given new vigour by the fear that the liberal party would coalesce with labour. There is an engaging belief among statisticians and poets that they are the born leaders of nascent democracy, and few popular movements are long secure from their help and guidance: at the time of the 1918 general election Mr. Sidney Webb and Sir Leo Chiozza-Money staked out their claim. They were followed by an eager rush of itinerant intellectuals who were eager to sign on before a monopoly could be established. Soon a new formula was constructed for political grouping: the labour party was to be the party of "earned incomes," and the vast liberal and conservative middle-class of men and women engaged in commercial and "professional" work was at liberty to enter it.

Though the invitation has not as yet been widely accepted, there have been some recruits to labour, and more will no doubt come in; to the historian the interest of this projected fusion lies in the change which it marks in political idealism. The old liberal creed would seem to be forfeiting the sympathy of its last supporters; politics are losing their soul; and material self-interest is being made the touchstone of government. It was perhaps inevitable that there should be a move in this direction at the end of a war which disturbed the financial equilibrium of every one in the country; inevitable, too, that more altruistic counsels should have to wait for a hearing until each man had done the best for himself in the licenced scramble which economists call the "distribution of wealth" and the "apportionment of taxation." The problems of the future, it is urged, are economic; in England at least there is now as much personal and religious liberty as any one cares to enjoy; foreign politics only become interesting as they precipitate or avert war; and war is over for the present. In their existing state of physical and nervous exhaustion the inarticulate millions are concerned only to attain the highest possible level of personal comfort and to bask there with the greatest possible degree of security. They are profoundly interested in wages and prices, but here their political interest stops short. Until it is seen whether this narrowing of political outlook is likely to be permanent, liberals will occupy themselves more profitably in studying it intelligently than in deploring it self-righteously. They must recognise that for the present at least the electors are considering every issue in terms of money; to nationalisation of industry they are applying the test: will it make living cheaper or dearer? So with a crusade against soviet government. So with the imperial mission of Great Britain in Mesopotamia. So with Free Trade. So with the resumption of commercial relations with Russia. It is only at Westminster that the nervous party organisers wonder whether the middle classes will "vote labour," whether the "old gang" can retain its hold on the liberal machine in the country, whether Mr. Lloyd George can form a new party and collect funds. The electors will vote at the prompting of their pockets. If they have not broken down the familiar lines of party division, it is because they are not deceived by any talk of a party which is to contain all the "earned incomes" and realise that there is no true distinction between incomes earned or unearned; taxation falls on the people with money, however acquired. They are as little deceived by warnings about "Bolshevism" and suspect that it is all a dodge to make their flesh creep. England, they feel, does not love revolutions and has a blind, stupid instinct for avoiding them; preeminently by never allowing too large a proportion of the population to become too hungry at the same time; prices indeed are high, but wages have risen to meet them; when trade has recovered after the war, prices will fall, but wages will tend to remain constant; the poorer classes will find themselves richer, the rich poorer; an immense economic revolution will have taken place without a single soviet. Every one is concerned to safeguard his own position.

Though political interest in England has sunk to low-water mark in one direction, it has risen alarmingly in another. The national tradition of describing parliament as a "talking-shop" and of demanding machines or men who will "do something" may indicate some little confusion of thought among those who would make a deliberative assembly executive, but it prepares the way for a great constitutional change when men discover more certain and less dilatory methods of "doing something" than by parliamentary means; interest has shifted from the House of Commons to Fleet Street, to Unity House, to the periodical conferences of labour and, indeed, to any mass-meeting convened for any purpose by men or women who are in earnest about anything. Representative government is breaking down; direct government threatens to take its place; and the gravest problem of domestic statesmanship is to restore faith in parliamentary institutions.

III

This temporary dislocation is no new phenomenon. The reform bill of 1867 became a serious part of the ministerial programme when a London mob pulled up the railings of Hyde Park: that was direct pressure from below. Direct pressure from above came when Mr. Gladstone appealed, over the head of some four hundred critical, angular supporters, to vast mass-meetings throughout the country; their verdict and sanction overrode the authority of the discreet representatives who had been returned to interpret the will of the people; representative government yielded place, on occasion, to a direct mandate, to an informal referendum: in a word, to direct democracy. And, as democracy became articulate through the press and through public meetings, the doctrine was born that every political change must be inaugurated by a press and popular campaign.

