LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Class 
 
THE LIBERAL STATE: 
 
 A SPECULATION 
 
THE LIBERAL STATE 
 
 A SPECULATION 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
 Author of " The Neo-Platonists," etc. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 WATTS & CO., 
 
 17, JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C. 
 
 1907 
 
GENERAL 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IN calling this essay a speculation, I do not mean 
 that it is an attempt at prophecy. I have, indeed, 
 found prophecy interesting, and I do not think 
 it need always be a form of error ; but it is rather 
 for poets and novelists (who, of course, come 
 under the poetic type) than for philosophers and 
 critics. What I have attempted is a sketch of 
 an ideal going in some respects beyond the 
 present order ; but, nevertheless, having its roots 
 in the European past. I have aimed neither at 
 the reality nor at the appearance of starting with- 
 out assumptions, and doing everything from the 
 beginning. Had such been my aim, I might (if 
 endowed with sufficient concrete imagination) 
 have brought out a NOVA UTOPIA, by HYTHLO- 
 
 D^EUS UCHRONIENSIS. 
 
 The title does not refer to party distinctions. 
 What I mean by the " Liberal State " is a State 
 that accepts democracy (not necessarily untem- 
 pered) and intellectual freedom, not as mere tem- 
 porary phases of a transition, but as permanent 
 elements in an ideal polity. I suppose both the 
 historic English parties would admit this in prin- 
 ciple, though with some shades of difference. The 
 real opposition to the Liberal State is to be found in 
 a hierarchical or bureaucratic State, in which a 
 
 169762 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 caste or an order of experts or the representatives 
 of a doctrine govern without systematic popular 
 control. Speculations regarding 1 ideal States of 
 this type also are not purely Utopian, but have 
 roots of their own in the past. 
 
 So far as they look to a system of this kind as 
 ideal, the polities alike of Plato and Comte belong 
 to the anti-liberal opposition. Yet both Comte 
 and Plato were eminently progressive minds ; and 
 believers in the liberal system may perhaps learn 
 more from them not dialectically only, but in the 
 way of actual suggestion than from contemplat- 
 ing the empirical development of the type of polity 
 which they themselves prefer. The normal order 
 as evolved in Europe, they may hold, is govern- 
 ment by an assembly ; in the ancient city-State 
 by an assembly of all the citizens, in the modern 
 national State by a representative body. Yet this 
 is apt to run to an anarchy of interests, and to 
 fail of achieving a synthesis. Great constructive 
 minds feel this want. Hence in part comes the 
 influence exercised on them by a fully elaborated 
 social order, without the crudities of new begin- 
 nings, such as Greek or modern democracy. 
 Archaeological research has shown how long such 
 an order had existed before the historic civilisa- 
 tion of Greece emerged. The Egyptian civilisa- 
 tion had been fully formed during a period far 
 beyond anything that the Greeks, who were really 
 an old race, but had lost the record of their own 
 past, could imagine of history. It was by this, 
 as contemporaries already perceived, that the 
 hierarchical structure of Plato's ideal polity was 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 inspired. Similarly, Comte was inspired by the 
 Catholic order of mediaeval Europe. And this order 
 was not only in essence, but in actual derivation, the 
 authoritative system revived, after the Greek and 
 Roman experiments in the direction of freedom 
 appeared alike to have failed, and a religion from 
 Western Asia had been adopted as its ally by the 
 new imperial autocracy. The conservatism of 
 Egypt and Babylon and Persia had come to life 
 again in the outward form of the new order. 
 Though the inner workings of the spirit were 
 manifold and could be controlled only for a season, 
 yet through this millennium Asia had its revenge 
 for Salamis. 
 
 It was not, of course, the actual religious and 
 social systems of Egyptian or Chaldaean or 
 mediaeval Christian priests that thinkers like Plato 
 or Comte desired to impose on what they regarded 
 as the contemporary dissolution, Athenian or 
 European. Human life, in their view, ought to 
 be guided by rational insight arrived at after the 
 most penetrating inquiry, not by an immemorial 
 system of custom and tradition, however much in 
 some moods they might admire this. Yet their 
 object at last came to be the imposition of a new 
 system, modifiable in detail when there was suffi- 
 cient intelligence among the rulers, but in the 
 main to be accepted henceforth as laid down. 
 
 To this conception of a definitely fixed order 
 there is, after all, not much fear that any line of 
 philosophic thinkers will succumb. The school 
 of Plato in antiquity was remarkable above the 
 rest for its variations ; and among the thinkers 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 most influenced by Comte have been some of 
 the chief representatives of English liberalism. 
 As Mill observed in his excellent account of the 
 Positive Polity, the difficulty is to do justice to 
 what is really valuable in Comte's later work, 
 undeterred by the absurdities of his detailed regu- 
 lations. Even Plato's sense of humour has not 
 altogether saved him from liability to similar 
 comment ; so that we must beware, above all, 
 of underrating the amount of direct insight 
 into the true order contained in both systems. 
 Plato started ideas for social reform of which the 
 suggestiveness is not yet exhausted, if, indeed, it 
 has ever been quite realised. And Comte, even 
 from his inferior speculative point of view, was 
 able to furnish on one side the rational formula of 
 a new European polity. The Western Europe of 
 the future, according to him, is to be a community 
 of republican States under the spiritual direction 
 of philosophy. With the qualification that philo- 
 sophers ought not to aim at organising themselves 
 in a universal Church, and that the visible power 
 in the State must be that of popularly-elected 
 representatives and not of a patriciate least of all 
 an " industrial patriciate " liberal thinkers may 
 accept this in principle. That philosophers as a 
 class should not aim at the government Comte 
 also admitted ; but then, as he was careful to 
 point out, even the mediaeval Church did not 
 assume the direct government of temporal affairs. 
 We must here return from his chosen model to 
 the outline of a rational order adumbrated in 
 classical antiquity The social power of philosophy 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 must in the end proceed from its due recog- 
 nition as an element in culture, and from the 
 permeation of opinion by the ideas elaborated in 
 the schools when these have been sifted by 
 common sense. Philosophers individually may 
 aim at a higher degree of satisfaction than is given 
 by the effective popular philosophy, ethical and 
 other, which we may hope will again emerge ; but 
 the schools must not attempt to get their last 
 refinements adopted officially by the State. These 
 are, as it were, the growing part of philosophy, 
 which cannot yet bear fruit. To attempt to force 
 them means in the beginning the suppression of 
 liberty, and in the end the sterilisation of know- 
 ledge itself. 
 
 In one respect only is the task of modern philo- 
 sophy more serious and difficult than that of 
 classical ancient philosophy. It is confronted 
 with a popular religion of hierarchical type and 
 inheriting theocratic pretensions. Shall it try to 
 modify this in substance while retaining its form ? 
 Or shall it definitely set itself to replace the reli- 
 gion of the past ? Or shall it stand wholly apart ? 
 On the general problem here stated, something is 
 said in the latter part of the book. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE ----.. v 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 INTRODUCTORY - 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE - - - 18 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 FROM THE ANCIENT TO THE MODERN REPUBLIC - 43 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 POLITICAL CONSTITUTION - - - - 96 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 SOCIAL ORDER- - . . . - 112 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 THE STATE AND RELIGION - - - - 165 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 EDUCATION - - - . . -183 
 

 
 r ' 
 
 OF 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 OF the three greatest synthetic intellects of 
 the nineteenth century, the most antipathetic 
 to political liberalism, in apparent tendency, 
 is Comte. Yet, curiously, while Hegel and, 
 to some extent, Spencer have been used in 
 the interests of reaction, Comte, in spite of the 
 intensely retrograde tone of his later work, 
 has never been of the slightest service to any 
 of those who have practically defended the 
 remains of that old authoritative order which 
 he so profoundly admired. Whatever may 
 be the reason of this, it is worth while to take 
 a hint from the fact. I propose to select as 
 the starting-point for a political speculation in 
 which the idea of liberty is supreme, the final 
 crystallisation of human society imagined in 
 the Positive Polity. 
 
 First, we may recognise a real advance in 
 insight in Comte's later work as contrasted 
 with the Positive Philosophy. He had come 
 to see clearly that, from his own point of 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 view, there is a kind of cycle in human 
 history. The ideal order at the end more 
 resembles in many ways a long-past order 
 than it resembles the characteristic inter- 
 mediate phases. This old order he finds not 
 in Europe, but in what he regards as the 
 typical theocracy of the ancient East. Under 
 this type of a "complete," "normal," 
 " organic " system he tries, by a too wide 
 generalisation, to bring India and China, as 
 well as Egypt and Western Asia. India and 
 China (with Japan, which he also includes) in 
 reality represent outlying forms, modified in 
 the first case by a highly speculative tendency 
 of the priestly caste, which detached it from 
 the effective government of life ; in the 
 second case by a strongly practical bias of the 
 general mind, which gave the direction to an 
 essentially secular, if nominally spiritual, 
 authority. Still, it remains true that the 
 portion of the East with which ancient Europe 
 was in contact had very much the character 
 ascribed by Comte to his ideally stable 
 theocracy. Its form of social order was that 
 which has been assumed by the earliest 
 elaborate human civilisations known ; and it 
 had lasted for a period to be numbered by 
 thousands of years. Thence, as Comte held, 
 
INTROD UCTOR Y 
 
 our own civilisation has in part actually des- 
 cended ; though, as he noted also, we had to 
 " change ancestors " at a certain point. And, 
 he went on to insist, human life, in our part of 
 the world, has never regained equal stability. 
 All since then is " revolutionary transition." 
 
 The point at which he places the beginning 
 of this revolutionary transition is the Homeric 
 period in Greece. Thus the transition in 
 Europe to a new order (not yet existent) has 
 already occupied three thousand years. Its 
 beginning is marked by the rise to power of 
 the military class before there is a fixed orga- 
 nisation of life under the representatives of 
 authoritative religion. Under Eastern theo- 
 cracy, indeed, military chiefs acquired the 
 kingship of the great social aggregates ; but 
 the system was then too fixed for the warrior- 
 king, apparently autocratic as he might be, to 
 modify it by his personal initiative. The 
 vicegerent of deity cannot change the divine 
 order to which he belongs. The old " heroic 
 monarchy," the type of which may be seen in 
 Greece and later in Northern Europe, is thus 
 the first form of the revolutionary transition ; 
 preceding aristocracy and democracy, which 
 are the succeeding phases. The king is here 
 the head of a body of armed freemen, and has 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 a limited but real directing power not 
 stringently determined by ancient custom. 
 The consciousness of the community, working, 
 in the absence of a strong sacerdotal caste, 
 with a certain detachment from presupposi- 
 tions, can act through him as its organ. As 
 against this distinctively military kingship, 
 the structure of the typical theocracy is pro- 
 foundly industrial. The military class, even 
 when employed for conquest, is subservient. 
 The king, with his sacred attributes, even 
 when he becomes a conqueror, is merely the 
 director of a total system elaborated by a 
 pacific priesthood. The principle of the 
 system is caste that is, essentially, hier- 
 archical division of labour. According to 
 Comte, this is fundamentally the more 
 rational order. The priesthood represents 
 the inherited wisdom of the community, 
 dominated by a theological philosophy which 
 is then the highest attainable. It restricts as 
 much as it can the destructive activity of 
 warfare. Every social function has its place 
 in an ordered system that needs peace to 
 flourish. The defect is that the system is 
 insufficiently progressive. Functions tend to 
 be hereditary': distribution of them in accord- 
 ance with personal merit is not a distinctive 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 social aim. The religion, in contrast with 
 that of Greece and Rome, may be called 
 "conservative," as opposed to "progressive," 
 polytheism. Or, as we may say by way of 
 commentary, religion, in relation to the rest 
 of life, was a stronger bond in the first case 
 than it was in the second. What the military 
 civilisation of classical antiquity accomplished 
 was to break down the old order and prepare 
 for the new. It could not found anything 
 definitive. In Greece the relatively unorga- 
 nised character of the religion permitted some 
 freedom of thought, through which the first 
 steps were taken to the final positive (atheo- 
 logical) philosophy. The result of this, how- 
 ever, for the Greeks themselves was irremedi- 
 able anarchy. Rome (to which Comte is 
 more sympathetic), by organising the system 
 of military conquest, in which the Greeks had 
 failed, promoted the formation of public, as 
 distinguished from private or merely family, 
 spirit. For industrial activity, though it is 
 constructive, is unfortunately egoistic in its 
 determining motives. Altruism is developed 
 through the sense of community ; and this, 
 at first, can come only from the joint action 
 necessary in war. Since, however, warfare is 
 destructive in the means it takes to its end, 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 there is here, again, a merely provisional 
 value in the result. First, offensive must 
 pass into defensive war, and then war between 
 communities must cease, before the definitive 
 State can be attained. It will have been 
 attained when the positive philosophy, sub- 
 stituting Humanity, as the true Great Being, 
 or highest manifestation of life on the planet, 
 for the extra-mundane God, has been syste- 
 matised in the religious form of a cult and a 
 dogma ; and when public spirit has been 
 turned from the destructive methods of 
 militarism to the service of man through 
 socialised industrialism. Instead of Theo- 
 cracy there will at last reign the even more 
 organic and stable "Sociocracy." 
 
 According to this scheme, the European 
 Middle Age is one phase of the revolutionary 
 transition. And Comte still held so far to the 
 scheme of the Positive Philosophy that he tried 
 to represent this phase as continuously pro- 
 gressive on the lines of the whole intermediate 
 period from Homer to himself. The Roman 
 Empire was the terminus of a system of con- 
 quest. Christendom was a defensive system ; 
 even the Crusades, in spite of their aggressive 
 appearance, being only the means of preserv- 
 ing Western Europe from reduction under the 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 rival order of Islam. In Catholic monotheism 
 theology had reached the last stage before its 
 dissipation by the destructive agency of meta- 
 physics, to be followed by the positivist con- 
 struction. Yet it was not the theology of the 
 Middle Ages that he admired, but their social 
 order. And in his later work he has an occa- 
 sional perception that this whatever may be 
 the case with the other features of the period 
 was a return to the type of an Asiatic theocracy. 
 Thus he ought logically to have regarded it 
 as a check to the revolutionary transition. On 
 his part this would have meant no reproach ; 
 for, when he comes to the " anarchy " of 
 modern Europe, which set in with the break- 
 up of mediaeval institutions from the fourteenth 
 century onward, he can find no praise too 
 strong for the " admirable retrograde school " 
 (of De Maistreand others) which, as he thinks, 
 discovered the speculative justification of the 
 old order in its time. The " right of private 
 judgment " was, in his view, of merely tem- 
 porary value. The permanent truth in prin- 
 ciple, as against the Protestants and Deists of 
 the transition, was with the Catholic reaction. 
 Only the particular dogmas of the reaction 
 were at fault. The value of the transitional 
 anarchy consisted in this : that, presuppositions 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 being dismissed, the great thinkers of the 
 modern world could prepare the way for 
 the replacement of Theology by Positivism. 
 The sciences of experiment and observation 
 are henceforth to furnish the universal type of 
 knowledge ; and it is to be recognised that 
 there is no providence above the human provi- 
 dence. This dogma having been substituted 
 for the Catholic dogma, and the providential 
 order dictated by the Religion of Humanity 
 established, there is no place for any liberty 
 of thought except the " relative " liberty of 
 deducing conclusions from accepted premises. 
 To this final order the mediaeval Church has 
 a peculiar ideological relation. It was a kind 
 of theocratic new model, which had to be 
 broken up because of the defects of its doc- 
 trine, but which, by its strict separation of the 
 spiritual from the secular power, indicated the 
 true line of advance from the ancient theocra- 
 cies with their confusion of the two. Here 
 both Islam and Byzantine Christianity failed 
 to make the advance, the failure of the latter 
 being the most decided. Positivism dismisses 
 the doctrine of Western Catholicism, with all 
 other theological doctrines, but preserves 
 or restores its social and spiritual organisa- 
 tion. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 In the definitive order the Positivist priest- 
 hood, consisting of men of science or philoso- 
 phers selected for a combination of moral and 
 intellectual aptitudes, will have only a consul- 
 tative voice in affairs ; but, with no more than 
 this, it will be in effect more powerful than 
 the Chaldasan or Egyptian priesthood or the 
 mediaeval Papacy. From secular life the 
 anarchical system of appointing to public 
 offices by a vote of the people (as in Greece 
 and Rome), or of choosing by vote represen- 
 tatives to determine ministerial appointments 
 (as in modern times), will meanwhile have 
 ceased. Activity being industrial, except 
 in so far as some military organisation is 
 necessary for internal police, the proper 
 secular rulers are the industrial chiefs. From 
 these, in each State, three will be appointed 
 as dictators. Their appointment, when the 
 system is in working order, will be by their 
 predecessors. They will govern benevolently 
 in the interests of the working classes and by 
 the advice of the priesthood. The effective 
 supremacy of the priesthood would be secured 
 in Comte's system by great reductions in the 
 size of existing States. No one of these, as 
 against a cosmopolitan church under a single 
 head the High Priest of Humanity is to 
 
io INTRODUCTORY 
 
 have any real choice of an independent destiny. 
 The priesthood also is to be appointed by 
 nomination on the part of predecessors and 
 superiors. " Election by inferiors " is a typical 
 absurdity of the anarchical transition. Its only 
 value, as with the " right of private judgment,'* 
 was in its relation to future progress. Pro- 
 gress, unfortunately, could not go on beyond 
 a certain stage while authority remained in 
 the hands of the ancient hierarchy. Yet 
 nothing in history is more excusable than the 
 attempt of this to cling to power after its time 
 had passed. And, of all the institutions that 
 have thus tried to maintain themselves beyond 
 their own historical period, none deserves 
 more respect and sympathy than " the admir- 
 able Catholic-feudal type." 
 
 Here we discover the root of Comte's 
 aspirations. His whole later development 
 has the value of showing to what positions 
 the mediaeval reaction which was so con- 
 spicuous an element in the complex nine- 
 teenth century logically leads. That reaction 
 is not yet exhausted, but has been reinforced 
 by the new concentration of wealth seeking to 
 organise itself on a feudal model. This con- 
 centration Comte proposed not to check, but 
 rather to encourage artificially. An " industrial 
 
I NT ROD UCTOR Y 1 1 
 
 patriciate " is to take the place of the feudal 
 nobility, as a scientific priesthood is to take 
 the place of the theological priesthood. 
 Women are made the objects of a cult, in 
 which they are regarded as the "moral 
 providence" of humanity, but they have no 
 rights of property. According to the social 
 code to be accepted, they are in strict 
 economic dependence. So also, on the whole, 
 are working men. The proletariate is to be 
 normally passive, constituting the " general 
 providence," as contrasted with the " intel- 
 lectual providence" of the priesthood and 
 the "practical providence" of the patriciate. 
 Personal merit, Comte observes historically, 
 is of more value under militarism than under 
 industrialism. High industrial functions are 
 quite compatible with mediocrity. Thus, 
 while the Athenian demos aimed at recog- 
 nition of personal merit, and the Roman 
 aristocracy to a greater extent succeeded in 
 making its emergence possible, it can hardly 
 be expected in the ideal polity to determine 
 largely the functions of the individual in life. 
 It will indeed be the principle socially recog- 
 nised for distribution of functions ; but, the 
 " revolutionary transition " once over, there 
 will be a considerable return in practice to 
 
1 2 INTROD UCTOR Y 
 
 fixation of occupations by heredity. Where 
 personal merit will tell is in the distribution 
 of posthumous honours at the hands of the 
 priesthood. " Objective immortality " that 
 is, the continuance of a separated soul is a 
 chimera; but by the true servants of humanity 
 "subjective immortality" is attainable in the 
 memories of survivors. This will be the com- 
 pensation for thwarted ambitions and uncon- 
 genial careers. For the rest, these do not 
 very much matter : social functions can, on 
 the whole, be pretty well fulfilled by those 
 who are trained for them, without much 
 reference to innate differences, of which it is 
 easy to exaggerate the importance. What is 
 most important of all is to cultivate the moral 
 virtue of humility. To this the priesthood 
 will attach the greatest value. The social 
 system will be one of "duties, not rights," of 
 graduated command and obedience. For the 
 secular chiefs, who have the responsibilities of 
 large mercantile and industrial undertakings, 
 a certain satisfaction will be offered (within 
 bounds) of pride and the taste for luxury. 
 The pride of the practical class is less socially 
 dangerous than the vanity of the theoretical 
 class ; though, Comte rather strangely adds, 
 vanity is a nobler quality than pride. Any 
 
INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 extreme aberrations of the practical chiefs will 
 be redressed by measures of the priesthood. 
 If the capitalists systematically fail in their 
 duties, then the working class will be called 
 on to carry out something of the nature of a 
 papal interdict. This will be a more powerful 
 weapon than an interdict was in the Middle 
 Ages. It must be added that, in the ideal 
 order, all classes and both sexes are to be 
 educated on similar lines up to the age of 
 twenty-one. Whether this is a mitigation or 
 an aggravation of the system of hierarchical 
 dominance would be an interesting topic for 
 debate. Plainly enough, the whole social 
 system is ultra-Catholic. The moral senti- 
 ment to be cultivated is that of the " slave- 
 ethics" found by its enemies in the Church 
 Catechism. 
 
 There is no need, however, to cry out 
 against this scheme. The representatives of 
 the past, to whom Comte appealed, knew that 
 here was no salvation for their cause. He 
 waited in vain for a response from Nicholas 
 of Russia or from the Society of Jesus. 
 Hierarchs and despots perceive instinctively 
 that the order they stand for cannot be main- 
 tained or restored consistently with a trans- 
 formation of theology into its negation plus 
 
1 4 INTRO LD UCTOR Y 
 
 science. The phantasms in whose names they 
 rule have a kingdom which is "not of this 
 world." Priesthoods, in order to move the 
 visible world, must have the fulcrum of their 
 lever, as Hume said, in the invisible. What 
 we may take the liberty of calling the anthro- 
 pomorphic (or automorphic) Atheism of Comte 
 will not fill the place of anthropomorphic 
 Theism. An atheocracy is not a practicable 
 form of government. Comte's distinction of 
 "spiritual" and "secular" is no longer an 
 " absolute " opposition between two worlds, 
 but is correlated, as he would say, with the 
 "relative" opposition between theory and 
 practice. His priesthood, therefore, can 
 appeal only to demonstration and verification, 
 not to traditions from gods, or to revelations, 
 or to occult knowledge of invisible beings 
 with wills modifiable by duly performed rites. 
 Humanity and Reason, in whose name it 
 must assume to rule, are always there to judge 
 it. It can threaten with no thunders from a 
 supernatural judge. The whole basis of its 
 authoritative headship is from the first non- 
 existent. 
 
 By the admission of some disciples of his 
 own, Comte's theoretical doctrine has no 
 rational connexion with his social hierarchy. 
 
INTROD UCTOR Y 1 5 
 
 This seemed to them the resultant, not of posi- 
 tive science nor of the repudiation of meta- 
 physics, but of systematised reaction against 
 practical tendencies he disliked. Yet we must 
 not regard the whole conception of a definitive 
 social order as chimerical because one par- 
 ticular expression of it is baseless. The view 
 put forward in the Positive Philosophy, that 
 an ideal order may be conceived to which pro- 
 gress, after a time, will become "asymptotic," 
 is reasonable enough. A type approximately 
 maintained for thousands of years, and more 
 and more slowly getting nearer to its perfec- 
 tion, might very well be the outcome of a 
 relatively short transition. And on the 
 geological scale the three thousand years of 
 Comte's transitional period soon, in his 
 view, to be ended make only a short stretch 
 of time. Indeed, this is exceeded on the scale 
 of recorded history by the millennia that can 
 now be assigned to the civilisations of Baby- 
 lonia and Egypt. If we add to the years of 
 the old theocracies those of the Cagsarean and 
 Papal and modern absolutist regimes, not 
 much is left for what Comte chooses to call 
 anarchy. But are the Greek republican period 
 and the period of more or less popular consti- 
 tutions since the close of the Middle Age 
 
1 6 IN TROD UCTOR Y 
 
 distinctively mere anarchies? Shall we not 
 rather say that they are the adumbration of a 
 new and distinctive order? The polemic of 
 the reaction, it must be allowed, has forced 
 liberal thinkers to put the alternative in this 
 modest form. We are no longer confident in 
 the possession of an accepted system to which 
 all else is unenlightenment and barbarism. 
 And, if we reject Comte's side of the alterna- 
 tive, we have evidently before us a more 
 difficult problem than he set himself. For 
 both the Greek and the modern periods of 
 relative freedom are too short and too mixed 
 in character to permit of our finding, on any 
 extensive scale, an already existent model for 
 the future. Moreover, the new type may be, 
 even in the ideal, less determinate than Comte 
 thought. We may hope that at any point of 
 the future considerable variation will still be 
 possible ; and may therefore feel it necessary 
 to guard against too great fixity in our ideals. 
 By this kind of caution he was in no way 
 troubled. On the other hand, we must 
 beware of looking on continuous change itself 
 as the ideal. From any point of view, there 
 has been something cyclical in the historical 
 process. This has consisted in movement 
 between two contrasting and relatively fixed 
 
INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 types. If Comte was right, the Middle Ages 
 were a premature attempt to restore an ideal 
 order that had been lost. If he was wrong, 
 they were a reaction towards a superseded 
 order. In either case, modern times mark a 
 recurrence in some ways to the order or 
 anarchy, whatever we choose to call it, of 
 the Greek period. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 POSITIVISTS may ask, What better device or 
 watchword can you find than that of the 
 Church of Humanity " Order and Progress "? 
 There is no difficulty in accepting the chal- 
 lenge. The State, claiming to be the true 
 organ of Humanity, could fairly reply that a 
 better watchword is " Justice and Freedom." 
 This has in truth been the ideal both of ancient 
 and modern States of liberal type ; though, of 
 course, it has been very imperfectly realised 
 even in the best of them. The poetic and 
 philosophic thinkers of Greece would have 
 been in perfect accord with the popular mind 
 in accepting the phrase as the utterance of an 
 aspiration in which all should agree. Though 
 differing about details, none would have dis- 
 puted the general formulation. Admitting of 
 debate in practice, it is yet much less ambi- 
 guous than the other. For an actual " order " 
 may be detestable ; and " progress " may be 
 interpreted to mean no more than increased 
 18 
 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 19 
 
 mechanical efficiency in attaining ends of 
 little or no human worth. The Persians in 
 bridging the Hellespont, cutting a canal 
 through Athos, and doing all they could to 
 subjugate the Greek "anarchy," might easily 
 regard themselves as the practical interpreters 
 of both terms. A Greek despot, adopting the 
 usual policy of supporting religion and pro- 
 moting works of material utility, would have 
 accepted the motto with delight. It may be 
 said with truth that Comte's own ideals are 
 different, and are not in the ethical sense 
 materialistic ; but that only shows the ambi- 
 guity of the phrase. On the other hand, the 
 conception of justice as a distinctive virtue 
 with a political reference, and especially related 
 to freedom, was new in the world. It did not 
 belong to the theocratic East, where the 
 virtues were conceived in terms of obedience 
 to a supreme will which dictated the law. 
 This will, no doubt, was said to be "just"; 
 but that was only a general term of praise. 
 The "just man " was a synonym for the 
 "good man," who observed the rules of the 
 social code. This usage, indeed, has con- 
 tinued to a considerable extent in ancient and 
 modern European literature ; but, from the 
 beginning of Greek political life, there has 
 
20 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 also been the more distinctive meaning of 
 justice. From Greece it passed on to Rome 
 and to modern Europe. Are we to conclude, 
 because an ideally just order has not yet been 
 attained, that the appeal to justice has no 
 positive value ? Shall we regard it as merely 
 a disintegrating agent that destroys the 
 reverence for ancient might and substitutes 
 nothing but an imaginary equality of rights 
 unattainable in the world of reality? 
 
