ool Addresses 
 
 on 
 
 of Social Work 
 
 acCunn
 
 ^.^
 
 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 ETHICS OF CITIZENSHIP. Fourth Ed. 1907. 
 James MacLehose & Son. 
 
 THE MAKING OF CHARACTER. Fifth Ed. 
 
 1908. 
 
 At the University Press, Cambridge. 
 
 SIX RADICAL THINKERS. BENTHAM, J. S. 
 MILL, COBDEN, CARLYLE, MAZZINI, 
 T. H. GREEN. Second Impression, 1910. 
 Edward Arnold, London.
 
 LIVERPOOL ADDRESSES 
 
 ON 
 
 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN MAGGUNN, M.A., LL.D., 
 
 Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in the 
 University of Liverpool. 
 
 LIVERPOOL 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS: 57, ASHTON STREET 
 
 LONDON 
 CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD. 
 
 1911
 
 Printed at the DAILY POST AND MERCURY Printing Works, 
 Fleet Street, Liverpool.
 
 To JAMES W. ALSOP, Esq. 
 
 MY DEAR ALSOP, 
 
 Will you allow me to inscribe this 
 volume to you as a small tribute from a friend 
 who has for many years watched your public life 
 with respect and admiration, and who has had 
 many opportunities of appreciating the magnitude 
 of your services, and the sincerity of your devotion 
 to the City of Liverpool and its University. 
 
 Believe me, 
 
 Sincerely yours, 
 
 JOHN MAcCUNN. 
 
 March 10, 1911.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 Addresses V. and VII. of the following have 
 already been published by the Associations to 
 which they were delivered. Some pages of VIII. 
 have already appeared in " The Making of 
 Character " ; and my thanks are due to the 
 Syndics of the Cambridge Press for permission 
 to reproduce them here. VI. and VII. were also 
 printed for private circulation amongst their 
 members by the Societies concerned. It is 
 perhaps also desirable to say that Section III. 
 includes two consecutive addresses, lest the 
 reader should suspect the author of an over- 
 estimate of the endurance of audiences.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK. 
 
 II. SOCIAL MOTIVE AND DEMOCRATIC 
 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 III. JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES TO SOCIAL 
 
 WORK. 
 
 IV. CITIZENSHIP AND IDEAL INTERESTS. 
 V. LOCAL PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION. 
 
 VI. POLITICAL PARTY AND POLITICAL 
 CONVICTION. 
 
 VII. THE TEACHING OF RELIGION AND THE ART 
 OF EDUCATION. 
 
 VIII. ETHICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE.
 
 I.-MOTIVES TO SOCIAL 
 WORK.* 
 
 It is not for a moment to be supposed that the 
 only members of the community who render 
 social service are those who of set purpose 
 disinterestedly undertake it. Every man, whether 
 he intend it or not, serves his generation by doing 
 his own work, provided he does it well. With 
 the vast majority indeed this is the main con- 
 sideration. They do not often lift their thoughts 
 to any end so large as the public good, or even 
 the good of any considerable social group. They 
 think first, and often enough they think last, of 
 livelihood, of provision for those near and dear 
 to them, of their good name, of the kind of work 
 they are turning out, of well-earned rest when 
 their working days are done. 
 
 Nor are they, on this account, to be stigmatised 
 as selfish. It is a perversion of fact, though some 
 social censors and satirists and even some social 
 analysts have been guilty of it, to vilify the 
 ordinary battle of life as if it were a predatory 
 
 "Addresses I. to III. were delivered to the Liverpool School of Social 
 Science and Social Work.
 
 i ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 struggle, a " cut-purse and cut-throat scramble," 
 in which each, regardless of each, fights fiercely 
 for his own hand. On the contrary, it is the 
 family rather than the isolated individual that 
 is the true social unit. And most men work so 
 habitually, so ungrudgingly, so patiently for kith 
 and kin, or for friends and connections, that it 
 would be a misnomer, not to say a libel, to brand 
 their motives as " selfish." 
 
 But though not selfish, these motives of the 
 mass of men are nevertheless private. If 
 society struggles and staggers forwards with 
 an indomitable vitality, this is not because the 
 average man makes the public good his conscious 
 and direct aim. In a social system, still strongly- 
 rooted in family life, in private property and 
 inheritance, in industrial and professional com- 
 petition, the vitality of the body politic, which 
 is ever bearing us on towards ends greater than 
 we know, comes from the many millions who go 
 forth to their manifold toil till the evening, and 
 who, in fulfilling that commonplace though 
 honourable destiny, look little or not at all 
 beyond the limited range of private interests. 
 That stalwart individualist John Stuart Mill 
 predicted the coming of a day when a common 
 man would dig or weave consciously for his 
 country's good as well as fight for it. And 
 Ruskin eloquently prophesied that trade must 
 have its heroisms and the market its sacrifices 
 no less than war. But that day is not yet. The 
 individualistic analysis, if not too atomistically
 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK 3 
 
 interpreted, still holds true at any rate over wide 
 tracts of our national life. 
 
 Nor is it to be forgotten that there are many 
 vocations in which deliberately unselfish motives 
 are so inextricably interwoven with the push of 
 private interests that it is often hard to say which 
 are paramount. Our public officials, our doctors, 
 nurses, teachers, ministers of religion, all work 
 deliberately and of set purpose for the good of 
 others. They serve the city and the State, they 
 administer justice, they relieve suffering, they 
 diffuse knowledge, they make character, they 
 uplift the fallen, they console the sorrowful. 
 Gratefully one renders tribute to their splendid 
 and unobtrusive self-sacrifice. But we neither 
 ask nor expect that their self-sacrifice should 
 be selfless. Do they not love their vocation? 
 Do they not value their reputation? Do they 
 not work for and cherish their honourable 
 independence? In truth, the very point that 
 makes these callings enviable is that, in them, 
 the passion for social work joins hands so happily 
 with personal pride and absorption in a chosen 
 vocation. 
 
 And yet of course there is another kind of social 
 work, and other motives than these. This lies 
 upon the surface. For though the society we live 
 in is fortunately not lacking in vigour and vitality, 
 nothing can be more certain than that a given 
 society can manifest much vigour and vitality, 
 and yet be far from a satisfactory state of 
 social health. This is a fact we are not suffered
 
 I, ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 to forget. For if there be one feature of the 
 latter half of the igth century more conspicuous 
 than another, is it not that, during that period, 
 our reformers and moralists, our dispassionate 
 social researchers, our satirists, and not least our 
 socialists, have been busy with tongue and pen 
 opening our eyes to the miseries, hardships, 
 degradations, dangers, which mar and menace 
 our social system, and which all its prodigious 
 vitality and all its astonishing prosperity have 
 hitherto proved unequal to throw off? With 
 social vitality it is too true a tale comes social 
 disease. 
 
 The bane, however, has brought the antidote. 
 It has at any rate brought one antidote in that 
 rapid expansion of voluntary effort and agency 
 for social betterment which has taken form and 
 a body in our endlessly diversified charities, 
 our conferences, congresses and leagues, our 
 settlements and schools of social science and 
 social work. 
 
 Need it be added that the same clear call 
 for remedy appears, ever increasingly, in our 
 legislative programmes, and in that competition 
 for remedy between State action and voluntary 
 effort which, by its very rivalries, marks the 
 collapse of the bygone fool's paradise that the 
 health of the social organism can be left to take 
 care of itself. The result is matter of common 
 knowledge. In the camps of individualism, as 
 well as those of socialism, we meet the settled 
 conviction that it will never be well with our
 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK i 
 
 country until its citizens, and as many of them 
 as possible, pass far beyond the narrow pale of 
 private interests and make the public good, in 
 one or other of its manifold departments, their 
 deliberate, conscious, and direct aim. And with 
 this conviction has come the emergence of motives 
 to social work in the stricter and more definite 
 sense of the words. 
 
 Now these motives are many and diverse, and 
 they are of course exceedingly unequal in depth, 
 force, and steadiness in different individuals. 
 But it seems possible to single out those which are 
 salient, and may be found operating in the actual 
 community of which we are members. 
 
 It is no disparagement of human nature to 
 say, to begin with, that of these motives one is 
 Fear. This, indeed, is only what one might 
 expect. For most movements for social better- 
 ment have, as their shadow, an element of 
 menace. In other words, they are commonly 
 accompanied by pictures, sometimes highly 
 rhetorical, sometimes conjured up by the un- 
 adorned eloquence of facts, of the miseries, 
 hardships, and wrongs that need redress, and 
 forecasts, sometimes threatening enough, of what 
 will happen if nothing is done. And these fore- 
 bodings for society never lacks its Cassandras 
 take many forms. Early in the iQth century the 
 alarm was political revolution. Then, under 
 Malthusian influence, it was over-population. 
 Nowadays, when biology and physiology have 
 had their say, it is rather physical and moral
 
 6 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 degeneracy and the congested squalor of great 
 cities. But there are, of course, many alarms 
 besides these, alarms of industrial conflict, failure 
 of employment, commercial defeat, pauperism, 
 attacks on property, decay of the family, popular 
 ignorance, intemperance, inordinate luxury, 
 decline of national character, religious infidelity, 
 and so on. Nor, in view of the grim catalogue, 
 is it too much to say that in the igth century 
 democracy has come into its kingdom to find 
 that its kingdom is a damnosa hereditas of 
 difficulties that seem likely to put it to the proof. 
 It is a natural result that many persons, and by 
 no means only those who are pessimists or 
 alarmists, go about haunted by all manner of 
 vague fears of impending catastrophes. 
 
 Now it need not be suggested that these 
 vague fears have ever of themselves done 
 much to prompt social work. General alarms are 
 singularly impotent to create concrete service. 
 Did fear of national degeneracy ever yet produce 
 an officer of health ? Did fear of pauperism ever 
 yet inspire a single guardian of the poor? And 
 yet fear has its place : indirectly, and in associa- 
 tion with other things, it is certainly far from 
 impotent. 
 
 One may see this in politics and legislation. 
 Fear for the future of one's country, it has been 
 well said, is heroic virtue ; and so must it ever be, 
 so long as it is no small part of the statesman's 
 work to dissipate alarms and restore confidence. 
 More potent still is the fear that attaches itself
 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK j 
 
 to some definite institution that is believed to 
 be in danger. Conspicuously so when menaces 
 rouse the strong resentful instincts of alarmed 
 resistance. The instinct may be often enough 
 unreasoning and obstructive; but that is no 
 ground for denying it the title to be ranked as 
 a motive to social work. Especially, of course, 
 when the threatened institution is one that has 
 enlisted time-honoured loyalties and affections. 
 Let but a man's Church be assailed, or his trading 
 Company, or his Trades Union, or his School 
 or University does not indifference shake off 
 its apathy and develop a militant energy that 
 astonishes the world? It would be sheer blind- 
 ness to overlook the volume of passion and effort 
 that is poured into public questions by the 
 conservative instincts of society; and in these 
 conservative instincts fear is no small element. 
 Let none withhold his tribute from even the 
 champions of lost causes. They have not lived 
 in vain, even if they have done no more than stir 
 the stagnant waters of political apathy. 
 
 And yet, when fear thus plays its part, it need 
 not receive more than its due. For that part is 
 after all but partial, because it is only the 
 negative side of a positive loyalty and attachment 
 to institutions. It is this that gives it substance,^ 
 this that nerves it to effort and sustains it in 
 work; this that makes all the difference between 
 the mere political nervousness which fears it 
 knows not what, and the fear which has become 
 a just solicitude for the fate of something a man
 
 8 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 believes worth having and living for. The truth 
 is that human affairs are always sufficiently 
 precarious to render it impossible to care much 
 for anything without some dash of fears. Nor 
 is the best citizen the man with the fewest fears 
 for his country's institutions. But with him the 
 fear is only the shadow; the loyalty, the attach- 
 ment, is the substance. 
 
 Fortunately this motive this positive loyalty 
 and attachment to institutions is one upon 
 which in most countries, and in. none more than 
 our own, we can confidently reckon. Its object 
 may vary. It may be a village club or a political 
 party; a local school or a national church. But 
 in one form or another the motive is widespread, 
 persistent, and effective. 
 
 This is only what one might expect. For, in 
 an old and complex social system like ours, it 
 early dawns upon the minds of its members (the 
 lesson is begun even in school days) that he who 
 would act with effect must act in association. 
 Individual isolation is soon seen to be the 
 straight path to individual impotence. Hence 
 the institutions small and great, new and old, 
 which diversify English society from end to end. 
 And, then, an institution, be it remembered, is 
 no mere bit of social fabric, no mere piece of 
 social mechanism. If it be not decadent or dead, 
 it is a meeting-point, a centre of convergence 
 for human wills which have united in a living 
 partnership for carrying out the ends, whatever 
 they may be, for which the institution stands.
 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK < 
 
 For while of course every institution has its 
 material and outward embodiment (buildings, 
 offices, equipment, officials, balance-sheets, and 
 so forth), these are not its essence. Its essence 
 is that it is the vehicle of some plan, project, 
 or purpose upon which its members unite, and 
 into which they put a bit of their lives.* And 
 just for that reason no institution with which 
 men are in earnest can long exist without evoking 
 those feelings of loyalty and even affection which 
 prompt its members to spend and be spent in 
 its service. We often talk of supporting institu- 
 tions; and no one need quarrel with the phrase; 
 but it sometimes hides the further fact that 
 institutions support us. No one is likely to deny 
 it who reflects what a Church or a Charity or a 
 political Party does for its members, not only 
 in opening up lines of action, nor yet in catching 
 them up into a larger and more enduring life, 
 which persists while generations come and go, 
 but in furnishing a permanent object by which 
 the motives to effort may be fed, steadied, and 
 sustained. It is needless to labour the point. 
 Few will deny that the men of most service to 
 their generation are those who throw in their lot 
 whole-heartedly with institutions. 
 
