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. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW fSO 26* 23Apr'63ZFl OCT 80 1930 30m-6,'14 YB C803