 This last position Comte would not to its 
 full extent have maintained. In spite of the 
 contempt which he expresses for theories of 
 "rights," he did not expel justice formally 
 from the list of virtues. Freedom has a place 
 in his scheme, though a minor one. He 
 would reserve a sphere for individual indepen- 
 dence as against the extreme forms of com- 
 munism. He recognises as the most advanced 
 polity the "Republic of the West," which 
 consists only of the group of States that have 
 gone through the " revolutionary transition." 
 And he has the insight to admire to the full 
 the highest expression of the ideal opposed to 
 his own. While, in his later work, outgoing 
 Joseph de Maistre in his antipathy to the 
 Greeks, to whom he will not allow even artistic 
 pre-eminence, he can yet enthusiastically 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 21 
 
 praise the supreme genius of ^Eschylus. In 
 the Prometheus Bound he sees the protest 
 of the European consciousness against the 
 jealous theocracy of the elder world. None 
 the less, his conviction remained that the 
 value of this, as of all protests, was only 
 temporary. Knowledge is not, indeed, to be 
 kept for ever within a closed circle ; but 
 temporary liberty is, after all, only a means 
 to giving authority a firmer and a wider base. 
 Thus the intensest expression of authority 
 pure and simple is with him the last word. 
 Benevolent superiors are to determine what 
 is good and useful, and a subject community 
 is to live according to their dictates. It is 
 admitted, no doubt, that superiors may err, 
 but they are not to be bound by law. The 
 methods of redress are such as have been in 
 use with the oppressed masses in Asia and in 
 mediaeval Europe. The form of his ideal was 
 in effect still the graded hierarchy descending 
 from the supra-mundane God through the 
 ranks of his servants on earth. In his polity, 
 reciprocal and equal obligation is not only 
 not the determining social principle, but is 
 explicitly rejected. To find this worked out 
 we must go to thinkers of a different type. 
 Attempts have been made to work it out 
 
22 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 with clear abstract perfection. These began 
 in the Greek philosophic schools, had a 
 profound influence on Roman law, and, in 
 conflict and interaction with other theories, 
 have found varying expression in mediaeval 
 and modern speculation. Personally, I should 
 like to be able to accept a theory of " natural 
 rights." An ethico-political system mathe- 
 matically deducible from a priori principles is 
 aesthetically fascinating. Still, with a certain 
 regret, I acknowledge myself unable to accept 
 a doctrine of the kind as completely valid in 
 principle. Yet the form of such a theory 
 seems to be a true expression of the European 
 moral consciousness. It may not carry its 
 own evidence in itself, but it appeals to a kind 
 of prevision that something like it will be 
 found to result from the analysis of moral 
 ideas. And, indeed, this has usually been 
 found to be so. The most analytical moralists 
 have marked out a place for a system of rights 
 which, whether called " natural " or not, are 
 such as ought to be observed between 
 members of human society. In their analysis, 
 however, those who have taken what is called 
 the experiential view have not left the matter 
 there. The ideas of right and duty and 
 obligation, they have found, are ultimately 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 23 
 
 referable to an end of action. This, and not 
 pure " law " or "form," is the supreme prin- 
 ciple alike in politics and in ethics. Can we 
 deduce justice from this ? 
 
 By the thinkers known as utilitarians, the 
 end has been defined either as "happiness," or 
 as something that is necessarily accompanied 
 by happiness. Attempts have been made to 
 give extreme precision to this view. Bentham, 
 for example, thought that happiness must be 
 defined as the algebraical sum of pleasures 
 and pains, pleasures being treated as positive 
 and pains as negative quantities. The social 
 end, as it must be conceived by the legislator, 
 is the maximum of happiness in this sense. 
 But Bentham's principle, though it served its 
 purpose in the theory of legislation, where 
 subtleties in defining the end are unnecessary, 
 has no final theoretical validity. It merely 
 substitutes, for the natural right of the indi- 
 vidual to equality of treatment, a natural right 
 of each particular element of pleasure to count 
 simply in proportion to its quantity as con- 
 tributing to a total. In fact, it is "abstract" 
 in the worst sense. Happiness is not a sum 
 of pleasures, though pleasures may be an 
 element in it. Really it is a state of 
 the personality, to which no calculus is 
 
24 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 applicable. What the attempted calculus of 
 pleasures and pains did was to set up a 
 general criterion by which much absurdity 
 and inhumanity could be banished from 
 legislation. For, of course, there are some 
 generally ascertainable conditions of human 
 happiness ; and these, so far as the legis- 
 lature can formulate them, are appreciable 
 by treating happiness on purely hedonical 
 principles. The valuable thing in Bentham's 
 formula was (as has been said by a thinker 
 of another school) that the " greatest possible 
 happiness " was that of the " greatest possible 
 number"; that every one was to count for 
 one, and no one for more than one. It was, in 
 fact, a rough principle of " democratic justice." 
 And yet, when the same principle was ex- 
 pressed in terms of the " natural rights " of 
 persons, and not of elementary pleasures 
 and pains in abstraction, Bentham called it 
 an "anarchical fallacy." 
 
 On the whole, it seems to me that, if we are 
 utilitarians, it must be in the very broad sense 
 in which the term (admittedly an unfortunate 
 one) is applicable to Plato and Aristotle. 
 The end being happiness, anything that 
 brings the happiness we desire may be said, 
 by stretching the ordinary meaning of utility, 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 25 
 
 to be " useful " in relation to it. But perhaps 
 utility is best kept to its ordinary sense, in 
 which it refers to a means not desired for its 
 own sake, but only in relation to an end. 
 For the relation between happiness and the 
 activities it accompanies is quite different. 
 There is here no externality. We say that in 
 a certain activity of the personality there is 
 happiness ; but the happiness and the activity 
 are not separable. The subjective feeling 
 cannot exist except as part of a total state. 
 And the elements of this total state are not 
 definable through and through in hedonic 
 terms. The moral virtues related to the end 
 have therefore to be arrived at by various 
 devices not reducible to a calculus. Such, for 
 example, was Aristotle's method of placing 
 them in a mean between opposite excesses 
 and defects. For a theory of happiness in 
 advance of that implied in the hedonical 
 calculus we might adopt Plato's later method 
 of " mixing " knowledge or insight with 
 pleasure and other elements. 
 
 Now, some maintain that the virtue of 
 justice cannot be arrived at by any reference 
 to happiness. They do not deny that happi- 
 ness is an end, or that it may result from the 
 practice of justice ; but, they say, justice in 
 
26 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 itself is an affair of correlative right and duty, 
 a law and an obligation, not properly related 
 to an end, but essentially an a priori 
 "form" of all moral action. Utilitarianism, 
 through ignoring this, leads necessarily to 
 some kind of benevolent despotism, where 
 there is no question of justice in the 
 proper sense. In the ideal utilitarian order 
 those that have insight into the means to 
 happiness must seek to rule irresponsibly ; 
 and the others must be willing to obey. The 
 autonomy of personal wills cannot be recog- 
 nised as against the general interest. In 
 short, a polity like that of Comte is the 
 logical outcome of the reference of morality to 
 ends. Naturalism (of which this reference is 
 a part) and theocracy, therefore, ultimately 
 coincide in the social type to which they lead. 
 Let us return, then, to Comte's formula in 
 its more detailed expression, and see whether 
 after all, on utilitarian principles, we may not 
 have to give up what was proposed as the 
 better formula. In full it runs thus : " Love, 
 the principle ; order, the basis ; progress, the 
 end." Will this bear the substitution of 
 "justice, the basis ; freedom, the end "? Or 
 does it follow, if we admit love, or, in Comte's 
 other phrase, "altruism," as a first principle, 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 27 
 
 that we must accept the rule of benevolent 
 despots? I do not see that the inference is 
 logically necessitated. It rather seems to me 
 that the words substituted might stand as a 
 more exact interpretation of that which in 
 Comte's meaning has permanent validity. 
 Thus interpreted, it ceases to be ambiguous. 
 Order is good if it is a just order. Progress 
 is worth while if it consists in, or is finally 
 compatible with, increased freedom. And 
 freedom and justice imply the recognition of 
 personal autonomy. 
 
 I have assumed that, utilitarianism being 
 accepted in the very general sense given to it, 
 as the ethical doctrine that attaches itself to an 
 end, we must also accept Comte's social prin- 
 ciple. If there were no element of love, or 
 altruism, or imaginative sympathy in human 
 nature, I do not see how it would be possible 
 to arrive at any morality at all. In deductions 
 of virtues from happiness as the end, such a 
 principle, when it is not expressly stated, is 
 tacitly presupposed. Or, if it is not, there is 
 a fallacy in the argument. An egoistic deduc- 
 tion of obligation, for example, may have its 
 merits, since the element of seeking one's own 
 good has its place in a comparison of claims ; 
 but if no motives but egoistic ones are allowed 
 
28 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 to come in, the omission is ultimately fatal. 
 To have insisted on the sympathetic and 
 morally disinterested element in human 
 nature is one of Comte's greatest merits. 
 Of course, he had been preceded by a long 
 line of ethical thinkers from the latter part of 
 the seventeenth century onward ; but no one 
 has made the general position more explicit as 
 against the assumption by the once pre- 
 dominant theological schools of a natural 
 pure egoism of human nature so far as it 
 remains unmodified by supernatural grace. 
 It was precisely this assumption, adopted 
 dialectically by some anti-theologians also, 
 that made necessary the express antithesis 
 between egoism and altruism, and the demon- 
 stration that the latter exists by nature. In 
 classical antiquity, the distinction was usually 
 left vaguer. Even more frequently than in 
 modern times, arguments about happiness 
 mix up the social with the individual 
 reference indiscriminately. It is commonly 
 assumed that we care something for the 
 welfare of others, and less interest is taken in 
 determining the relative original strength 
 of "self-regarding" and "extra-regarding" 
 impulses. The principle of love, however, 
 was on occasion quite distinctly formulated. 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 29 
 
 The phrase " caritas humani generis" occurs 
 in Cicero ; and the idea is not put forward as 
 new in philosophy, but as so old that the 
 more recent schools, such as the Stoics, ought 
 not to claim it as distinctively their own. 
 
 How, then, shall we proceed from this idea 
 to those of freedom and justice? The answer 
 is, simply by the consideration that humanity 
 arrives at consciousness, so far as we know, 
 only in the individual. Happiness is the 
 happiness of a personality. This personality 
 is, indeed, fundamentally social. In its origin 
 in time, that is to say, it is a social product. 
 And much of its activity is necessarily 
 related to impersonal ends of society. At the 
 same time, this activity is always itself 
 personal. Thus the ultimate realisation of 
 social aims is in the individual. Now, for 
 individual happiness autonomy is necessary. 
 The activity by which the ethical end is 
 attained becomes possible only in freedom. 
 The internal freedom here primarily meant 
 can, of course, be achieved by some natures 
 even in a hostile society. And we know that 
 in human life, even at its freest, there cannot 
 be absolute freedom from all constraining 
 conditions. Between one polity and another, 
 however, there are differences correlated with 
 
 SITY 1 
 
30 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 the reigning type of ethics. In our ideal 
 polity it is clear that the aim would be to 
 make the constraining conditions subservient. 
 No personality would be conceived as a mere 
 means to the attainment of their ends by 
 others, or to the better carrying on of some 
 objective process. So far as it is equivalent 
 to absence of constraint by other wills, or by 
 some mechanical or quasi-mechanical order, 
 freedom has a negative sense. So far as its 
 meaning is that the personality energises in a 
 manner determined by its own nature or by 
 voluntary choice, it has a positive sense. In 
 politics the sense tends rather to the negative 
 side, though not necessarily to the exclusion 
 of all positive provision of means to realise 
 freedom. In ethics it becomes positive, as in 
 Spinoza's conception of the "free man." 
 
 Justice is not itself to be identified with 
 this moral freedom or autonomy ; but, when 
 regarded with a view to its end, it is the most 
 important condition of freedom. Without a 
 recognised system of reciprocal rights and 
 duties, a society of freemen cannot hold 
 together. And the rights and duties must be 
 regarded as fundamentally between equals. 
 The question of merit and proportionate dis- 
 tribution of social goods may come in as a 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 31 
 
 refinement ; but primarily the assumption 
 must be that all are to be treated alike. All 
 alike must be entitled, when the terms of the 
 bargain are equal, to claim the fulfilment of a 
 contract. To this primary, contractual form 
 of justice Hobbes restricted the term. " Dis- 
 tributive justice," or assignment of social 
 goods in proportion to merit, he regarded as 
 not properly coming under the head of justice 
 at all. On grounds of equal egoistic right, 
 he was able to deduce in considerable detail 
 the generally accepted rules of justice ; thus 
 illustrating the fundamental importance of the 
 idea of equality. And it must be remembered 
 that for Hobbes, in spite of his defence of 
 absolute monarchy, freedom in the political 
 sense above defined is an end of the social 
 union. The absolute monarch is there to 
 secure this in the most efficacious manner. 
 In fact, Hobbes's general view might serve 
 very well to illustrate the position of Comte, 
 that monarchy is the first form of the revolu- 
 tionary transition from the dominion of 
 hierarchs and the system of caste. 
 
 But suppose the question put : Why should 
 any effort be made to establish the new type of 
 society, whether in a more rudimentary or in 
 a more advanced form ? It certainly does not 
 
32 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 come without conscious effort. And a society 
 ostensibly recognising legal equality has so 
 far turned out relatively unstable. Aristotle 
 made the remark that polities are broken up 
 through real or supposed infractions of justice. 
 Why not keep out the explosive in the inte- 
 rests of social order? A system of inherited 
 status, custom and routine, command and 
 obedience, tempered by more or less kindly 
 consideration on the one side and gratitude on 
 the other in short, the hierocratic system 
 taken as his model by Comte is the most 
 stable of all when the cry for social justice either 
 has not been heard or can be effectively sup- 
 pressed. Here the answer at once takes us 
 beyond the attempt to deduce justice wholly 
 from egoism. We must care for liberty (and 
 not dominion or comfortable submission) for 
 ourselves, and then for the establishment of 
 an order that can realise it for others. That 
 is, action must be, in greater or less degree, 
 from the principle of love. Not every one, 
 indeed, who is animated by the principle of 
 love will seek this end. There have, of 
 course, been benevolent despots ; and obedi- 
 ence may be from love as well as from fear. 
 To take us beyond this type of social relations 
 there must be the feeling for autonomy, or 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 33 
 
 inward law of personal action, which the 
 despot, benevolent or other, will call self- 
 will ; but it must be combined with altruism. 
 Altruism in general, sympathy or compassion, 
 is in fact more primitive than the sense of 
 justice. It is found in all types of society. 
 The sense of justice is later and more intellec- 
 tualised ; without primordial altruism it would 
 never have come into being. 
 
 This may be illustrated by the extremely 
 ancient maxim which Hobbes accepts as the 
 general rule of justice and as a compendious 
 substitute for its particular laws. The form 
 he prefers in stating it as a test is the negative 
 one : Do not that to another which thou 
 wouldest not have done to thyself. Whether 
 this or the positive form is preferred, the 
 appeal is clearly to imaginative sympathy. 
 The transition is taking place from this to 
 the intellectual idea of reciprocal obligation. 
 Logically, the difference between the two 
 forms of the maxim is immaterial ; but 
 rational moralists in general have inclined to 
 prefer the negative form. This is the form to 
 be met with in Isocrates and in Confucius. 
 Of course, neither the Greek rhetorician nor 
 the Chinese sage was the inventor of it ; it 
 already belonged to the wisdom of nations. 
 
34 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 It has its application in any social order, and 
 could scarcely be used politically to suggest 
 modifications in a given order. Within an 
 actual system of ranks, whether inherited or 
 acquired, its subjective use may, with good 
 will, give the nearest approximation to justice. 
 The person about to act is to imagine himself 
 in the position, whatever that may be, of the 
 person in relation to whom he is, and consider 
 how the intended action would then appear to 
 himself. The question whether those relative 
 positions ought to continue or not seems out 
 of its range. Thus its general recognition is 
 common to the society of "duties without 
 rights " and to the society in which the 
 principles of human right were beginning to 
 be formulated. 
 
 A point recognised in all schools is that 
 maxims like this, when considered by them- 
 selves, make a more forcible appeal to the 
 moral consciousness than such deductions of 
 them from ends as are attempted by utili- 
 tarians. And this, it may be observed, 
 applies not only to maxims of justice, but of 
 prudence. Examples of both kinds might be 
 selected from the Book of Proverbs, or from 
 the Gospels, or from Diogenes Laertius. 
 The instantaneous aesthetic impression of a 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 35 
 
 compact saying by a known or unknown 
 author is superior to that of the chain of 
 argument by which a later systematic thinker 
 may seek to give it support. For life also the 
 guidance of a general rule is commonly safer 
 than the attempt to think out the effects of an 
 action in detail. This is partly explicable 
 because a general rule is the stored-up 
 wisdom of many. But is there not in the 
 maxims of justice, as the a priori moralists 
 say, something more? Is there not some 
 mysterious obligation that overrides all ends 
 whatever if these conflict with the law of 
 duty and right? 
 
 This, the view of Kant's Practical Reason, 
 is undoubtedly impressive. Yet it must be 
 observed that adherents of this view, while 
 making it ostensibly independent of all meta- 
 physics, proceed from it to a metaphysics of 
 their own. Usually this is stated in the 
 theistic form, that the moral law is a 
 command of God, and that final good is 
 assured as the result of obedience to the divine 
 command. A pantheistic expression might 
 equally well be given to it. Conformity with 
 the idea of justice, it might be said, leads by 
 an immanent process to the realisation of final 
 good ; and in this belief we must follow our 
 
36 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 moral intuition in defiance of any calculation 
 of interest for ourselves, or even for society, 
 when this interest seems incompatible with 
 the moral law. The mysterious character of 
 the feeling points to conformity between the 
 law within and the order of the universe. 
 Now, either of these metaphysical views would 
 bring the moral law finally into relation with 
 an end, known or unknown. The strange 
 result is that only on the hypothesis of 
 Atheism would it be absolutely independent. 
 Kant, indeed, holds that on this hypothesis, 
 too, it would still be valid. Yet the philo- 
 sophical theory that human morality stands 
 out in absolute antithesis against a non-moral 
 order of things was precisely that which the 
 doctrine of the practical reason was devised to 
 avoid. 
 
 As a matter of fact, a priori moralists, 
 including Kant himself, find themselves under 
 the constant necessity of introducing reference 
 to ends of desire. Charles Renouvier, firmly 
 as he adheres to Kant in principle, has to 
 allow the want of genuine " objectivity" in the 
 Kantian maxims. The science of morality is 
 for him also not strictly analogous to mathe- 
 matics. The occasional rigorism and fanati- 
 cism of Kant's moral doctrine is made to 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 37 
 
 disappear under the stress of practical, and 
 especially of political, applications. But we 
 must go further. That which has an appear- 
 ance of concession to practice, when more 
 closely examined, presents itself as revision 
 in relation to ultimate principles. Suppose 
 knowledge of consequences ideally complete, 
 then, in the light of this, the exceptions to 
 anything we can lay down for ourselves as a 
 law would be ; nstantaneously evident, and we 
 could act freely with a sense of superiority to 
 law. In politics this is the position assigned 
 by Plato to his guardians of the State, trained 
 by dialectic to adequate knowledge of the ideal 
 good. And, although no human knowledge 
 is so complete as this, we can frequently, by 
 reference to ends philosophically conceived, 
 make clear the extreme imperfection in prac- 
 tice of ethico-political maxims which have at 
 first sight an air of self-evidence. Thus the 
 idea of end is the vital centre. Maxims in the 
 form of laws, if not constantly tested by it, 
 become starting-points for the most lifeless 
 casuistry. 
 
 This is quite consistent with the view that 
 doctrines of " natural rights " have come to be 
 underrated both as regards theoretical validity 
 and practical effect. According to the position 
 
38 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 taken, they have the claim to consideration 
 that is generally allowed to axiomata media 
 and to the maxims of sages. They were the 
 last result of a long mental development from 
 the time of Aristotle to the Stoics and the 
 Roman jurists, and thence through mediaeval 
 doctors to modern publicists engaged on prac- 
 tical problems. The statement in the American 
 Declaration of Independence, that human 
 beings have the right to " life, liberty, and the 
 pursuit of happiness," commends itself at once 
 to the general mind as setting up a political 
 ideal that ought to be aimed at. Yet, when it 
 is put as if absolute, without reference to any 
 more definite common good, it becomes 
 barren. Contemplation of it as a formal 
 principle, with attempts at more and more 
 subtle deductions from it, will not help us. 
 In fact, no formal maxim reveals more clearly 
 the necessity of returning from the idea of law 
 to that of end. 
 
 For the value of the rights claimed depends 
 on the quality of the "life," on the possibili- 
 ties involved in the " liberty " secured, and on 
 the kind of " happiness " attainable. The 
 social structure may be such as to allow of 
 practically no liberty but the liberty, by skilful 
 bargaining, to achieve success in a world of 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 39 
 
 universal industrial competition. Now, even 
 if the struggle were on equal terms, the 
 presence of formal law would not make the 
 achievement of this type seem an adequate 
 result of agelong effort. But the equality is 
 merely nominal. In a system of private 
 property which is nevertheless essential to 
 liberty the struggle cannot remain equal, 
 since at any point of time some will have 
 gained and others will have lost. This would 
 still be true if the competitors began equal ; 
 but in our societies no time is historically 
 traceable when they did. Modern social and 
 economic conditions do not tend to redress 
 the inequality. On the contrary, the greater 
 the progress of accumulation by which the 
 wealth of society is increased, the more 
 unequal the struggle between individuals 
 becomes. Whatever formal conditions may 
 be laid down, so long as the ends of competi- 
 tive industrialism are supreme, they contain 
 no hope of fundamental modification. If the 
 end of life is happiness in the exclusive posses- 
 sion of material goods, then the result at best 
 can only be a sort of Neo- Vandalism. Let 
 each fight for the greatest share of particular 
 good things, but let all " play the game " now 
 of commerce as formerly of war. 
 
40 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 To make a difference we need a change of 
 opinion ; and for this we need a return to the 
 philosophic analysis of good. The problem 
 is to form a conception of a kind of good that 
 is distinctively human and that can be shared. 
 Now philosophers, and in general those who 
 have a regard for the Hellenic tradition from 
 which European civilisation set out, place this 
 good as a rule (whatever form of words they 
 may choose) in culture. Some may lay more 
 stress on one element, some on another ; but 
 that is the common result. For the distin- 
 guishing characteristic of man is to be able 
 to think and speak. And language, in a 
 generalised sense, includes expression not 
 only in words, but in other ways, as by music 
 and by plastic and pictorial art. By a slight 
 extension of the familiar definition, to know 
 the best that has been thought and said, or in 
 any way expressed, may be called "culture." 
 This does not need great material appliances ; 
 though it supposes a society that has accumu- 
 lated something beyond the bare means of 
 subsistence. Given this, there is the possi- 
 bility of leisure ; and the conditions of life on 
 the planet do not in themselves forbid its 
 equitable distribution. Culture, therefore, as 
 distinguished from material luxury, is the 
 
THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 41 
 
 human and sharable good of which we are 
 in search. If the social structure tends to 
 encourage the kind of individual activity from 
 which it springs, and at the same time to 
 promote its social diffusion, a formulated 
 statement of equal rights and reciprocal 
 obligations has value in providing a basis for 
 the higher activity of man. But, in itself, the 
 formal law can tell us nothing about the 
 happiness to be pursued. 
 
 Not that the presence of formal law is alto- 
 gether worthless even in a life that is otherwise 
 empty of higher good. In spite of modern 
 industrialism, with its enslavement of human 
 life to the means of animal subsistence, rela- 
 tions of formal liberty and equality have their 
 value in contrast with relations of command 
 and obedience, charity and subservience. 
 They make possible a feeling of human 
 dignity when life is in the grasp of economic 
 mechanism ; as the Stoic philosophy made 
 it possible in face of newly-risen autocracy. 
 But we are dealing with the question of 
 further progress in view of the partial failure 
 hitherto of the modern liberal State. My 
 point is that this is to be attained by thinking 
 again about ends, and not by subtler discrimi- 
 nation of rights deduced from formal rules. 
 
42 THE WATCHWORD OF THE STATE 
 
 To the end as here determined, it is well to 
 remember, a nearer approach has sometimes 
 been made in the past than is to be seen in the 
 present world. What now characterises the 
 conspicuous summits of civilisation is not 
 culture, but a refined and unsharable luxury, 
 the ideal of polished barbarians. In inclining 
 more to this, the Romans and all modern 
 races in greater or less degree have shown 
 themselves naturally inferior to the Greeks. 
 Yet all have been impressible, again in 
 different degrees, by the better ideal. The 
 problem is, by philosophy and education to 
 place this ideal above the competitive struggle 
 for a greater share of the things that con- 
 tribute merely to a pleasanter or more efficient 
 animal existence. 
 
 The political bearing of this will become 
 obvious later. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 FROM THE ANCIENT TO THE 
 MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 SOME commonplaces are true ; and one of 
 these is that modern political institutions of 
 the kind we call free had their beginning in 
 Greece. This has usually been taken to 
 mean, not that here was the beginning of a 
 transition essentially anarchical and leading 
 to a replacement, in new modes, of the old 
 Asiatic order against which the Greeks first 
 stood out ; but that something was founded 
 for Europe, however imperfectly. Before 
 trying to state precisely what this was, it may 
 be well to recall briefly the claims of the older 
 Eastern civilisation. For this had really 
 done a great positive work. And there is 
 still an anti-Hellenic current of opinion, not 
 visibly declining in strength, and ready to 
 insist on everything that can be said in favour 
 of the " priests and tyrants " so misunderstood 
 and misinterpreted, as the romantic reaction 
 urged, by those " prejudices of the eighteenth 
 
 43 
 
44 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 century " which summed themselves up in the 
 type of opinion known as the " Enlighten- 
 ment." 
 
 We may admit that the old theocratic 
 monarchies furnished the outline of a social 
 order that lasted for ages ; and that not only 
 the Greeks, but their successors the Romans, 
 with all their practical organising power, 
 failed to establish anything of comparable 
 stability. Hence, in the European Middle 
 Age, a return was made to the Oriental type. 
 In this new theocratico-monarchical order 
 many cultivated minds still find their religious 
 and artistic if not political ideal ; and, since it 
 definitively broke down, the European world 
 has run into a phase in which no one who 
 looks beyond the day or the hour can 
 acquiesce. In fact, we are now more than 
 ever confronted with the question whether 
 modern Europe is capable of solving the 
 social problems which the Graeco-Roman 
 world failed to solve. Is the transition, then, 
 after all, anything but an anarchy, to be 
 replaced by some new social authority that 
 shall carry out with complete scientific insight 
 the work planned and in part accomplished by 
 the Eastern theocrats? 
 
 The services of these to civilisation may 
 
 
'ERS 
 
 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 45 
 
 justifiably be dwelt on. The Greeks them- 
 selves, Comte remarks, though by their 
 resistance they broke the old order, yet always 
 continued to speak with gratitude of the 
 preliminary elaboration of astronomy and 
 geometry, and so forth, by the priesthoods of 
 Egypt and Chaldaea. The foundations of 
 industrial civilisation were laid so firmly by 
 that order that they lasted, with comparatively 
 little new invention, till modern times. Greek 
 rational science, as distinguished from the 
 empirical science out of which it sprang, 
 remained only a branch of culture for the few. 
 It was industrially applied on the great scale 
 only after its further development by the 
 nations of modern Europe. And, now that 
 it has undergone this development, have we 
 not the new and fashionable philosophy of 
 Pragmatism trying to bring it back to the 
 pre-Hellenic phase? The Greeks and the 
 early moderns (say, before the " industrial 
 revolution ") would appear to have attained 
 hardly anything of their own that can be 
 called scientific truth. For truth is that 
 which will work in practice ; and their dis- 
 coveries had little application to the useful 
 arts. True science, therefore, is mainly that 
 of Oriental theocracy and modern industrialism. 
 
46 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 Thus, from the point of view of this pre- 
 eminently modern school, as of Comte, new 
 industrialism would be old theocracy writ 
 large. Its necessary completion would seem 
 to be a hierocratic organisation. A sacerdotal 
 class is needed to limit science to investiga- 
 tions bearing on practical utility, and to hold 
 in check the " revolutionary metaphysics " in 
 which it forgets its limitations and becomes a 
 subversive instead of a constructive force. 
 