 So true is this that it is only too possible to 
 love institutions not wisely but too well. Nothing 
 is easier than to find, in any large community, 
 men and women to whom their particular church 
 or chapel, or school or political club, or trades 
 
 * See some luminous pages in Boe&nquet's " Philosophical Theory of 
 
 the State," p. 170. 
 B
 
 io ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 union or charity is the one thing beyond their 
 private interests that fills their lives. So far 
 good; nor could society spare the type. But 
 such persons have the defects of their qualities. 
 They lose the larger outlook. The many- 
 sidedness and rich perspective of social life and 
 effort escapes them. All's well with the world, 
 if only the institution on which their hearts are 
 set is prosperous; nothing is well, the very 
 heavens are darkened, if its prosperity suffers 
 even a passing eclipse. One can easily forgive 
 the limitations of these single-minded folk for 
 the sake of their devotion : but it is limitation 
 none the less. 
 
 But if experience tells us this, it also tells us 
 where lie the antidotes. For the motive of loyalty 
 to institutions can manifestly be intensified and 
 enlarged in two directions. It can be broadened 
 into civic patriotism; and it can be at once 
 vitalised and humanised by a recognition of the 
 worth and claims of the individual man. We 
 must look at these in turn. 
 
 The distinctive note of civic patriotism, as 
 found in its best types, is that it lifts its eyes 
 beyond particular and sectional interests to the 
 well-being of the city, or the State, as a whole. 
 Of this it habitually thinks; for this it habitually 
 works. This does not mean that the best citizen 
 is the man of most varied activities. Far from 
 it. For the good citizen knows well that, as 
 price of his efficiency, he must bend to the iron 
 law of division of labour under which the
 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK n 
 
 world's work can alone be done. He soon 
 discovers that he must choose his line, and 
 concentrate his energies as his preferences, 
 aptitudes, opportunities, may prescribe, be it 
 public health, housing of the poor, education, 
 finance, charity, or what not. But then this 
 specialised activity need never obscure the 
 comprehensive outlook that embraces many if 
 not all the ends for which a great city, and still 
 more a great nation, exists. And this is much. 
 For in the light of this larger view, the one- 
 sidedness and exaggerations, the narrowness and 
 even the fanaticism of sectional effort are at 
 an end, and in their place comes the sanity of 
 purpose, the willingness to give and take in 
 the furtherance of one's own pet projects, the 
 readiness to recognise the work of fellow-citizens 
 in other lines than our own all which are 
 amongst the fruits of the genuine civic spirit. 
 
 Nor need the larger outlook bring any abate- 
 ment of that emotional fervour which particular 
 institutions enlist, and which is sometimes 
 supposed to evaporate as interests widen. Con- 
 trariwise. For there is something in the very 
 thought of a great city, with its struggling, 
 suffering, transient yet on the whole victorious 
 life, which touches the imagination and the 
 heart. Who can doubt it who recalls Words- 
 worth's sonnet on London from Westminster 
 Bridge, or Carlyle's picture, seen as by flash of 
 lightning, of W eissnichtwo at night, or Alexander 
 Smith's noble invocation to Glasgow
 
 12 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 " City ! I am true son of thine, 
 Ne'er dwelt I where great mornings shine 
 Around the bleating pens : 
 Ne'er by the rivulets I strayed, 
 And ne'er upon my childhood weighed 
 The silence of the glens. 
 Instead of shore where ocean beats 
 I hear the ebb and flow of streets." 
 
 It is sometimes said that local patriotism as 
 an emotion is dying out. So it is, perhaps, as 
 the mere habitual sentiment for locality. But so 
 it is not, if it is the feeling, not unknown to those 
 who have lived and worked in a great city, that 
 is stirred by the sense of the magnitude and 
 unwearying energy of that corporate life which 
 sweeps into the central currents of its course so 
 many ends for which men give their lives. 
 
 This is not the furthest. In these days, when, 
 both in idea and in fact, the spirit of nationality 
 and empire is to the front, there is, of course, a 
 patriotism which lifts its eyes beyond the city, 
 and which, far from being the monopoly of 
 political imperialists, is deeply-rooted in the 
 ordinary citizen, who is quite ready unobtrusively 
 to play his part, when some national catastrophe 
 has made calls on his purse, or when war or 
 menace of war has made proof of his courage. 
 
 Yet the fact remains that it is in work done 
 for and in the city that the social motives are 
 mainly vitalised. For the service of the city 
 has advantages which are peculiarly its own. 
 Its problems are more forcibly and definitely 
 before our eyes, they even stare us in the face,
 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK 13 
 
 every day we live. And our local plans, 
 experiments, and solutions are, to an extent 
 impossible on the wider stage, our own to devise, 
 to watch, to criticise, to control. And, however 
 great the elation of the humble elector proudly 
 conscious that he is playing his part in world- 
 politics, it is, speaking broadly, in the smaller 
 arena of city life and in the actual service of 
 local institutions that he feels most and does 
 most for the public good. 
 
 Yet this civic spirit may easily stop short of 
 its best. There is a type of citizen whose interest 
 in local institutions is real and many-sided. He 
 likes public work, he finds it absorbing, lively, 
 even in its way amusing. What he wishes for 
 is to see local institutions well administered. 
 Efficiency, something of the efficiency he prides 
 himself upon in his private business, is his 
 dominant note. He wishes, in short, to carry 
 into public work a business-like ideal ; and so 
 long as he gets that, he does not think much, 
 or at all (outside of his own small private circle) 
 of individual lives. Possibly he has not the 
 sympathy or the imagination to picture what is 
 actually going on in the obscure courts and 
 alleys and endless monotonous streets of mean 
 brick tenements. Very likely his feet may never 
 have crossed the threshold of one struggling or 
 indigent home : very likely he might feel out-of- 
 place and ill at ease if he went there. Not for 
 a moment is he to be undervalued on that account. 
 It is quite as common for men to be ill-fitted to
 
 14 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 come into personal relations with the poor as 
 with the world of rank and fashion. But what 
 of that? These men do admirable work. Many 
 an institution is deep in their debt. Nor is it in 
 the least doubtful that they number amongst 
 them not a few of the most energetic and effective 
 benefactors of every great city. 
 
 But there are others whose interest takes a 
 different direction. These are the people whose 
 thoughts run first of all to individual lives, to 
 their struggles and sufferings, their toils obscure, 
 their precarious fortunes, their unheeded failures 
 and successes. Their prime interest, in short, 
 centres in the drama of human life, and it is this 
 intensely human interest in persons that really 
 vitalises all the service they give to political or 
 social or religious movements. 
 
 The motive of persons of this kind may, 
 however, assume various and fairly distinguish- 
 able forms. Thus it may be, especially in its 
 beginnings, almost purely emotional. It may 
 be simple natural pity for suffering or sympathy 
 with hardship, and nothing more nothing more 
 except the impulse to rush to the rescue. So far, 
 it is perhaps not not in these days of charity 
 organisers held in much repute. And, of course, 
 it has its obvious defects. It is precipitate, undis- 
 criminating, sometimes sentimental, frequently 
 gullible, and often highly mischievous so 
 mischievous that social reformers spend much 
 breath and ink in branding it as the sin that is 
 not to be forgiven.
 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK 15 
 
 But it is not the instinct of pity that is at 
 fault, nor the sympathy with suffering. Will 
 anyone contend that there is too much pity and 
 sympathy in the world? Will anyone aver that 
 the world is too tender-hearted? One wishes it 
 were. For in that case there would be larger 
 opportunities of dealing with this emotional 
 motive in the right way. And the right way, one 
 ventures to think, is not to set about to kill it, 
 or even to discredit it, but to deepen it, and 
 thereby to raise it to the rank of an incentive 
 which society could ill afford to neglect, so long 
 as feeling and who will deny it? lies close to 
 the springs of action. Emotion without ideas 
 may be blind and reckless, but ideas, however 
 just and reasonable, without emotion are 
 barren. 
 
 How then is this emotional motive deepened? 
 The answer is that it is deepened by a belief 
 which may be truly said to lie at the roots of 
 Western civilisation the belief in the worth, 
 the potential worth at any rate, of the individual 
 life. For this belief is no mere tenet of 
 reformers, far less of visionaries. On the 
 contrary, it has been wrought into the very 
 texture of the consciousness of the community 
 by some of the most potent agencies that can 
 operate on human nature. Have not the churches 
 been preaching it, and (within limits) acting upon 
 it, since the Christian era? Have not jurists, 
 legislators, and administrators been building it 
 solidly into the massive fabric of Law and
 
 16 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 Justice? Has not the cause of popular education 
 been inspired by it, ever since Pestalozzi worked 
 his wonders with his wretched waifs? Has not 
 charitable effort, in all its many modes, been 
 bearing witness to it by insisting, full in the face 
 of appearances, upon finding worth even in the 
 " worthless " ? Has not democracy recognised 
 it as at once root and fruit of reforming energy? 
 We may, of course, speculate and argue as to 
 what this belief actually means. Members of 
 different philosophical schools may seek out the 
 grounds of its justification. But at any rate the 
 belief is there, strongly held and powerful enough 
 to have prompted the ascription to even the least 
 among the sons of men, even to the slave and 
 savage, of a value with which no serious thinker 
 would dream of endowing even the highest of 
 the animals. 
 
 It is through this belief that the natural 
 motive of pity has been deepened, and through 
 alliance with it that the resulting motive has 
 assumed a higher and, we may add, an intensified 
 form. This becomes evident if we ask a quite 
 simple question : Why is it that to any ordinary 
 citizen of our day the sufferings of a fellow-man 
 have an immeasurably stronger claim upon him 
 than the sufferings of an animal ? The fact will 
 not be disputed : if not, what is the explanation ? 
 
 Not surely the contention, which might be 
 difficult to make good, that the mere suffering 
 of a man is greater than that of an animal; but 
 the fact that the miseries of a man have a far
 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK 17 
 
 deeper, and in truth a tragic significance, because, 
 beyond the mere quantum of suffering, they may 
 obstruct and even blight a life which might 
 otherwise be decent, self-respecting, and worth 
 living. It may be enough to ask about the 
 animals, as Bentham said it was, " not can they 
 reason, or can they talk, but can they suffer?" 
 But this is precisely what it is not enough to ask 
 about a man. For the sufferings of the human 
 lot are never seen in their true light, and never 
 sufficiently hated, till it is recognised that human 
 suffering would not be the hateful thing it is if 
 it did not so grievously obstruct and choke 
 the capacities and struggles for a better life. 
 
 Now this, it may be, is not a view that many 
 people formulate. But mankind are actuated 
 by motives long before they put them into 
 formulae. So here. This conviction of the 
 value of the individual life is too deeply rooted 
 to have to plead for recognition. It has won 
 recognition. Religion, Law, Education, political 
 and social Democracy, Charitable effort are, as 
 we have said, its sponsors. Nor is there any 
 feature of our Western civilisation more striking 
 than the tenacity with which this belief holds 
 its ground in the best minds, not only in face of 
 the cynics, satirists, and pessimists who decry 
 the human species, but (a far greater thing) in 
 face of the dreary array of ugly facts upon which 
 these " devil's-advocates " of mankind subsist. 
 There is a passage in the " Anthropology " of 
 Kant in which that great philosopher quotes
 
 i8 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 a remark which Frederick the Great once made to 
 the optimist, Sulzer : " My dear Sulzer ! you little 
 " know to what an accursed race we belong." Is 
 it not significant, and an uncommon tribute to the 
 strength of the conviction of human worth, that 
 it was the man who quoted those words who held 
 and taught, more confidently than any thinker of 
 either the ancient or the modern world, the 
 doctrine of the dignity of every rational soul? 
 
 Results upon motives follow. For wherever 
 and in whatever form this conviction is held, it 
 transforms the attitude to human hardship and 
 suffering. And it does this by regarding them, 
 no longer as mere afflictions, but as hindrances. 
 It is not mere pity for suffering that is uppermost 
 now : it is sympathy (and the more of it the 
 better) not unmixed with respect for the kind 
 of men and women who suffer that practical 
 respect at any rate which goes to work in the 
 belief that those who have claims upon our help 
 are every one of them worth helping. 
 