In the last six years every political revolution has been forced on the House of Commons from outside. The constitutional passage of home rule was checked in 1914 by a threat of military rebellion and popular violence; the suffrage was extended to women as the reward of their extra-parliamentary agitation and in the teeth of press and popular opinion; war with Bolshevist Russia was stopped by the labour party, outside the House; and Ireland, despairing of help or leadership from England, has set up a Sinn Fein government. In one form or another this is "direct action"; and "direct action" is the ultima ratio of the governed against their governors when the elected representatives slip beyond the control of their electors. The course of legislation and of foreign politics is now determined by a series of political strikes. In 1920, the labour party tried its hand on a solution of the Irish problem. Certain railway workers refused to carry munitions for the government. The National Union of Railway Workers was urged to support this local strike and to declare a general strike if the government tried to run the Irish railways with the help of engineers working under military discipline. Here, if it had chosen to throw down the challenge, organised labour would have met and contended with the executive of representative government on the highest plane. Mr. J. H. Thomas shewed the statesmanship to avert or postpone this conflict by asking the prime minister to receive a deputation to discuss an Irish settlement from the standpoint of labour.

At least for a time parliament has been superseded by the direct action of men who find themselves impotent as parliamentary electors but powerful—perhaps, in the future, all-powerful—as the mechanicians of the communal life. This change from constitutionalism to direct action, from representation to control at first hand, is too grave to be ignored. As men meet primarily in human associations for the comforts of life, they defeat the object of their association by encouraging or condoning trials of strength which establish nothing but the momentary triumph of the moment's victor; what has been secured by the railway strike of 1919 beyond the knowledge that the railwaymen can to a great extent paralyse the activity of the country and that the rest of the community can to a great extent improvise means and services for preventing complete paralysis?

It is more than time alike for employers and employed to realise that they are the servants of the public: as every strike comes to an end at some time and on some terms, there is no reason in equity why a strike should ever begin; if the individual submits—and cheerfully submits—his honour, life and fortune to the arbitrament of a judge and jury, every man or body of men who will not submit an industrial dispute to a similar tribunal is suspected of having discarded equity in favour of the doctrine that might, however temporary, is right. Employers and employed will only win public sympathy, if indeed they care to have it, when they agree to compulsory arbitration backed by the severest penalties for breach of agreement; the status of both is at present that of a robber-baron. It is more than time, too, for masters and men in any one industry to realise that they represent but a small proportion of the organised capital and labour in the country, a yet smaller proportion of the total life and wealth of the community.

More needful even than the divorce between militant politics and militant economics is the reestablishment of public order.

As the policeman is a symbol, as organised society depends far less on the executive officers of the law than on respect for the law, nothing but chaos can be expected of any successful resistance to law. When the law-breaker goes not only unpunished but rewarded and honoured, can it be expected that others will not follow in the footsteps of those who have risen by anarchy to be lord chancellor, lord of appeal, chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the Ulster party? The privy councillor who preaches and prepares armed resistance to law, the suffragette who breaks a window, the employer or the workman who breaks a contract, the conscientious objector who repudiates any liability that the soveran government may impose upon him is a danger, by contact and example, to the whole state, a mad dog whose extirpation is the first duty of all who value the stability of the state. Here, as everywhere, popular judgement is warped by social and intellectual snobbishness: the "passive resister," whose "nonconformist conscience" forbade his paying rates for the support of Church of England teaching was an object of impatient scorn; the lady of rank who declined to lick insurance-stamps at the bidding of a little Welsh attorney was a woman of pride and independence; the officers who threatened mutiny and the civilians who took up arms against home rule were regarded as heroes; but the men who preferred prisons and obloquy to the necessity of trying to take the life of their country's enemies were branded as traitors and cowards. There can only be one equitable rule: so long as a man remains a member of any community—nation, church, profession or club—he must submit scrupulously to its rules and only seek to change them by constitutional means.