 Not to press the topic of Pragmatism, the 
 apology could be continued on serious lines. 
 The ancient hierarchs, it might fairly be 
 said, committed no such crimes against 
 humanity as their Byzantine and Papal and 
 Russian successors. The order through which 
 they ruled was no doubt very conservative 
 and somewhat oppressive ; but they did not 
 deliberately oppose the search for new know- 
 ledge. The fault was mainly in the complex 
 structure ; and this was inevitable in the first 
 great elaboration of civilised life. Though 
 relatively unspeculative as compared with the 
 Brahmans of India, the priesthoods may even 
 have passed on some philosophic insight as 
 well as scientific knowledge to Greece. 
 Heraclitus and ^schylus may have derived 
 from them indirectly the hint of an esoteric 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 47 
 
 Monotheism or Pantheism. What, after all, 
 can the Greeks claim for themselves ? Were 
 not those Christian Fathers right who called 
 them the plagiarists of the " barbarians " ? 
 Let us, then, forgetting the aberrations of the 
 later theocracy, which, with Comte, we may 
 attribute to the theological doctrine of the 
 Middle Age, and not to its type of social 
 order, return from the " rights of man " to a 
 system directed from above by the wise and 
 benevolent, chosen by men of like kind. 
 What can be in substance more rational ? 
 
 There is no difficulty about the answer. 
 Whatever had been done before, the Greeks, 
 in founding self-government and free philo- 
 sophy, went on to a higher phase. Both 
 these achievements were in reality something 
 positive, not negative and anarchic. If either 
 idea were to be lost or permanently subordi- 
 nated to authoritative external tradition, that 
 would mean that a higher end had become 
 visible on earth than man was ever to attain. 
 Progress, to which the theorists of authority 
 appeal, would be an illusion. 
 
 It is with the idea of self-government that 
 we are at present concerned. The new thing 
 that arose in Greece was the self-governing 
 commonwealth, the Republic. The germs of 
 
48 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 this existed in the mixed political constitution 
 of which traces are to be met with in the 
 Homeric poems. After the Homeric period, 
 without violent revolution, the constitutional 
 king became the president of an oligarchy, 
 the office usually ceasing in the end to be 
 hereditary. At a later stage the democratic 
 element in the State (vaguely present from 
 the beginning) stripped the oligarchy of its 
 privileges and assumed full control. The 
 essential idea, whether the commonwealth was 
 aristocratic or democratic, was that there 
 should be no irresponsible power. The tem- 
 porary wielder of power held it from the 
 community, and was responsible to the State. 
 A stage often intermediate in time between 
 oligarchy and democracy was the system 
 called by the Greeks " tyranny. " This was 
 not a return to the old heroic kingship, but 
 was essentially an imitation, on a small scale, 
 of the institutions of the East. The " tyrant " 
 no doubt an able and enlightened man put 
 an end to the struggles of aristocratic and 
 democratic factions (often siding first with the 
 latter) and ruled irresponsibly. His watch- 
 word, as has already been suggested, might 
 have been "order and progress." His natural 
 allies were popular religion, more especially 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 49 
 
 the peasant cults, on the one side, and the 
 great Persian monarchy on the other. With 
 this he could easily put himself on friendly 
 terms. He could be regarded as an outlying 
 member of what was in theory a world-wide 
 officialdom, keeping the peace in his city and 
 promoting useful public works. Nor was he 
 indifferent to the arts and sciences. Poets and 
 philosophers were invited to his court. Yet 
 the Greek world stamped the name of tyrant 
 with the extremest reprobation. He was out 
 of the law, and to kill him was an act of 
 supreme virtue. Plato, according to the 
 romance embodied in the Epistles attributed 
 to him, had hoped to get his own schemes of 
 political reform carried out by a Sicilian 
 despot. Yet in his theory of the degenera- 
 tions of the State the tyrant is made the 
 antithesis of the just man : even when 
 successful he is the most miserable of mortals, 
 and in the picture of the life after death he is 
 represented as everlastingly damned. 
 
 This sprang from a profound instinct. It 
 was felt that the permanent success of an 
 efficient tyranny would be the most irreparable 
 of evils, nullifying all that Greece meant for 
 the human race. The able despot, of course, 
 might do work that was of real value, like 
 
50 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 Napoleon afterwards, in so far as he was the 
 "soldier of revolution." In the process of 
 centralising administration, old tribal or clan 
 distinctions, for example, were effaced, so that 
 a larger civic patriotism could afterwards get 
 unobstructed course. The same kind of work, 
 however, could be done by disinterested legis- 
 lators, who refused kingly sway when it was 
 offered. The tyrant's aim at personal power 
 thus destroyed his case ethically. And in 
 classical antiquity the condemnation of the 
 type was never withdrawn. Long after the 
 Roman world had become a monarchy, the 
 biographer of Julius Caesar, having put on 
 record his repeated acts of clemency, could 
 nevertheless say of the man who had made 
 himself the master of what was once a free 
 State, "Jure periit." Not till a new religion 
 had re-consecrated monarchy was opinion 
 reversed. For the supreme poet of the 
 Christian Middle Age, two of the criminals 
 in the lowest depths of hell are Brutus and 
 Cassius, the slayers of the successful tyrant. 
 Each judgment, in turn, was not so much 
 individual as the reflex of a social type. 
 
 But, it is often said, are we to look for a 
 genuine type of freedom to the military and 
 slave-holding states of antiquity, simply 
 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 51 
 
 because they were called republics? The 
 reply might very well be that the problem 
 was first to form a society, large or small, of 
 equals, refusing to submit on any terms to 
 the personal authority of a master. A society 
 of this kind once formed, the feelings and 
 ideas it cherishes within itself can afterwards 
 spread abroad. Members of the unprivileged 
 orders can acquire, where there is something 
 of a common culture, a sense of their own 
 intrinsic equality, and can by degrees assert 
 their right to a share in the government. 
 Nor is there any limit to the process. This 
 reply is to a considerable extent valid. Ideas 
 of liberty and equality spread downwards from 
 political aristocracies. In a hierocracy or a 
 despotism they do not appear except by com- 
 munication from other societies. Thus the 
 sophistic appeal to democracy on behalf of 
 despots who have reduced the privileged and 
 unprivileged orders to a common servitude 
 falls to the ground. But there is also a fuller 
 reply. Modern advances on the ancient type 
 of free State, though in some respects real, 
 are far from being immeasurable. To set 
 the nominal equality of rights, for example, 
 between rich and poor in modern law against 
 the actual distinctions of class in antiquity is 
 
52 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 too transparent a fallacy. Suppose that by 
 way of retort the repudiation of the name of 
 subject by an ancient Athenian were set 
 against the royalist forms of command used 
 in a modern constitutional State. This, too, 
 would be misleading. We must compare 
 ideal with ideal and fact with fact, not ideal 
 on the one side with fact on the other. 
 
 In the fuller reply the point about " mili- 
 tarism " may first be set aside. The fluctuat- 
 ing relations between the industrial and the 
 military mechanism of societies both, so far, 
 indispensable have no title to be dignified 
 with the name of a law of progress. The 
 attempt to assign to them this rank is as 
 palpable a failure in Spencer as in Comte. 
 With both thinkers the supposed law of tran- 
 sition from militarism to industrialism appears 
 to have been a sweeping generalisation from 
 their own period ; which was in many ways 
 really progressive, while it was an age of grow- 
 ing industrialism. Comte's exposition in his 
 later work seems at first sight hardly recon- 
 cilable with it. For the change from "con- 
 servative" to "progressive" polytheism, in 
 his view, accompanies the passage from an 
 essentially industrial to a military civilisation. 
 Still, it might be replied, the military period 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 53 
 
 is for him, taken by itself, mainly an anarchy, 
 and is only of value in preparing the way for 
 a more socialised industrialism ; so that the 
 " law of progress " is not abandoned in sub- 
 stance. Clearly, however, his expectation 
 that the decline of militarism in Europe would 
 go on continuously has been falsified by 
 events. Again, Spencer, in his later years, 
 while not abandoning his view which asso- 
 ciates industrialism with growing freedom, 
 was obliged to admit its oppressiveness in our 
 own time. Freedom of contract under it, he 
 confessed, is little more than nominal ; and 
 its effect on the individual worker is both 
 physically and mentally deteriorating. 
 
 Of course industry is a necessary basis of 
 all societies ; and Comte, even in his Utopia, 
 did not look forward to a society that could 
 dispense with everything of the nature of an 
 army. Thus there is no absolute antithesis. 
 The proportion between the organisation for 
 material support and for attack and defence 
 is one of greater and less. Militarism and 
 industrialism, in the special senses, might 
 seem to be opposite forms of hypertrophy, 
 subordinating the real ends of the community 
 to what ought to be means. Unfortunately 
 they have not even the advantage of being 
 
54 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 incompatible. Continental Europe at present 
 suffers from both. And it would be difficult 
 to show that there is greater effective freedom 
 a sufficient range of time and space being 
 taken in highly industrial as compared with 
 highly military societies. The " militarism " 
 of the Greek cities was to a great extent a 
 defensive organisation for maintaining the 
 freedom of small communities against the 
 apparently overwhelming mass of empires 
 proportionally more industrial in basis. 
 Sparta, with all its militarism, was not 
 aggressive. And that militarism, in the 
 greatest crisis of human history, had its part 
 in defending the freedom of the Western 
 world. 
 
 So far as slavery is concerned, it is only 
 quite recently that modern States can claim to 
 have definitely advanced on antiquity. The 
 last century has seen the slow abolition, 
 perhaps not yet fully accomplished, of what 
 began as colonial slavery established with the 
 sanction of European governments. Still, it 
 may be said, compare one of the more 
 advanced countries of Europe, apart from its 
 colonies, with a Greek democracy. Of 
 England, for example, it has been true for 
 some centuries that none of its inhabitants are 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 55 
 
 slaves. That could never be said of ancient 
 Athens. Then, usually, a completely false 
 inference is drawn. Athens, it is inferred, 
 though nominally a democracy, was really a 
 community of idlers living on slave labour. 
 From the literature of Athens in the fifth 
 century B.C. it can be conclusively proved that 
 this was not so. The Athenian democracy 
 included all classes, free artisans forming a 
 numerous body. Slavery, though it un- 
 doubtedly existed and spread in Greece, was 
 not from the beginning an integral part of a 
 Greek community. Its growth, as an eminent 
 living historian has shown, was due essen- 
 tially to capitalism. The status of slavery 
 may have had its origin in the custom of 
 taking prisoners of war ; but, as Meyer says, 
 these can never have been of much use indus- 
 trially. The slaves were in the main imported 
 from the East. They were employed in the 
 larger industrial undertakings, and the result 
 was the displacement of free labour. So far, 
 therefore, was slavery from being the true 
 industrial basis of an ancient State that, by 
 reducing the poorer freemen to beggary, it 
 contributed to the failure of the more demo- 
 cratic polities. This, it may be noted by the 
 way, sufficiently refutes the view of some 
 
56 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 modern anti-democratic writers that demo- 
 cracy was possible in Greece only because it 
 meant really government by a privileged class. 
 The remark may also be made incidentally 
 that the retrospective optimism of Comte and 
 Spencer as regards slavery is deprived of its 
 justification. It was not by passing through 
 the stage of slavery that mankind was trained 
 to industry. For slavery is properly a 
 Western and not an Eastern institution ; and 
 in the West it is an excrescence, and, as we 
 have seen, a pernicious excrescence. In the 
 East, indeed, some were distinctly slaves ; but 
 the characteristic institution of the East was 
 caste. Slavery did not greatly develop, as it 
 did under Western capitalism. Thus, where 
 it was less pernicious because there was no 
 political freedom to undermine, it was still 
 clearly unnecessary. It appears, therefore, 
 everywhere as an extreme degradation and a 
 wrong. Its part in the process of the world is 
 that of an evil, and not of a relative good. 
 The true positive origin of industries was not 
 compulsion to work for a master, but the 
 differentiation of aptitudes in a tribe. Spencer 
 himself traces out this process, and then shows 
 how coercion of various kinds came to be 
 superimposed. Evidently, neither social nor 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 57 
 
 individual coercion could create an aptitude 
 for doing even the simplest work that had not 
 been done before. And to enforce continuity 
 of labour there seems no reason why physical 
 needs should not have sufficed. 
 
 The point is, not that slavery could in fact 
 have been avoided, given an element of 
 " radical evil " (as Kant expressed it) in 
 human nature, but that it has its root 
 in evil. This is part of the whole process 
 as we know it ; but, in metaphysical 
 language, it is that in it which has to be 
 overcome. To return to the empirical facts : 
 it must be allowed that the other kinds of 
 force are capable of being as oppressive as the 
 morally more anomalous form called slavery. 
 To be a member, say, of a low caste of 
 unskilled workers is not formally the same 
 as being owned by another person, but it 
 may in practice be little better. The position 
 of an unskilled worker under nominally free 
 contract is in some respects worst of all. 
 There is no limit to the hours of labour that 
 may be imposed ; and in compensation there 
 is not even security. The slaveowner had at 
 least an economic interest in caring for the 
 life and physical welfare of his slave. All 
 this, it may be said, tends to show a nearer 
 
58 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 approach to equality in the conditions of the 
 mass of mankind than might be inferred from 
 the formal institutions. Where institutions 
 are on the whole better, the actual conditions 
 may, in some details, be worse. It is gene- 
 rally recognised, for example, that domestic 
 slavery among the Greeks was relatively 
 mild as compared with modern colonial 
 slavery. For the extreme harshness of slave- 
 owning as practised by Englishmen so late as 
 the eighteenth century, Bishop Butler can be 
 cited as a witness. Yet it had already become 
 more inconsistent with accepted institutions 
 than it was at Athens. 
 
 Though formal slavery was not character- 
 istically Eastern, it appeared to a Greek that 
 "among the barbarians all are slaves but one." 
 "Slave" might even be a term of honour. All 
 prided themselves on being slaves of the king. 
 To the Greeks, although slavery grew up 
 among them in its distinctive form of personal 
 ownership, it was essentially antipathetic. At 
 first it presented itself as an expression of 
 might exercised by the stronger for his 
 advantage. An ethical defence was hardly 
 thought of. The question of justice not 
 being raised, to be made a slave was from the 
 slave's point of view simply a misfortune. 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 59 
 
 There was no divinely appointed place for 
 him, as for the low castes in a hierarchy. 
 Virtue being conceived in a broadly human 
 sense, and not simply as specialised function, 
 the popular view was that the slave tended to be 
 a worse type morally. In being only " useful " 
 and not an end for himself, he was on a lower 
 level. As the ethical idea of human right 
 appeared, there came radical protests against 
 the institution. It was argued that a man is 
 not a slave by nature, but by fortune. One in 
 the position of a slave may have the virtues of 
 a freeman, while the nominal freeman may be 
 slavish in mind. Against such arguments, 
 the reply of Aristotle was that, some men 
 being slaves by nature, these may rightly be 
 subjected by force and made, by their labour, 
 instrumental to the higher life of others. The 
 hope of emancipation, however, was to be 
 held out. Both among the Greeks and 
 among the Romans emancipations were, in 
 fact, constantly going on. In Roman juristic 
 theory, the Stoical view prevailed that slavery 
 was from the beginning " contrary to nature " ; 
 but the jurists accepted it as a fact. Yet, 
 while the slave continued to be regarded as 
 property, his position was gradually mitigated 
 by legislation. The historical process in the 
 
60 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 West tended towards abolition of the status, 
 precisely because its anomalous character was 
 necessarily recognised as reflection proceeded. 
 While itself the worst form of social iniquity, 
 "chattel-slavery" was less ingrained than 
 institutions claiming a divine sanction for 
 their oppressiveness. 
 
 In an ancient, as in a modern, democracy 
 it could not have been permanent ; but the 
 democracies themselves ceased. The impor- 
 tant thing to notice is how far they had gone 
 when the check came. In reality, there is no 
 form of advanced modern speculation about 
 political and social institutions that had not 
 appeared at Athens. Aristophanes would not 
 have set himself to ridicule ideas of com- 
 munism and equal rights for women if such 
 ideas had not been put forward by some 
 persons. It has been thought that he was 
 caricaturing Plato ; but, as the scheme in the 
 Republic is of an entirely different nature, and 
 is never clearly alluded to by the dramatist, 
 the probabilities are that both the comic and 
 the serious development started from ideas 
 already afloat. These we may suppose to 
 have been originally democratic, and more 
 resembling those of the comedy. 
 
 It is noteworthy that Plato, in his scheme of 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 61 
 
 aristocratic communism, surmounted slavery. 
 There is no proper place for the institution in 
 the society he plans out. The philosophic 
 and military classes form a higher caste, the 
 commercial and industrial classes a lower 
 caste. As the scheme of communism does 
 not extend to the latter, they are, from the 
 point of view of a modern political economist, 
 in a state of greater freedom. And the system 
 of caste was to be rationalised, so far as this 
 was compatible with public acceptance of 
 a fiction which Plato saw to be necessary as 
 its groundwork. It was to be taught and 
 believed that the gods had formed the higher 
 classes of more precious material ; and yet, if 
 anyone born in their rank was found to be 
 naturally inferior, he was to be depressed to a 
 lower position, while anyone born in a lower 
 rank, but found to be naturally superior, was 
 to be taken up into the higher. 
 
 Plato discusses the education only of the 
 governing classes. This we may ascribe, not 
 to neglect, but to the fact that in a Greek 
 State the problem of elementary education, as 
 now understood, had solved itself. The 
 Greek past had not been a period in which 
 the arts of reading and writing were confined 
 to a priesthood. Thus they made way naturally 
 
62 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 in proportion as they became serviceable 
 for life ; and no inherited jealousy limited the 
 means of access. At Athens they were as 
 widely diffused as they are in a modern 
 democracy after two or three generations of 
 systematic effort. Here the loss of political 
 freedom in the ancient world made no differ- 
 ence. The new authorities that first arose 
 did not feel themselves dependent on a limita- 
 tion of popular culture. Throughout the 
 Roman Empire there was provision for 
 elementary education, besides institutions for 
 higher instruction. Modern research has 
 fully confirmed the general impression 
 summed up in the name of "dark ages" 
 applied to the succeeding period. Barbarism 
 and Christian theocracy for a time reduced 
 culture, whether higher or elementary, to a 
 minimum that barely sufficed to preserve the 
 continuity of European civilisation. Since the 
 "revival of learning," a tradition of neglect 
 has had to be slowly overcome ; and the very 
 destruction of the theocracy has aided the 
 tradition. Despots and friends of despotism, 
 warned by the convulsions that followed 
 increasing light, came to see in popular 
 ignorance a safe support. And, precisely 
 where this cause has been less in action, the 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 63 
 
 furious quarrels of sects long thwarted the 
 efforts alike of the State and of private phil- 
 anthropy. In antiquity there was, of course, 
 no question of any corporate authority over 
 education save that of the State. 
 
 But for the factors now indicated, it would 
 be difficult to explain, not why there has been 
 some progress in modern times, but why that 
 progress has been so late and so slow and so 
 interrupted. The answer is to be found in 
 the nature of the intermediate period. This 
 meant, so far as directing ideas are concerned, 
 the return of monarchy, theocracy, and caste. 
 Monarchy, in fact, came in with the Cassarean 
 revolution, theocracy with Constantine ; the 
 system of caste was established in legal theory 
 in the early Byzantine period. At that time 
 it was made unlawful for the cultivators of the 
 soil to leave their hereditary occupation. Into 
 the class which afterwards became that of 
 " serfs " were absorbed at once slaves and the 
 smaller freemen. This process went on not 
 only in the East, but in the rising Teutonic 
 communities. By the teachers of the new 
 religion the status of slavery had been sanc- 
 tioned, like monarchy, as part of the divine 
 order. Christian slaves were even exhorted 
 by some apostolic and patristic writers not to 
 
64 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 seek emancipation. The economic conditions, 
 however, had become hostile to slavery proper. 
 By degrees they became hostile to serfdom as 
 well. The ferment of old ideas also remained, 
 with the literature which contained them, 
 though these did not count practically till 
 quite modern times. When institutions of 
 the nature of slavery again began to seem 
 contrary to justice as formulated in theories of 
 natural rights, it was easy to reinforce the 
 attack by passages in the New Testament of 
 which the spirit is equally opposed to them. 
 Christianity, we must remember, is a complex 
 religion. The apprehensions of its official 
 teachers as to the consequences of popular 
 acquaintance with its documents at last caused 
 them to prohibit the reading of translations 
 that had been made of them into the vernacular 
 languages of Europe. For a time the appeal 
 to ideas of fraternity and equality in the 
 Gospels came chiefly from heterodox Chris- 
 tians. Orthodoxy, however, at length gave 
 its sanction to the modern movement, and 
 now almost claims for its dogma the merit of 
 having abolished slavery. 
 
 The Middle Ages, like their religion, were 
 extremely complex. The directing ideas of 
 the period were essentially those of the ancient 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 65 
 
 East, dominating a newer community that 
 had failed to carry forward the ideas of its 
 prime. But within the mediaeval European 
 system, ruled over by priests and anointed 
 kings, there were the strivings of peoples 
 newly incorporated, and only now reaching 
 the stage represented by the heroic monarchies 
 of Greece. A portion of the ancient culture, 
 civic and not hieratic, was also a necessity to 
 the priesthood, which could not rule without 
 some superiority in knowledge, and which 
 felt the intellectual insufficiency of its own 
 documents. Thus the vague efforts of new 
 populations after political freedom could, in 
 time, be reinforced. Discussions, indeed, were 
 for long to go on only within a limited circle 
 and in a learned language. Popular educa- 
 tion except in the form of religious spectacle 
 and the hearing of selections from a sacred 
 literature was not an interest cherished by 
 the directing class. Yet the way was being 
 prepared for later popular movements. And, 
 economically, the Middle Ages were exempt 
 from many of the evils of capitalism. Thus, 
 as the towns grew, the crafts that developed 
 from germs left by the arts of life in their 
 ancient centres could be practised by free 
 workmen, with a pleasure in the exercise of 
 
 F 
 
66 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 their skill which modern machine industry 
 has tended to destroy. 
 
 It is this essentially progressive growth of 
 one kind and another that fascinates modern 
 historians, and gives them a certain impatience 
 with the attitude of the Renaissance and the 
 eighteenth century. The sweeping condemna- 
 tion of the Middle Ages, however, in a time 
 that had still some immediate consciousness 
 of having emerged from them, referred essen- 
 tially to their directing ideas. The very inter- 
 mixture of ill-understood progressive move- 
 ments in the actual period may have seemed 
 to add to it something peculiarly irrational 
 and inorganic. The East, with its definitely 
 monarchic and theocratic order, was fairly 
 intelligible. In general outline it was part of 
 the classical picture of the world. But what 
 was to be made of the confused alliance of this 
 order with military anarchy ? Here were caste 
 and graduated subjection side by side with 
 municipal experiments in democracy. The 
 priesthood was a peculiar kind of caste. In 
 theory the highest rank, it was drawn from all 
 classes of society, and offered an opening to 
 personal merit. Yet, being always in its 
 ideal and at length by absolute compulsion 
 celibate, it did not promote social flux. New 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 67 
 
 families could not in general be founded by 
 men who rose to ecclesiastical eminence. 
 And while the clergy in a manner represented 
 culture, like the old Oriental priesthoods, its 
 teaching, having been first elaborated in a 
 cultivated medium hostile to it, systematically 
 depreciated knowledge. Thus chiefs of the 
 only educated class could declaim officially 
 against the rudiments of liberal education. It 
 is really not surprising that the period was for 
 long called simply barbarous. To penetrate 
 to its humanly valuable elements, there has 
 been needed the most resolute and studious 
 interest in the most complex detail. 
 
 There has also been needed the many-sided 
 sympathy evoked by what is called the 
 "romantic movement. " This was in part 
 reactionary, and would have liked to see a 
 realisation of the hierarchical theory never, in 
 fact, realised in the actual Middle Age. The 
 most distinctive character of a romantic move- 
 ment, however, does not seem to be that of a 
 reaction. What is common to all movements 
 described by the name is rather a kind of 
 contemplative interest in the past as past. It 
 is aesthetic emotion finding its object in 
 reflected instead of direct experience. Thus it 
 supposes a long past incompletely remembered. 
 
 OF 
 
68 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 A movement of the kind was making itself 
 felt towards the end of classical antiquity, 
 both Greek and Roman. Old stories were 
 being put in new and more varied lights, and 
 the shades of feeling we call " modern " were 
 finding expression. The superposition of a 
 new religious order stopped this particular 
 movement. The Christian Fathers were not 
 romanticists. When next the same spirit 
 appeared it expressed itself in new languages 
 and in new forms. From this period, starting 
 in the eleventh century, all such movements 
 have received their distinctive name. " Ro- 
 mance " meant neo-Roman. Its characteristic 
 matter consisted in old legends, and its literary 
 form combined a revival with the originality 
 due remotely to a break in culture. The later 
 classical revival called the Renaissance has an 
 essentially different character. There is not 
 in it the half-pathetic looking back to an 
 order which the world is conscious of having 
 transcended. Types of life and thought and 
 art believed to be higher, and in this case 
 really higher, were being deliberately revived. 
 The classical revival was continued in the 
 eighteenth century, but on the side of 
 literature and art in a more restricted way. 
 Simultaneously romance revived ; and in the 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 69 
 
 nineteenth century the revival was sometimes 
 combined with a deliberately reactionary 
 purpose. But, from the purely aesthetic point 
 of view, it is clear that the Middle Ages were 
 especially adapted to the kind of reminiscent 
 sentiment called romantic. They contained 
 elements of a more archaic order. These had 
 for modern Europe something like the effect 
 of the less-known old heroic legends, when 
 newly revived in late Graeco-Roman antiquity. 
 For, of course, it is not the local and temporal 
 character of the subject-matter that has the 
 romantic effect. What we call by convention 
 " classical " matter can be treated in a romantic 
 manner. For this a condition seems to 
 be that consciously superseded elements 
 should have the writer's and the reader's 
 sympathies. In this sense the Hymn to 
 Proserpine is a romantic poem ; not so The 
 Last Oracle. 
 
 There are other shades of meaning con- 
 nected with the word " romance " ; but this 
 seems to be that which it conveys aesthetically. 
 Thus the half-known mediaeval world has had 
 a characteristically "romantic" fascination. 
 The literary search for what Bacon called the 
 element of " strangeness " in beauty has 
 thrown itself especially on that world. As it 
 
70 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 never was a world of clear daylight, its charm 
 for the curious will no doubt remain. 
 
 To return from this digression, it may be 
 said, with or without irony, that there is 
 nothing " romantic " in the representative 
 institutions that emerged in the Middle Age. 
 They constitute, in fact, the one great political 
 invention, with no backward reference, since 
 the rise of the city-State on the shores of the 
 Mediterranean. Inventions of this kind pro- 
 ceed from no assignable person, and are not 
 finally explicable. All we can do is to 
 classify them as social "variations," analogous 
 to the organic variations on which the rise 
 of new species depends. First appearing 
 clearly as a new thing in the very depth of 
 the monarchico-theocratic period, the prin- 
 ciple of representation was destined to bring 
 back the classical type of polity on an 
 enlarged scale. By the method of electing 
 deputies to an assembly, which thus came to 
 stand for a whole people, and by that alone, 
 the modern free national State began to exist. 
 
 The absence of this principle had made the 
 continuance of the ancient republican type 
 impossible. The Greeks had brought the 
 autonomous city, as a political unit, to such 
 finished form within its own limits that it 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 71 
 
 could neither incorporate itself in, nor incor- 
 porate with itself, a larger community. This 
 was seen especially in the case of Athens. 
 When an alliance was formed with minor 
 cities to keep the defeated Asiatic Empire 
 within its bounds, this passed into a rule of 
 Athens over the others. The allies became 
 tributaries. The free development of Athens 
 as an autonomous State would, in fact, have 
 been restricted by a real federation in which 
 other States had a voice of their own. Hence 
 the solution by federalism the only develop- 
 ment then possible on strictly republican lines 
 was never seriously attempted. What was 
 formed was a kind of empire. As this was 
 an empire over nominal equals, each subject- 
 city, however mildly governed, felt itself 
 deprived of the autonomy to which, as Greek 
 cities, none could resign their claim. The 
 Athenians, too, seem to have felt that, whatever 
 great ends might be attained by it, their 
 system was not quite compatible with justice 
 as they themselves conceived it. Yet, at the 
 same time, they held firmly the conviction 
 that it was something better than the world had 
 hitherto known. In fact, they had succeeded 
 in the highest political aim the construction 
 of a polity free within itself but had been 
 
72 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 unable to evolve a method of extending it. 
 The imperial solution actually adopted failed ; 
 but this, after all, was a failure in a secondary 
 problem. Before a type can either impose 
 itself or diffuse its influence, it must first 
 exist. The Athenians had solved for them- 
 selves the problem of liberty; excluding, as 
 their great tragic poet said, anarchy on the 
 one side and despotism on the other. They 
 had failed to show by example how the solu- 
 tion could be generalised ; or, in default of 
 this, to hold together and extend an empire in 
 the Greek world. 
 