 Hence this motive readily becomes dis- 
 criminating, as the merely emotional motive 
 notoriously is not. For it is not of the mere 
 amount of suffering, nor is it of the mere relief 
 of misery, that the man who truly has this motive 
 thinks first of all. He may even find room for 
 the reflection that great suffering unrelieved has 
 often enough been the rocky road to endurance 
 and heroism. What really concerns him, and 
 evokes his passionate sympathy is that kind 
 of suffering whose relief is the removal of
 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK 19 
 
 obstructions. Pitiful enough he may be, and 
 tender-hearted to the verge of weakness; but 
 when it comes to action, he is of like mind to a 
 certain great surgeon, one of the most tender- 
 hearted of men, who once said that with him 
 pity as an emotion had to cease in order that 
 pity as a rnotive might do its work. 
 
 It is in this way that claims upon our 
 compassion are transformed into claims upon 
 our help, so that the deeply-rooted human 
 instinct to rush to the relief of suffering or the 
 righting of wrong becomes the settled resolve to 
 emancipate fellow-citizens, whether by legislation 
 or private effort, from the manifold obstructions 
 of vice, disease, poverty, ignorance, thoughtless- 
 ness, which in diabolical alliance baffle the 
 forward-struggling strivings of the human spirit. 
 Nor is this a result other than what one might, 
 on reflection, expect to find. The motives that 
 prompt a man to work for his fellows, whether 
 in public life or otherwise, must sooner or later 
 be vitally influenced by his ideas of what the 
 people really are for whom his work is done. 
 And so long as he holds to the belief that there 
 is not one of his fellows, unless exceptionally 
 brutalised by vice and crime, but has in him the 
 making of a better man, he is not likely to flag 
 for lack of motive. 
 
 Indeed, it is precisely the wide acceptance of 
 this doctrine that may be said to make the modern 
 social problem difficult by a vast expansion of 
 the area of recognised social obligations. For
 
 30 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 though it must be admitted (it is a truism) that 
 the civic patriotism of the ancient world, 
 especially, of course, the Greek world, was more 
 intense and highly developed in many ways than 
 that of a modern Englishman, it is never to be 
 forgotten that our inferiority is due to our aiming 
 at a larger and far more difficult thing. For when 
 all is said, the Greek civic spirit was narrow. 
 It knew much of the rights of reason for the select 
 minority : it knew nothing of the rights of man 
 for the mass. 
 
 " Like ours it looked in outward air, 
 Its head was clear and true ; 
 Sumptious its clothing, rich its fare, 
 No pause its action knew ; 
 Stout was its arm, each thew and bone 
 Seemed puissant and alive 
 But ah ! its heart, its heart was stone, 
 And so it could not thrive." 
 
 No; its heart was not stone. Who can doubt 
 that it felt, and passionately enough, for kith and 
 kin and friends and fellow-citizens? It was only 
 that its heart was narrow, or at any rate not large 
 enough to find a place for that vast misery and 
 welter of servile life upon which the shining 
 citizenship of Athens, like its glorious Parthenon 
 on the unhewn native rock, was built. 
 
 In the modern world we have at any rate tried 
 {not always successfully) to improve upon that. 
 For whatever be the cleavages of classes, the 
 modern city and nation have certainly accepted 
 responsibilities for the entire community without 
 respect of classes or persons. It is even becoming
 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK 21 
 
 trite to say that, in these days democratic, the 
 community must stand altogether if it stand at 
 all, and move altogether if it move at all. And 
 in this respect we may claim, without vain-glory, 
 that the public spirit of an Englishman of our 
 day as far surpasses that of an ancient Greek in 
 the comprehensiveness of its humanity as that 
 of an ancient Greek no doubt surpassed his in 
 the closeness of the bond which made the 
 individual one with the State. It is the belief 
 in the worth of the individual life that makes the 
 difference. The contrast has become possible 
 because the most insignificant and poverty- 
 stricken day-labourer, not to say the most abject 
 pauper and contemptible wastrel, is recognised 
 as having claims not only on our compassion, but 
 upon reasonable sympathy and practical effort 
 claims which would, there is little doubt, have 
 filled a Greek of the age of Pericles with 
 incredulity and derision. The merit, amongst 
 many a demerit, of our modern ideal of citizen- 
 ship is that it tries to hold fast to what is best 
 in both views, to emulate the intensity of that 
 ancient civic spirit, and to widen it to multitudes 
 who lay quite outside the close Athenian pale. 
 Nor can one better describe the social problem of 
 our day than by saying that it has accepted the 
 task of uniting the patriotic civic spirit of 
 the aristocratic Greek republic with the more 
 inclusive, and more truly human, spirit of the 
 democratic city and nation.
 
 II-SOCIAL MOTIVE AND 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION. 
 
 If what has been said above be true, the 
 motives to social work which may already be 
 found in our midst are at their best when loyal 
 attachment to institutions is, on the one hand, 
 broadened into civic patriotism, and, on the 
 other, intensified and humanised by sympathy. 
 Not, however, by a mere emotional sympathy, 
 but by natural compassion deepened and 
 moralised by that belief in the worth of the 
 individual man which has taken root, despite 
 all discouragements, in the consciousness and 
 institutions of Western peoples. 
 
 With these motives before us, two problems 
 emerge. The one, which is not only practical 
 but urgent, is educational. How are these 
 motives to be intensified where strong, 
 strengthened where weak, and evoked where 
 lacking this is the educational question. For 
 it is not the business of the social reformer to 
 discover, or invent, new motives. This must
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 23 
 
 be left to the prophets and leaders of mankind 
 who, at rare and incalculable epochs, confer 
 upon the world the incomparable gift of a great 
 new incentive. For the ordinary reformer it is 
 enough to make the most of the materials he 
 finds ready to his hand. Nor, if we pause to 
 reflect how woefully the world falls short of 
 what these available motives already are in the 
 best types, is he likely soon to exhaust his task. 
 The second problem is of a different kind. 
 How are these motives to be justified, how are 
 they to prove their sanity and reasonableness 
 this, which may be called the philosophical 
 question, though it greatly concerns many besides 
 philosophers, is a no less important, though a 
 less urgent, enquiry than the first. It will be 
 dealt with in the sequel. 
 
 The educational problem may, however, assume 
 a lesser or a larger aspect. 
 
 In its lesser aspect it concentrates all its 
 energies upon a comparative few, those public- 
 spirited folk, namely, who (be they professionals 
 or voluntary workers) are already willing and 
 even eager to make the public good, in one or 
 other of its many aspects, their direct aim. Such 
 persons are manifestly good material so good, 
 in fact, that there is no doubt whatever that they 
 can be made better. For the literature of social 
 pathology, never nearly so copious as now, can 
 effectually open their eyes to the maladies of 
 society; and initiation into practical work, under 
 organised expert guidance, can give to their
 
 24 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 reading a reality such as the mere notional 
 knowledge got from books can never impart. 
 And with this may easily go it is part of the 
 programme of this School and of other Schools 
 like it a study of the methods whereby, in our 
 own and other countries, social sympathy may 
 best translate itself into good works, as well as 
 of those economic and political facts and forces 
 with which all genuine reform has inevitably to 
 reckon. Nor is it Utopian to predict that, as 
 these Schools of Social Training gain recruits, 
 every great city like this will number amongst 
 its citizens many men and women well qualified 
 to grapple with those questions in which they 
 already feel so keen an interest. 
 
 Yet this is not enough. The larger, the far 
 larger, educational problem lies behind, and it 
 is one that cannot be ignored. In point of fact, 
 it is forced upon our generation by two political 
 movements of the first magnitude the one, the 
 advent of democracy, the other, the change that 
 has passed upon the spirit and aspirations of 
 democracy during the past half-century. 
 
 For it is a truism to say that democracy has 
 come. ' The tramp of its myriad feet is on all 
 " our thoroughfares," as Carlyle said years ago. 
 And democracy, of course, means (amongst 
 other things) democratic government. Nor is 
 anyone likely to deny that democratic govern- 
 ment is a fact that has to be reckoned with. But 
 then, its significance depends. It depends on 
 what democratic government aspires to do how
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 25 
 
 much or how little. It was the ideal of the 
 Radicals of the second and even of the third 
 quarter of the nineteenth century that it should 
 do little. The weapon, political power, was to 
 be placed in the hands of the people, but care 
 was to be taken that the people, unless for the 
 safeguarding of their civil and religious liberties, 
 were on no account to use it too often or too 
 much. The youthful Demos was to be presented 
 with a new rifle a lovely weapon with the 
 strict injunction that, for all purposes beyond 
 self-defence, he was never to load with more than 
 blank cartridge. But the democracy we know in 
 the twentieth century has changed all that. It 
 wears a different guise. It has now for some time 
 ceased to believe that the social system is a self- 
 acting mechanism, or organism, that can best be 
 left to go, or develop, in its own way. It has 
 come to see that the health of the organism is 
 not in proportion to its prodigious vigour and 
 vitality. It has become aware of deep-seated 
 social diseases which it seems signally impotent 
 to throw off destitution, pauperism, squalor, 
 epidemics, unemployment, commercial crises, and 
 all the rest of the familiar dreary catalogue. 
 And with this perception has come an altered 
 view of government. The suspicion, dread, 
 hatred even, of legislative intervention which fill 
 the pages of Bright, Cobden, Spencer, and 
 (though in less degree) of Mill, have wonderfully 
 waned now that the men who obey the laws are 
 the men who make them. " The State we are
 
 26 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 " the State. Why should we fear ourselves ?" 
 this is the thought that has begun to germinate. 
 
 Nor are there lacking signs enough of a 
 changed attitude on the part of multitudes who 
 have heretofore been content to look to the 
 voluntary good offices of the well-meaning 
 leisured few for the relief of their hardships, 
 miseries, and degradations. They dislike the 
 dependence. They resent the patronage, how- 
 ever well-intentioned. And so, when they fall 
 on evil days, they look ever-increasingly to the 
 public authority, the authority democratically 
 dependent on their own votes, for that ameliora- 
 tion of their lot which has been, in times past, 
 the concern of voluntary benevolence and 
 voluntary social effort. Democracy, in short, 
 having got its weapon, seems minded to use it. 
 And this change of attitude need one say it? 
 is of pregnant significance, because our country 
 seems manifestly about to plunge into a course 
 of social, and possibly socialistic, legislation. 
 
 Now it is manifest what all this involves. It 
 means that both national and municipal problems 
 of the utmost gravity are, to an extent undreamed 
 of fifty years ago, being brought into the lives 
 and thrust upon the decisions of the rank and 
 file of the democratic electorate. The political 
 problems which exercised our ancestors (parlia- 
 mentary reform and such like) were not easy; 
 but they were simplicity itself compared with 
 these new questions (health and housing, tem- 
 perance, pensions, poor-law reform, land-tenure,
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 27 
 
 taxation), which send their roots deep down into 
 social causation. They may well perplex the 
 wits of the wisest, and now they are going to be 
 dealt with by the rank and file of a democracy 
 which seems determined to take its salvation 
 into its own hands. 
 
 Hence the need, urgent beyond all precedent, 
 for the education of the democracy. " We 
 "must educate our masters," said Lowe*, in 
 characteristic words. But this dictum of distrust 
 needs amendment. For the real problem is to 
 educate the democracy to be their own masters. 
 
 Now it is not to be supposed that a problem 
 of this magnitude is to be solved by Schools of 
 social science and social training for the few 
 the admirable few who are already instinct with 
 the spirit of social helpfulness. It has a vastly 
 larger scope, nothing less indeed than the 
 education of the whole democratic electorate by 
 whose votes the future is to be made or marred. 
 Nor is it difficult to see what this larger education 
 must include. Manifestly it demands the nurture 
 of the social conscience and the civic spirit, and 
 not less manifestly the education of the political 
 intelligence. What follows will naturally fall 
 under these two simple and obvious heads. 
 
 It is one of the greatest services which a School 
 of social science and social training such as we 
 have established in Liverpool has to render that 
 it opens the eyes to the imperative need for the 
 
 * Afterward* Lord Sherbrooke.
 