But, inasmuch as constitutional government is the art of understanding and coordinating to a common end human beings who are at once above and below the mute, mechanical conscripts of an autocracy, the governors have to make obedience easy by making government human. In the twentieth century man is too imaginative and too little servile to worship the inexorable soveranty of Hobbes' Leviathan. Men and women will submit still to starvation, torture and death rather than compromise with an ideal: it is doubtful citizenship, but it is a psychological problem to be faced and solved; it is best solved by preventing the martyr's high, tragic sense of desperation and by facilitating the methods of constitutional redress. Direct action is a final protest when the ways of constitutionalism are blocked; in Russia, in Ireland, in Egypt and India, the man with a grievance has been driven back on the bomb remedy. England dislikes sporadic violence as much as general revolution: bombs are unlikely to be thrown in England, but the political strike will take their place as an alternative to the methods of representative government unless these methods can be made more sensitive to opinion. First the mode of election must be so changed that a minority candidate no longer slips into parliament over the struggling forms of his majority rivals; then the life of parliament must be so shortened that a member can be called to more frequent account; and lastly the constituency must have power to demand of its member that he submit himself for reelection when he is acting against its wishes. The representative must, in other words, become more and more the deputy. Such a development would have brought consternation to the heart of Edmund Burke; but it is the only alternative, in a press-ridden, publicity-ruled state, to direct action.

These are the mechanics of politics, the fundamentals governing the relations of ruler and ruled in all states at all times. Politics—in the sense of a conflict between parties organised in obedience to common principles and in pursuit of common aims—have lately been shelved. Now—as always—the king's government must be carried on; now—for the first time—it must be carried on by the king's present ministers. To secure that consummation, the unbending partisans of other days have sunk their differences: Mr. Lloyd George and Lord Curzon, Mr. Churchill and Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Montagu and Mr. Balfour work side by side; though liberal and conservative stalwarts retain enough of the old spirit to assure their constituents that they would resign if a sacrilegious finger were laid on their cardinal principles, by luck, contrivance or the requirements of the moment Mr. Lloyd George has been able to avoid such controversial legislation as might split his ministry; and, where legislation threatened to become controversial, as in the latest home rule bill, the greatest living conciliator found a means of accommodating minor differences until a united cabinet recognised the absurdity of resigning office.

Though every government falls more or less unexpectedly, there is no reason why the present one should not continue until its leaders judge the moment to be ripe for an election. A ministry is upset by opposition within the House or outside; the coalition has no organised opposition to fear beyond the "wee free" liberals, who are numerically unimportant, and the labour party, which is not yet ready to take control. Coalition liberals and coalition conservatives have at least one foot firmly planted in the promised land; before they try to plant the second foot, they have to remember Aesop's fable of the dog that snapped at the reflection of his own piece of meat. Outside the House there is plenty of criticism, plenty of opposition; but, though a little of the criticism becomes fruitful through the urgency of the press, there is no visible alternative government, no one wants a general election, and the public is bored with politics. The warning which Charles II gave to his ambitious brother might be quoted by any minister to any critic who wished to supplant him.

Something as great as the war in its comprehensive, intimate attack on every member of the community will be required to reawaken general interest in politics: when Great Britain is even nearer bankruptcy and starvation, when the United States refuse her credit, when the world shortage of food affects the stomachs of the world and the hungry, maddened hordes of central and eastern Europe break raveningly forth, it may be remembered that the misrule of the present government has an exact parallel, on a smaller scale, in the misrule of Louis XVI's ministers before the French revolution.

IV

On the eve of the 1918 election the prime minister expressed his political ideal in the formula that England had to be made a home fit for heroes. How far he has realised this ideal in the years during which he has ruled the House of Commons without opposition is a question which the heroes themselves are best qualified to answer; but, exalted as was his vision, some may still feel that, since England contains men and women of most unheroic stature and is but a part of the inhabited world, his formula was inadequate. The young men of the generation which this book has attempted to describe were, from the first awakening of their intelligence, exercised over the function of government and divided over its aim by the political philosophy which they hammered out for themselves in reading and discussion. From different angles and by different paths they reached agreement on the postulate that, before all else, every man should have secured to him the minimum of essentials. He could not claim food, air and warmth of natural "right", for in organised society a man enjoys only those rights which his fellow-men allow him; but the communists accorded them as a payment on account, and the individualists as an insurance against revolution. Those who fought shy of party labels and regarded themselves as having been born fortuitously and without consultation into a world from which there was no escape but by death felt that they had every inducement to live, by mutual consideration, on the best possible terms with their fellows and that life would be intolerable if a neighbour rifled their pockets as they slept or broke their heads if they snored. Those who gloried in the name of liberals and believed that the end of life was the attainment of beauty included in their minimum the claim that each man should have secured to him the chance of making his own life beautiful. With generosity not yet tarnished by experience and with hatred of injustice not yet tempered by custom, these young men felt that they could not be wholly comfortable while others were uncomfortable: the cries of the suffering might banish sleep, their desperation might threaten security; if they obtruded it, as they were so tastelessly prone to do, their misery might disquiet an over-active conscience. Policy joined hands with humanity in favour of giving every one his minimum of essentials.