 The collapse of the Athenian Empire did 
 not restore the independence of the minor 
 States, as jealous rivals had promised. The 
 first result of the decisive defeat of Athens 
 was the return of Persia and Carthage to the 
 sphere from which they had been driven. 
 Within the Greek world, the harsher empire 
 of Sparta, now substituted for that of Athens, 
 went down in its turn, and the East became 
 relatively still stronger. The re-descent of the 
 West to a lower level could be seen setting 
 in. Great results of a kind were still to be 
 attained, and Athenian ideas were to be 
 diffused in many indirect ways ; but, had it 
 not been for the rise of a new republican 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 73 
 
 polity in Italy, the return of Asiatic monarchy 
 would have been earlier and more complete. 
 
 For the Macedonian monarchic empires, 
 resulting from the statecraft of Philip and the 
 military genius of Alexander, rapidly became 
 Oriental in type. Their starting-point was, 
 indeed, a national monarchy that might, under 
 other conditions, have anticipated the modern 
 development by passing into a constitutional 
 State ; but the early acquisition of an empire 
 was fatal to this possibility. The effect of the 
 Macedonian overlordship in Greece itself was 
 to reduce the autonomous city to the rank of 
 a municipality. In the East, the king assumed 
 the character of a divine incarnation. He 
 took over officially the attributes of the ancient 
 Oriental kings, and scrupulously respected 
 the old organisation of religion. At the same 
 time " Hellenism," in the form of literary and 
 scientific culture, was diffused. The idea of 
 its diffusion had, indeed, already become 
 current in Greece. Isocrates observed that 
 the name of " Greek " now indicated a type 
 of education rather than membership of a 
 race ; and, though not a mind of the highest 
 originality, he displayed true prescience in 
 looking to the Macedonian monarchy as the 
 means of spreading Hellenism. Thus there 
 
74 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 were very plausible grounds, now as later, for 
 acquiescing in monarchy. It gave comparative 
 peace, and probably to the average individual 
 as much freedom as he desired ; and under it 
 there was not less care than before for culture. 
 The vocation of the Greeks in practical 
 politics had, in fact, been fulfilled. Between 
 the Macedonian and the Roman periods there 
 was, indeed, an attempt at federalism by some 
 of the smaller Greek communities. Within 
 this, slight trials were made of representative 
 methods, as afterwards, quite in a subordinate 
 way, by Augustus ; but nothing important came 
 of them. This whole movement was merely a 
 phase of transition ; as, indeed, it seems to 
 me that federalism must be always. The 
 instinct was sound by which the Greeks, in 
 their period of greatness and intense effort, 
 rejected this as incompatible with the com- 
 pletest unfolding of the life of the city. The 
 end of a federation must be either to consoli- 
 date into a fully unified State or to break up 
 into separate units. As an intermediate stage 
 it may, like an empire, have a certain relative 
 value ; but for the accomplished type of the 
 State we must look not, indeed, again to the 
 city, but in the end to some individualised 
 unity. 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 75 
 
 The relative value of a transitional federalism 
 is seen in the case of Rome, which, though a 
 city-State, had a less finished form than the 
 autonomous cities of Greece. This, as is 
 known, was due to some remains of an early 
 federation of its constituent elements. The 
 result was the possibility of incorporating 
 subjects on terms nearer equality. Hence, 
 there could be formed by degrees an empire 
 that was not a mere system of domination. 
 To the growth of this there were other aids as 
 important as military aptitude. While the 
 origins of Roman law were much like the 
 origins of law in the Greek cities, the Romans 
 had more persistence in the elaboration of 
 legal ideas. Thus, one of the instruments 
 by which political freedom is to be realised 
 had greater efficacy. For the elaboration of 
 law, the gradual extension of dominion, with 
 incorporation of former subjects as members 
 of the State, furnished the conditions. As 
 Greek culture was adopted, the ideas of Greek 
 philosophy, so far as they could be turned to 
 legal account, influenced the jurists. The 
 Roman aristocracy was, as Comte has 
 remarked, more anti-theocratic than a Greek 
 democracy, and, under its rule, intellectual 
 liberty was more secure. Here the passage 
 
76 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 to monarchy, on the whole, made no change. 
 The occasional proceedings against philo- 
 sophers of republican sympathies under the 
 early Empire were quite episodical, and left no 
 trace on the imperial policy. Even in relation 
 to practical freedom the republican past had 
 in some respects fixed itself permanently in 
 institutions. While the individual citizen as 
 such lost all share, even apparent, in governing 
 the State, he had a recognised right to a 
 certain equality of treatment. The distinctive 
 idea of justice, as it has since been understood 
 in Europe, was preserved, and to some extent 
 developed, in the legal system of the Empire. 
 The Roman dominion in the eastern pro- 
 vinces resembled the British dominion in 
 India. The system did not permit further 
 political growth from within ; but on the old 
 social strata was superimposed the result, in the 
 form of law, of a process that could only have 
 gone on at first in politically free communities. 
 The difference may perhaps be this : that in 
 the Roman Empire, as the centre ceased to be 
 vital, the subject-communities could not be 
 trained to self-government ; whereas in the 
 British Empire, with a self-governing State 
 as the directing power, this training is possible 
 if there is goodwill on both sides. From an 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 77 
 
 ideal point of view, empire is in no case final. 
 Instead of furnishing a solution of the problem 
 of internal development, it lives on the results 
 of development already achieved. 
 
 Before passing into a monarchy, the Roman 
 Republic had changed from an aristocracy 
 into a formal democracy. Yet, during this 
 phase, the government always remained in 
 reality oligarchic. The analogy is not with 
 the Athenian democracy, but rather with the 
 English as it has hitherto been. There was a 
 system of popular election, and " new men " 
 could from time to time gain admission into 
 the circle of governing families ; but these, as 
 a body, remained the ruling class. At the 
 end of the republican period, the aristocracy, 
 it is recognised on all sides, had become 
 corrupted by capitalism. This was seen on 
 the whole as clearly, while the sympathy of 
 literature was still on the side of political 
 liberty, as it has been during the latest phase 
 of reaction. No really new insight was 
 reserved for the modern Caesarists. All that 
 they could do was to find in the causes that 
 made the overthrow of the republic possible 
 its moral justification also. The necessity of 
 tyranny became the tyrant's excuse. Yet, if 
 carefully examined, a Caesarist like Mommsen, 
 
78 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 not entirely without liberal sympathies, may 
 be seen to make remarkable admissions, as, 
 for example, that the best elements in Italy 
 were against the new monarchy. Had Caesar, 
 instead of being (in contemporary German 
 phrase) the greatest of political " realists," 
 been an idealist like Pericles, it is conceivable 
 that he might have reformed the State on 
 lines anticipating the attempt at a constitu- 
 tional empire in the second century. Clearly, 
 however, unless the biographic tradition is 
 totally wrong, he was a man to whom 
 monarchic power was an end. His methods 
 were those of a Greek despot to start as 
 democratic leader, to gain sufficient military 
 strength, and then to overthrow the republic 
 by arms, suppressing opinion so far as neces- 
 sary. All the ethical feeling of antiquity, it 
 has been said before, remained on the side of 
 the republican party. Caesar himself, as his 
 most eminent panegyrist admits, showed his 
 feeling of this by writing his famous, but 
 lost, Anticatones after the death of Cato. 
 The philosophers took Cato, not Caesar, as 
 their ideal ; though admitting at last with 
 regret that want of sufficient virtue in the 
 State had made monarchy inevitable. The 
 senatorial party for a time kept up a 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 79 
 
 resistance, fortifying itself by the Stoic philo- 
 sophy. Coming into power after the death 
 of Domitian, it succeeded in modifying the 
 conception of government. The ideal now 
 set up was that of a monarchy whose end was 
 liberty. Philosophic emperors, like Marcus 
 Aurelius and afterwards Julian, themselves 
 belonged to this direction of thought. Marcus 
 Aurelius recalls for honour, not the founder 01 
 the monarchy, but his leading opponent and 
 the chief of the conspiracy against him. 
 Julian writes a satire on the Cassars, in which, 
 however, Augustus is represented as having 
 the grace to be rather ashamed of his own 
 apotheosis. But, of course, the drift to 
 absolute monarchy was persistent ; the efforts 
 of idealists, even on the throne, could only 
 check the decline. Slavery and capitalism 
 within, and the incorporation of multitudes 
 that knew and understood only the rule of a 
 despot, were necessarily fatal to the small 
 communities of freemen that had risen 
 on the outskirts of a civilisation controlled 
 for ages past by hierarchs and half-divine 
 kings. To the Greeks themselves, at the 
 height of their republican enthusiasm, this 
 type, seen from a distance, had still some- 
 thing of the glamour that surrounded the 
 
8o FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 god-descended rulers of their own heroic 
 period. 
 
 The reformed Empire, philosophically 
 directed, went on in theory long after the 
 Antonines. The desire to attach themselves 
 to the tradition of which Marcus had become 
 the most illustrious representative was 
 indicated by the adoption of the name 
 " Antoninus " by later emperors. To fix the 
 consecrated military absolutism of Oriental 
 type by which the Roman basis of " Senate 
 and People " was at length displaced, there 
 was needed a new hierarchic religion. This 
 brought with it the substitution of the 
 "labarum," with its cross and crown, for the 
 old standard that had come down from the 
 republic. The religion adopted, as we are 
 often told by apologists for its supernatural 
 claims, was that which at first appeared most 
 hostile to the order of the Roman State. One 
 reason for its thus appearing is that its first 
 emergence as a recognisable phenomenon was 
 in the second century of our era, precisely at 
 the time when the old republican ideal had 
 been revived among the governing classes. 
 Christianity was in reality the finally successful 
 form taken by a propaganda that had long been 
 going on from Asia. On this the statesmen 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 81 
 
 of the West had always kept a suspicious 
 eye. Societies organised by foreign mysta- 
 gogues, resting on a secret cult and a doctrine 
 regarded as revealed, obviously threatened 
 the formation of a State within the State. 
 And of all societies of this type the " Catholic 
 Church," with its unconcealed claim to 
 universal dominance and its systematic attack 
 on the old civic and national religions, must 
 have appeared the most dangerous. To 
 regard it as fundamentally "democratic," and 
 opposed for that reason by the higher classes, 
 is a complete error. The Platonic philo- 
 sopher Celsus, who wrote against the 
 Christians under Marcus Aurelius, is 
 distinctly more democratic in tone than 
 Origen, who replied to him two generations 
 later. In Origen we may see already the 
 aristocracy of the priest. The theory of the 
 Christian Empire held by ecclesiastics was 
 that which was long afterwards formulated by 
 Joseph de Maistre. There can be no check 
 on monarchy "from below," but only " from 
 above " that is, from the representatives of 
 revealed religion. 
 
 The authority of these, we know, was for 
 ages to be superposed on the new military 
 aristocracy that sprang up after the disruption 
 
82 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 of the Western Empire. Kings and nobles 
 were to lend their swords to propagate unity 
 " in Christ," now supreme in theory, as the 
 unity of the human race had been for the 
 closing epoch of paganism. Of course, 
 paganism had not realised " liberty, equality, 
 and fraternity," though aspirations towards 
 all of them, and not merely the first, had been 
 uttered by the nobler minds. But still less 
 did dominant Christianity realise them. 
 
 Though Christianity offered its aid to grow- 
 ing absolutism, and was at length adopted by 
 a successful soldier who became emperor, the 
 schism in the Empire still continued in a latent 
 state. What remained of Roman patriotism 
 was associated with the old civic cult. The 
 philosophic schools stood out to the last 
 against the doctrine of the Church. The 
 Senate and its spokesmen in the imperial 
 service pleaded for tolerance. If, however, 
 the emperors were inclined to this, the high 
 ecclesiastics insisted on a policy of persecu- 
 tion. All resistance, whether of Christian 
 heretics or of the heathen populace or of 
 philosophers, was crushed in the interests of 
 the "Catholic faith"; and the newly-conse- 
 crated despotism, though losing ground, went 
 on for centuries in the East. In the West, 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 83 
 
 notwithstanding the new unification, it could 
 not retain a pretence of coherence for two. 
 The Teutonic invaders who overthrew it 
 nevertheless accepted its religion. For the 
 religion of the Roman decadence presented 
 itself as that of the civilised world. And 
 kings aiming at absolutism, provided they 
 were "orthodox," could rely on the support 
 of the clergy. " Recalcitrant elements " were 
 brought under the yoke by massacre. With 
 the religion, however propagated, the new 
 races entered on the inheritance of the old 
 culture, which was still the basis of all the 
 liberal education that remained. From their 
 native seats they had brought traditions of 
 freedom. With these there went a peculiar 
 loyalty to personal chiefs, not to the idea of 
 the State, as with the races of classical 
 antiquity. In the stage they had reached 
 socially they were, when first known, more 
 primitive than the Homeric Greeks. Hence 
 an endless mixture of elements, some of 
 which have already been remarked on. Into 
 this tangle we need not enter again. We 
 may take a leap forward to the first coherent 
 and successful new beginnings of a political 
 freedom consistent with civilisation. 
 
 For some time, the force that promoted 
 
84 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 renascent culture was that of new-formed 
 monarchy. A largely conceived attempt was 
 made in the West to revive the Empire as a 
 controlling power over national kings, but 
 this never counted as much more than an 
 ideal. The new type of civilisation to be 
 evolved depended essentially on the indepen- 
 dent nationalities that were growing up in the 
 time of confusion that followed the wreck of 
 the old Western Empire. The unification of 
 these within themselves depended on a strong 
 central monarchy ; but this met with resis- 
 tance from the feudal aristocracy of chiefs with 
 vassals bound to them by the tie of personal 
 loyalty. Thus feudalism, on one side a 
 graduated system of subjection, had also a 
 side on which it represented freedom. This 
 freedom, however, tended to anarchy ; and 
 naturally, under the conditions, to an oppres- 
 sive anarchy. The feudal noble might strive 
 for independence of the king only to establish 
 an unrestricted tyranny in his own domain. 
 The king, by putting himself on the side of 
 the commonalty against the nobles, could 
 usually in the long run gain the supremacy 
 over both. In the meantime, peace and 
 security of life were promoted. On the 
 Continent this was the normal process. 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 85 
 
 Coincidently, therefore, with the revival of 
 culture, a new impulse was given to abso- 
 lutism. What checked this process, and at 
 length reversed it, was mainly the exceptional 
 course of things in England. 
 
 While allowing much for circumstances, 
 such as the comparatively early unification 
 brought about by the Norman Conquest, and 
 the greater liberty to make experiments given 
 by the insular position of England, we may 
 still claim something for national character. 
 This is allowed by Continental historians. 
 Edward Meyer, for example, points out that 
 the relative success of Athens and of England 
 in finding a way out of a political crisis is due 
 to a certain moderation of temper common to 
 all classes. In virtue of this, political factions 
 have not assumed the extreme ferocity that 
 has been seen in some other States, both 
 ancient and modern. There is something of 
 " give and take " ; no class stands out to the 
 last for privilege on the one side or revolution 
 on the other ; and this is not due to want of 
 spirit, but to an element of fairness. Thus in 
 England in the thirteenth century, when the 
 first groundwork of the national character had 
 been laid, nobles and commons could combine 
 to restrict the royal power. 
 
86 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 This is quite rightly regarded as the new 
 birth of European freedom. To make light of 
 Magna Charta from some present-day point of 
 view is a pseudo-democratic fallacy. Because 
 the aristocracy was careful to maintain first 
 its own privileges against the king, it does 
 not follow that even slight concessions to 
 popular claims were of no value. We cannot 
 expect a general declaration of the rights of 
 man in 1215, nor even much later. The mere 
 verbal recognition that in some respects all 
 freemen were to be treated alike was an 
 immense gain. And, whether it is political 
 or intellectual liberty that is in question, the 
 freedom of a few is better than the freedom of 
 none. The end, of course, is not, in either 
 case, that there should be a small body of 
 freemen, with the mass of the community in 
 civil or spiritual servitude ; but this, as a 
 temporary state, is better than universal 
 bondage. 
 
 For the purpose of a general view it is not 
 necessary to follow out in detail the process 
 by which, from the thirteenth century onward, 
 the Commons in Parliament gradually made 
 their power felt in the State. The exigencies 
 of the kings from time to time brought them 
 to develop constitutionalism. Sometimes the 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 87 
 
 paramount need of putting an end to feudal 
 anarchy led to a kind of temporary absolutism 
 with popular support. Parliamentary institu- 
 tions, in the meantime, were not suppressed. 
 Thus they could spring into active life again 
 as soon as a serious attempt was made to 
 establish an absolute monarchy on principle. 
 The decisive contest was postponed to the 
 seventeenth century. In the end the result 
 was a compromise. The constitution adopted 
 was a " limited monarchy," already formulated 
 in the fifteenth century as the English type. 
 The effective government during most of the 
 eighteenth century was by the aristocracy. 
 Hence England in that period was classified 
 by Continental observers, not as properly a 
 monarchy (for the type of this on the Conti- 
 nent had now become absolutism), but as 
 an "aristocratic republic." With temporary 
 revivals of monarchical sentiment, the drift 
 since then has been to a more adequate expres- 
 sion of representative democracy, though the 
 constitution still remains mixed. The result 
 of the whole movement is that, through the 
 slowly evolved device of choosing deputies, a 
 self-governing nation is now as clearly defined 
 a political unity as a self-governing city was 
 in antiquity. 
 
88 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 In England itself the new republican polity 
 may be said to have remained implicit. 
 Royalist forms are still used in the machinery 
 of government. In America and France the 
 type of the explicit republic has been reached. 
 Towards both of these developments English 
 ideas essentially contributed, though they did 
 not act alone. To understand their begin- 
 nings we must go back for a moment, and 
 indicate the factors that combined, in the 
 transition to modern Europe, to revive poli- 
 tical freedom, not simply as a fact, but as an 
 ideal. 
 
 Of course, it was not in England alone 
 that endeavours had been made to preserve 
 freedom in the Middle Ages ; but, at the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century, it 
 appeared as if, with the newly-acquired 
 stability of the State, absolutism was to 
 triumph everywhere. In England itself, 
 great men thought the obstacles in its way 
 relics of a more or less barbaric past. The 
 best thing, in their opinion, was that a 
 monarch, concentrating the sovereign power 
 in himself, should choose intelligent servants 
 to administer the affairs of the nation for the 
 public good. This was the conviction of 
 Bacon, as it was afterwards of Hobbes. 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 89 
 
 Here, however, the national genius, or what- 
 ever we like to call it, was better inspired 
 than the highest individual genius, at least 
 of a philosophic kind. Neither popular nor 
 aristocratic feeling was really in favour of 
 absolute monarchy. There was among the 
 gentry a diffused admiration testified to by 
 Hobbes for the republican polities of anti- 
 quity. Again, the Jewish and Christian Scrip- 
 tures, which had now become, through the 
 Reformation, the most powerful element in 
 general culture, seemed to point to a theocracy 
 different in kind from a tyranny of prelates 
 centring in a king by divine right. The 
 view, indeed, is held that Josephus, who 
 invented the term to describe for Greek and 
 Roman readers the polity of the Jews, had 
 in mind an ideal of Puritan theocracy, and 
 not a system of social direction by priests. 
 To this last the term has come to be applied 
 perhaps most frequently. Thus it has become 
 an equivalent of the more scientific term 
 " hierocracy." The Puritan theocratic ideal, 
 although when it attains power it tends to 
 coincide with the hierocratic form, means 
 something different. It is primarily hostile 
 to a hierarchy, social or spiritual ; claiming 
 as it does for each individual believer in the 
 
90 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 true religion direct inspiration from God. 
 When confronted with a State or Church that 
 gives out commands against the individual 
 conscience, it becomes a principle of insur- 
 gence. Hence some have taken it to be the 
 primal source of modern political liberty. 
 This, indeed, is going too far. Its part in 
 the struggle for freedom was mainly that of 
 an emotional revolt. It suggested no work- 
 able form of institutions by which freedom 
 could be preserved. Still it must count, along 
 with the attraction exercised by classical 
 republicanism, as an element in the move- 
 ment. Without the preservation and develop- 
 ment of old Teutonic institutions, however, 
 Scripturalism and Classicism together would 
 probably have failed to check the reduction of 
 the whole West under a neo-Latin absolutism. 
 All the forces united were not too much ; but 
 the essential thing was that native elements, 
 at once vital and formative, were there, and 
 only needed stimulation to bring about a new 
 growth. 
 
 After the decision of the contest in England, 
 the principal factors for the rest of Europe 
 were the English constitutional development 
 itself, and the political and legal ideas of 
 antiquity, which, among theorists, had been 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 91 
 
 active all along. In the eighteenth century 
 insurgent theocracy practically ceased to 
 count. The extension and logical precision 
 given by French thinkers to claims first 
 upheld as privileges inherited by the natives 
 of a particular country has been made a 
 ground both of praise and of blame to the 
 French mind. No doubt, there was in all this 
 something that depended on a special aptitude 
 for logic and clearness ; but the intellectual 
 modification was, on the whole, that which 
 belongs necessarily to any progressive trans- 
 formation of ideas in a new social medium. 
 Accidental complexities are lost while the 
 essence is preserved. Thus, if the ideas are 
 vital, they put forth new power. Cases might 
 be shown in which Englishmen have simpli- 
 fied and logically developed the discoveries 
 of Frenchmen. If any blame is due, it is 
 certainly not to those who carry further either 
 speculative or practical ideas, but to those 
 who let them sink into mere tradition. That 
 this was not the fate of English ideas in 
 politics was due, so far as theory was con- 
 cerned, mainly to French thinkers ; and, in 
 practice, first to the American War of 
 Independence and then to the French Revolu- 
 tion. Since those events it has become 
 
92 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 clearer and clearer that the notion of the 
 Republic in the generalised sense is bounded 
 by no limits of nationality whatever. 
 
 The type of the self-governing national 
 State having been determined, the question 
 arises whether any form of polity transcending 
 this can be perceived in process of growth. 
 From the hints already given it must be 
 clear that I do not find either in an 
 empire or in a federation anything of this 
 kind. The national State remains, so far as 
 can be seen, the highest collective form taken 
 by humanity. The supreme political problem 
 now is to develop it as the basis for the best 
 individual life. A world-State is no true end. 
 The ideal as regards the relations between 
 single States is the development of a higher 
 form of international ethics. This must come 
 from the extension of ethical precepts already 
 recognised within the State. Alliances for 
 the preservation of peace within a limited 
 range may be useful towards this. They 
 might conceivably extend themselves to what 
 Kant described as a " federation " of all 
 States, for this meant only a systematic 
 limitation on mutual aggression. In its dis- 
 tinctive sense, federalism is an inferior 
 political form, restricting the self-development 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 93 
 
 both of the parts and of the whole. The true 
 line of advance differs in different cases, 
 according to the degree of heterogeneity of the 
 parts. In Austria, it is probably separation 
 of the nationalities ; in the American Union, 
 reduction of the separate States to the rank of 
 provinces. Greater unification than could be 
 conceived in antiquity, except under a 
 monarch, has of course been facilitated by the 
 new rapidity in means of intercourse. This, 
 combined with the representative system, may 
 make it possible to bring all America north 
 of Mexico under two unitary republics. To 
 become independent commonwealths is, from 
 the present point of view, the ultimate destiny 
 of all the self-governing colonies now included 
 in the British Empire. Here in particular 
 federation is chimerical, except in the form of 
 a permanent alliance to keep the peace. Any 
 effective consultation either of England by the 
 Colonies, or of the Colonies by England, 
 regarding internal politics would fetter the 
 development of both. Short of formal 
 independence, the best system is probably 
 that which exists. The Colonies are sub- 
 stantially independent, though there is a 
 rarely exercised power of veto on their 
 legislation by the central Government. Any 
 
94 FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 
 
 attempted change in the direction of estab- 
 lishing a greater collective unity would 
 involve the introduction of something in the 
 nature of a written constitution. Such a 
 fixation of an order already extremely complex 
 would mean a fatal loss of plasticity. 
 
 In the case of India, as of the British 
 Colonies, history has brought about an 
 exceptionally fortunate result. Its geo- 
 graphical remoteness has made the efficient 
 government of an Oriental empire possible 
 without necessitating any modification in the 
 government of England itself. Thus English 
 political institutions appear safe against going 
 the way of Roman institutions, in which 
 finally inner development of civilisation had 
 to be sacrificed to a problem of expansion and 
 diffusion. Had England and India been in 
 geographical proximity, it is clear that one of 
 the two things, empire or democracy, would 
 have had to give place to the other. As it is, 
 the two are quite compatible. The latter will 
 probably in the end make plain the moral 
 duty of promoting the internal political 
 development of India and its final, if distant, 
 emancipation from tutelage. 
 
 Thus the ideal is a system of free national 
 States, each developing within itself, and all 
 
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN REPUBLIC 95 
 
 in contact with the rest for purposes of culture, 
 but none aspiring to universal dominion. 
 The outlines of many have already been 
 determined by historic circumstances ; there 
 is no need for a carving out such as Comte 
 imagined. This, indeed, in his scheme was a 
 necessity, for above the State he placed as a 
 higher organism the " Church of Humanity." 
 If we recognise no organised spiritual power 
 above the State, then we naturally cleave to 
 the historic unities England, France, Italy, 
 Germany with which strong emotions of 
 patriotism are already associated. Above 
 these, indeed, there is Humanity ; but 
 Humanity kingless and priestless, not con- 
 centrated in a new hierarchy and a sovereign 
 pontiff : 
 
 Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, 
 Whose nature is its own divine control. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 
 
 PROVISIONALLY, we may assume that within 
 the State the ground-principle must be legal 
 equality, the principle of discrimination per- 
 sonal merit. How does this affect the existing 
 political order generally, and more especially 
 that of our own country ? 
 
 It might seem to exclude from the first all 
 heredity of functions recognised by law. A 
 brief discussion may, nevertheless, be devoted 
 to the portions of the constitution in which 
 this heredity has hitherto maintained itself. 
 
 First, then, is the ideal constitution neces- 
 sarily an explicit republic, or may there be a 
 titular monarch? The form of State that is now 
 republican only implicitly, it might be argued, 
 can rank among the permanent forms pro- 
 vided the hereditary king is made ostensibly 
 as well as really the appointed centre of the 
 State, deriving the right to this position from 
 the State itself, and not from an order of ideas 
 inconsistent with any genuine republican 
 96 
 
POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 97 
 
 ethics. The notion, for example, that there 
 is a supreme duty of obedience to the 
 command of another person, whose position 
 has been fixed in advance, belongs wholly to 
 the ethical system that has already been 
 rejected. Command and obedience may exist 
 in an ideal order, but they must be capable of 
 general deduction from rational principles. 
 The point is not that every particular 
 command, whether of the law or of a person, 
 should be examined before it is acted on. 
 This would be obviously absurd in the 
 relation between parents and children, and 
 impracticable in some other social relations, 
 such as that of a military subordinate to his 
 superior officer. All that is meant is that, to 
 any rational inquirer, it should be possible to 
 show the necessity of command and obedience 
 in these cases by deduction from the nature of 
 the order to which it belongs. Reason must 
 be finally the judge. Obedience without 
 examination can only fill a minor place within 
 a system of which the supreme principle is 
 rational devotion to an end. That form of 
 monarchy which makes it a paramount duty 
 to obey a person raised above the rest intrinsi- 
 cally or by divine decree is thus necessarily 
 
 excluded. Can European monarchy in any 
 
 H 
 
98 POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 
 
 form be upheld permanently on these prin- 
 ciples ? 
 