 28 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 first of these two requirements. For our local 
 School does not regard it as its business to 
 convert the world to good works. It assumes, 
 in those who come to it for instruction and 
 training, that the social conscience is already 
 awake, the social sympathies already strong, and 
 the will to work for fellow-citizens already alive 
 and resolute. On this assumption all its work 
 proceeds. "With the object of providing an 
 " opportunity of systematic study and training 
 " for those already engaged or anxious to engage 
 " in any of the many forms of social and charitable 
 "work" so runs its prospectus. Destroy that 
 assumption and its work is foredoomed to futility. 
 Nor is this true only of practical training. It 
 applies also to social research. For though a 
 social researcher is not bound to be a philan- 
 thropist, one may indulge the suspicion that there 
 is no more indomitable researcher than the man 
 who has his human side, and even it may be some 
 far-off vision of the fruits of his labours. One 
 recalls the address given in this place by Charles 
 Booth on the foundation of the Economic Society. 
 It breathed, as one might expect, the spirit of 
 the researcher. But there was one memorable 
 passage in which, just in a word, he spoke of the 
 interest of the fascinating human drama that lies 
 behind even the aridities of figures and statistics. 
 But if this be true, if in the programme of this 
 and other like Schools a social conscience is 
 essential in all who mean, whether as workers 
 or researchers, to grapple with social problems,
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 29 
 
 what, we may well ask, are we to expect of the 
 democratic electorate who seem so eager to solve 
 those same problems for themselves? Can we 
 expect to find in them that public spirit which 
 prompts a man to work for social ends? Can 
 we in their case reckon upon the social sympathies 
 which leave nothing to be done except to open 
 the eyes by instruction and to guide the feet 
 by training? The answer to this question is 
 incontrovertible. We cannot, or rather we cannot 
 unless the democracy can be induced to take steps 
 to create and to foster the needful motive. 
 Herein lies the decisive difference between the 
 lesser and the larger educational problem. The 
 lesser takes the social conscience for granted; 
 its concern is with instruction and training; the 
 larger is vastly more comprehensive. Whatever 
 it may do for the political intelligence, it has to 
 lay the preparation for this in the nurture of that 
 helpful spirit and civic conscience without which 
 mere political knowledge, though it were cried 
 upon the housetops, must remain barren and 
 abortive. 
 
 For a social conscience is not a congenital 
 endowment. Men are not born with a ready-made 
 perception of the gravity of public causes and 
 the value of social ends. Except in those small 
 beginnings which are great potentialities, a social 
 conscience has a slow and gradual growth. It 
 needs all the agencies of evolution, from the 
 family onwards, to secure its development. If 
 ethical analysis teaches us anything, it tells us
 
 30 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 that. Easy and light, by comparison, would be 
 the education of a people, if it were only a 
 matter of popular enlightenment. The infinitely 
 harder task is to capture the Will, especially the 
 wayward and formidable Will of a great 
 democracy to capture the will and to yoke it 
 to the unselfish, resolute service of the public 
 good. 
 
 It used to be the fashion for the publicists of 
 democracy, the philosophical Radicals and the 
 Manchester School, to assure the world that 
 social salvation lay along the lines of enlightened 
 individual self-interest. And so within limits it 
 does. We have already said* that, in the 
 existing social system, the pursuit of private 
 interest is one of the great driving wheels of the 
 social machine. Who can doubt that it is to this 
 pursuit of private interest that much, if not most, 
 of the vitality of a city and a nation like our own 
 is due? But when we come to social problems 
 it is different. One can recall an occasion when 
 Henry George (not an especially patient reformer) 
 told an audience in this city that no one who put 
 his hand to great social reforms need expect to 
 reap in personal profit the full fruits of his 
 labours. They were words of sanity. One 
 cannot think so lightly of the problems that 
 confront our generation as to suppose that they 
 are likely to be solved in the short span of a 
 life. Which of us, I wonder, would consent that 
 
 Page 2.
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 31 
 
 social problems should be hung up till social 
 reformers are convinced that they will individually 
 receive a quid pro quo for their work? As well 
 hang them up for ever. And which of us here 
 would father the imputation that the social work 
 done in this city, say for the past half-century, 
 has been motived by the masterful, but happily 
 not all-masterful, appetite for private gain or 
 glory? It is not in that spirit that great 
 reforms have been carried through in the past; 
 not, for example, the anti-slavery crusade or the 
 factory acts. Nor have the philosophers of 
 individualism Bentham, James Mill, and even 
 the younger Mill ever been reduced to direr 
 straits than when they set themselves to square 
 their psychology of self-interest with their passion 
 for the public good. For whatever a democratic 
 electorate of self-seekers might do and it need 
 not be denied that it could do many things it 
 is safe to say it would hardly solve its social 
 problems. Nor can it expect to solve them till 
 it has developed a social conscience. 
 
 Now it is not our present purpose to specify, 
 far less to estimate the comparative value of the 
 influences that go to the making of the social 
 conscience. For there are many voices here. 
 This one pleads for the Family as the nursery 
 of the public affections ; that one for the churches 
 as the one sure source of human brotherhood; 
 a third for the religion of Humanity; a fourth 
 for the humanising influences of ethical societies 
 and leagues for moral and civic instruction;
 
 32 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 others, again, for the socialising pressure upon the 
 individual mind and conscience of that actual 
 corporate life which, from parish council upwards, 
 is an outstanding feature of our age and country. 
 Nor is it the least hopeful of the signs of the 
 times that these voices are so many and so 
 confident. 
 
 There is, however, still another influence to 
 which it is not easy to set limits the influence 
 of the schools which spread so wide a net and 
 sweep into it the entire rising generation of 
 democracy. For the immense advance which 
 Elementary Education has made in the last forty 
 years has led not a few to turn their eyes to the 
 school, not only as the remedy for illiteracy and 
 the place of preparation for artisan and clerk, 
 but as the possible seed plot of the civic spirit. 
 
 It is now some eighteen years since Mr. Acland, 
 then at the Board of Education, introduced into 
 the Code the new subject of ' The Life and 
 Duties of the Citizen," and the step was prompted 
 by a true perception. It recognised the need for 
 fostering the civic spirit from childhood onwards 
 amongst the citizens-to-be who throng the close- 
 packed benches of our elementary schools. And 
 few persons, I imagine, are likely to quarrel with 
 the aim of that new departure. It is one thing, 
 however, to accept the aim : another to be clear 
 as to how it is best to be achieved. And here 
 it is important to distinguish quite decisively 
 between two ends which, though closely inter- 
 related, are far from identical ; the one, instruction
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 33 
 
 about citizenship, the other, the nurture of the 
 civic spirit. For it is entirely possible to impart 
 much information about citizenship without 
 thereby doing much to make a citizen. There is 
 a great gulf between knowing about citizenship, 
 even all about it, and being a citizen in heart 
 and conscience; just as there is between knowing 
 about work among the poor and going to see the 
 poor in their homes, or between knowing about 
 missions and experiencing in heart and conscience 
 the prompting that sends out the missionary 
 with his life in his hands. The citizenship that 
 addresses itself to social problems, at any rate, 
 will not do much unless it is rooted in that 
 loyalty to institutions and still more in that 
 practical respect and even sympathy towards 
 fellow-men which are as breath of life to all 
 public causes. 
 
 Not that instruction about citizenship is 
 unimportant. It is vitally important. It must 
 needs come some time. It makes all the difference 
 between the mere law-abiding subject and 
 the intelligent patriot. This goes without 
 saying. Therefore let the School, and even the 
 Elementary School, impart it so far as it can. 
 But let it do this with the clear perception that 
 it is doing little for citizenship unless it can 
 succeed in planting and watering those human 
 sympathies and corporate feelings which may in 
 due season, by the experience and discipline of 
 later years, be broadened into the truly civic 
 spirit.
 
 34 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 It is certainly not beyond the Schools to do 
 this. Is it doubtful that they can do much to 
 send out boys and girls into the world, not only 
 self-reliant and courageous, able "to make their 
 " way in the world," but also pitiful and human- 
 hearted and with widening sympathies with other 
 sorts and conditions of men besides those they 
 have actually met in their own narrow circles? 
 May no schoolmaster say that this is a dream. 
 
 But a School can do more than this. By its 
 discipline it can lay the foundations of that law- 
 abiding spirit; and by its organisation develop 
 in fruitful beginnings that sense of a corporate 
 life both of which are amongst the greatest 
 possessions of a civilised people. This is matter 
 of common experience. For when one follows 
 many a good citizen's record as schoolboy and 
 as man, is it not the boy who plays his part in 
 the corporate life of his own small world who 
 in due season takes on his shoulders the burden 
 of the city or the State; because, having felt 
 there the force of the great twin influences of 
 comradeship and leadership, he has learnt even 
 thus early the secret of that loyalty to comrade 
 and leader which is the cement of all collective 
 action in the State. Burke has put this in words 
 which are trite because they are so true : " To 
 " be attached to the sub-division, to love the 
 " little platoon we belong to in society, is the 
 " first principle, the germ, as it were, of the public 
 " affections." It is a sentence that hits the mark. 
 To love the little platoon and not merely to know
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 35 
 
 about the larger platoons (good though that 
 may be) this is the beginning of all political 
 education. 
 
 There is, of course, much besides this that 
 the School can do. It can prepare the clerk 
 or artisan to earn his living. It can mould 
 manners and confirm morals. Not least it can 
 unfold, even before very youthful eyes, the 
 memorable and enkindling record of the nation's 
 and the city's history. And it can teach about 
 the duties of citizenship. But not all these put 
 together will suffice. Nothing will suffice which 
 does not make sure work in weaving into the fibre 
 of heart and conscience those actual ties to kith 
 and kin, to friends and neighbours, and even to 
 fellow-countrymen remoter than these, in which 
 Burke, with unerring political insight, discerned 
 the germ of the public affections. 
 
 As to the precise methods and instruments of 
 education by which this result is to be achieved 
 let teachers say : it is perhaps the greatest 
 of their responsibilities in these days when 
 democracy is still new to its work. But it is not 
 rash to hazard one remark. Be it in Family, 
 School, or Church, the persons responsible must 
 themselves be what they wish to create. For 
 when the object of any teacher is to bring the 
 rising generation truly to care for anything, it 
 is never enough that he should know about that 
 thing, however thoroughly : he must himself care 
 for it whole-heartedly. This holds in literature, 
 in science, in art, in religion. It holds every-
 
 36 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 where. The lesson that comes home is not 
 necessarily that which occupies the set times and 
 seasons of education, but that which makes its 
 appeal when young minds discern and they are 
 quick to discern that those at whose feet they 
 sit are in earnest about the matter, whatever it 
 may be, of which they aspire, so to say, to be 
 the ambassadors. This principle is fundamental, 
 and its present application is obvious. For if 
 the schools of a nation are indeed to be the seed- 
 plots of those social sympathies and civic virtues 
 which an energetic democracy needs, this will 
 never be unless they are staffed by teachers who 
 know, not merely in that notional way which is 
 only knowing about, but who know really, and 
 in experience, what these sympathies and virtues 
 are. Surely it is the idlest of dreams to suppose 
 that any teacher will do much to create sympathy 
 with suffering, or respect for fellow-citizens, or 
 loyalty to institutions, or pride in the city of 
 our birth, or love of country, unless he himself 
 possesses, or rather is possessed by, these things ? 
 It is sometimes said that schoolmasters ought 
 not to be too much of politicians. And if to be 
 a politician means to convict rival politicians, the 
 other half of the nation, in fact, of being wrong, 
 there is doubtless truth in the remark. But the 
 real danger is rather that our teachers may not 
 be politicians enough. For if to be a politician 
 is to realise the magnitude and the urgency of 
 the tasks that confront our democracy, and to 
 be alive to the local problems that lie at our
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 37 
 
 feet, and to have learnt to respect fellow-citizens 
 and to care for the future of our city and the 
 destinies of our country these are surely the 
 characteristics we must wish to find in the men, 
 and women, who staff the schools of a democratic 
 people. 
 
 The School, however, even were it staffed by 
 patriots and philanthropists, cannot do every- 
 thing. It is at best but the place of beginnings, 
 and what is begun in it, if it is not to be lost, 
 must be confirmed and carried on by later 
 influences. 
 
 But it is just here we meet a well-known 
 problem. For the life of the average citizen is 
 not divisible into his school days, even when 
 prolonged by continuation classes, and those 
 later years when he takes his place in industrial 
 or political associations those associations to 
 which many look so hopefully for the practical 
 education of the coming democracy. Un- 
 fortunately there is a critical and often fatal 
 gap in which the youth is more than schoolboy 
 and less than citizen. Not that the gap is quite 
 without its bridges. A fraction throw in their 
 lot with the corporate life of church or chapel. 
 A fraction accept the discipline and responsi- 
 bilities of military service. A fraction unite 
 themselves to societies, clubs, guilds, which so 
 many well-wishers are making desperate efforts 
 to establish. And all such associations, even 
 those founded for trivial objects, provide a sort 
 of training in public spirit, and become thereby
 
 38 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 an undesigned preparation for the serious citizen- 
 ship of later life. But for the vast majority, 
 especially for the mass who quit school at 16 
 or 14, the gap is not bridged. No, they drift 
 away from the " little platoons," the family and 
 the school, in which they have heretofore lived; 
 these earlier ties are relaxed, and the adolescent 
 life, boyhood behind and manhood still in front, 
 goes out to push its fortunes in a competitive 
 and indifferent world. Is it wonderful if, as the 
 years go on those momentous, adolescent years 
 when the sympathies are still plastic and the 
 habits still unconfirmed what happens in ten 
 thousand cases is that the race for personal 
 success, the scramble for livelihood, the natural 
 appetite for pleasure, the allurements to frivolity 
 give selfishly self-centred interests an ascendancy 
 which they never afterwards lose. ' They forget 
 u all they have learnt " how often have we 
 heard that trite lamentation. But the more 
 serious calamity by far is that the earlier ties are 
 weakened, or even severed, and that no other 
 socialising attachments (unless, indeed, the ties 
 of private friendships) have come to take their 
 place. 
 