It had not been given when the war put an end to dreaming. It has not been given yet. It will not be fully given until a man is secure from disease and premature death; from pain, hunger, thirst and cold; from spiritual and intellectual fear; from terror of his fellow-man; from the educational inequality that sets him at a disadvantage with others; from the grievance that comes of a blow struck to his racial or religious sentiment. Twenty years ago, before they discovered the limitations of official politics, young liberals found from the contemplation of those ideals a vocation: they believed in equality of opportunity and swore by better housing, better feeding, better education; they sympathised with the aspirations of nationality half a generation before these were discovered and forgotten by the rest of England; they were disturbed by the thought that men were flogged to death in the Belgian Congo or massacred in Armenia; and, maybe, they wearied the complacent with statistics of all those who in a single year and in the richest country in the world died of cancer and consumption or rotted away with syphilis. The verminous, rickety child seemed no less a blot on civilisation than the short-lived prostitute who—they were assured—was irreclaimable, "because that sort of thing always has gone on; it's the oldest profession in the world; and, of course, it is a safety-valve...."

Twenty years of work and travel, twenty years of mingling with average, sensual men and women, twenty years' experience of inertia may have cured young liberals of their optimism, but it should have strengthened their faith. By now they have probably seen much of what, before, was made known to them only from books: they have walked through factories and seen girls turned into machines by the monotonous repetition of one part of one process; they have looked, over the side of a liner, at straining, black, half-naked men who have already been turned into the semblance of shuffling, debased animals by the monotony of carrying coal; they are assured, perhaps, that industrial conditions are better in England than anywhere else, but they still wonder what life and what vision of beauty are possible to these slaves of the work-room and of the coal-lighter, who are not the less slaves because they enjoy freedom to move from one master to another. Sheltered indeed must be the life of any who have not found, in twenty years, a daily vent for the compassion which is the living breath of liberalism.

The communist who seeks to abolish private property has more chance of success than the impatient reformer who tries to sweep away all the ugliness of modern life by breaking the mechanism on which modern life with its ugliness and its beauty depends. It is too late to make an end of industrialism; and man was harder used and more brutalised before the advent of machinery than ever since. His lot is improving daily; and all that the reformer can reasonably ask is that the rate of improvement shall be accelerated until the employer of labour no longer imposes on his work-people conditions that he would himself refuse. In war, a British officer does not order his men into an action which he is himself afraid to undertake; at the end of a march, he does not think of his own needs until he has seen that his men have their food. There is something perilously like shirking in the attitude of an employer who expects men and women to undertake hardships from which he stands aloof; and, directly or indirectly, all are employers.

The mission of liberalism will not be fulfilled until it has achieved a form of civilisation whereof no part can inspire misgiving or shame. Every country has its dark places; the inhabitants of every country turn a blind eye to them until the upheaval of war, the outbreak of revolution or the spread of a new faith throws a challenge to every social institution and demands that it shall justify itself. When more than five million men voluntarily risked their lives in defence of one system against another, their decision was less a clean-cut choice than a blend of herd-instinct, collective hypnotism and that irrational feeling for associations which is called patriotism; the decision once taken, they committed themselves to a struggle in which one order of civilisation would probably maintain itself and another would probably be overthrown. If they preserved that which was less good and destroyed that which was more good, they sinned against the light; if they preserved that which was more good, they were still obliged to prove it so much the better that no sacrifice was too great for it; and, if in their scrutiny they discovered blemishes, they were bound to remove them for fear the enemy would say that they had sacrificed themselves for something that was not worth their lives. During the war, of course, every one was too busy to hunt for blemishes and to remove them.

After the war every one is too busy; and those who once called themselves liberals have lost interest in everything but the cost of living, though the youngest of them can recall the days when the present prime minister's voice throbbed with emotion in describing the misery of the poor and in championing the outcasts of civilisation, wherever they were to be found.

It is more than time for the young liberals of twenty years ago to recognise that the liberal faith has lost its prophets and that the prophets have lost their liberal faith.