 Something may be fairly said on behalf of 
 it. Where there is no hereditary monarchy, 
 while for the rest there is a parliamentary 
 system like that of England, with a Prime 
 Minister at its head who is the leader of a 
 party, a President above parties is still needed 
 as a formal centre. Again, under a system in 
 which the President is practically elected, not 
 by a parliamentary choice express or implied, 
 but by a direct popular vote, he has something 
 more of monarchic power than most European 
 monarchs ; and yet this power definitely 
 depends on the general will. Why should 
 not the general will fix the hereditary form of 
 presidency as the most convenient? Histori- 
 cally, it may be further contended on behalf 
 of European monarchy, so far as it is of the 
 constitutional type, this mode of kingship 
 arose as a limited rule of chiefs over freemen. 
 Thus it was the real beginning of the 
 republican polity. And it has long served 
 as a rallying-point to enable national patriotism 
 to rise above local and particular loyalties. 
 May it not still furnish an imaginative aid to 
 the more abstract sentiment of devotion to 
 the State ? Of course, where it has gone, no 
 
POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 99 
 
 one imbued with the republican ideal would 
 think of restoring it ; but, where it exists, 
 ought we not to desire that it should remain ? 
 
 Against a definitely anti-monarchic move- 
 ment without special grounds, these argu- 
 ments seem valid. And where the State is 
 still imperfectly unified, as in Italy, while the 
 monarchy stands against sacerdotal claims 
 and a possible lapse into federalism, there 
 are even special grounds for maintaining it 
 against attack. Yet the basis of monarchic 
 forms in Europe has become so immersed in 
 the Catholic-feudal order through which it 
 has been the fate of this part of the world to 
 pass, that its final preservation anywhere 
 does not seem consistent with the ideal 
 political order. In England, in particular, 
 the Court is the centre of a social hierarchy 
 which now presents itself as one of the most 
 irrationally complex types imaginable. Adop- 
 tion of the explicitly republican form sooner 
 or later appears necessary to effect any great 
 simplification of this. What we may hope 
 for is such an advance of general feeling that 
 a king and people should agree to end heredi- 
 tary monarchy at a certain date. In a modern 
 nation, as in an ancient city, if all reflective- 
 ness does not die out under the growing 
 
ioo POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 
 
 commercial stress of life, with its profoundly 
 reactionary influence, the time must arrive 
 when the consecrated separateness of a single 
 person and the accompanying etiquette shall 
 have become for the participators too obsolete 
 to be kept up even as a form. 
 
 The question about the existing aristocratic 
 element in the State confronts us in England 
 nearly, but not quite, in the same way. Here- 
 ditary legislative functions already appear 
 more anomalous than the reserved power of 
 an hereditary monarch, precisely because they 
 may still be seen in action. Historically, 
 on the other hand, even more can with justice 
 be said for the English aristocracy than for 
 the monarchy. While the monarchy held the 
 State together, the aristocracy prevented the 
 loss of liberty without destroying the unifica- 
 tion achieved. In the Middle Ages the barons 
 sought the aid of the people to limit the royal 
 power ; and in the seventeenth century the 
 movement against absolutism was brought to 
 a successful close by aristocratic leaders. The 
 successors of these in the eighteenth century 
 tended to be in personal opinion republicans 
 and deists. We can only regret that in the 
 reigns of the first two Georges, and before 
 the reaction came under George III., they did 
 
POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 101 
 
 not work for the gradual supersession of 
 formal monarchy. They were content, how- 
 ever, to let monarchical and ecclesiastical 
 ideals sleep. Here, again, the Catholic-feudal 
 past has been inexpugnable. When the 
 nobility of France, which had ceased to be 
 an aristocracy in the political sense, was over- 
 thrown, along with the absolute monarchy of 
 which it had become an appendage, reaction 
 against " the ideas of the eighteenth century " 
 became intense in the upper class of England, 
 as of all Europe. And, of course, civic 
 republicanism offered nothing congenial to 
 the ennobled plutocrats of the nineteenth 
 century. Quaint and picturesque royalism 
 and feudalism, with a colouring of High 
 Church theology, were superseding, for those 
 to whom the interests of property were 
 supreme, all that savoured of the hated 
 French Revolution and the new democracy 
 it had let loose. This reaction has more and 
 more consolidated itself around the exceptional 
 political position of the peerage. 
 
 The existence of hereditary titles is a minor 
 question. Whether legally abolished or not, 
 they will no doubt remain in use so long as 
 the sentiment to which they appeal has its 
 roots in historic Christendom. But the roots 
 
102 POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 
 
 may be cut. So far as republican France is 
 concerned, this stage has in part been already 
 attained. Frenchmen of no special education, 
 it could be said some time ago, find transla- 
 tions of the Greek and Roman classics actually 
 more intelligible than those among their own 
 classics that presuppose the hierarchic order 
 of the court of Louis XIV. 
 
 For us the practical question is, of course, 
 the continuance or discontinuance of the 
 House of Lords. And first it may be asked 
 whether a Second Chamber is necessary at 
 all. Is not the representative Chamber suffi- 
 cient? From the point of view of a Greek 
 democracy, it already contains an "aristo- 
 cratic " element. Its members are chosen by 
 election, and not by lot, and therefore tend to 
 be distinguished in some way above the mass 
 of their constituents. This is a necessary con- 
 sequence of the organisation of democracy in 
 a modern national State, since a meeting of the 
 whole body of citizens is physically impossible. 
 No Parliament can be a " public meeting " in 
 the sense in which the Athenian Assembly 
 was. Will not the House of Commons, then, 
 being in this sense of aristocratic constitution 
 yet representative of the whole people, suffice 
 as the sovereign power in the State ? 
 
POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 103 
 
 Modern experience seems to be against 
 this. In the most advanced democracies 
 some kind of senatorial element has had to 
 be introduced. Considered rationally, it 
 seems to be needed at once for keeping back 
 ill-considered innovations and for checking 
 reaction. But this will not serve as a defence 
 of the existing House of Lords. In it the 
 bias to reaction has become increasingly 
 predominant. What should characterise a 
 Senate is trained intelligence in maturity ; 
 but as a body the members of the House of 
 Lords are not of trained political intelligence. 
 The effect of reforms in detail might be (as 
 is said) to make it more efficient as a support 
 of the sectional interests that appeal to the 
 mass of its members. What is needed, there- 
 fore, is direct substitution of a new Second 
 Chamber for the existing one. The best 
 suggestion is one that I have seen put forward 
 hypothetically, I do not now remember where. 
 The actual Privy Council, at present function- 
 less as such, it was observed, would make a 
 very good Senate. Arguments were not given, 
 but they are obvious. For the Privy Council 
 would usually contain an approximately equal 
 number of members representing both political 
 parties. These would be the men who had held 
 
io 4 POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 
 
 the highest offices in the State. Most of the 
 trained intelligence in the existing House of 
 Lords would be included among them. The 
 distinguished outsiders admitted from time to 
 time would belong precisely to the class of 
 minds that ought to find place in an ideal 
 Senate. For when they are men of science or 
 letters they are such as have also taken part 
 in practical administrative work. And, of 
 course, intelligence in a political body should 
 not be of a purely theoretical kind, but should 
 be that which is capable of application to 
 detailed business. 
 
 Such proposals have reference to the time 
 when something more approximating to an 
 ideal order exists. As a temporary measure, 
 with a view to carrying through rapid 
 changes, simple suspension of the veto 
 exercised by the House of Lords may become 
 necessary. We are not at present concerned, 
 however, with questions of what has been 
 called " revolutionary right " that is, with 
 temporary measures of an extra-legal and 
 extra-constitutional character but with the 
 general outline of the series of modifications in 
 the existing political order which would make 
 it explicitly conform to the republican ideal. 
 
 As the result, we arrive at a system still 
 
POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 105 
 
 containing all the elements of the "mixed 
 government" from which Western communi- 
 ties set out. This has been shown already by 
 political thinkers, who have observed that 
 the electorate is the democratic element ; that 
 the representatives, at one or more removes, 
 are an aristocratic element ; and that there is 
 a monarchical element in the fact that finally 
 the decision as to the action to be taken rests 
 with a single person, the Prime Minister or 
 the President. What has disappeared is 
 heredity of functions. 
 
 To complete the outline, one or two 
 questions about the electorate and the 
 mechanism of elections must be discussed, 
 however slightly. We can hardly avoid, 
 first, the question whether, in a complete 
 democracy, women ought to possess the 
 franchise. If we assume as I think we 
 must that in all other respects the two sexes 
 are entitled in justice to equal rights, it does 
 not seem possible to deny this in the long 
 run. The only ground of objection would be 
 the inferior political competence of women. 
 Some philosophers have taken this ground. 
 There is a curious coincidence here between 
 Proclus and Spencer. Proclus very ingeni- 
 ously defends Plato's exclusion of women 
 
io6 POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 
 
 from political power in the Laws, after he had 
 recognised their equal title in the Republic, by 
 the difference in the economic order of society 
 in the two cases. Women, says Proclus, 
 have less public spirit and more relative 
 regard for private interests than men. Thus, 
 where there is a system of communism 
 where, consequently, there are no private and 
 domestic interests there is no reason why 
 they should not take part in the government. 
 Where private property is recognised, as it 
 is in the Laws, they are rightly excluded. 
 Spencer, in much the same way, argues that 
 their influence in politics would be deterio- 
 rating because they are relatively deficient in 
 sense of justice and power of abstract thought. 
 But, of course, every rational person would 
 admit that in these respects many women are 
 superior to most men. It is, therefore, only 
 a question of degree. Is there here a 
 sufficient ground for the exclusion of one 
 whole sex? It would certainly be an 
 invidious ground ; and there is great 
 plausibility in Mill's argument that, so far 
 as such a difference really exists, it is due to 
 circumstances. To some extent the circum- 
 stances have already been changed by the 
 nearer approach to equality of education, and 
 
POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 107 
 
 to legal recognition of equal rights generally. 
 That most women's occupations are normally 
 domestic does not seem to affect the question. 
 Domestic occupations cannot be more narrow- 
 ing than specialised machine-industry or 
 subordinate commercial employment. And, 
 if it is argued that these employments are 
 mentally enlarging, it may be replied that 
 many women share in them. Hence, also, 
 they have a special interest in their public 
 regulation. If in some countries women 
 are more susceptible to clerical influence, 
 exercised in the interests of corporations 
 hostile to the State, this is in great measure 
 the fault of men, who are themselves 
 responsible for maintaining the convention 
 that has separated the sexes as regards the 
 application of reason to religion. Any change 
 tending to make conventional acquiescence 
 in superstition a visible danger would be 
 beneficent. 
 
 For choosing representatives, the system 
 known as Proportional Representation is now 
 advocated, on the ground that it would give a 
 more exact picture of the state of opinion in 
 the electorate. If this were the primary aim 
 of a representative assembly, the argument 
 would be conclusive. Nothing could then be 
 
io8 POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 
 
 more absurd than the immense over-represen- 
 tation of the party that is for the time being 
 in the majority. If, however, the end of 
 parliamentary government is effective State- 
 action in accordance with the general will, 
 then it seems to me that proportional repre- 
 sentation must be rejected. The more 
 diffused ability to take part in detailed political 
 discussion has brought with it increased 
 facilities for the checking of legislation by 
 parliamentary minorities. Now, in the 
 present system, wherein each town or district 
 sends a member representing the local 
 majority, the great numerical preponderance 
 given to what may be a relatively small 
 majority all over the country partly counter- 
 acts this weakness of democratic government. 
 That one of the two parties is in the majority 
 that its policy has received the assent of 
 the constituencies is made plainly visible. 
 Obstruction to new legislation can be 
 denounced with popular effect as an attempt 
 to thwart the declared will of the country. 
 This, therefore, has a better chance of being 
 carried out. What is needed for action, in 
 short, is an artificial simplification of political 
 issues and divisions of opinion, not the 
 reproduction of these in the House of 
 
POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 109 
 
 Commons in all their complexity. Of course, 
 if anyone advocates proportional representa- 
 tion as an indirect means of paralysing State- 
 action, so that the free play of individual 
 interests may evolve an unlimited industrial 
 plutocracy, the present argument will seem to 
 him to tell in its favour. 
 
 Another device which those who desire 
 State-action will reject, on reflection, is the 
 Referendum. This exists in some modern 
 democracies, and it has been proposed to 
 introduce it into England. Let any suffi- 
 ciently large group, under certain conditions, 
 be able to call for a mass vote from the 
 constituencies on the particular measure 
 before Parliament. This, it is said, would be 
 an appeal to the real " sovereign " behind all 
 the constitutional mechanism. Thus it might 
 be regarded as a realisation of " direct demo- 
 cracy " under modern conditions. It could no 
 longer be said that an ancient State was more 
 democratic in the power of directly affirming 
 its will than a modern State. The reply is 
 that the constant possibility of an appeal of 
 this kind would tell against an important 
 though incidental good result of the represen- 
 tative system. In this, as has been pointed 
 out, there is an element of " aristocracy " 
 
no POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 
 
 in the proper sense. The average repre- 
 sentative is, in intellect and training, 
 superior to the bulk of his constituents. He 
 is elected, so far as agreement of opinion 
 determines his election, on certain broad 
 questions. Details of legislation are neces- 
 sarily, in some part, left to his judgment. 
 Consequently, many changes that commend 
 themselves to intelligent minds, but arouse 
 little emotion, can be silently carried through. 
 If, however, a direct appeal to the country on 
 such changes were rendered easy by a new 
 mechanism, prejudices and wakeful " vested 
 interests " would constantly see their oppor- 
 tunity, and would often succeed in playing on 
 the latent popular feeling against change. 
 Illustrations of the possibilities can easily be 
 given. Suppose the Referendum had been a 
 portion of the British Constitution in the 
 middle of the eighteenth century. What 
 would have been the chances of bringing the 
 reformed calendar into use ? Suppose that in 
 the not too near future a Bill should be 
 brought into Parliament making the metric 
 system of weights and measures compulsory, 
 and reforming the coinage in accordance 
 with it. Would not the absence of the 
 Referendum very much increase its chances ? 
 
POLITICAL CONSTITUTION 
 
 Of all devices of this kind, the worst would 
 be the permission of an appeal to localities to 
 sanction or reject for themselves some piece of 
 general legislation : that is to say, if we 
 desire a strong, unified State, capable of rapid 
 and effective action. Why we should desire 
 this will appear from the next chapter. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 WHATEVER changes may be proposed in the 
 political order, there is no State in Europe 
 entitled in the most general sense to the name 
 of liberal that is not in advance of the social, 
 and in particular the economic, order over 
 which it presides. For the form of the State, 
 in the liberal nations, is the result of conscious 
 efforts after freedom and justice, with the 
 equality they suppose ; whereas modern 
 society combines with the surviving in- 
 equalities of feudalism the new inequalities 
 of capitalist industrialism. Now, the Catholic- 
 feudal order was a system of graduated 
 command and obedience, founded on violence 
 and consecrated by falsehood. At its best, it 
 was mitigated by consideration for inferiors 
 on the one side, and by deference to superiors 
 on the other. The effect of modern indus- 
 trialism has been to preserve the form of the 
 system and to destroy its mitigations, substi- 
 tuting for these a pure anarchy of self-interest. 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 SOCIAL ORDER 113 
 
 To this extent we must agree with the nine- 
 teenth-century prophets who have denounced 
 it from the point of view of an idealised past. 
 Where those prophets were wrong was in 
 ascribing its evils to the modern political 
 revolutions that had dethroned the old autho- 
 rities, and were slowly dissipating the rever- 
 ence for the hierarchy of fixed and inherited 
 ranks. For, worse in some respects though 
 the industrial anarchy may have been, we 
 cannot find in the old order any true ideal of 
 human relationships as they ought to be. 
 
 In reality, it is the concentration of new 
 wealth that has in great part nullified the 
 beneficent effect of political changes. If 
 differences of fortune had not been immensely 
 increased through the possibilities thrown 
 open by the application of science and 
 invention to industry, the problem of the 
 modern State would have been much less 
 difficult and complex. Territorial privileges 
 inherited from feudalism having been swept 
 away, and no new great contrasts of wealth 
 and poverty introduced, the system of free 
 contract, with little State-interference to limit 
 the kinds of contract permissible, would have 
 been fairly workable as the basis of a liberal 
 State. But the expectations of "individualist" 
 
ii4 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 Liberalism have been falsified by the advent 
 of industrial plutocracy. The indirect advan- 
 tage of this may have been, by the problems 
 it has raised, to overthrow an inadequate 
 conception of the State. That the State 
 should take for its task simply to enforce 
 contracts freely made between parties regarded 
 as equal was undoubtedly an advance on the 
 conception of it as machinery for supporting 
 the splendour of a privileged order on the toil 
 of a subjected mass. That it should be 
 neutral with regard to speculative opinions 
 was similarly an advance on the conception of 
 it as the "secular arm " in relation to the self- 
 styled "spiritual power," in the visible form of 
 a corporation of persecuting hierarchs appeal- 
 ing to an invisible head whose will they 
 claimed to know. Yet this was not the end. 
 The end is to return to the classical conception 
 of the State, according to which it exists to 
 realise justice in every sense, and not merely 
 in one simplified aspect. Thus conceived, it 
 is itself the "spiritual power," so far as there 
 is any organised spiritual power at all. Or, if 
 we like, we may say that the true spiritual 
 power is that of individual thought, of which 
 the elements are selected by the State for 
 gradual realisation. 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 115 
 
 According to this view, the chief practical 
 problem now is, under the influence of ideas, 
 to modify by State-action the type of society 
 which we have inherited, and the type of 
 economic order that has been allowed to grow 
 up at haphazard. Thus the field is thrown 
 open for a system so radically different from 
 the present order as Socialism. If this, in 
 any of its forms, can be shown to be more 
 rational, then the aim of the State ought to be 
 to bring it into being. Even against revolu- 
 tionary methods, certainly no tenderness or 
 reverence for the old order could any longer 
 stand in the way. So far as the social 
 hierarchy under which we live is not merely 
 endured as the result of impersonal forces, but 
 rests on sentiment, that sentiment has become 
 almost purely base. Higher sentiments of a 
 social kind can and do exist, but they have 
 reference to an ideal ethical and political order 
 that is striving to be, or to that in the past 
 which prepared for it. From the graded 
 hierarchy of rank and wealth as it exists they 
 are completely alienated. 
 
 Thus all feeling against Socialism from 
 attachment to the present order may be set 
 aside. The real arguments against it are, 
 that in suppressing private property it would 
 
ii6 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 as a direct consequence suppress liberty ; and 
 that the type of order it involves is, after all, 
 merely a new kind of industrial State. The 
 difference of this from an industrial plutocracy 
 would be, apart from the relative disappear- 
 ance of inequality, all for the worse. For, 
 being a more systematised industrialism, it 
 would suppress the happy accidents through 
 which culture is still promoted in a disin- 
 terested manner. In a society of which the 
 principle is anarchical competition, no doubt 
 the possibility of showing any other kind of 
 power depends more and more on the posses- 
 sion of a basis of commercial or industrial 
 faculty. Its ethical standard was formulated 
 by one of the few speculative advocates of 
 plutocracy that everyone ought to be able 
 to become a philistine if need be. But our 
 actual society contains elements of very 
 various historical origin. And plutocracy, 
 needing as it does for itself private property 
 and inheritance, cannot propose to efface the 
 accidental results of earlier stages of social 
 existence. Hence, as things are, some are 
 free to do disinterested work from the begin- 
 ning. Social democracy, by its levelling 
 principle, would submit all without exception 
 to the industrial test. Its equality, too, in the 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 117 
 
 long run, could not be absolute. Industrial 
 directors would be needed ; and these, how- 
 ever chosen, would form a hierarchy. Even 
 were material rewards equalised, there would 
 be grades of authority and power. It is true 
 that, if the principle of specialising were 
 admitted, some persons might be set apart to 
 do work not directly industrial ; but the con- 
 ditions for this would be less free than in our 
 present society. For the type of the theoretic 
 life as it exists has been fixed by the man of 
 leisure choosing to devote himself to pursuits 
 for which he has a strong bent. This is the 
 model even when the particular conditions are 
 different. Under a system where all are 
 paid servants of the State, the model 
 for everything must be the life of employ- 
 ment externally fixed. The ethical ideal in 
 relation to other persons, according to Kant, 
 is to treat them always as ends for themselves, 
 and never as mere means. By the industrial 
 socialistic State this ideal would be exactly 
 reversed. 
 
 As may be seen, the arguments against 
 Socialism from the points of view of culture 
 and of freedom tend to coalesce. We may 
 put the whole briefly thus. The rulers in 
 the State, according to the very principle 
 
n8 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 of the system, would be its industrial 
 directors ; hence the ideals of the State would 
 be more, and not less, stringently commercial 
 than they are now. The individual would 
 be rigorously a portion of the industrial 
 mechanism. His essence would be conceived 
 as efficiency of function in relation to this. 
 
 What, then, becomes of equality if we reject 
 Socialism? The reply is that we must modify 
 the cruder ideal of equality. With Aristotle, 
 we must say that in some respects human 
 beings are entitled to be treated all alike ; in 
 some respects there ought to be difference of 
 treatment. " Democratic " must be qualified 
 with "aristocratic" justice. This means that 
 differences of personal merit must be recog- 
 nised as the ground for proportionate differ- 
 ences of treatment within certain limits. For 
 Plato and Aristotle, this was in theory the 
 meaning of aristocracy. Differences of treat- 
 ment according to inherited rank or wealth 
 they called " oligarchic." Aristotle, it is true, 
 did not himself recognise that all men what- 
 ever ought to be treated alike as not reducible 
 to slavery ; but this does not affect the theo- 
 retical soundness of his position about justice, 
 which was generalised from relations among 
 freemen. It is important to note that the 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 119 
 
 same general position is recognised in the 
 French Declarations of Rights of 1789 and 
 X 793 where discrimination according to 
 " virtues and talents " is laid down as the 
 principle of selection for public employments. 
 Some socialistic thinkers may, on meta- 
 physical grounds express or implied, object 
 wholly to this. There is, in reality, they may 
 say, no such thing as personal merit, or 
 none that is ascertainable. The acquirements 
 called virtues, whether moral or intellectual, 
 depend on inherited dispositions ; and these 
 are an affair of fortune as much as inherited 
 wealth. The position, indeed, is oftener 
 applied in the other direction. The criminal, 
 for example, is declared to be a victim of 
 heredity or bad surroundings, as in some 
 sense he may be. But, of course, logic 
 requires the application equally in both 
 directions. The general doctrine, though 
 often held by materialists, seems to imply 
 the hypothesis of a colourless soul, alike in 
 all individuals, the victim of fate in one case, 
 and the recipient of a kind of "grace" in others. 
 Or, again, from a different point of view, it 
 may be said that there is personal merit, but 
 that for fellow-men it is unknowable. It is, 
 ultimately, always moral ; and it depends on 
 
120 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 an act of undetermined freewill, overcoming 
 the nature or circumstances of the agent. No 
 one can judge of this but the agent himself ; 
 or perhaps not even he, but only God. Hence 
 from either of these points of view the 
 State or human justice must regard no one as 
 really entitled either to blame or praise, but 
 must distribute pleasure and pain benevolently, 
 so as to make all as happy as their circum- 
 stances or individual nature will permit. If 
 there is any difference, more care ought to be 
 devoted to the bad and stupid, because they 
 are unfortunate, and need more painstaking 
 to prevent their falling too far below the 
 average level. 
 
 A doctrine of this kind has furnished the 
 theoretical basis for much practical argument 
 by social reformers. Whatever we may think 
 of it in the last resort, it stands for some 
 elements of empirical truth. Metaphysically, 
 the extreme inferences could be escaped by 
 supposing intrinsic differences in souls. 
 Actions and acquirements thus go back, not 
 wholly to something extrinsic, but in part to 
 a difference that is the basis of personality. 
 And a personality cannot be treated as the 
 victim of itself. In any case, for society or 
 the State no question arises of determining 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 121 
 
 merit or demerit in relation to the universe. 
 This conceded, it seems reasonable, on the 
 whole, that general opinion, without explicit 
 theory on the final question, should, from a 
 common-sense point of view, recognise per- 
 sonal merit in the ordinary human sense, 
 which implies no ultimate judgment. And, in 
 this sense, moral and intellectual virtues may 
 be distinguished from what are obviously gifts 
 of fortune as being removable from the person. 
 But this kind of fortune, too, it must be 
 allowed, cannot be wholly eliminated in a 
 state of equality such as is compatible with 
 liberty. Equality thus understood means, 
 primarily, legal equality. There are to be no 
 privileged classes. Any person, in so far as 
 contracting with any other, is to be regarded 
 as an equal, and, within limits, the contract 
 will be enforced. This seems very elemen- 
 tary, though it is the result of a long social 
 process. There have been civilised legal 
 codes in which no such principle of equality 
 was recognised. But with this principle of 
 contractual equality differences come in. 
 Contracts refer to transferable rights, espe- 
 cially of property. Thus, where they are 
 enforced, changed distributions of property 
 are effected. Inequalities of fortune have now 
 
122 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 appeared, if they were not already there. 
 Further, given either legal inheritance or 
 freedom of bequest, the children of the new 
 generation start life with unequal chances. 
 Even if property, on the death of the owner, 
 were simply to revert to the community, the 
 children of richer parents would still have 
 a better chance. And this is inseparable from 
 the kind of equality that the system implies. 
 
 Individualist opponents of Socialism have 
 found in this system, without qualification, 
 the only practicable solution of the question of 
 social justice in general. When the State 
 gives commercially "a fair field and no 
 favour," they say, personal merit tells to its 
 full extent. Any attempt to interfere with 
 free competition under a system of equal 
 contractual rights is an injustice, as depriving 
 the best of their due reward. For those who 
 freely enter into bargains are the proper 
 judges of the value they receive ; and those 
 who gain most by the transaction are obviously 
 the best, according to a judgment from which 
 there can be no legitimate appeal. Then, to 
 reinforce the doctrine already arrived at on 
 this economic basis of " supply and demand," 
 the biological formula of " survival of the 
 fittest" is brought in. In human life, as in 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 123 
 
 nature generally, there is a "struggle for 
 existence." The organisms best adapted for 
 the struggle survive ; so that clearly, if its 
 action is interfered with, there will be survival 
 of the unfit, and the race will deteriorate. 
 Even what looks most like an element of 
 fortune is treated as a fuller realisation of 
 justice. The best that is, those who have 
 gained most are able to give better openings 
 to their children ; and, on the general prin- 
 ciple of heredity, that the best parents have 
 the best offspring, this effects a further 
 improvement in the race. Personal merit is 
 automatically rewarded in each generation ; 
 and, in the succeeding generation, those born 
 with the best natural dispositions have them 
 reinforced by upbringing in the most favour- 
 able circumstances. All that the State can 
 with advantage do is to make sure that this 
 beneficent process of natural selection within 
 the human race shall go on till man, like the 
 older animal races, has become perfectly 
 adapted to his environment. 
 
 I do not attribute this thorough-going 
 optimism to any particular writer ; but it 
 seems a fair representation of the doctrine for 
 which scientific warrant is claimed by journal- 
 istic defenders of the existing order of things. 
 
i2 4 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 At one time the formulae taken out of their 
 context and applied as conjuring charms 
 against revolution were mainly those of the 
 " classical " political economy ; now they 
 come more from evolutionary biology. With 
 the thinkers who elaborated them they stood 
 for important truths ; and perhaps they really 
 mislead no one. Opponents of the present 
 order are not made to relax their attack ; and 
 members of the possessing classes who may 
 have an underlying suspicion that that order 
 is not wholly just will hardly find a sufficient 
 anodyne in the phrases of their champions in 
 the Press. A logical refutation, however, 
 may not be superfluous. 
 
 The most general reply is, of course, the 
 familiar one that, as Spencer himself pointed 
 out, " survival of the fittest " in his formula 
 does not necessarily mean survival of the best. 
 It only means survival of the fittest to survive 
 under given conditions. Thus the argument 
 that personal merit receives due recognition, 
 that the naturally best get the best chance, and 
 so forth, is valid only for those who desire that 
 the present type of society should continue. 
 A corresponding argument against restricting 
 military anarchy by the strong hand of the 
 central power would have been equally valid 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 125 
 
 while that was in being. Those who desire 
 more effective legal control over the com- 
 petitive industrial type quite logically refuse 
 to recognise that the individuals most adapted 
 to it are ideally the best. But, it may be 
 asked, what criterion of good and bad have 
 you save that of biological or sociological 
 adaptation to a really existent, not a merely 
 ideal, order? The reply is that the criterion 
 must be furnished by philosophical reflection 
 on human ends. Are the individuals that 
 survive under such and such conditions those 
 that are capable of what seems to reflective 
 consciousness a worthy human life? In this 
 there is nothing that can be objected to as 
 "transcendental." A similar criterion is 
 capable of application to the lower animals. 
 Some animal races have survived, in condi- 
 tions of great defect or great excess of 
 appropriate food, by becoming of inferior 
 organisation. What, then, is the test of 
 inferiority ? Atrophy or stunting of organs, 
 involving less vivid and less varied conscious- 
 ness. Let us see whether the tendencies 
 (unchecked) of the present economic order are 
 not to something similar ; and let us try to 
 put the case of an apologist. 
 