 This is universally deplored by all reformers. 
 It is the weakest point in our social organisation. 
 It is the ruin of many a life, the marring of many 
 a citizen, the detriment of the State. What is to 
 be done to counteract it? How is the youth of 
 the nation, who in a few years will inherit the 
 rights and responsibilities of political power, to
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 39 
 
 be taught that the community needs and expects 
 serious service and sacrifice at their hands ? " By 
 " universal military service," say some. " By 
 " anything rather than that," say others. And 
 indeed the controversy runs high and hot. But 
 meanwhile the need remains. Nor is there a more 
 fruitful enterprise for a School of Social Science 
 and Social Work than to go into the facts of this 
 matter, and to suggest some way, or ways, by 
 which this demoralising and desocialising interval 
 between boyhood and manhood may effectually 
 be bridged. 
 
 For if this were done, the prospect would 
 brighten. One might almost say that, if the 
 preparation for them were securely laid, the later 
 years of adult life could take care of themselves. 
 For during the last sixty years, the growth of 
 corporate life, and the sense of corporate life, 
 has been going on apace. It is no longer an 
 " anarchic " and atomistic individualism that 
 alarmists dread. No writer now can re-echo the 
 wild despairing cry of Carlyle in 1830 that 
 " in the cut-throat and cut-purse scramble " of 
 individual greed " there is no longer any social 
 " idea extant." Labour, capital, politics, govern- 
 ment, religion, charity, even amusement, have 
 been moving steadily onwards to organisation, 
 and the cry of our Cassandras now is that 
 unions, leagues, syndicates, federations, caucuses, 
 bureaucracies, and what not are rapidly organising 
 England into a new slavery. Herein lies ground 
 for hope. For though the artisan who faces the
 
 40 
 
 anxieties and miseries entailed by strike or lock- 
 out may or may not live to enjoy a rise of wages, 
 he inevitably learns the lesson of public spirit 
 in the iron disciplines and bitter sacrifices of 
 collective action. The citizen who casts in his 
 lot with a political party may or may not achieve 
 the ends he has at heart, but he cannot miss the 
 fact if he be more than a political camp- 
 follower that public causes are not to be won 
 but by sacrifice of leisure, money, and energy. 
 This holds all along the line. There is no form 
 of organised action for common ends, even when 
 those ends may be wild and illusory, which may 
 not become an education in civic spirit. It is thus 
 that Democracy educates her sons in her own 
 way, because it is thus that, by the call to 
 organise and work for corporate ends, she evokes 
 and fosters the social conscience. 
 
 This, however, is but one requisite. I said, 
 you will remember,* that there were two; and 
 the other was political intelligence. 
 
 It is far from me to suggest that political 
 intelligence is to be acquired only in books, 
 schools, or lecture-rooms. It is needful to say 
 this because some of the bitterest assailants of 
 democracy (Sir Henry Maine, for example, or 
 Robert Lowe) have written as if it were. First 
 these critics of popular government magnify 
 political problems as enough to tax the wits of 
 experts, which (especially when the problems 
 
 See paga 27.
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 41 
 
 are social) is entirely true; and then they turn 
 round and ask if ignorant " roughs " and 
 " clowns " (the words are Maine's) are likely to 
 find solutions. And, if that were the sum of the 
 whole matter, the case for democratic government 
 would be as hopeless as these two distinguished 
 publicists believed. But the matter stands quite 
 otherwise. For political intelligence comes in 
 other ways besides those that make direct appeal 
 to intellect. 
 
 It comes, one may suggest, from face-to-face 
 personal experience of the hardships, miseries, 
 and obstructions which it is ever-increasingly 
 the concern of legislation and administration to 
 extinguish. And in this connection, we may 
 rejoice that no student of this School of Social 
 Work need lack that personal contact with 
 concrete cases which will give to his knowledge 
 a reality which it will never afterwards lose a 
 reality which mere hearsay knowledge can never 
 possess. It comes, in greater measure still, of 
 that practical experience of affairs, and that 
 intercourse with men, which are to be found in 
 the workshop, the friendly society, the trades 
 union, the co-operative association, the political 
 committee, not less surely than in middle-class 
 business life or leisured-class immunity from 
 business life. All those forms of corporate life 
 are schools of political intelligence as well as 
 nurseries of civic motive. Mill called them 
 " education in the widest sense of the word." 
 And, not least, political intelligence comes of
 
 42 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 that sagacity, shrewdness, common-sense (call 
 it what we may) which, though none too common 
 in the world, is certainly not the monopoly of 
 any class in the community, being as it is the 
 distinctive quality of the practical man, however 
 humble, in all ranks and conditions of life. 
 
 These, or something like these, are among the 
 elements which go to the making of the political 
 intelligence. And the hope of the friends of 
 Democracy is that these elements may be found, 
 and more and more as the years go on, in 
 sufficient measure to fit the rank and file of the 
 electorate, whose business, after all, is not to 
 find solutions for themselves so much as to 
 choose the men they think can find them, to form 
 a sound judgment upon broad political issues 
 when these, having been well threshed-out in 
 press and on platform, are from time to time 
 submitted to them for decision. 
 
 And yet nothing could be more fatuous 
 and it is here Democracy may learn from its 
 critics than to surfer these or any other pleas 
 for democratic government to obscure the fact 
 that, for the solution of those social problems 
 which the democracy of our day is so eager to 
 grapple with, nothing less is needed than expert 
 knowledge of the highest quality. Think of the 
 reform (or as some would have it the destruction) 
 of the poor law, of the fiscal policy of the 
 Empire, of sanitation and public health, of the 
 perplexities of unemployment, of the almost 
 mysterious cycles of commercial depression, of
 
 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 43 
 
 the intricacies of land valution and taxation 
 who will say that these or any other large political 
 problems can ever be solved except by minds 
 with a wide and firm grasp of facts, principles, 
 and methods? Majorities are not enough. 
 There is nothing more essential for a democracy 
 to realise, because there is nothing more certain, 
 than that majorities, however overwhelming, can 
 never really solve a single social problem. 
 Majorities can make, or unmake, governments, 
 push problems to the front, choose the men they 
 think capable, reject the men they think incapable, 
 and they can also, of course, approve or reprobate 
 the solutions offered. But solutions are beyond 
 them unless, somewhere available in elected or 
 electorate, there exist that sound knowledge and 
 firm grasp of conditions without which reforms 
 must to the end of time remain superficial or 
 fraudulent. For diagnosis and therapeutics, as 
 scientific as they can be made, are as needful for 
 the body politic as for the body physiological. 
 Nor is it doubtful that, in the one case as the 
 other, ignorant treatment will bring its nemesis. 
 
 May I add, in conclusion, that it is these 
 considerations that give all Schools like this a 
 claim upon the public. Firstly, because this 
 School aspires, in all modesty, to take its place 
 amongst many other agencies for diffusing a 
 knowledge of the facts, laws, and methods of 
 social work. We make no great pretensions. 
 We do not take our students very far. But 
 at any rate we take them much further than
 
 44 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 the average citizen cares as yet to go. And, 
 secondly, because we desire to bear our 
 testimony, by the mere fact of our existence, to 
 the gravity and urgency of the need in this 
 democratic country for a study of social problems 
 immeasurably beyond these our small beginnings. 
 We think that the day is past when the maladies 
 of the social system can be left to those mere 
 "good intentions," however benevolent, which 
 are in truth not intentions at all because they do 
 not take the trouble to forecast the results, and 
 especially the more distant results, of social 
 action and State intervention. We believe that 
 those who aspire to meddle as meddle they 
 must with the complex, delicately-balanced, 
 vulnerable social organism should make sure 
 that they know what they are doing, lest haply 
 in " raw haste, half-sister to delay," they leave 
 their country worse than they found it. We are, 
 in short, convinced that social work must rest 
 on social science; and, in that conviction, we 
 stand for the reasonable demand that if clergy, 
 teachers, doctors, engineers, soldiers need a 
 special training for their professions, so also do 
 the statesmen, the publicists, the leaders, and (in 
 such measure as may be possible in a hard-driven 
 world) the citizens of a democracy which, for 
 better or worse, and with the fate of this great 
 Empire at stake, has taken its destinies into its 
 own hand.
 
 Ill -THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 MOTIVES TO SOCIAL WORK. 
 
 If what has been said is true, if it is by belief 
 in the worth of individual lives that the service 
 of institutions is humanised and sympathy with 
 suffering deepened and steadied, it is clearly of 
 vital moment that this belief should be kept 
 alive. This is the most reasonable of conclusions. 
 For the quality of human motive inevitably 
 depends upon its object, and with the stability 
 and value of the object in this case the lives of 
 men the motive must stand or fall. 
 
 But unfortunately this belief is not left 
 unassailed. For in all societies, great or small, 
 there is a large crop of decriers of the species. 
 Some of them are cynics, and some are satirists, 
 and some again, without either the pungency of 
 the cynic or the wit and indignation of the satirist, 
 are simply those corrosive minds who delight in 
 the belittlement of human nature. There are 
 also Gallios to whom all generous estimates are 
 an enigma, and " men of the world " to whose
 
 46 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 matter-of-fact eyes the philanthropic, or demo- 
 cratic, or religious faith in human worth is either 
 incomprehensible, or at best the devout imagina- 
 tion of enthusiasts. Nor are there lacking 
 formidable theories about human nature, both 
 pessimistic and naturalistic, which would render 
 it flatly impossible and even absurd for their 
 converts to hold fast to that conviction of the 
 value and dignity of man of which Kant is so 
 unfaltering a prophet. Add to these solvents 
 of faith the disquieting array of facts the 
 damnatory revelations of the criminal court, the 
 prison, the workhouse, the asylum, the slum 
 and altogether we have a collective indictment 
 admirably fitted to remind us (to return to words 
 already quoted) "to what an accursed race we 
 "beloAg." 
 
 There are more ways than one of meeting this 
 indictment. One way is to set to work, after the 
 fashion of practical men of heart and will without 
 much appetite for theorising, and to prove against 
 all comers that even the worst specimens of the 
 race are worth helping by making them actually 
 better through our help. Nor does it seem 
 doubtful that many a quite humble worker in 
 the holes and corners of city or country carries 
 in his wallet experiences in this respect which 
 might well put cynic, satirist, and pessimist to 
 silence. None are more entitled to a hearing 
 than those who have put their belief in the 
 possibilities of human nature to the test of 
 experiment. Yet this is not the only way. For
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 47 
 
 once misgivings have arisen as to those who are 
 the objects of interest and effort, there is nothing 
 for it, at least to such as wish to make their 
 foundations sure, but to turn to the serious study 
 of human nature, and to face the question whether 
 a scrutiny of facts, as rigorous and searching as 
 it can be made, deepens or dispels that faith in 
 the worth of men which is the tap-root of social 
 motive. 
 
 Fortunately the question is anything but new. 
 Since the dawn of history mankind has never 
 been slow to recognise human worth; and since 
 the dawn of ethical and religious reflection, this 
 recognition of the unique value of human beings, 
 even in the midst of dire misfortunes and 
 disasters, has furnished a central problem to the 
 thinkers. Hence two well-worn lines of enquiry. 
 What is it that gives a human life its value in the 
 best types, or (to be more concrete) what is it 
 that redeems the life of Job amongst his potsherds 
 or of Socrates when he put the cup of hemlock 
 to his lips? This is the one question. And the 
 second more characteristic of the modern than 
 of the ancient world is but an extension of the 
 first. For it does but press home the inquiry if 
 this secret of human worth, whatever it may be, 
 is the monopoly of the few or the birthright also 
 of the weak, the obscure, and the neglected. 
 
 Not that the answers to these questions are 
 always reassuring. For it is not only against mere 
 hostile opinions that the belief in human worth 
 has to contend. As already suggested, it is also
 
 48 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 against deliberate theories about human nature, 
 and amongst these is pessimism. 
 
 For, of course, pessimism is not merely a 
 discourse on the miseries of life. If it be that, 
 as indeed it is, it is only so because it is a 
 philosophy of misery which claims to prove, by 
 penetrating analysis, that by his very nature and 
 by the constitution of the universe, man is born to 
 misery as the sparks fly upward. Dowered, by 
 the inscrutable force which operates throughout 
 all Nature, with the instinct of self-preservation, 
 man struggles on to find that the sorrows of life 
 far exceed its joys. Pain is the lord of life. For 
 what is life but one long pursuit of illusory 
 satisfactions, which turn to ashes in the tasting. 
 From this there is no escape. So has it been 
 from the beginning : so will it be to the end. 
 For the " Will to live," however bitter the 
 experiences into which it precipitates the hapless 
 human race, vitalises each fresh generation to 
 struggle forward to the same harvest of miseries- 
 miseries of unsatisfied desires, of unending toil, 
 of broken illusions from which there is no refuge 
 but death. 
 
 And yet the darkness is not so unrelieved as 
 might appear. For this " Will to live " which 
 thrusts man onward irresistibly, breaks forth not 
 only in bodily activities and in psychical cravings, 
 but in intelligence. And intelligence can achieve 
 at any rate three things for its possessor. It can 
 furnish the solace and delights of Art, so that 
 even the wretched such of them at any rate as
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 49 
 
 care for things of beauty can find at least a 
 temporary anodyne in self-forgetful absorption 
 in objects the sonata, the poem, the painting, 
 the statue which charm us out of ourselves, and 
 which never delude us, because they are created 
 simply to be interesting in themselves and for 
 no ulterior purpose whatever. 
 
 11 When you get simple beauty and nought else, 
 You get about the best thing God invents." 
 
 from this consolation mankind is not shut out. 
 
 But intelligence can do more than this. For 
 it can open the eyes at any rate of those who think 
 to the fact that they and their fellow-sufferers 
 (for are not all born to suffer) are all alike kin, 
 inasmuch as all alike are the products, shall we 
 say the victims, of one and the same " Will to 
 live " which drives on the sons of men to the 
 common destiny of disillusionment. Hence 
 room for the growth of sympathy, the reflective 
 sympathy of the man in whom the experience of 
 dissatisfied desire and disillusioned egoism has 
 given birth to the wish to alleviate in others the 
 sufferings he is impotent to remove either from 
 his own life or from theirs. 
 
 And, not least, intelligence can teach the lesson 
 that, after all, the "Will to live," however 
 masterful, has left one way of escape. For 
 cannot intelligence suggest that, as the miseries 
 of life come of the vain pursuit of illusions, these 
 miseries will end if only passion-driven man has 
 strength of mind enough to cease to care for
 
 50 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 what life has to give, and to acquiesce in that 
 inevitable passage from life to death in which 
 lies the one effective escape from suffering? 
 
 It will be easy enough to shew that this 
 estimate of human life strikes at the heart of 
 social effort. Any theory which declares life to 
 be irremediably a poor thing at best must needs 
 dishearten those who wish to make it better. 
 But it does not follow that pessimism has not its 
 message even for them. For at very least it 
 furnishes an antidote to that facile optimism 
 which exasperates by the proffer of all too easy 
 remedies for miseries the depths of which it has 
 never plumbed. It is good that those who stand 
 forward to make life better should realise the 
 depths of the sea of human misery. The 
 experienced social worker may not need the 
 lesson : he probably sees enough for himself. 
 But for one who knows the facts there is a 
 multitude who do but skirt the fringe of the woes 
 of the world, and have little notion of the 
 magnitude of the evils they set out to encounter. 
 To them pessimism has a salutary message. It 
 at any rate tries to go to the root of the matter. 
 Be its diagnosis right or wrong, it at least tries 
 to track the sorrows of men up to their ultimate 
 causes. It is easy to say that pessimism paints 
 the world in drab, and to set it down as morbid, 
 or cynical, or sentimental. It is not so easy to 
 accept its challenge, and to prove as well as assert 
 that life can be made something better than the 
 death in life it makes it out to be.
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 51 
 
 Nor can it be doubted that there is much in 
 pessimism to evoke that compassionate sympathy 
 which is at any rate an element in social motive. 
 If those sufferings that are the Nemesis of folly, 
 vice, and crime can touch the heart to pity, how 
 much more the sorrows which are the inevitable 
 fruit of that forlorn struggle to live which 
 condemns all alike, saint and sinner, strong and 
 weak, rich and poor, master and servant, to take 
 their assigned positions in the universal partner- 
 ship of wretchedness. " Poor wandering, way- 
 " ward man !" cries Carlyle. "Art thou not tried 
 "and beaten with stripes, even as I am? Ever 
 " whether thou bear the Royal mantle or the 
 "beggar's gabardine, art thou not so weary, so- 
 " heavy-laden ; and thy Bed of Rest is but a 
 " Grave. O my Brother, my Brother, why cannot 
 " I shelter thee in my bosom, and wipe away all 
 "tears from thy eyes!" How infinitely more 
 pathetic, one may well ask, if that which is here 
 described is the common irreversible doom of all 
 that live? Small wonder that Schopenhauer 
 should find in sympathy the ground phenomenon 
 of ethics. 
 
 And yet it is precisely here that pessimism 
 begins to disclose its inadequacy. Sympathy 
 with suffering, if our previous analysis be sound,* 
 will never be of the deepest, nor will it be 
 discriminating, so long as it is only sympathy 
 with suffering, however acute. It is the belief 
 
 * See page 15 et seq.
 
 52 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 in the value of the being who suffers that makes 
 all the difference between our compassion for a 
 saint and a scoundrel, or for a man and an 
 animal. And when sympathy passes into action, 
 the very nerve of effort lies in the conviction that 
 we can not only alleviate suffering, but alleviate 
 suffering which mars and obstructs a life which 
 is worth living. There is no room in pessimism 
 for this belief. The miseries of mankind mar that 
 which, according to its creed, has at best but little 
 value. Nor could the alleviation of their miseries 
 be more than an illusory and passing respite. 
 Hence the paralysing doubt, Is it worth while? 
 Nay, better the grief that kills than grief assuaged 
 only to encounter new cause for grief. Better 
 the hope that is unwilling to be fed and is never 
 fed, than that which is fed only to live in one 
 more fools' paradise. For as the sting of 
 suffering is only understood when the onlooker 
 realises that the miseries of the object of his 
 compassion are robbing him of a life of positive 
 worth and happiness, so does the triumph of 
 sympathy lie in the perception that the relief of 
 the wretched is the emancipation of obstructed 
 powers whose exercise points the way to a self- 
 respecting and self-satisfying life. For this 
 kind of suffering, and for this kind of sympathy, 
 there is no room in pessimism. 
 
 A similar line of remark applies to the 
 pessimist's doctrine of Renunciation. This is 
 unquestionably its loftiest mood. It brings it 
 into closest affinity to two of the greatest religions
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 53 
 
 of sacrifice. "In my i/th year," says Schopen- 
 hauer, " without any but the most elementary 
 " school education, I was as possessed by the 
 " sorrow of the world as was Buddha in his youth 
 '' at the sight of illness, old age, pain, and death." 
 And if thus with Buddha he saw the problem, 
 with Buddha also as he is himself aware he 
 finds the solution. " His books at their best," 
 says Wallace in his brilliant little Life of Schopen- 
 hauer, " give the picture of a soul . . . which 
 ' holds the best life to be that of one who has 
 ' pierced through the illusions dividing one 
 ' conscious personality from another, into that 
 ' heart of divine rest where we are each members 
 ' one of another, essentially united in the great 
 ' ocean of Being in which and by which we alone 
 ' live." These sentences are a sympathetic 
 rendering of that pessimistic self-sacrifice that 
 passes into glad acquiescence in personal 
 annihilation. The affinity to Christianity is 
 hardly less obvious. For iwhen the Christian 
 moralist tells mankind that he who would save 
 his life must lose it, and when the emphasis is 
 made to lie as not seldom it is on the losing 
 of self in the service of man, we are not far from 
 the renunciation of the pessimistic creed, 
 especially if we bear in mind that pessimism is 
 an ethics of sympathy as well as of renunciation. 
 It may no doubt be a problem for the student 
 and one may suspect it is a problem pessimists 
 never solve to understand by what process " the 
 Will to live," so masterful and unquenchable, so
 
 54 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 deeply rooted in the very fibre of life, is brought 
 thus to humble itself and acquiesce in its own 
 suppression. But so it is. This self-renunciation, 
 this total surrender of the very last shred of 
 egoism and self-seeking, is so pronounced that 
 one is tempted to say of pessimism that having 
 belittled all the ends of life as vain, illusory, and 
 worthless, it makes amends by exalting life to a 
 superhuman elevation just for that moment 
 when the last rush of annihilating darkness is 
 descending on the soul. 
 
 Now all this is so lofty, and so much in 
 harmony with the spirit in which the best work 
 of the world is done, that it might appear unjust 
 and even outrageous to say that, despite its 
 doctrine of renunciation, pessimism remains the 
 most fatal of all philosophies to social motive. 
 But so it is. It is the most deadlv of all theoretic 
 
 j 
 
 solvents of social effort. It is so because it 
 belittles human nature. For no gospel of 
 renunciation can confirm, far less elevate, the 
 estimate of man, unless it includes either a 
 recognition of the value of the ends for which 
 the sacrifice of self is made, or of the value of 
 the person, the self, who makes the sacrifice. 
 Pessimism gives us neither. For if the lives 
 even of the so-called fortunate and happy, how 
 much more those of the ill-starred and wretched, 
 be so honey-combed with misery that the best 
 thing that could befall a man would be not to 
 be born, and the second best that, seeing by no 
 choice of his own he has been thrust into the
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 55 
 
 world, he should set himself to care not a whit, 
 
 nay, to despise, everything that life has to offer, 
 
 is it wonderful if his fellows should doubt if it 
 
 be worth while lifting so much as a little finger 
 
 in his service? It may be that as matter of fact 
 
 they do, driven on by instincts of compassion. 
 
 But why should they? Why work so devotedly 
 
 to restore the sick to health, the indigent to 
 
 livelihood, the wastrel to industry, the sorrowful 
 
 to joy, the despairing to new hope, if this new 
 
 life to which we strive to bring them back is to 
 
 be a new lease of misery to end only with the end 
 
 of life? Nothing cuts the sinews of social effort 
 
 more completely than the paralysing conviction 
 
 that the lives of those who are its objects are 
 
 despicable. The two things are irreconcilable. 
 
 Even the temporary alleviation of suffering must 
 
 repel, if it be translated into prolongation of 
 
 agony. The one thing left for pessimism, as for 
 
 Buddhism, is to preach the glad tidings of the 
 
 gospel of acquiescence in personal annihilation. 
 
 And this, of course, is, in a sense, effective. 
 
 "The right ear that is filled with dust 
 Hears little that is false or just." 
 
 There is no further disillusionment. But this is 
 not the renunciation that sheds dignity and 
 heroism on human nature. It is poles asunder 
 from the renunciation which in the moment of 
 self-surrender realises the value of what is 
 surrendered, and even in the hour of death is 
 most profoundly convinced of the value of
 
 56 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 life. Compared with this, such peace as the 
 pessimist's gospel can bring is but the sense of 
 relief begotten by the knowledge of coming 
 escape from a hopeless life-long struggle, 
 disillusionment, thraldom, and unhappiness. 
 Pessimistic renunciation is but the last impenitent 
 protest against the value of human life, the last 
 Parthian shaft against all resolute, hopeful, and 
 unselfish effort. 
 
 It is therefore fortunate that pessimism finds 
 an antidote in naturalism. For naturalism is 
 at all events a cheerful creed. Like pessimism 
 it recognises to the full the strength and 
 pertinacity of " the Will to live." Awake to the 
 indomitable persistence with which Life struggles 
 forwards, at all costs, in the vegetable and 
 animal worlds, it recognises in the highest 
 animal, man, the same principle of self- 
 preservation. Unlike pessimism, it discerns in 
 this process the emergence of higher, that is, 
 more fully-developed and more richly-integrated 
 forms of life. It has much to say of " the fit " ; 
 in the light of evolution it prophesies the advent 
 of the fitter, and even of the "fittest" who, 
 having put all rivals under their feet, shall 
 victoriously in the latter day stand upon the 
 earth. There is no misgiving here that life is 
 not worth living. On the contrary, the legend 
 inscribed on the gateway of the Academy of 
 naturalism might well be " More life and fuller." 
 
 This appears with convincing clearness in 
 some of its extremest types. Nietzsche is, to
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 57 
 
 say the least, no philanthropist : had his power 
 been equal to the ferocity of his rhetoric, he 
 would have swept the world clean of all the 
 Christian virtues and all the Christian graces. 
 But why? Because, reverting to that deification 
 of successful Power which is as old as the Greek 
 Sophists, he would have the world peopled by 
 strong, self-assertive, self-seeking egoists who 
 are so entirely convinced that life is worth living, 
 at any rate in their own persons, that they are 
 quite prepared to sacrifice their fellows in whole 
 battalions, and to glory in so doing, if only they 
 could thereby make the utmost of themselves. 
 It is a ruthless creed, but it does but transfer 
 to human affairs that struggle for existence and 
 survival of " the fittest " which is the law of 
 nature; and it has at all events the redeeming 
 feature that it affirms the value of life. In the 
 very phrenzy of its egoism it is a protest against 
 the pessimistic message that a human life even 
 at its best is worthless. To assert the will to 
 live at all costs ; to denounce individual sacrifice 
 and renunciation as the false and contemptible 
 morality of slaves what is this but a way of 
 saying that fulness of life is to be coveted and 
 struggled for at any price? 
 
 Hence it may be said that, even in its most 
 pitiless form, and in despite of all the scoffs of 
 Nietzsche at philanthropy, naturalism does not 
 a little to reinforce the philanthropic spirit. By 
 its laudations of human nature in its strong and 
 victorious types, and in its firm faith that the
 
 58 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 best that is is but first-fruits of something better 
 to come, it leaves no place for the doubt that 
 the elevation of man may not be an end worth 
 living for. It affirms the very contrary. 
 