 Suppose that there exists a capitalist society 
 
126 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 pure and simple, with no check on the kind 
 of contracts between employers and employed. 
 In this society, it must be allowed that the 
 types to survive would not be all identical. 
 There would be variety of a kind. On the 
 one hand, commercial and organising ability 
 would lead to the highest positions. On the 
 other hand, capacity for enduring long hours 
 of toil and reducing physical wants to a 
 minimum would enable masses of labourers 
 to subsist. As machinery became more 
 perfect skilled artisans would be less needed ; 
 but always, between the summit and the base 
 of the social pyramid, there would be profes- 
 sional men of specialised intelligence, able to 
 make themselves serviceable to the capitalist 
 directors. Medicine and the application of 
 science to industry would be of the greatest 
 importance. For indispensable recreation 
 there would be a demand on purveyors of 
 coarse or light amusements. Disinterested 
 culture, an educated admirer of the system 
 might scornfully avow, would scarcely find a 
 place. But is there not full scope for human 
 intellect in making the resources of the planet 
 available for the sustenance of the greatest 
 mass ? The comfort of the middle classes and 
 the luxury of the few are necessary to give the 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 127 
 
 spur to this employment of intellect. In some 
 nearer approach to the completed type, such a 
 defender might admit, with or without regret 
 for the loss, amusements would have to be 
 discountenanced in the interests of " effici- 
 ency." Still, he could point to the genuineness 
 and multiplicity of the virtues required to keep 
 the system in working order. There would be a 
 predominance of well-unified personalities, for 
 no class could afford many subsidiary interests. 
 The very lightness of the recreations, while 
 they remained, would be an evidence of the 
 strenuousness imposed by the normal working 
 of the system. As positive characters marking 
 out the different classes, there would be seen 
 energy and directing power, highly-trained 
 skill, and, at the bottom, the basal industrial 
 qualities of laboriousness and abstinence. It 
 might be hoped that, either by transmission 
 of acquired characters or more slowly by 
 natural selection, genuine castes would be 
 produced. As these were consolidated, dis- 
 content with the order would become more 
 and more evanescent ; so that at length there 
 might be formed a complete moving equi- 
 librium, capable of lasting till the planet 
 ceased to be an abode of animal life. 
 
 Now, admittedly, such a system might 
 
128 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 survive ; it appears to comply with the 
 material conditions. And if to any mind 
 this seems worth while if its ultimate extinc- 
 tion seems anything but a consummation 
 devoutly to be wished there is really no 
 answer. Even in this case, however, the 
 test is not mere survival, but the appeal to 
 reflective consciousness. To some type of 
 mind somewhere a prosperous, efficient, intelli- 
 gent industrial plutocracy must seem a worthy 
 end of all past efforts and aspirations of the 
 human race. This type of mind, however, is 
 not universal. The subversive movements 
 going on from Russia in the East to America 
 in the West seem to show that at any rate the 
 proletariate has not yet accepted the ideal of 
 its present lords. The popular mind is less 
 taken in than a certain type of high but 
 merely instrumental intelligence by the fallacy 
 of elaborating means till the ends are sup- 
 pressed for which they exist. And the world 
 still has it in its power to choose. Above the 
 industrial mechanism there is the State. 
 What the State will do depends on opinion. 
 If this moves in the desired direction, then by 
 resolute State-action the mechanism can be 
 so transformed as to be the servant instead of 
 the master of humanity. 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 129 
 
 If this transformation can be effected without 
 the suppression of individual property and of 
 liberty, we have surmounted both individual- 
 ism in the ordinary sense and socialism. Now, 
 State-control of capitalist industry, as dis- 
 tinguished from State-ownership of capital, 
 leaves the rights of property in general as 
 they have nearly always been conceived ; that 
 is, as subordinated to the commonwealth, not 
 abstract and absolute. It is the extreme indi- 
 vidualists who here maintain a revolutionary 
 position. And it is in the interests of liberty 
 itself, which they professedly have at heart, 
 that the economic order needs control. The 
 solution is, in the first place, to require on 
 behalf of each person a certain minimum of 
 material comfort and of leisure. Employers 
 of labour must not be permitted to exact 
 compliance with contracts reducing what they 
 offer to bare subsistence in return for the 
 whole available energy of the employed. 
 How does this interfere with liberty in its 
 sense of absence of restraint on the realisation 
 of individual capacities ; each person being 
 treated as an end for himself? For, of course, 
 the condition as regards the minimum of 
 leisure applies only to employments which no 
 
 one can be supposed to follow except on 
 
 K 
 
130 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 compulsion. The interference of the State 
 tempers the coercion exercised by organisations 
 within it. It in no way limits the really self- 
 chosen work of private persons. State-action 
 in the form of factory-legislation can be seen 
 in actual experience not to have diminished 
 liberty, but to have prevented the subjection 
 of those affected by it to what would have 
 been practically a condition of slavery. This, 
 however, scarcely needs further enforcing. It 
 is now generally allowed. Commercial laissez 
 faire can be classed as a too-wide generalisa- 
 tion from a single group of doctrines (the 
 most important being international Free 
 Trade) which were sound in detail, and to 
 some extent generally liberating, but which 
 furnished no complete solution of the problem 
 of the modern State. 1 
 
 In spite of the veto pronounced by Hegel 
 on specific proposals of legislation by philo- 
 sophical writers, I venture to urge that there 
 is one branch of State-interference ripe for 
 definitive treatment. The very worst feature 
 of modern capitalism has always been its 
 employment of child-labour. Even the most 
 
 1 I have maintained this position on philosophical grounds 
 in papers on " Individualism and State-action " and " Politics 
 and Industry," reprinted in Essays and Notices (1895). 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 131 
 
 rigid opponents of State-action, in the days 
 of economic individualism, usually admitted 
 that this was an exceptional case. Yet, while 
 there have been mitigations, the system has 
 never been abolished. In America it is said 
 to be spreading. Now, in addition to its 
 intrinsic inhumanity, it must have the most 
 deteriorating effect, mental as well as physical, 
 on the community and the race ; that is to say, 
 if we assume that members of all classes 
 ought to grow up able not merely to take 
 their share in the labours by which life is 
 maintained, but to have part in its higher and 
 freer activities. It can scarcely be said that 
 this last aim is adequately provided for by the 
 devotion of part of the child's day to school 
 and part to wage-earning. Indeed, the most 
 detestable part of the system has always 
 seemed to me the permission, now fortunately 
 reduced to a minimum, of " half-time " in 
 factories. The least that can be expected from 
 the next Act of Parliament on the subject is 
 the complete suppression of this, or of any- 
 thing approximating to it. The rule ought 
 to be that no industrial employment shall 
 have place in a child's life during the years 
 of compulsory education. The proposal to 
 enforce attendance at " continuation schools " 
 
132 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 after the years of labour have begun must be 
 absolutely condemned. It would be a revival 
 of the evil of "half-time " in a new form. A 
 period ought to be fixed during which the 
 groundwork of education can be laid for an 
 average intelligent child. The beginning of 
 industrial work should be placed late enough 
 for freedom to be then allowed either to con- 
 tinue or not to continue school studies. It 
 would be as tyrannical to try to force all into 
 the intellectual mould as to try to force all 
 into the sporting mould. Not that we are in 
 danger of that kind of tyranny. What we are 
 in danger of is tame acquiescence in the per- 
 petuation of something like the present 
 "labour-certificates," by which the rather 
 more intelligent children are allowed to go 
 to full industrial employment a year earlier. 
 Similarly, no doubt, not the more, but the 
 less, intelligent would be forced into the 
 continuation schools. Means adapted to level 
 intelligence artificially to the exact degree 
 thought fitting for members of a closed indus- 
 trial caste are worthy of the united forces of 
 plutocracy and bureaucracy. 
 
 Equality conceived in a human sense, and 
 not as a dead-level of subjection to the 
 material conditions of life, means a possibility 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 133 
 
 of real culture for all. Those capable only of 
 the minimum would find employment in the 
 occupations requiring less intelligence, and 
 yet would not be wholly debarred from leisure 
 and a humane mode of life. We can have 
 nothing but approval for Comte's polity in so 
 far as it sets up this as a positive ideal. The 
 error is in expecting it to be realised by 
 capitalists acting as an earthly providence. 
 This is at once to give them too much power, 
 and to enforce on them too great moral 
 responsibility. Comte quite rightly holds 
 that they are entitled to larger material 
 rewards than either wage-earners or any class 
 like that of his philosophic priests. The 
 work of the latter may be of extreme value ; 
 but also it may be useless, and its degree 
 of utility cannot be foreseen. Hence, on 
 the whole, they must take an economic 
 position about as good as that of wage-earners 
 in a well-ordered society. That is to say, 
 they must receive a fixed and moderate pay- 
 ment which provides security. The ability of 
 the industrial chiefs, though not so high inas- 
 much as it is less generalised, is directly applic- 
 able to practice, and in the organisation of a 
 business is constantly brought to the test. 
 Besides, to balance their chances of great 
 
134 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 profits, employers run the risk of losing all 
 their capital. Thus it is fair that they should 
 be able to add to their own material wealth. 
 In fact, it is only in this way that the wealth 
 of the community can be effectively increased. 
 But, as Comte saw quite clearly, his special 
 function tends to make the capitalist a strong 
 egoist. This being the failing of the class, 
 though it may be compensated or corrected in 
 particular types, it is unfair to the class itself 
 to require that it should be in practical ethics 
 the directing power of the community. What 
 is still more obvious is the absurdity of making 
 the proletariate, admittedly more altruistic, 
 abnegate its part in social direction, sacri- 
 ficing all the political rights ever achieved by 
 the Greek democracies or by the democracies 
 of modern Europe. That the working classes, 
 not having the chance of great gains, should 
 have in compensation economic security, is 
 so evidently fair that some philanthropic 
 employers, in the spirit of Comte's providen- 
 tial capitalists, have made attempts to realise 
 this ideal in their own business ; but such 
 attempts were never successful on a large 
 scale. The solution of " profit-sharing " has 
 remained on the whole a dream of the mid- 
 nineteenth century. At present what seems 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 135 
 
 to have been arrived at as the most practicable 
 system is a compromise in which security is 
 to be attained partly by associations of work- 
 men themselves and partly with the aid of the 
 State. Capitalists as a class, it is already 
 clear, must be left to their own social function, 
 which is that of accumulation under limits to 
 be fixed more closely by law and opinion. It 
 is to these, and not to moralised wealth acting 
 from above, that we must look for the achieve- 
 ment of our ideal. 
 
 So far, while modifications in the economic 
 order have been discussed, society has been 
 treated in the main as consisting of industrial 
 classes, employers or employed. Discrimina- 
 tions within the capitalist class have been 
 unnecessary, since there is no question of a 
 governing hierarchy or of a nomination of 
 selected " dictators." From the point of view 
 of a democratic polity, Comte's classification 
 of the industrial chiefs, in the order of 
 diminishing "generality " of their operations, 
 under the heads of banker, merchant, manu- 
 facturer, and agriculturist, has a purely 
 theoretical interest. In the State the capitalist 
 is simply a citizen with one vote, like the 
 labourer. For the sake of completeness, 
 however, a word must be said on the class of 
 
136 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 landowners as distinguished from capitalists 
 in the special sense. Economically con- 
 sidered, rent holds a peculiar position ; and, 
 historically, land-owning has been associated 
 with the privileges of feudal lordship. Still, 
 in the end, agriculture is an industry along 
 with others. Whether it is best managed 
 under the existing triple division of rent- 
 receiving landlord, capitalist farmer, and 
 wage-earning labourer, or without the first of 
 these but with the two latter, or with union of 
 all three functions in the peasant proprietor, 
 is a question partly of economic efficiency 
 and partly of the relation of this to the higher 
 interests of the community. The State might 
 make itself the universal landlord ; but to this 
 there is the objection that it would thus burden 
 itself too much with direct economic functions 
 better left under the stimulus of individual 
 interests. Its proper part is to regulate the 
 conditions of employment ; only in excep- 
 tional cases can it become itself the employer 
 of labour, or be responsible for the appoint- 
 ment of employers. Against universal peasant 
 proprietorship there is the argument that fair 
 and humane conditions of employment are 
 better than a condition of economic indepen- 
 dence with isolation, when the known effect of 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 137 
 
 this is to produce a class of which the ruling 
 passion is a narrow greed. A State that is 
 neither socialist nor distinctively capitalist 
 will not aim at multiplying the type of the 
 "economic man." The most desirable solu- 
 tion probably is to retain the present separa- 
 tion of economic functions, but with destruc- 
 tion of the conception of them as terms in a 
 graduated social hierarchy. Now, the remains 
 of feudal privileges have gone, or will go, 
 under the pressure of legislation proceeding 
 "from status to contract." A clear-sighted 
 reformer will not desire the reversal of this, 
 and the return to some complex tenure dating 
 perhaps from the time before feudalism. The 
 true advance is, just as in relation to the 
 economic order generally, a fuller recognition 
 of the competence of the State to regulate and 
 to revise the terms of contracts so as to substi- 
 tute a real for a nominal equality in bar- 
 gaining. For the rest, the process of wearing 
 down the feelings that belong to the old order 
 must be slow, unless, indeed, the education 
 of opinion in a new ethico-political type of 
 thought should, through some unforeseen 
 change, proceed with revolutionary swiftness. 
 We must now go on and bring into the 
 account directly the non-industrial elements of 
 
138 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 society. But, first it may be said, these to a 
 certain extent emerge as an incidental result of 
 an economic system that allows inheritance 
 and bequest. There will be a class living on 
 its income, whether in the form of rent or 
 investments, and not engaged in profit- 
 making business. Some members of this 
 class will do disinterested work by taking 
 part in government, central or municipal, or 
 in aesthetic or scientific occupations. No 
 doubt many will simply give themselves to 
 organised pleasure. Legally, they must be 
 free to do this as part of a system that does 
 not make all compulsorily servants of the 
 State ; though in an ideal order there would 
 be some moral disapproval of that mode of 
 life. What can be demanded consistently with 
 the Liberal, as distinguished from the Social- 
 istic, policy is that no special facilities and 
 privileges shall be given to the amusements 
 of wealthy idlers ; and that their favourite 
 pursuits, when they come into conflict with any 
 public interest, shall receive no consideration. 
 It has already been recognised in passing 
 that the existence of a leisured class does, to 
 some extent, provide for disinterested work. 
 Without this element in it a society would lose 
 plasticity. To set up a model of occupation 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 139 
 
 carried on with no view to material interests, 
 there must be a class not necessarily large 
 whose members are free from all care about 
 those interests. But will the right persons be 
 thus endowed with leisure? Now here a con- 
 cession must be made to the philosophical 
 Conservative. As a result of history it has 
 probably come about that the better stocks 
 have, to some extent, been segregated for the 
 higher positions. Force and fraud may have 
 frequently led to the attainment of them ; but, 
 after all, it may be said, these are names given to 
 the excesses or the deviation-forms of strength 
 and intelligence. The evils that otherwise 
 result are checked when the strong have at 
 last been bound by laws. Social degenera- 
 tion is sufficiently guarded against if there is 
 not a closed system of caste. The higher 
 ranks are then open in each generation to new 
 ability ; and their incompetent portions can 
 decay and fall off. 
 
 Qualification of course is needed here. The 
 argument from heredity has to be corrected 
 by Galton's law of " return of the race to the 
 mean." If one member of a particular stock 
 shows distinguished ability, it does not follow 
 that that height of distinction will be repro- 
 duced ; there is even a presumption that 
 
140 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 will not. All that can be said is that stocks 
 which have produced distinguished members 
 are on the average probably rather better. 
 Further, we must remember that according to 
 Weismann's theory of heredity, now supported 
 by the most eminent biologists, acquired 
 qualities are not transmitted to descendants. 
 What can take place is only selection of 
 stocks having the capacity, under similarly 
 favourable conditions, to develop in a similar 
 direction. The powers of specialised action 
 acquired in each generation are not handed 
 on to the next ; nor is even the potentiality of 
 acquiring them increased. Thus the possi- 
 bilities of what has been called "caste- 
 segregation " are comparatively limited ; 
 fortunately, we may think, for otherwise how 
 terribly specialised races and families would 
 have become ! It follows also that biological 
 evolution has less direct explanatory power in 
 relation to psychological evolution than it 
 would have had on the Lamarckian or 
 Spencerian theory. Not biological theories 
 of race, but theories of the "social medium," 
 furnish the true explanation of human as dis- 
 tinguished from animal psychology. This 
 applies also to the psychology of classes. 
 The modes of thinking and acting that 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 141 
 
 characterise the members of a particular class 
 result in the main not from difference of race, 
 but from a certain social tradition impressed 
 from childhood. It must be added that, since 
 " imitation " runs through the whole of 
 society, there are no class-traditions perfectly 
 marked off. Thus a view like that of the post- 
 Socratic Greek philosophers, with its stress 
 on " education " in the generalised sense, is 
 again triumphant over the belief in " race " 
 pure and simple, which seemed to have been 
 resuscitated by the new developments of 
 biology. Yet we must not deny the residue 
 of truth in this belief, whether held by an 
 ancient or a modern Conservative. Education 
 can do more with better material ; and the 
 distribution of a society into classes is not 
 entirely a chance-distribution. 
 
 Would, then, the kind of selection that goes 
 on in our present society be sufficient if the 
 working of that society were made consistent 
 with humanity and justice within its own 
 limits ; if, that is to say, the possibility of a 
 really human life were assured to all, and if 
 the social flux between classes were facilitated 
 rather than artificially hindered ? For, as we 
 have seen, under individualist industrialism 
 some, through possession of inherited means, 
 
142 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 are free to promote the higher interests of 
 humanity ; and for others, in the chances of 
 competition, freedom is attainable. To this 
 we may reply that, while incidentally these 
 interests are promoted, they are not sufficiently 
 made the object of direct care. The principle 
 of direct social selection tends to be almost 
 exclusively industrial. The types selected 
 are either those that have the capacity for 
 achieving success in a world of commercial 
 competition, or those that are fitted to subserve 
 the interests of such as have this capacity. 
 More varied kinds of personal merit, it could 
 fairly be maintained, found an outlet in past 
 orders of society than in that which, apart 
 from political action, the economic forces are 
 tending more and more to bring into being. 
 If we are to have something better than a 
 perfected and humanised industrialism, some 
 further social modification is necessary. 
 
 Here the Platonic Republic offers itself as 
 a higher social type. It is not the true 
 political type, as has been admitted. All 
 authority, in the Liberal State, must be 
 responsible. There must be no irresponsible 
 government even by those selected, if it were 
 possible, for intellect and virtue. As Plato 
 himself remarked in the Statesman, men do 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 143 
 
 not differ so much from one another that any 
 stand out from the rest as a race of herdsmen 
 from the herd. And this in reality disposes 
 of many of his own suggestions for detailed 
 regulation. Socially, too, the system of caste, 
 derived by Plato from the old hierarchical 
 order of Egypt and the East, and reproduced 
 with modifications in the European Middle 
 Age, must be rejected. It is not, indeed, a 
 closed system (as the Egyptian caste of occu- 
 pations also is said not to have been) ; but its 
 ostensible principle is heredity. Transferences 
 from the lower to the higher or from the 
 higher to the lower caste were to be made in 
 infancy ; so that very special physiological 
 and physiognomical accomplishments would 
 have been needed in the guardians who were 
 to advise the transfer. In fact, no such insight 
 as is presupposed into human potentialities 
 has even yet been acquired. This method 
 of promoting the social flux could not have 
 been applied in practice. As between the 
 military class and the philosophical rulers, 
 the method suggested was practicable ; for all 
 were to be educated together for a time, and 
 then a separation made according as some 
 showed more aptitude for bodily exercises and 
 some for dialectical studies. But clearly, if 
 
144 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 there is to be a really open system, the passage 
 from one extreme to the other, admitted in 
 theory, must be made practicable also. Even 
 when this exists to the full extent, it follows 
 from the concession already made that there 
 will exist a kind of hereditary nucleus of each 
 class. Still, the recognition of personal merit 
 as the determinant makes an important differ- 
 ence, provided an attempt is made to realise 
 it by means of social institutions. We must 
 not, with Comte, in effect put aside what he 
 himself takes to have been the fundamental 
 ground of agitation through the whole " revo- 
 lutionary transition " by restoring in a new 
 form the ideal of Catholic or Christian humility. 
 This is both aesthetically and ethically the 
 most repellent solution of all. There is a 
 semblance of reason, there may even be a 
 kind of mythical truth, in fictions about 
 golden, silver, and brazen races. There is 
 neither semblance nor reality of truth or 
 reason in the idea of a purely arbitrary 
 assignment of position in a purely human 
 society. The decree of the divine despot, 
 manifesting itself in the order imposed by 
 priest and king on earth, having gone, the 
 sanction for this order goes with it. 
 
 The permanently applicable elements in the 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 145 
 
 Platonic scheme are the notion of selecting 
 the higher social ranks for moral and intellec- 
 tual qualities, and the communism ; this last 
 not, of course, literally in the form of which 
 Plato gives an outline. In fact, none of his 
 successors ever seriously took it in that sense. 
 We must retain private property for all ranks ; 
 and with it the monogamic family. Ideas of 
 holding goods in common, and of " group- 
 marriage," now that anthropological material 
 has been sufficiently accumulated, seem to 
 have been adequately worked out by experi- 
 mental savages ; so that further trying and 
 failing on these lines is superfluous. Mono- 
 gamy is in domestic evolution the terminus. 
 Of course, it had been reached by the more 
 advanced races before the present religion of 
 Europe was adopted ; and from this, as an 
 ideal, it has gained nothing. The Catholic 
 modifications have been on the whole inju- 
 rious to it. The true line of development of 
 marriage was in the direction of equal justice, 
 of completely reciprocal rights and duties. 
 While the ideal is fixity, not change, there 
 can yet be no advantage to society in binding 
 together two persons in unwilling union. In 
 such union, besides, it is clear that the weaker 
 
 party will be the most oppressed. A legal 
 
 L 
 
 or THE 
 
 I UNIVERSITY | 
 
146 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 contract is doubtless a necessity in actual 
 human society ; but above this is the idea of 
 personal attraction, not of ecclesiastical con- 
 secration. When it comes to ethical and 
 aesthetic comparison, we certainly need not 
 fear to contrast marriage as conceived by 
 Shelley or Mill with official dissertations 
 founded on Paulinism. Here, again, and 
 here especially, we have to repudiate the 
 reactionary suggestions derived by Comte 
 from the worst of models. 
 
 This is a little aside from the problem that 
 the communism of the Republic was brought 
 in to solve ; but it was perhaps needful to 
 repudiate any ultra-revolutionary views that 
 might be imagined in the background in asso- 
 ciation with the term. The questions we have 
 to ask are, first, whether in existing society 
 there is any class corresponding with that to 
 which Plato assigned the highest rank ; and, 
 in the next place, if such a class exists, what 
 ought to be its economic relation to the rest of 
 the society. 
 
 There is such a class; and the account of its 
 evolution is given in Spencer's Principles of 
 Sociology, under the head of " Professional 
 Institutions." These, as he shows, have a 
 social origin different from that of " Industrial 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 147 
 
 Institutions," to which he devotes separate 
 treatment. ' While these last are for the 
 " sustentation " of life, the first are for its 
 "augmentation." This includes the culture 
 which, I have concluded, is the true end of 
 society, as distinguished from the instruments 
 of its material existence. For the sake of con- 
 venience, it may be well to note down the 
 names of the professions as Spencer gives 
 them. They are, in his order : Physician 
 and surgeon; dancer and musician; orator 
 and poet, actor and dramatist ; biographer, 
 historian, and man of letters ; man of science 
 and philosopher ; judge and lawyer ; teacher ; 
 architect ; sculptor ; painter. How all these, 
 in their differentways, augment life is explained 
 in a preliminary passage, which, though 
 rather long for a quotation, must be cited 
 in full : 
 
 It is obvious that the medical man who removes 
 pains, sets broken bones, cures diseases, and wards 
 off premature death, increases the amount of life. 
 Musical composers and performers, as well as 
 professors of music and dancing, are agents who 
 exalt the emotions and so increase life. The poet, 
 epic, lyric or dramatic, along with the actor, 
 severally in their respective ways yield pleasurable 
 feelings and so increase life. The historian and 
 the man of letters, to some extent by the guidance 
 they furnish, but to a larger extent by the interest 
 which their facts and fictions create, raise men's 
 
148 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 mental states and so increase life. Though we 
 cannot say of the lawyer that he does the like in a 
 direct way, yet by aiding the citizen to resist 
 aggressions he furthers his sustentation and 
 thereby increases life. The multitudinous pro- 
 cesses and appliances which the man of science 
 makes possible, as well as the innumerable intel- 
 lectual interests he arouses and the general illumi- 
 nation he yields, increase life. The teacher, alike 
 by information given and by discipline enforced, 
 enables his pupils more effectually to carry on this 
 or that occupation and obtain better subsistence 
 than they would else do, at the same time that he 
 opens the doors to various special gratifications : 
 in both ways increasing life. Once more, those 
 who carry on the plastic arts the painter, the 
 sculptor, the architect excite by their products 
 pleasurable perceptions and emotions of the 
 aesthetic class, and thus increase life. 
 
 Not all of these professions are of sufficient 
 dignity for the highest rank in the Platonic 
 State. That is much more limited. The 
 general correspondence, however, will be clear 
 on comparison. For in Plato's view the 
 functions of his guardians correspond to those 
 of the priesthood in a theocracy ; and Spencer 
 has shown inductively that the professions 
 arise out of the early priesthood, or, as he 
 says, out of " Ecclesiastical Institutions " 
 (separately dealt with). The early priest, 
 having, according to the accepted theory, 
 special relations with the invisible powers that 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 149 
 
 control nature and human life, is enabled by 
 the offerings of the community to keep him- 
 self in association with these. Thus, it is sup- 
 posed, benefits will be gained from the gods 
 and possible injuries warded off by their aid. 
 Through the leisure thus acquired, the class 
 which at first has naturally a kind of specula- 
 tive bias is enabled to accumulate knowledge, 
 real as well as fancied, and to practise arts 
 that enrich life, though they are not necessary 
 for its bare support. Hence arise by degrees 
 the extremely heterogeneous " professions " 
 brought together in the list. As society 
 differentiates, these branch off and become 
 independent and sub-divide. Nevertheless, 
 they long preserve reminiscences of their 
 origin. Some are still paid nominally by 
 "honoraria," not by wages contracted for. 
 Some have the nature of public offices, for 
 which the payment is fixed. The theory was 
 that the exercise of them was spontaneous and 
 disinterested, and that the recipients of 
 benefits offered voluntary gifts to those that 
 conferred them or were in a position to confer 
 them. On the same terms what are called by 
 Spencer the agencies for " defence" and 
 " regulation " that is to say, the military and 
 governmental organisations were supported. 
 