 So much therefore may be set down to the 
 credit of naturalism. It sees in the struggle of 
 life, which fills the pessimist with despair, the 
 necessary ordeal by which human nature proves 
 its mettle : it foresees the coming of a time when 
 by evolutionary process, the best that is will 
 have given place to a better. And by doing 
 these things, it certainly is well fitted to bring 
 encouragement and hope to all who wish and 
 work for the betterment of man. 
 
 Unfortunately, however, what this type of 
 naturalism gives with the one hand it withdraws 
 with the other. 
 
 For when we look closer, the aristocracy of 
 naturalism, " the fittest to survive," as has often 
 been pointed out (and not least by Huxley),* 
 cannot be said as such to possess any moral 
 worth whatever. " Fittest " is an epithet that, 
 naturalistically, must be construed rigorously 
 in relation to environment. If the environment be 
 good, the fittest will have qualities accordingly; 
 but if the environment be bad, the fittest would 
 be anything but worthy of our admiration. In 
 Gomorrah, for example, the fittest were those 
 who were ultimately deemed fit to be destroved 
 by fire from Heaven. It follows that the "fit" 
 
 In hia "Evolution and Ethics."
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 59 
 
 or "fittest" of which evolution speaks are not 
 necessarily such as to kindle the wish that the 
 species should inherit the earth. Nor does 
 Huxley shrink from the statement that moral 
 effort is so far from finding inspiration in this 
 idea of " the fittest " that its prime function is 
 to resist and counteract the " cosmic process " 
 of which "the fittest" are the fruit. Clearly 
 social effort must work up to other values than 
 those which, so far, naturalism is able to furnish. 
 This becomes evident if we remember that 
 one of the attributes of the fittest to survive is 
 ability to prevent others from surviving. The 
 "fittest" of the evolutionist, like the merciless 
 " superman " of Nietzsche, rises on stepping 
 stones of the dead selves of his neighbours and 
 rivals. For the emergence of the fit is to the 
 last degree costly. In the process of natural 
 selection (to borrow Huxley's metaphor) for 
 every bullet that hits the mark a thousand fly 
 wide and are wasted. Of the individual life 
 Nature is not only careless but contemptuously 
 lavish. The drift of this is obvious. How is 
 it possible to familiarise the mind with this 
 profligate wastage of human material without 
 lowering our estimate of the value of individual 
 lives? Nietzsche tells us that the poor are good 
 for nothing but statistics; statistics, we may 
 add, that are swelled by the multitudes whose 
 extinction is the price of the advent of the small 
 minority who, if the strict law of natural selection 
 has free play, prove their worth, such as it is,
 
 60 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 by practically disproving the worth of their 
 weaker competitors in life's race. Thus regarded, 
 naturalism becomes almost as fatal to social 
 effort as pessimism. It sets us wondering if the 
 weak, the unfortunate, the obscure and neglected, 
 not to say the physically and mentally and 
 morally defective, are worth even a tithe of the 
 thought and labour that is bestowed upon them. 
 Nietzsche's vituperative assaults on Christian 
 ethics are but one indication of many that pity, 
 mercy, long-suffering, refusal to despair even 
 of the worst and weakest, are not the ways of 
 naturalism if naturalism stands or falls with 
 the struggle for existence between individuals 
 as the law of human as it admittedly is the law 
 of animal life. 
 
 This, however, is happily not the case. For 
 there is a broader and a more human naturalism. 
 It is more human because it is more social In its 
 conception. For this creed enlarges its idea of 
 " cosmic process " so as to include within it 
 the conflict of social groups. These groups, 
 having come into existence through the natural 
 sociality of man and other influences, fulfil the 
 evolutionary law of struggle for existence and 
 survival of the fittest. They fulfil it indeed so 
 effectively, group against group, that they rear 
 within them individuals who are so thoroughly 
 socialised that they have risen far above that 
 selfish struggle of man against man of which we 
 have already said enough. The group may be 
 small or large a clan, a tribe, a nation; but the
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 61 
 
 essential features are always alike. For in order 
 that the group may hold its own and stand strong 
 against its rival groups, individual rivalries 
 within the group are greatly softened and 
 humanised, and in their place come those self- 
 suppressions and that sense of common interest 
 which are essential to the pursuit of a common 
 good. Without these even a gang of banditti 
 would dissolve. Nor need the evolutionist, if 
 he thinks he has sufficient data, deny himself 
 the vision of the coming of a time when the 
 combative qualities fostered by conflicts between 
 races or nations may be further softened or even 
 extinguished by the evolution of an organised 
 humanity (far enough off at present), in the 
 service of which that reciprocal hatred between 
 nation and nation which deluges the world with 
 blood might be dissolved in the pursuit of 
 cosmopolitan ends. 
 
 Now a theory like this manifestly modifies and 
 corrects the cruder and more individualistic 
 naturalism. For the price of the emergence of 
 the fit is no longer the wholesale destruction of 
 the weaker individuals by the stronger; and, 
 consequently, the wastage, so appalling in the 
 sub-human world, need no longer so much 
 disquiet us. Wastage, no doubt, there is. It 
 comes when group encounters group in the 
 sanguinary wars that devastate the world. But, 
 within the several groups, hatreds and hostilities 
 are conspicuously softened (though in societies 
 where competition prevails they are far from
 
 62 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 abolished). This follows because, if a group 
 (let us say a nation) is to present an 
 invulnerable front to its rivals, it will take care 
 that conflicts between its members are, at all 
 events in their more disturbing and destructive 
 forms, suppressed. 
 
 Hence the type of human being which now 
 comes to the front is conspicuously more in 
 harmony with a faith in the value of the 
 individual man. For he is no longer the self- 
 assertive human animal, but the loyal citizen 
 who has been so effectually socialised, and who 
 responds so naturally to the demands his country 
 makes upon him, that he does his utmost to make 
 and keep the commonwealth strong against all 
 comers. A type of this kind has many valuable 
 qualities : it is intrinsically worth having and 
 worth working for. But this is not all. For the 
 value which comes to be ascribed to the group 
 reflects itself in the lives of its members. From 
 the days of the village community or clan 
 onwards, men always regard the group to which 
 they belong as having value value so great 
 that they are ready on occasion to sacrifice even 
 their lives for its sake. And this tendency so 
 essentially human rises to high-water mark 
 when the object of loyalty is the modern nation 
 (or empire). It is not too much to say that, in 
 practice at any rate (for the average citizen does 
 not trouble himself much with theory), the life 
 of the nation is regarded by every citizen as 
 if it had an absolute value. And whatever
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 63 
 
 hesitancies on this point may arise, as in some 
 cases they do, when the larger idea of Humanity 
 emerges, bringing in its train possible conflicts 
 between patriotic and cosmopolitan ends, the 
 fact substantially remains that the citizen of 
 France, England, Germany, Switzerland acts 
 on the conviction, tacit or avowed, that the 
 conservation of his country's life and power, 
 not to say the fulfilment of his country's destinies, 
 is essential to civilisation. He will not even think 
 of national self-effacement. So indomitable is 
 the value set upon the group. 
 
 Small wonder therefore if we also come to 
 value every man who either is, or can be made, 
 a good citizen. It is one of the commonest of 
 experiences that the recognised value of any 
 institution imparts a value to its members such 
 as they might not otherwise possess. Even its 
 humblest supporters gain an enhanced importance 
 in our eyes. How much more when the valued 
 object is that organism of institutions, the nation, 
 which has victoriously proved its strength in the 
 evolutionary struggle for existence ? 
 
 Now it may be admitted that this takes us 
 some considerable way. To the question, Why 
 ascribe to our fellow-men that value which 
 makes them the objects of social effort? we have 
 now an answer. We have the conception of a 
 nation, well-organised, able to hold its own 
 against all comers, of acknowledged value, and 
 with citizens reared and disciplined to promote 
 its efficiency in all modes. Is not this an object
 
 64 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 worth working for? And if so, what more do 
 we need to justify the energies of legislators, 
 administrators, and philanthropists ? 
 
 And yet we do need something more. The 
 justification is incomplete. 
 
 i. For, in the first place, we must never 
 forget that social motive and effort are not limited 
 to fellow-citizens. Cosmopolitan sympathies and 
 cosmopolitan effort exist in great strength and 
 vitality. Be the official attitude of group to group 
 what it may, and be international rivalries never 
 so keen, the fact remains that the sympathies pass 
 far beyond the frontiers of the group and extend 
 to other peoples, tribes, and races. What, then, 
 is the justification of this? Wliy should an 
 Englishman, for example, interest himself, 
 through the mission field or otherwise, in savage 
 races, or it may be in Jews or Armenians, whom 
 he believes to be persecuted, or possibly in the 
 citizens of some foreign nation menaced by 
 invasion ? 
 
 One can hardly say it is because of a sense of 
 the value of the group to which these aliens 
 belong. It sometimes is, but by no means always. 
 Cosmopolitan sympathies go out to men oftener 
 than to nations or groups. And the nations or 
 tribes to which these men belong may be far 
 from admirable, and even politically worthless, 
 without drying up our interest in their members. 
 As matter of fact many of the objects of mis- 
 sionary and civilising effort belong to no organism 
 which has any value whatever in the eyes of their
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 65 
 
 sympathisers. Nor does it help much to say as 
 is often said that they belong at any rate to the 
 great family of Humanity, for as " Humanity ' 
 is not not yet, at any rate an organised unity 
 of recognised value (as the nation is) this reference 
 to " Humanity " is only a way of saying that these 
 objects of our interest and effort have value 
 because they are human beings. And this may 
 possibly be the fact : but it is not a fact that 
 naturalism, so far as we have gone, has succeeded 
 in explaining. For the distinctive note of 
 naturalism is that it derives the value of the 
 individual from the recognised value of the group 
 to which he belongs. 
 
 2. It is even harder to follow the naturalistic 
 justification when we turn our eyes to what goes 
 on within the nation itself. One has only to pass 
 in melancholy review the incurably diseased, the 
 insane, the vicious, the paupers, the criminals, 
 and then to put the question if the pitiful and 
 patient care and tendance of these social failures 
 can be justified as making the nation strong in 
 the international struggle for existence. Grant 
 that the thought, time, and money spent on them 
 does something to enhance the sense of national 
 solidarity, it is doubtful in the extreme if this 
 does much to counterweigh the fact that they 
 are an impoverishment, a burden, if not a curse 
 to the society to which they owe so much. So 
 far at national strength goes, it might seem better 
 that they should be drowned in the depths of the 
 sea.
 
 66 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 Nor can we escape the difficulty by following 
 such stalwarts of naturalism as think that our 
 humanitarianism has gone too far, and that the 
 time has come to make less of the worth of the 
 worthless, and to give a freer hand to natural 
 selection. For in doing this we should not 
 merely be outraging our instincts of pity and 
 mercy (which it might be our duty to repress), 
 but running straight in the teeth of that obstinate, 
 deep-seated belief in the " worth " even of the 
 weakest and worst which, as we have seen, has 
 entrenched itself in religion, law, philanthropy, 
 education, and democratic politics.* In other 
 words, we should be confessing the failure of 
 naturalism to justify existing facts. Put the 
 blunt question : which course makes for the 
 strength of a nation; is it that its weaklings, 
 waifs, and wastrels should be kept alive through 
 ineffectual lives far on into old age, or that 
 (were such a thing possible) they should be 
 despatched quam primumt The answer does 
 not seem doubtful. 
 
 Nor is it easier to justify, on naturalistic 
 grounds, our preferences for some of the best 
 of mankind than to justify our interest in the 
 worst. Naturalism, if we have interpreted it 
 aright, builds upon the recognised value of the 
 social organism, on the ground that it has proved 
 its strength in the conflict of groups. And it 
 would seem to follow that our preferences 
 should go out towards the citizens of the strongest 
 
 Page 15.
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 67 
 
 States. But this is not the case. "A generous 
 " spirit," says Lord Acton, " prefers that his 
 " country should be poor and weak, and of 
 " no account, but free, rather than powerful, 
 " prosperous, and enslaved. It is better to be 
 "the citizen of a humble commonwealth in the 
 "Alps, without a prospect of influence beyond 
 " the narrow frontier, than a subject of the 
 " superb autocracy that overshadows half of 
 "Asia and of Europe."* 
 
 Now if a preference of this kind (for we need 
 not enter into the specific comparison suggested) 
 is a fact; if we do affirm that the life of the 
 member of the weaker State may have more 
 genuine value than that of the citizen of a great 
 and powerful Empire, one of the great world- 
 powers, then it would seem to follow that the 
 worth assigned to the individual cannot be 
 dependent on, or derived from, the value 
 ascribed to a group because that group is even 
 irresistibly strong and victorious in the inter- 
 national struggle. From whatever sources the 
 citizenship of the small, weak, and even 
 insignificant State may derive the quality of 
 life which constrains us to give it the decisive 
 preference, this source is not to be found in the 
 mere fact that, by the vis a tergo of social 
 evolution, the community to which he belongs 
 has become strong and formidable. Yet that 
 would seem to be the source to which, on 
 naturalistic grounds, we ought to go. 
 