150 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 These, together with the existing ecclesiastical 
 agency, are still supported in the same way. 
 In the Army and Navy, the Established 
 Church, and the Civil Service, the method is 
 not that competitors for appointments should 
 offer their services at a certain price, and that, 
 other things being equal, the lowest tender 
 should be taken. Competence is determined 
 by what is at least supposed to be trained 
 judgment. Officially, the rate of payment is 
 not bargained for, but is graduated and fixed ; 
 the graduation being in theory according to 
 seniority with degree of qualification, not 
 according to an estimate of the economic 
 value of the services rendered. Hence those 
 just named are typical "professions." The 
 others, as they have branched off, have 
 tended to become more industrialised. Must 
 we expect this to go on indefinitely, and 
 rejoice in it? Is the ideal that everyone, 
 whatever else he may be, should be funda- 
 mentally a " man of business "? Or is the 
 process one of departure from type, which, we 
 may hope, belongs only to an age of transi- 
 tion ? And, as the ground of this hope, are 
 there any signs of a counter-tendency a 
 movement back from private to public pay- 
 ment ? 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 151 
 
 It seems to me that the better view on this 
 point is held by Comte, whose position was 
 that the ideal of the professions ought to be 
 extended to industrial activity also. Every 
 kind of work, he holds, is essentially a service 
 done to the community. It cannot, in the 
 strict sense, be remunerated. There is no 
 means of fixing accurately what each person's 
 services are worth in terms of the exchange 
 of commodities. The true conception in all 
 cases is not that of " earning a living," but of 
 doing certain work and being supported while 
 doing it. What the nature of this support 
 should be depends on the nature of the 
 employment, for different employments call 
 for different material conditions. In practice, 
 however, he does not propose to apply the 
 typical mode of supporting the professions to 
 industrial activities. These last are left to 
 contracts between private persons, supervised 
 only by the moralising agency of the priest- 
 hood. Similarly, it may be recalled, Plato 
 did not apply his communism to the industrial, 
 but only to the military and philosophic, 
 classes. For the class in Comte's polity that 
 corresponds (though not exactly) to Plato's 
 guardians, the mode of support is that of 
 the typical professions now existing ; but on 
 
152 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 a modest scale. There is to be a public pay- 
 ment of the priesthood just sufficient to assure 
 due independence and leisure. So far as this 
 part of the scheme is concerned, it is simply 
 the Platonic communism made practicable. 
 
 Now, the interesting and remarkable thing 
 is that both Plato and Comte, in framing 
 the economic order for their highest social 
 class, were going back to the original prin- 
 ciples of the liberal professions, as made 
 manifest by Spencer in tracing their evolu- 
 tion. Of course, they over-simplified greatly 
 Comte as much as Plato. They would 
 have liked to reduce all the variety and com- 
 plexity of actual professional institutions to 
 the unity and simplicity of the philosopher 
 taking the place of the priest. The philo- 
 sopher, priest, or guardian was to be at the 
 same time man of science. There would be 
 little need for medicine or law when the 
 members of the State observed the rules of 
 temperance and ceased to quarrel; and this, 
 no doubt, would be the case when they were 
 at once intelligently and sympathetically 
 governed. The priest, naturally, would be 
 the teacher. If he did not himself practise 
 the fine arts so far as they are permissible, he 
 would supervise them. In any case, their 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 153 
 
 modes of expression would have to be rigor- 
 ously pruned. The system, in short, as 
 both thinkers came to recognise, was a 
 simplified and, in their view, rationalised 
 hierocracy. In their love of regularity, they 
 would have undone what Spencer regards as 
 the progressive order of the whole process. 
 And yet they seized the essential meaning of 
 the group of institutions in its practical bear- 
 ing ; while Spencer has developed it induc- 
 tively, but, in his ever-recurrent admiration 
 for industrial anarchy, quite missed the 
 practical suggestiveness of his own generali- 
 sations. 
 
 If we are to retain the heterogeneity of the 
 professions as a permanent result of progress, 
 it will follow that we must not try to make of 
 them a governing class or a Church. For 
 this, the simplification aimed at by Plato and 
 Comte would be indispensable. Besides, the 
 political order involved in this kind of scheme 
 has been rejected. We find the ideal of the 
 Liberal State to be as incompatible with 
 government by irresponsible intelligence as by 
 a hereditary caste or by irresponsible wealth. 
 What remains of value in the conception is 
 social, and not properly political. A consider- 
 able place, it appears, can be reserved in the 
 
154 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 social order for selection by trained judges, as 
 distinguished from competition in the market- 
 place, and for public payment, as distin- 
 guished from dependence on private possessors 
 of wealth. This, as has been noted, is in 
 many professions the present usage. In 
 others there may be observed a tendency to 
 return to it. The medical profession, for 
 example, is coming to depend more on public 
 appointments with fixed payments attached, 
 and less on the chances of private practice. 
 If a legal reform advocated by Spencer, 
 among others, were carried out, there would 
 be the same process of return in the case of 
 law. For a system of gratuitous justice 
 which might at any time become a definite 
 aim of reformers would involve public pay- 
 ment of advocates as well as judges. This 
 general movement, of course, tends to reduce 
 the very great prizes in the professions. On 
 the system, fewer fortunes would be made 
 approximating to the scale of success in 
 business. This being the outlook, a pro- 
 fessional career would act as a kind of auto- 
 matic moral test. Intellectual tests being 
 made more stringent, so as to exclude the less 
 able members of the wealthier classes, a high 
 order of ability would thus be secured ; and 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 155 
 
 yet it would be clear in advance that smaller 
 pecuniary rewards must be looked for than in 
 a commercial career. Thus the money-loving 
 and luxury-loving type would be deterred 
 from entrance. The way to success being 
 to a less extent through quasi-commercial 
 competition, the modes of thought and feeling 
 that accompany this would find their territory 
 narrowed. Through social imitation they 
 might even tend to be extruded from com- 
 merce itself. The payment need not come 
 uniformly from the State. It might come 
 also from systems of endowment or from 
 municipalities. In general, however, to avoid 
 routine and officialism, it would be necessary 
 to place at the summit, for determining the 
 highest appointments, political chiefs who are 
 not specialists, but stand for the intelligence 
 of the community as a whole. Premature 
 fixation of sciences has come not, as Plato 
 expressed the fear that it might, from the 
 natural conservatism of a democratic State or 
 its representatives, but from the prejudices 
 of the majority in corporations of experts. 
 These, however, are details which there is no 
 need to elaborate. The essential thing is that 
 a certain relatively disinterested character of 
 one group of social functions should find 
 
156 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 reinforcement in custom, and that this dis- 
 interested character should become in opinion 
 the ideal. 
 
 With all this, it will no doubt remain true 
 that for much of the best work, both scien- 
 tific and artistic, humanity must depend on 
 fortune. Probably the artistic professions 
 will always have to remain in a less organised 
 state than the others. In art, as in science, 
 the English distrust of academies has much to 
 say for itself. It may be suggested, however, 
 that a new social direction such as is supposed, 
 dethroning the commercial standard from its 
 supremacy, must tell on the general attitude 
 towards the arts. Yet the uncertainty of dis- 
 covering genius, and the chances of a fortu- 
 nate coincidence of this with a position of 
 complete independence, must make us fall 
 back as a reserve of hope on the apparently 
 functionless class with unearned leisure. 
 From the point of view of culture, this is 
 one essential reason against suppressing the 
 class, as it would be suppressed under 
 any scheme that could be called socialistic. 1 
 
 But suppose that, notwithstanding these or 
 
 1 An outline of this speculation on the endowment of the 
 professions is set forth in Appendix I. to The Neo-Platonists 
 (1901). 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 157 
 
 similar modifications in the social structure, 
 the prepotency of commercial wealth should 
 still be too great. In dealing with this 
 problem we must first repeat the concession 
 already made, that commercial enterprise is 
 quite rightly the means of attaining the 
 highest pecuniary rewards possible in the 
 community. It is fair that men whose aim is 
 wealth should have a career open to them as 
 well as men of different kind. In pursuing 
 this aim they perform a definite social function. 
 Those who care less for wealth have no right 
 to complain if less falls to their share. But 
 we must remember that wealth gives power, 
 and the exercise of individual power on a 
 certain scale may affect the social type. Now, 
 success in accumulating money is a presump- 
 tion against and not in favour of competence 
 to direct its employment in the interests of 
 culture. The State is evidently far more 
 competent than individuals whose aim has 
 been material gain to endow the higher 
 interests of mankind. In politics the evils 
 that directly result from the powers wielded 
 by men who have acquired great fortunes of 
 the newer kind are generally recognised. 
 Has human society, then, not the right to 
 guard itself against excesses resulting from a 
 
158 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 mechanism which it finds generally con- 
 venient? The mechanism of an ancient 
 democracy brought with it possibilities of 
 establishing a tyranny. Hence it was 
 corrected by political devices which, con- 
 demned by open or secret sympathisers with 
 oligarchy or despotism, were at last vindicated 
 by liberal historians. The complications of 
 modern industrialism, on a system permitting 
 unlimited accumulation, have led to a new 
 and pernicious power of individuals naturally 
 selected through qualities which, on any 
 rational view of personal merit, are of a 
 comparatively low kind. Undoubtedly we 
 must attribute this to an impersonal process, 
 and not to some special perversity in the class 
 of " multi-millionaires," who are merely the 
 ablest of their type. But all the more, to deal 
 with the new danger a new method has 
 become necessary. 
 
 This is the only point at which we have to 
 call in the principle of " revolutionary right " 
 (droit, Recht). It is of some interest to note 
 that precisely the a priori thinkers make use 
 of this phrase. Since justice, in their view, 
 consists in a set of universally valid principles 
 resulting in general rules, a difficulty comes 
 in where bad systems have been allowed to 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 159 
 
 grow up, which yet cannot be redressed 
 without an infraction of the rules recognised 
 as just. Such is the force of practical 
 considerations that those thinkers have been 
 obliged to admit that what is properly a 
 " wrong " must be done in order to return 
 to right. Thus revolution has a law or right 
 of its own, which is in a manner opposed 
 to what is otherwise universal justice. To 
 experiential moralists the case presents 
 less difficulty. Keeping in view all along 
 the end to which moral or political laws 
 or precepts are in relation, they need not 
 admit that an exceptional measure taken 
 in view of this end is " wrong " when 
 considered in relation to the whole. And 
 certainly the legal principle of " prescription " 
 has no claim to rank as a supreme principle 
 of ethics or politics. The phrase cited, 
 however, is convenient. For measures 
 disregarding now recognised rights that 
 were brought into being by past law must 
 be allowed to be, on any theory, permissible 
 only in the last resort. They are strictly of 
 " revolutionary " character. 
 
 Now, whatever other changes may come 
 about, I do not see how society is to issue 
 from the present order without some measure 
 
160 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 of this kind. Industrial plutocracy does not 
 seem likely to disappear merely in consequence 
 of social changes not touching it directly. It 
 rather tends to self-conservation. The only 
 permanently effective measure against the 
 extremely wealthy class the practical tyrants 
 of a nominal democracy will be to fix a legal 
 maximum of income. More than one thinker 
 has suggested this, but I am not sure that the 
 corollary has usually been drawn, that existing 
 accumulations above the limit must be directly 
 confiscated to the uses of the State. If the 
 present holders of the immense and ramifying 
 power given by huge masses of capital in an 
 industrial order were left in possession without 
 new competitors, this would not only nullify 
 the measure, but would establish permanently 
 a narrower oligarchy. It is as if an attempt 
 were made to reform the House of Lords by 
 creating no new peerages. If distribution 
 were compelled, but the recipients left to the 
 discretion of the possessors, the result would 
 only be the establishment of rather larger 
 family dynastic groups. Admittedly, to make 
 the measure effective, a strong force of public 
 opinion would be necessary that would not 
 tolerate evasions ; but this would in reality 
 somewhat mitigate the shock of revolution. 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 161 
 
 By the time that opinion against great 
 aggregates of wealth has become deep and 
 strong it will have affected some of the 
 possessors. Indeed, it is not improbable that 
 initiators of the legislation may appear among 
 the heirs of those who have founded the 
 American "dynasties." 
 
 An ancient analogue is furnished by the 
 reforms of Solon at Athens, which were the 
 real beginning of Athenian democracy. At 
 that time historic Greece was emerging from 
 what historians now call its " Middle Age" 
 a kind of feudalism, though vaguer and less 
 ingrained than ours, following on the break- 
 up of the old " Mycensean " civilisation. Of 
 this progress capitalism was the accompani- 
 ment, and its evils were already beginning to 
 be felt. As trading and industrial operations 
 became larger, the poorer freemen were more 
 and more obliged to contract debts to the rich ; 
 and inability to pay principal and interest 
 involved loss of freedom. For the ideal of the 
 most anarchic industrialism was in being, in 
 so far as there was here no restriction on the 
 kind of contract that the State would enforce. 
 If a debtor contracted to go into slavery on 
 failure to pay, he would have to go. The 
 
 measure taken to remedy this collapse of the 
 
 M 
 
1 62 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 inherited order in face of new problems was a 
 cancelling of debts up to a certain date, with 
 the provision that henceforth it should be 
 unlawful for anyone to make a contract to sell 
 himself into slavery. Without this restriction 
 on the excessive powers of capitalised wealth, 
 it was clear that no really democratic State 
 would be possible. Indeed, Athens had still 
 an episode of tyrannic government to pass 
 through before democracy was attained. 
 Modern conditions being in some respects 
 different, the war against plutocratic pre- 
 dominance will have to take a different form ; 
 but it is equally necessary. Of what value 
 would any political constitution be if the 
 permanent economic order were that of a 
 few masters controlling huge hierarchies 
 of industrial functionaries, from managers 
 and technical experts down to unskilled 
 labourers, with a floating mass of the 
 casually employed to take on or discharge 
 in correspondence with the pressure of busi- 
 ness? All the tyranny that Individualists, 
 not without reason, protest against in the 
 Socialistic State would be established in 
 detail. And the subjects would not even be 
 secure. A new feudalism and bureaucracy 
 would be combined with the peculiar evils 
 
SOCIAL ORDER 163 
 
 springing from the egoism of competitive 
 commerce. On the manifestation of these in 
 "trusts " it is unnecessary to enlarge. 
 
 To sum up : the methods of emergence 
 from the present order that have been advo- 
 cated are, first, systematic State-regulation of 
 industry ; second, the more definite constitu- 
 tion of a non-industrial element within the 
 social organism by placing the intellectual 
 professions as far as possible on a footing of 
 endowment and of selection by qualified 
 judges rather than of quasi-commercial com- 
 petition and dependence on the market; third, 
 direct curtailment of the possibilities of 
 acquiring social predominance by the accumu- 
 lation of wealth. All these methods, of 
 course, imply rejection of the anarchical 
 theory of the State. In truth, if we are to 
 contrast the more organic and " spiritual " 
 with the more mechanical parts of the social 
 organism, it is not State-direction that 
 should be regarded as an affair of mere 
 mechanism, but the uncontrolled operations 
 of industry. No doubt these can in the 
 end be moralised only by the human agents 
 that carry them on ; but, as a condition, the 
 State must in some degree embody in law the 
 conceptions which the better minds have 
 
164 SOCIAL ORDER 
 
 formed concerning the relation of the means 
 of subsistence to life itself and its ends. 
 Complete embodiment of ethics in law must 
 be allowed to be both impracticable and unde- 
 sirable ; but, in the outline given, I think the 
 fixing of this as the legislative ideal has been 
 avoided. At any rate, the methods of Indi- 
 vidualists, apart from single though impor- 
 tant questions such as Free Trade, have been 
 proved by experience to be mistaken. Their 
 notion of the ideal political order as " anarchy 
 plus the policeman " is obsolete. Yet they 
 did, after all, generalise from some particular 
 cases where they were right. And, in their 
 ideal of human spontaneity, they had hold of 
 a permanent truth. If the control of the 
 State over industry is now invoked, this is 
 not with the aim of superseding a liberal by 
 an authoritative ideal, but, on the contrary, 
 with the aim of so bringing into action public 
 reason that individual spontaneity may be 
 finally realised. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 THE STATE AND RELIGION 
 
 FOR the action of the State, as of the indi- 
 vidual, direction and inspiration will be found 
 in science and philosophy and poetic thought. 
 The historic religion of mediaeval Europe, 
 representative as it is essentially of an alien 
 culture, offers neither inspiration nor direc- 
 tion. The world-wide Church in which it has 
 embodied its ideal forms no higher object of 
 devotion above the State, but a pseudo-polity, 
 an anti - republic. This was the effective 
 meaning of the Catholic idea from its incep- 
 tion, as is shown in the very name given to 
 its visible order, borrowed, as that was, from 
 the Assembly of a Greek city. Its organisa- 
 tion, however, still presents a very practical 
 problem. What is the State to do in face of 
 its claim to hold the spiritual hegemony, to 
 interfere in public education, to have its 
 mythology officially recognised even when in 
 conflict with known truth ? 
 
 During the early modern period the best 
 165 
 
166 THE STATE AND RELIGION 
 
 solution practicable was that of national 
 Established Churches. After a thousand 
 years of dominance, not, indeed, unbroken, 
 but never really lost, the Christian theocracy 
 of the West had been shattered, and could in 
 detail be brought under. Yet the claims of 
 its divided portions remained, in theory, 
 identical with those of the whole. For 
 Calvinist as for Catholic, it was the duty of 
 the civil magistrate to carry out the directions 
 of God's representatives on earth, and to 
 pursue the rebels against their dogma to the 
 death. In estimating the problem before 
 statesmen, we must remember how firmly 
 rooted in opinion and feeling those claims 
 were. The books universally regarded as the 
 Word of God contained, among their various 
 documents, priestly compilations in which 
 tolerance was treated as the greatest of 
 crimes. The one unpardonable offence of the 
 kings of Israel had been their recognition 
 of cults not identical with that which was 
 centralised at Jerusalem. To this central 
 position the Rome of the Popes claimed to 
 have succeeded ; and the clergy of the new 
 Churches, continuing the tradition as a matter 
 of course, upheld their own creed, or its 
 essentials, as divinely revealed, and not with 
 
THE STATE AND RELIGION 167 
 
 impunity to be deserted by any who had once 
 been under the discipline of the faith. Thus, 
 complete formal equality of all religions 
 before the law was absolutely impossible. 
 Kings or statesmen who might attempt to 
 secure any approach to this could only appeal 
 to the heathen or to a few isolated thinkers in 
 their own time. Against the attempt, clerical 
 demagogues could stir up the deepest popular 
 conviction, ingrained not only through their 
 own most strongly impressed teaching, but by 
 the whole conception of historic Christendom 
 as a spiritual and visible unity in a doctrine 
 " once delivered to the saints." Toleration 
 appeared at the best as laxity ; conscientious 
 persecuting bigotry was the mark of a true 
 anointed servant of God. All that could be 
 done on behalf of the humanist ideal now 
 again in sight after its millennial eclipse was 
 that the State should recognise one Church as 
 the true Church, but should determine its 
 character so far as this was not incompatible 
 with its nature as a Christian Church, and 
 should make its yoke as light as possible. 
 By degrees a more or less illogical and 
 shifting toleration of dissidents could be intro- 
 duced. But in the meantime a new structure 
 of ideas was needed that could be set against 
 
i68 THE STATE AND RELIGION 
 
 the ecclesiastical claims. The outline of this 
 new structure was furnished by the notion of 
 a Church subordinate to the State. 
 
 The most powerful and effective work on 
 this line was done in the seventeenth century 
 by Hobbes and Spinoza. The documents 
 appealed to by the " Kingdom of Darkness " 
 were turned against itself. Above the eccle- 
 siastical corporations was placed, on ostensibly 
 Scriptural grounds, the civil ruler. He had 
 the same authority in the Church as in the 
 State, of which, indeed, the Church was only 
 an aspect. His true policy was to simplify 
 dogmas, to recognise the " liberty of philo- 
 sophising," as it had been recognised while 
 the " religion of the Gentiles " prevailed, and 
 to stop all persecution of religious teachings 
 that did not interfere with political order. 
 This policy he was entitled to carry out even 
 against the opinion of the clergy, for a 
 Christian magistrate surely held no lower 
 place than a heathen magistrate. No over- 
 lordship was to be recognised either of the 
 papacy or of a presbytery. The sovereign 
 power, whether monarchical or aristocratic 
 or democratic, might accept a particular 
 religion as the religion of the State, but, so 
 far as religion entered into the political order, 
 
THE STATE AND RELIGION 169 
 
 it could claim no authority that was other 
 than derivative from that of the sovereign. 
 
 Explicit recognition of more than one 
 religion as lawful followed as a matter of 
 course when it could be shown that this was 
 compatible with the preservation of peace. 
 The case for a general toleration was argued 
 out by Locke after the Revolution of 1688, 
 and found recognition in England in the 
 eighteenth century, though various disabilities 
 were long connected with membership of 
 other Churches than that " by law established." 
 Still, even the advocates of religious tests for 
 civil office maintained that these were con- 
 sistent with tolerance. In the meantime, the 
 precarious nature of a tolerance that was 
 merely the result of a truce, and not of prin- 
 ciple however illogically that principle might 
 be applied had been seen in France. Near 
 the end of the sixteenth century the Edict of 
 Nantes had permitted the Protestant as well 
 as the Catholic worship ; but this was merely 
 a measure of convenience to stop further civil 
 war. Conscientious feeling against toleration 
 was always in reserve ; and, before the end 
 of the next century, the Edict was revoked 
 through clerical incitement, with the result 
 that those who remained Protestants were 
 
iyo THE STATE AND RELIGION 
 
 expelled. This is sufficient to show the 
 extreme importance of some ground of prin- 
 ciple as the basis for a practical system. The 
 philosophic principle of tolerance once 
 acknowledged, feelings of humanity could 
 gather round it, making the renewal of per- 
 secution at length impossible ; but expediency 
 by itself was too weak. 
 
 So it might have been even as late as the 
 nineteenth century without the strong intel- 
 lectual barriers set up long before by Leviathan 
 and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. There 
 have not been wanting admired neo-Catholic 
 sophists who, if they could, would have 
 brought back in the name of conscience the 
 feelings, with the ideas, of a theocracy. Thus 
 it is not surprising that for a long time relative 
 freedom could only be secured by continuing 
 the direct association of the Church with the 
 State. Liberal and enlightened minds among 
 the clergy could be supported against the 
 bigoted and the ignorant. " Free Church- 
 men " had a recognised, if not an equal, place 
 within the State. And, as a French Catholic 
 writer said by way of reproach to English 
 institutions, Hume and Gibbon were at liberty 
 to write as they did without sacrificing any- 
 thing in literary or social consideration. On 
 
THE STATE AND RELIGION 171 
 
 the whole, we must regard this solution 
 of the problem retrospectively with no small 
 gratitude. 
 
 It seemed desirable to say this before affirm- 
 ing the decided conviction that the time has 
 at length come for the separation of Church 
 and State in England, as in America and 
 France. Historical Christianity has a certain 
 organic character, whence it will always revert 
 to its sacramental and sacrificial base. It 
 cannot permanently be represented, as it was 
 by rationalising divines in the eighteenth 
 century, as a moral code with a few arbitrary 
 ceremonies attached " for the persuasion of 
 the multitude." The policy of giving it this 
 direction through the controlling power of 
 a Liberal State has had a certain success in 
 the past ; but as a policy for the future it is 
 impracticable. The Latitudinarianism of the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the 
 Broad Church of the nineteenth, have been 
 swept away by successive waves of reaction. 
 And it is remarkable that these waves them- 
 selves have been increasingly reactionary. 
 The first, that of Methodism, was still Pro- 
 testant, and was mixed with considerable 
 humanitarian elements. The second, Trac- 
 tarianism, reverted to mediaeval dogma. Its 
 
172 THE STATE AND RELIGION 
 
 most eminent representative, when his direc- 
 tion had been finally determined, expressed 
 the utmost contempt for civilised and philo- 
 sophical religion. The germ of true religion 
 he saw precisely in the cruelties denounced by 
 Lucretius. The third wave is less furious in 
 this respect, but it is the most reactionary of 
 all, in returning neither to evangelical ethics 
 nor even to dogma, but to a cult, as the 
 essence of religion. The investigations of 
 anthropologists show that in this there is 
 nothing accidental ; the cult being, in all 
 religions of which the origin can be ascer- 
 tained, prior both to the mythology and to 
 the rule of life. It is hopeless to look for a 
 reversal of a movement having, for the 
 religious world, this historical necessity. 
 That world may diminish in importance rela- 
 tively to civic life and culture, but it has its 
 own organic laws. Imagine the result of any 
 attempt of the State to control it in the old- 
 fashioned manner say, by an Act of Uni- 
 formity on the Elizabethan model, or by a 
 Public Worship Act. The re-awakening of 
 half-forgotten dogma, too, has had its effect. 
 What chance Avould there be now of carrying 
 a Bill through Parliament to make rational- 
 ising modifications in the formularies of the 
 
THE STATE AND RELIGION 173 
 
 Church of England ? The revived theocratic 
 conscience of Anglicans, combined with the 
 fear of recriminations from Roman Catholics 
 and Nonconformists, boasting of their inde- 
 pendence of the State, would resist all 
 tampering by a mixed assembly of laymen 
 with the sacred deposit which, if anything at 
 all is meant by it, is in the keeping of the 
 men of religion. And what in the end would 
 be the gain if the policy were practicable? 
 That which the higher minds among the 
 clergy regard as the " spirit," in contrast with 
 the " letter," of religion, is indistinguishable 
 from something that can be arrived at by a 
 less roundabout path on the lines of pure 
 philosophy. 
 
 The final solution is to reduce all the 
 Churches alike to the rank of societies within 
 the State, tolerated so far as they are not 
 actively hostile to it. Whether a State philo- 
 sophically directed should forbid or check 
 superstitions is a question to be determined 
 by circumstances. No one would carry the 
 principle of religious toleration so far as to 
 propose that a civilised State should permit 
 human sacrifices, even if willing victims were 
 offered up. The English law does not allow 
 a bequest of money for masses to be said for 
 
174 THE STATE AND RELIGION 
 
 the repose of a testator's soul, regarding this 
 as a " superstitious " use. Application of the 
 same principle might lead far. Could not 
 bequests, for example, to teach the doctrine 
 of atoning sacrifice common to all orthodox 
 forms of Christianity be brought under the 
 same rules? Actual human sacrifices, it is 
 agreed, are to be forbidden. At the same 
 time it would be an interference with specula- 
 tive liberty to forbid anyone to defend the 
 sacrifices of the Druids, for example, as 
 having had their value in so far as they were 
 signs of a pious intention. And it would be 
 absurd to forbid anyone to believe that one 
 sacrifice in the past has supernatural efficacy ; 
 unless, indeed, it were to be adjudged, as it 
 was by the Inquisition, that beliefs we regard 
 as false are an affair of perverted will ; in 
 which case persecution might be logical. 
 When, however, the law is called on to aid, 
 after a man's death, his intention that belief 
 in the remission of sins by blood-sacrifice 
 shall be impressed on other minds, the 
 spiritual function of the State itself may be 
 invoked against this. Coercion is not to be 
 used against superstition unless it results in 
 acts of cruelty or immorality otherwise for- 
 bidden ; but discretion is to be used as to the 
 
THE STATE AND RELIGION 175 
 
 extent to which superstitions identical in 
 principle with those of Dahomey shall be 
 propagated by endowments. 
 
 There is one method by which it will 
 always be easy for the State to promote 
 religious development on rational lines. 
 Within the "free Churches" contests break 
 out from time to time as to the binding force 
 of the conditions laid down in bequests. 
 When the community has changed its view, 
 is it still officially bound to insist on the 
 preaching of doctrines prescribed in the trust- 
 deeds of endowments ? Here law-courts can 
 do much to facilitate the movement towards 
 freedom. Stipulations can be systematically 
 set aside on the ground that it is no interest 
 of the State to draw tight the bonds of 
 sectarian conformity. Those who leave 
 endowments may look for some general 
 regard to their intention ; but they leave them 
 subject to revision of the detailed terms by 
 new generations. This theory of bequests for 
 public purposes has to a considerable extent 
 been already acted on. 
 
 It would apply, of course, to a disestablished 
 Church of England. This understood, there 
 is no need to be otherwise than generous in the 
 conditions as to the retention of endowments. 
 
176 THE STATE AND RELIGION 
 
 The real danger would be if it were con- 
 sidered obligatory to hand them over to the 
 most rigorous adherents of the formularies 
 on the narrowest interpretation of their mean- 
 ing. When the State reserves its right, not 
 indeed to modify the formularies on its own 
 initiative, but to recognise the changed mean- 
 ings given them by the more liberal minds 
 within the Churches, the rest can be left to 
 the gradual permeation of the whole com- 
 munity by rational thought. 
 
 For in an atmosphere of widening culture 
 the reversion to that which is organic in the 
 historical religion does not affect the majority 
 of minds. The danger is not that sacerdotal 
 reaction should gain the victory in open dis- 
 cussion, but that it should, through the force 
 of its claim to represent what the religion 
 once was, keep or regain hold on all the 
 traditional means of coercion or of influence, 
 political and social. The anti-Protestant 
 movement in the Church of England does not 
 propose to segregate itself and support its own 
 type of worship on the resources that can be 
 furnished by its living adherents, but by 
 retaining official positions and public endow- 
 ments to capture the indeterminate mass. 
 From the beginning of Christianity this was 
 
THE STATE AND RELIGION 177 
 
 always the aim of the " Catholic " groups. 
 Their success at any time depends on the 
 relative strength or weakness of humanist 
 culture. When this has become strong 
 enough, the claim of ecclesiastical ritual and 
 dogma to be the true Christian religion, if 
 sustained historically, will tell not in favour 
 of the Church, but against the religion. The 
 groups of determined irrationalists will be 
 left isolated in a non-Christian world. 
 
 But, it may be urged, Christianity is 
 admitted to have been a very complex move- 
 ment. From the beginning it had many 
 strands. It was never purely and simply 
 Catholicism. There was the strand of puri- 
 fied Hebraism, and there was the strand of 
 Oriental gnosis. Why should not these 
 higher ethical or speculative elements, or both 
 combined, take a new departure and become 
 in effect a new and higher religion which 
 might still call itself Christian? We must 
 allow that this is a possibility ; but it does 
 not invalidate the preceding argument, which 
 concerns the historic Churches of Europe. 
 Such a transformation would be little less 
 revolutionary than the direct placing of philo- 
 sophy above all the historical religions. If it 
 really came about, all that could be asked 
 
 N 
 
178 THE STATE AND RELIGION 
 
 from the State would be a benevolent neutra- 
 lity. Many among the higher minds will 
 never again voluntarily place impersonal 
 human reason below any supposed super- 
 natural revelation whatever. This being so, 
 there would be something of hypocrisy if a 
 State consisting of all classes of minds were 
 formally to identify itself on the spiritual side 
 with a religion called revealed. The Churches 
 having been deprived of their claws and teeth, 
 the prudential reason has disappeared. For 
 the State to adopt a particular Church as its 
 own is at the best a limitation, just as if it 
 were to adopt a particular philosophic school. 
 Even a city, not to speak of a nation, was 
 always wider than a single sect. To univer- 
 salise a doctrine in a visible community, 
 persecution is a necessity ; as Plato logically 
 recognised when his authoritative bias had 
 prevailed. 
 
 The position, therefore, of the free Churches 
 and of the philosophic schools within the 
 State must be formally the same. Materially, 
 however, they will differ. While dogma is an 
 old philosophic term, and lists of the " dogmas 
 of the philosophers " were set forth in historical 
 compilations, these never took the form of an 
 authoritative creed to be assented to by 
 
THE STATE AND RELIGION 179 
 
 adherents. No philosophic school, it has 
 been said with truth, ever thought of 
 borrowing from the city the method of voting, 
 in order to determine its articles of faith. 
 There was no philosophic council or synod. 
 And to organise a cult is quite beyond the 
 range of philosophic ambition. Ancient 
 philosophers either conformed to the religion 
 of the State or ignored external religion 
 altogether. When Comte drew up the details 
 of a new cult, he recognised that he was no 
 longer a pure philosopher, but an aspirant to 
 the position of religious founder. Had this 
 aspiration been fulfilled as he expected it to 
 be, it does not seem to me that his position 
 would really have been higher than it is. If 
 we take the undoubtedly authentic beginners 
 of religious movements say Mohammed, or 
 Luther, or Wesley and leave out of account 
 the vague divine figures of mythical or 
 legendary founders who are no longer for us 
 tangible personalities, we do not find ourselves 
 in contact with the highest minds that the 
 human race has produced. A supreme 
 philosopher or poet like Plato or Shakespeare 
 is intrinsically greater than the greatest of the 
 men of action ; among whom the clearly- 
 known founders of religions must be reckoned. 
 
i8o THE STATE AND RELIGION 
 
 Buddha, if the type is traceable to a particular 
 figure, was a philosophic saint, and certainly 
 did nothing to introduce the popular mytho- 
 logy of Buddhism. 
 
 An attempt at transforming religion more 
 philosophical in conception than that of 
 Comte was made by Hegel, though this too 
 was without permanent success. Hegel did 
 not fear to place philosophy higher than 
 religion in so far as it has clear intellectual 
 insight into that which for religion exists only 
 in feeling. And his method was more in 
 accordance with philosophic aims, for he 
 proceeded on the dogma or mythology rather 
 than on the cult. Now, mythology is un- 
 doubtedly related to philosophy as a starting- 
 point. There are in it elements of speculative 
 imagination on which philosophic reason can 
 work either by development or opposition. 
 Hegel, too, had a gift for this kind of interpre- 
 tation. Some of the finest passages in the 
 PJienomenology of Spirit are renderings, at 
 once poetical and philosophical, of religious 
 myths. The religion on which he attempted 
 to philosophise as " the absolute religion " 
 was, however, orthodox Christianity ; and 
 this made the task impossible. He himself 
 throws out a remark to the effect that precisely 
 
THE STATE AND RELIGION 181 
 
 that mythology of which the core is the most 
 barbaric (as, for example, the " death of God ") 
 needs the hardest effort of thought to trans- 
 mute ; but this was not all the difficulty. 
 Christianity, with its documentary basis and 
 its patristic and scholastic development, was 
 not a spontaneous poetic mythology with 
 which anything could be done that a 
 philosopher liked. It had assumed a scientific 
 form, and, as its data were external and not 
 to be questioned, the purely deductive line of 
 thought necessarily applied to it had given it 
 more than the rigour of a philosophic synthesis. 
 The successors of the scholastic doctors were 
 in possession ; and, as a class, they have too 
 much feeling for the organic character of the 
 creed to allow it to be cut to pieces on the 
 chance of its rejuvenation. Perhaps on the 
 whole the most memorable result of Hegel's 
 philosophy of Christianity was that it gave 
 the impulse to Strauss's historical criticism of 
 the Gospels. 
 
 Does philosophy, then, simply stand apart 
 from religion, or has it a religious task of its 
 own ? In this sense it may be said to have a 
 religious task, that its problem does not in 
 any way fall short of the problem of the 
 highest religions. At its summit it appeals 
 
i82 THE STATE AND RELIGION 
 
 to feeling as well as intellect. This religious 
 attitude of philosophy has its completest 
 expression in Spinoza's Ethics. Whatever 
 the conclusions of the Ethics may mean for 
 anyone else, Spinoza himself found in them 
 the emotional satisfaction given by religion. 
 Any philosophy that does not effect this for 
 the individual thinker is so far incomplete. 
 But it is for the individual that philosophy 
 thus reaches its term. We have passed the 
 limits of its relation, and that of religion, to 
 the State. 
 
UNIVERSil 
 
 1 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 EDUCATION 
 
 NOT to leave the ideal too indeterminate, an 
 attempt must be made to give some outline of 
 the type of education to be promoted in a 
 State that directly interests itself in culture. 
 In this concluding chapter I intend to discuss 
 the respective claims of science, philosophy, 
 and literature. Education, in its widest 
 sense, means more than this. It includes, 
 for example, physical training, direct moral 
 instruction, training to appreciate the fine 
 arts ; but a limit is necessary, and I have 
 selected the topics commonly associated with 
 it by convention. " Technical education," as 
 belonging only to the special training for 
 particular trades or professions, and not con- 
 tributing directly to the ends of human life, 
 must be excluded on principle from a general 
 outline. In the ideal State it would be an 
 affair for subordinate branches of adminis- 
 tration. 
 
 By science is usually understood physical 
 183 
 
184 EDUCATION 
 
 science, based on mathematics and culmi- 
 nating in the science of man biologically 
 treated. This scheme may be extended at one 
 end by placing logic before mathematics. At 
 the other end, the biological treatment of man 
 is not the scientific terminus ; after that ought 
 to come, first, sociology, and then the psycho- 
 logy of man as an individual thinking, feeling, 
 and active being, formed in a certain social 
 medium. Within this group of subjects for 
 instruction physical science has special 
 importance, as showing forth the best- 
 organised method of discovering verifiable 
 truth. Logic and mathematics give the truth 
 of self-consistency and of ideal constructions 
 in number and space, with certain general 
 rules for testing inferences regarding facts 
 and events. By themselves, however, they 
 furnish neither application to the actual things 
 we know, nor an imaginative construction of 
 these to form a picture of the universe. The 
 physical sciences help us to form such a 
 picture, in which all its groupings and their 
 changes are exhibited as in accordance with 
 uniform laws called " laws of nature." This 
 is carried into more detail by biology and 
 the anthropological sciences, but the details 
 present themselves as applications of methods 
 
EDUCATION 185 
 
 seen in their greatest perfection in physical 
 science. It was from the physical sciences, 
 mathematically treated, that the idea of 
 uniform laws of nature first emerged. Hence 
 the special importance of these sciences in 
 education. There can be no doubt that the 
 elements of them, with notions of their 
 method, ought to form part of a liberal course 
 of instruction. It is something to know their 
 results, as these might be acquired inciden- 
 tally during an education purely literary ; but 
 there is an incompleteness in this if it is not 
 illuminated, to some slight extent at least, by 
 direct knowledge of the methods that, in a 
 way appreciable by all, yield a kind of truth, 
 though it may be only a truth about 
 the constant conjunctions of appearances. 
 Prisoners in the Platonic cave, whatever else 
 they may come to learn, cannot dispense 
 with knowing something accurate about the 
 shadows on the wall. 
 
 The formal training at the beginning has 
 special value as discipline in thinking, and 
 the sciences that come later in the series 
 concern us more closely as human beings 
 than the intermediate ones. Hence these also 
 have their part in general instruction. Each 
 subordinate group may be an object of 
 
1 86 EDUCATION 
 
 specialising from the point of view of culture. 
 An individual student may simply have more 
 taste for one group than for another ; when 
 this is so, he ought to specialise in it if 
 there is no sufficient external reason against. 
 Further, he may have a gift for advancing 
 science in a particular direction. In this case, 
 of course, there is still better reason for 
 specialising. For the general body of 
 students it will probably be well to bear in 
 mind that they are not likely to become 
 men of science. This being so, great atten- 
 tion to the kind of laboratory training, for 
 example, that would fit them for a scientific 
 career is a waste of educational energy. It is 
 enough that they should gain some insight 
 from practice into the nature of scientific 
 method. As the truths of the sciences are by 
 degrees condensed and integrated and made 
 communicable on the analogy of the older 
 subjects, reduction of the time necessary to 
 learn them at school will become easier. The 
 constant growth of detailed knowledge need 
 not affect this, since the object is not to instil 
 the greatest quantity of possibly "useful know- 
 ledge," but to give mental training along with 
 a basis for a coherent view of the order of the 
 universe and of human life. 
 
EDUCATION 187 
 
 Science considered in this way leads on to 
 philosophy, by which its parts are linked 
 together in a unified system. For a complete 
 classification of the sciences critical examina- 
 tion of knowledge is a necessity. The result 
 of philosophic criticism is to present objective 
 science as a statement of laws of phenomena. 
 Phenomena are appearances for conscious- 
 ness. By theorising on consciousness and its 
 implications, philosophy proper, or meta- 
 physics, arrives at a doctrine of reality. The 
 name for this doctrine is ontology. On the 
 side of action and of feeling, as distinguished 
 from intellect, the most generalised kind of 
 reflection leads to ethical, political, and 
 aesthetic philosophy. Ethics and politics, 
 as well as metaphysics, have a neces- 
 sary reaction on science. The actual 
 and possible branches of scientific investi- 
 gation being of indefinite multiplicity, 
 the generalised view of these, whether from 
 the practical or the theoretical side, keeps 
 them in a kind of unity which, by themselves, 
 they tend to lose. This is the element of 
 truth in Comte's attack on the "dispersive 
 specialism " characteristic of the science of our 
 day. His own view, however, in its turn, has 
 to be corrected by a wider conception of 
 
1 88 EDUCATION 
 
 philosophy, by a fuller recognition of the value 
 of science itself purely as culture, and by the 
 principle of liberty as regards the pursuit of 
 the different branches of science. It is not for 
 philosophy to prescribe what particular topics 
 men of science shall take up, but only to 
 furnish, if it can, some rational outline of a 
 scheme by which their relative importance 
 may become manifest. 
 
 The principle of liberty applies, of course, 
 directly to private investigations. It means 
 not only that there should be legal freedom to 
 choose a line of research, but that there 
 should be no moral disapproval of work 
 undertaken primarily to gratify intellectual 
 curiosity. For, in an ideal order, disinte- 
 rested sentiments with no particular ethical 
 colouring would have a recognised place. 
 Suppose the recent discovery of radium and 
 its properties were never to lead to anything 
 more practically useful than an enlargement 
 of our ideas on the age of the earth, would 
 this condemn it as involving a waste of 
 intellect ? Ought we to lament that the same 
 amount of scientific ability had not been 
 devoted to some branch of research that 
 might, sooner or later, facilitate that rapid 
 production of cheap, destructible articles which 
 
EDUCATION 189 
 
 students of economics find to be characteristic 
 of modern industrialism ? Unless we accept 
 some such criterion as this, we must allow a 
 larger space for scientific freedom than it 
 found in Comte's later, or indeed his earlier, 
 system. 
 
 These qualifications made, we can at the 
 same time admit that for public education the 
 directing idea must be that of a more liberal 
 Religion of Humanity. In a rational order 
 there will be a selection of subjects for instruc- 
 tion from a generalised point of view, practical 
 as well as theoretical. Unlimited specialisa- 
 tion will not be encouraged in schools and 
 universities. The minuter investigations will 
 no doubt be determined, so far as they are not 
 simply an expression of the private liberty of 
 the investigator, by industrial and other needs 
 that will be kept in view by technical colleges. 
 These again react on speculative research ; 
 and a possible teleological position is to find 
 the true spiritual value of industrialism in its 
 ultimate furtherance of theoretical science. 
 
 At some points, however, a moral super- 
 vision of science by the community is justified. 
 The defence sometimes made of vivisection as 
 a direct expression of the " liberty of science," 
 with which the State, as representing only 
 
190 EDUCATION 
 
 general non-scientific opinion, has no right to 
 interfere, must be dismissed as illegitimate. 
 Vivisection, in so far as it offers a problem to 
 ethics, cannot be sanctioned merely by its 
 relation to particular scientific pursuits. Its 
 utility for these is an element in the case, but 
 it does not by itself decide the case. With 
 those who regard it as not permissible merely 
 for the solution of questions put by theoretical 
 curiosity, I find myself in agreement. If 
 defensible at all, it must be on the ground 
 that the relief of human and animal suffering 
 which results from it is greater than the 
 suffering inflicted. Within this view further 
 limitations have to be admitted ; such as this, 
 that pain amounting to actual torture ought 
 not to be inflicted for the solution of any 
 scientific question. And, of course, painful 
 experiments on living animals should never 
 be merely for demonstration of what has 
 already been discovered. Of these positions, 
 maintained by Edmund Gurney, the general 
 approval of Darwin is on record. It may be 
 noted that, on the subject of man's relation to 
 animal life, Comte, by a happy exception, 
 strongly condemned the authorised Catholic 
 ethics by which animal suffering is treated 
 as a matter of absolute indifference. His 
 
EDUCATION 191 
 
 restrictions on vivisection, indeed, would have 
 been all but equivalent to its suppression. 
 Modern Protestantism, in unison with later 
 non-Christian antiquity in its teaching about 
 animal life, is here, by the confession of the 
 founder of Positivism himself, at a higher 
 moral level than Jesuit doctors. 
 
 This is something of a digression into 
 personal opinion ; but it may serve to show 
 the bearing of general philosophy on the 
 exaggerated claims of experts. The question 
 is not whether the particular opinions are 
 right, but whether specialists, working neces- 
 sarily in an abstract way within their own 
 department, ought to rule this with practical 
 irresponsibility. Now, evidently no depart- 
 ment of human activity can be wholly marked 
 off in practice, and all considerations excluded 
 that do not belong to one scientific mode of 
 considering it. Morally, the fact of sentiency, 
 with which the physiologist as such is not 
 concerned, makes a difference as regards what 
 is permissible in investigating the laws of 
 organic life. The appeal is finally to an 
 enlightened popular opinion ; and in accept- 
 ing this I think philosophy will be found to 
 be on the whole more democratic than special 
 science. Historically it is noteworthy that the 
 
192 EDUCATION 
 
 military despots of modern times, while encou- 
 raging mathematical and physical studies, and 
 choosing them as the basis of higher educa- 
 tion, have suppressed philosophy, and espe- 
 cially the moral and political sciences. 
 Recently there have not been wanting sug- 
 gestions from the scientific side that in a 
 system of fighting industrial plutocracies, 
 dividing the world among them, specialist 
 research may be of extreme value to the 
 particular social aggregate (labelled for con- 
 venience with the name of some historic 
 people) that can promote it with the greatest 
 efficiency. 
 
 The highest minds, philosophical as well 
 as scientific, have not been exempt from 
 aberrations of this kind. Not a biological 
 specialist, but Plato himself, put forward the 
 notion of artificial breeding, carried on in the 
 human race through selection of partners by 
 trained experts. In modern times this has 
 become a recurrent fantasy ; finding new 
 encouragement in the biology of evolution. 
 The thinker who in effect exploded it was 
 Schopenhauer, though by a line of thought 
 curiously inconsistent with his pessimism. 
 Under an appearance of formal deduction 
 from his metaphysics, but really by an effort 
 
EDUCATION 193 
 
 of what has been called the scientific imagina- 
 tion, he showed how individualised sexual love 
 is one manifestation of a teleology of the race, 
 deeper than all seeming personal aims. The 
 immanent end being the production of the 
 most perfect and beautiful offspring, clearly 
 selection from outside could only modify 
 for the worse the order that already exists. 
 Applying this view to practice, we may con- 
 clude that, if there is any interference with 
 marriages, it ought only to be negative ; for 
 example, to prevent transmission of tenden- 
 cies to disease. All positive dictation by 
 authority, whether public or parental, is 
 excluded on principle. The result of a more 
 philosophical science is therefore to confirm 
 the position that would spontaneously be 
 taken on the ground of human liberty. 
 
 All this shows how important it is not 
 only that philosophy should become scientific, 
 but that science should become philosophical. 
 Accordingly, it might seem as if all scientific 
 education ought to have its completion in 
 philosophy. This, however, I do not main- 
 tain. While philosophy is in a sense more 
 the affair of everyone, it seems to appeal to 
 fewer minds as a special subject of study. 
 
 The reason is, in part, that it requires normally 
 
 o 
 
i 9 4 EDUCATION 
 
 a higher degree of generalising power ; and, 
 in part, that the direct path to it is through 
 the subjective science of psychology, of which 
 the fundamental method is introspection. 
 Now, more persons are capable of observing 
 external objects and the changes in them than 
 of reflecting on their own mental processes. 
 Thus philosophy, apart from its diffused 
 influence on general thought, becomes a 
 special occupation for a comparatively small 
 number. What we may reasonably ask is 
 that for those who have the special taste for 
 it there should be no artificial hindrances to 
 its pursuit. The way to it through science, 
 which seems to be the most natural mode ot 
 approach, should not be made more difficult 
 than the way through classical literature. In 
 all universities there should be the possibility 
 of taking it up at a certain stage in the more 
 specialist pursuits, mathematical, physical (in 
 the widest sense), and philological. To the 
 specialists, on the other hand, it may be con- 
 ceded that the way to philosophy should be 
 always through one or other of these ; so that 
 philosophical students may begin with notions 
 of evidence and of accurate method, which, as 
 the greatest enthusiasts for metaphysics will 
 admit, cannot be derived from it to start with. 
 
EDUCATION 195 
 
 The intellectus sibi permissus should come 
 after, not before, discipline ; though, if it is 
 not allowed to come at all, the progress of 
 science itself (as distinguished from its com- 
 mercial applications) will cease. 
 
 It is not, therefore, philosophy that can 
 synthesise general education. And science, 
 though an important element in it, and one 
 that, at least in outline, ought to be universal, 
 is insufficient. If seriously pursued, it soon 
 diverges into specialism. The views given 
 by any branch of it are "abstract," in the 
 sense that they are detached from relation 
 both to human life and to the whole of nature. 
 It does not appeal to a wide range of emotions. 
 Even the humanistic sciences, to which it may 
 be held that the others lead up, do not directly 
 supply what is wanting. They, too, suffer 
 from the abstraction of the scientific point of 
 view ; and, moreover, as sciences they are 
 inadequate. Being the latest in the series, 
 they do not yet offer finished models of 
 scientific method. As regards doctrine, not 
 even in the most speculative branch of philo- 
 sophy is there more dispute than in sociology, 
 say, or political economy the last pre- 
 eminently an example of abstraction, and of 
 peculiarly misleading abstraction. 
 
196 EDUCATION 
 
 The predominant part of general education 
 must in the end be literature ; especially what 
 we may call poetic that is, creative literature 
 in the widest sense. This has, no doubt, since 
 the victory of humanism over scholasticism, 
 been made too exclusively the groundwork. 
 Older scientific and philosophical views were 
 dethroned without the substitution of any 
 general illumination from those that, in the 
 world of modern thought, displaced them. 
 Thus for ordinary minds the study of the 
 Greek and Roman classics has lost much of 
 the stimulating and emancipating power it 
 had at the opening of the modern era. When 
 it regains this, it is through the influence of 
 new scientific and philosophical points of 
 view ; not from the philological drill that 
 became, for the pure scholar, a sort of quasi- 
 science, doing duty for the whole range of 
 mental discipline, alike in the form and the 
 matter of knowledge. And yet, with certain 
 adaptations to meet changed conditions, it is 
 to a grounding in ancient and modern 
 European literature that we must chiefly look 
 for the educational synthesis. 
 
 Just as in the teaching of physical science, 
 when regarded as a part of general culture, 
 the kind of laboratory training that would fit 
 
EDUCATION 197 
 
 a pupil to become an expert is out of place ; 
 so, in the teaching of the ancient classics, 
 drill in the minutiae of grammar and composi- 
 tion ought to disappear for all but the few who 
 are to specialise in philology. It may be 
 admitted that for those who have not, in their 
 reading, a present consciousness of the last 
 refinements of grammatical structure, some- 
 thing is lost. And, especially in the case of a 
 dead language, this can only be acquired by 
 assiduous attention during the plastic years of 
 youth. To write a foreign, and especially an 
 ancient, language is undoubtedly an elegant 
 accomplishment and a supreme test of organic 
 knowledge of it. All this, however, for 
 practical reasons, must be surrendered to 
 those that have a special taste and aptitude 
 for the kind of accomplishment. After all, 
 the essential thing educationally, even in the 
 case of a living language, is not to be able to 
 write or speak it, but to acquire appreciation 
 of its literature. When this is steadily kept 
 in view as the end, the educational reforms 
 necessitated by the modern growth of 
 knowledge together with the limitations of 
 the human mind, will follow of themselves. 
 
 For general education, the number of 
 languages taught must evidently be restricted. 
 
[98 EDUCATION 
 
 Latin and French, with some more scientific 
 and systematic teaching of English than is 
 yet customary, may be taken to be indis- 
 pensable. The academical question now 
 seems to be whether Greek is still to be 
 included. On the whole, with the reforms 
 suggested, no reason appears why it should 
 not. With the reduction of grammar and 
 composition, in all languages taught, to the 
 necessary minimum, time would be greatly 
 economised. And on every ground there are 
 the strongest arguments against relegating 
 Greek to the class of such specialist studies as 
 Hebrew or Sanskrit or Arabic. Its literature 
 belongs to the direct European tradition. A 
 great part of modern literature has been 
 profoundly influenced by first-hand knowledge 
 of it. As poetic literature it is still of the 
 highest aesthetic importance ; nothing is less 
 an affair of mere antiquarianism. On the 
 mental discipline given by any philological 
 study no particular stress need be laid, since 
 this can be acquired most directly from 
 subjects like logic and mathematics. Yet 
 there is an advantage in combining with 
 formal training some more concrete interest. 
 To the other languages mentioned the same 
 reasons are not applicable in full. If it were 
 
EDUCATION 199 
 
 attempted to make out a case for Sanskrit as 
 representing the earliest known form of an 
 Aryan language, the reply would be, the 
 absence of direct influence, or indeed of any 
 influence at all till recently, on European 
 literature or thought. But Hebrew literature, 
 it may be said, has had a direct influence 
 comparable to that of Greek. The answer is 
 that here the influence has been almost 
 exclusively through translations. Knowledge 
 of Hebrew in Europe has been mainly confined 
 to a few experts. And, admittedly, Hebrew 
 poetry can be appreciated in translations as no 
 Aryan poetry can. In England the Hebrew 
 Bible had the good fortune of being translated 
 precisely at the time when the best minds 
 were most in sympathy with Hebraic feeling. 
 Other European languages besides those 
 mentioned may retain a kind of optional 
 character, and should perhaps not be 
 introduced at a very early stage. Whether a 
 student should learn German or Italian would 
 depend on his special line of interest. A case 
 indeed might be made out for placing Greek 
 with these rather than with linguistic studies 
 universally obligatory. The important point 
 is, not that a minimum of it should be 
 compulsory, but that it should remain in the 
 
200 EDUCATION 
 
 group of studies belonging to general 
 education, and not be henceforth limited to 
 philological specialists. The time when 
 Western Europe ceased to learn Greek is 
 much more a warning than an encouragement 
 to those who would discard it once again. 
 What can be said in favour of compulsion is 
 that to abolish it does not seem a particularly 
 desirable reform in a time when its effect 
 probably is to counterbalance commercial 
 stress in other directions rather than to restrict 
 academic liberty. 
 
 On the lines set forth, it seems practicable to 
 give literature a predominating part in the 
 higher education, while duly recognising 
 science and philosophy. The reason for 
 conceding to it this predominance is that 
 from nothing else can such a view of the 
 whole be obtained. The representation of 
 human life in poetic literature is, in a sense, 
 more living than life itself, as containing its 
 imaginative completion. Instead of an aggre- 
 gate of " facts," which are abstractions, it gives 
 us the inner reality. Moreover, the philo- 
 sophical, and to some extent the scientific, 
 ideas of the ages are embodied in their 
 enduring literature. Hence, even for com- 
 petent literary instruction, precisely the kind 
 
EDUCATION 201 
 
 of general scientific knowledge must be 
 imparted of which the necessity has been 
 shown on other grounds. It is in this way 
 that the historical sense of relativity is 
 acquired. The special importance of litera- 
 ture on the side of feeling is obvious. The 
 esthetic and the ethical emotions are appealed 
 to by it as they are not by science or by 
 philosophy as a branch of academic instruc- 
 tion. From no other study, in short, do we 
 get concrete fullness. 
 
 To literature an important subsidiary study is 
 history, in the most general sense. If this can 
 be taught philosophically, so much the better; 
 but agreement has not yet been arrived at on 
 its philosophy. There can be no question, 
 however, on the one side that the detail 
 taught in schools should be mainly that of the 
 history of Europe, and, on the other side, that 
 the beginning should be made with European 
 antiquity, and not somewhere in the Middle 
 Ages. This, indeed, ought to be insisted on 
 even for elementary schools. To set out from 
 some casual point in the history of England 
 say from the Norman Conquest is to begin 
 with a complex order quite unintelligible by 
 itself. Unless the antecedents of modern 
 Europe in Greek and Roman antiquity are 
 
202 EDUCATION 
 
 presented at least in outline, neither the history 
 of England nor of any other European country 
 can be understood. On a small scale some- 
 thing should be taught about the ancient 
 East as a background to it all ; and for this a 
 few conventional data about the history of the 
 Jews will not permanently suffice. But, after 
 all, our historical concern must remain chiefly 
 with the nations of our own group. Now, 
 these are the nations forming what was called 
 by Comte the " Republic of the West." And 
 the direct antecedents of this, in his view too, 
 are Greece and Rome. Antithetic views on 
 the philosophy of the process thus suggest the 
 same empirical outline of instruction. To 
 make general European history the basis of 
 primary education might, therefore, well be 
 the next considerable educational reform 
 attempted. Only on such a basis can a 
 common and civic patriotism be founded. 
 Before we reach this stage, however, there are 
 many obstructions to clear away. 
 
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