 * " History of Freedom," p. 23.
 
 68 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 The conclusion from all this is obvious. 
 
 The reality of cosmopolitan sympathies, the 
 philanthropic care for many who can only be 
 regarded as a burden to society, the fact that 
 we do not believe that the best kind of life is 
 necessarily to be found in the strongest State 
 these are considerations which bid us look beyond 
 naturalism, even in its most socialised forms, 
 for adequate justification of that belief in the 
 worth of the individual which lies so close to 
 the source of social motive. 
 
 We may accept this result with the more 
 confidence because, of course, pessimism and 
 naturalism do not exhaust the resources of 
 philosophy. There are other creeds, and one 
 of them, by no means obsolete, is utilitarianism. 
 
 No one can justly tax utilitarianism with 
 failure to recognise the value of the individual 
 man. In the pages of J. S. Mill, it is not only 
 a defence of individualism, democratic in the 
 breadth of its sympathies : it is also a passionate 
 incitement to foster individuality, even to or 
 across the verge of eccentricity, in all members 
 of the community. Few writers have had so 
 firm a faith in what human nature has it in 
 it to become. Nor can any reader, not only of 
 the ever-memorable Essay on Liberty but of 
 all his writings, rise from Mill's pages without 
 an enhanced conception of human life. Mill 
 has been twitted by critics with a low and 
 niggardly estimate of men, " the herd, the 
 " common uncultivated herd," as he sometimes
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 69 
 
 calls them; yes, but it is just this candid dis- 
 paragement of men as they are that throws 
 into stronger relief the glowing anticipations, 
 optimistic in the highest degree, of what (given 
 liberty and favouring environment) they have 
 it in them to become. Assuredly no doubt ever 
 crossed Mill's mind that his fellow-men were 
 worth the utmost that could be done for them. 
 Nay, the very reproach that has been levelled 
 against utilitarianism becomes, in this connection, 
 a tribute. The reproach is that utilitarianism 
 has been slow to assimilate biology; that it has 
 failed to recognise that society is " an organism " ; 
 that it has viewed the community arithmetically 
 as an aggregate of units and not biologically as 
 a wonderfully integrated organic whole which 
 has its own life to live, its own function to fulfil, 
 in the inevitable conflict with other organic 
 groups of like kind to itself. Be it so. The 
 reproach has its truth. It is undeniable that 
 even Mill, though living in days Darwinian, 
 fought singularly shy of biological formulae. 
 But why? Not of a surety because he failed 
 to recognise the reality of social ties, but 
 because he could never forget the claims of the 
 individual. Happiness that Greatest Happiness 
 which was the watchword of his School meant 
 for him always the happiness .of actual men and 
 women. This comes out in many ways. We 
 have it in the emphasis laid on individual rights 
 as the sine qua non of all social well-being; in 
 the significant addendum " each to count for one '*
 
 70 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 which, following Bentham, he tacks on to the 
 Greatest Happiness principle; in the insistence, 
 again and again renewed, that the value of any 
 social system is to be measured by the fullness 
 of life within reach of its members. Nor 
 is it doubtful that utilitarianism has left its 
 indelible mark on English thought by its glowing, 
 and at times all but fanatical, pleas for the 
 claims, possibilities, and worth of the individual 
 life. 
 
 Nor are the grounds of this estimate far to 
 seek. Men have value in utilitarian eyes 
 because it is their nature to possess the capacity 
 for happiness. Many and various as are the 
 ends and objects whose pursuit gives substance 
 and reality to the individual life, these are all 
 ultimately valuable for no other reason than 
 that they satisfy this deep-seated capacity and 
 craving for happiness. In this capacity therefore 
 lies the root of human worth. 
 
 There is much to be said for such a view. It 
 is indubitable that men desire a happy life for 
 themselves; quite as indubitable as that they 
 hate and recoil from the very thought of the 
 'opposite ; and in proportion as experience teaches 
 them that the satisfaction of these capacities for 
 happiness are many and great, in like proportion 
 do they consider their lives to be worth living. 
 To desire and value one's own happiness, to be 
 sure, is one thing, and to value and desire that 
 of other persons is another. But it is not beyond
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 71 
 
 the power of sympathy and sympathy plays a 
 vital part in utilitarian ethics to transfer to 
 the lives of others what is matter of familiar 
 experience to ourselves. Hence that attractive 
 and inspiring utilitarian picture of a community 
 of men and women living unobstructed and 
 happy lives, and satisfying their varied capacities 
 with the best things, small and great, which a 
 civilised society has in its gift. Best of all, of 
 course were such a millennium possible a 
 community in which every one was happy. But, 
 seeing that, in the imperfect state of human 
 affairs, failure, misfortune, disease, and death 
 still bring their blight, the next best is that at 
 any rate the majority should be happy. Such, 
 in brief, is the doctrine of the utilitarians. 
 It stands written in their formula, " Greatest 
 " Happiness of the Greatest Number " ; it stands 
 written still more eloquently in their devoted 
 and public-spirited lives. The conception filled 
 them with enthusiasm. Jeremy Bentham, " the 
 " most philanthropic of the philanthropic," as 
 he once styled himself, gloried in it. And 
 John Stuart Mill embraced it, so he tells us, as 
 " a religion " a religion which prompted him, 
 (to use his own words) to " take up his cross " 
 in the service of his generation. Call it religion 
 or call it philosophy, it evidently offered to its 
 votaries an object worth living for. One cannot 
 wonder that Green, that searching critic of the 
 utilitarian philosophy, should nevertheless freely
 
 72 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 acknowledge its supreme value as a doctrine of 
 public spirit and social service.* 
 
 But, though this is the truth about utili- 
 tarianism, and nothing but the truth, it is, 
 unfortunately, not the whole truth. For, in an 
 evil hour (as some may think) utilitarianism 
 wedded itself to hedonism; and on the strength 
 of psychological analysis, resolved the capacity 
 for happiness into the capacity for pleasurable 
 satisfaction. 
 
 This makes a difference. When we say that 
 we value a human life because it can be rendered 
 "happy" the word may pass, because it can be 
 made as it often has been made to cover so 
 much. It is quite another thing when it is 
 narrowed down to mean no more than pleasurable 
 satisfaction or escape from pain. We are at 
 once conscious then of a swift descent to a less 
 inspiring level. Easy enough to regard our 
 fellow-men as worth caring for and working for 
 on the ground that they have great capacities for 
 " happiness " : not so easy when we think of 
 them as simply dowered with capacities to 
 welcome pleasure and abhor pain. 
 
 Not that increase of pleasures and diminution 
 of pains is a small matter. These count for much 
 in most men's plan of life; and so long as this 
 is fact, it is reasonable that they should also 
 count for much in the sympathetic recognition 
 that the lives of our neighbours are similar to 
 
 * See " Political Obligation," page 23, and " Prolegomena to Ethics," 
 Sections 213 and 356.
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 73 
 
 our own. Nay, when we realise how many and 
 how varied, how pure, elevated, and satisfying, 
 are the pleasures of which human nature is 
 capable, which of us will deny that the thought 
 of bringing pleasures into the lives of fellow- 
 men supplies a powerful incentive? Not least 
 in cases where these lives, despite all their 
 capacities for happiness, have been starved, 
 cheerless, and wretched. For if many persons 
 think it worth their while, and even accept it as 
 a duty, to make the lives of their four-footed 
 dependents comfortable and happy, it can hardly 
 be unreasonable to be moved to do the same for 
 fellow-men who are so infinitely more capable of 
 pleasurable satisfactions than even the aristocracy 
 of the animal world. 
 
 It is therefore by no means necessary to 
 suggest that utilitarian hedonism is a failure as 
 a gospel of good works, least of all when the 
 motive it supplies is relief of pain. And, of 
 course, if the hedonistic version of human 
 nature be the true one, we must needs be content 
 with it and justify our motives accordingly. 
 
 We need not, however, be too easily content. 
 For two reasons, the first of which is that 
 hedonism has never lacked its assailants. Need 
 one recall the long array of ascetic philosophers 
 who, from the ancient Cynics onwards, have 
 derisively denied the value of pleasure in toto. 
 Need one suggest the still larger companv of 
 austere moralists who have never been weary of 
 descanting on the notorious fragility and
 
 74 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 evanescence of all pleasures, even the best and 
 noblest ? And, if we shrink from these extremists, 
 we have still to reckon with the more convincing 
 verdict of the soberer thinkers who tell us that, 
 though pleasures and pains have their value, 
 they drop into quite a secondary place in the 
 economy of human nature, being indeed no more 
 than the concomitants of life and by no means 
 its essence. All this must needs have weight. 
 It needs some courage, with the analysis of 
 Aristotle, Butler, Kant, Green on the other side, 
 to single out the capacity for pleasure as the 
 root of human worth. 
 
 The second reason is that there is another 
 alternative to utilitarian hedonism besides 
 naturalism or pessimism the alternative of 
 idealism. 
 
 As a doctrine of human worth idealism is by 
 no means at war with naturalism all along the 
 line. On the contrary, it welcomes every word 
 that naturalism has to say about the value of 
 the social organism. It agrees that a nation, 
 like every other group, has come to be what it 
 is by the long road of historical evolution. It 
 agrees that it has a unique value in the eyes of 
 its citizens. It agrees that it is in it that the 
 individual finds the nurture and the opportunity 
 without which his life, however great its 
 capacities, would remain poor, meagre, stunted, 
 and incomplete. Nothing is more characteristic of 
 idealism than the zeal with which it has adopted, 
 and translated into terms of modern life, the
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 75 
 
 old Aristotelian dicta that man is "a political 
 " animal " and " by nature a citizen." It is 
 therefore entirely at one with naturalism in 
 insisting that we must always estimate the value 
 of the individual in the light of the station he 
 occupies and the function he fulfils, in the larger 
 organism of which he is a member. So far there 
 is no quarrel. Divergence arises and it is 
 decisive only when we begin to scrutinise the 
 credentials of the value of the organism. For 
 the distinctive note of naturalism is to identify 
 value with strength. A group has value because 
 it has proved its value by coming out victorious 
 in the evolutionary struggle between group 
 and group. On this as an accomplished fact 
 naturalism takes its stand, and proceeds to derive 
 the value of the individual from the proved value 
 of the community to which he belongs. From 
 this idealism dissents. It looks beyond the value 
 of the group, however strong and compact : it 
 refuses to derive the value of the individual from 
 the value of the group, even though that group 
 be a great and all-powerful nation : it insists that 
 the value of the nation must ultimately be 
 estimated in one way, and in one way alone, and 
 that is in the light of the concrete lives of the 
 men and women who, in organic union, are the 
 nation. ' The life of the nation," says T. H. 
 Green, " has no real existence except as the life 
 "of the individuals composing the nation." Or 
 in still more sweeping words : " To speak of 
 "any progress or improvement or development
 
 76 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 "of a nation or society or mankind except as 
 "relative to some greater worth of persons is 
 "to use words without meaning."* 
 
 Hence a certain affinity between idealism and 
 utilitarianism. Both recognise the value of the 
 individual life. Both insist that the happiness 
 of the community, if it mean anything, must mean 
 the happiness of human beings. Both regard 
 the nation, or any other group, as possessing 
 value and both accord to. it an indisputable 
 value precisely in so far as human capacity 
 finds fullness of life and abiding satisfaction 
 in and through it. To both therefore the seat 
 and centre of worth is the human soul. 
 
 But idealism is, of course, not utilitarianism. 
 It rejects its hedonism. It refuses to find the 
 ultimate ground of worth in the capacity for 
 pleasure. If affirms that, on that conception of 
 human nature, the belief in the worth of the 
 individual would remain for ever inexplicable. 
 And so it does its best to furnish a better. 
 
 Why then should idealism, any more than 
 naturalism or utilitarianism, succeed in finding 
 grounds for the ascription to the individual of 
 value, worth, and dignity? It was with this 
 problem we set out, and it is with the idealist's 
 answer to it we must end. 
 
 The answer is comparatively easy, so long as 
 we limit our view to the aristocracy of the moral 
 life. In the best men we know, and still more 
 in the shining examples which the vast range of 
 
 * " Prolegomena to Ethics," Section 184.
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 77 
 
 recorded experience furnishes, we seem to find 
 a dutiful spirit and a devotion to ideals which 
 irresistibly compel our respect and often evoke 
 our reverence. Who can deny it? At first, and 
 to the last, this respect or reverence is an emotion. 
 But even from the first, and ever-increasingly as 
 experience deepens, it is far more. For it goes 
 with the ever-clearer perception that, in the best 
 types, this dutiful devotion, this devotion to 
 ideals, permeates and vitalises the individual life 
 through and through. The large interests of 
 public life and the small details of private inter- 
 course, the patriotic service of country and the 
 unobtrusive fidelity to the claims of business, 
 home, and friendship they are all alike pene- 
 trated by the one spirit. It is a spirit variously 
 described by analysts. Some would call it a 
 constraining consciousness of a law of Duty, 
 others would prefer to describe it as devotion 
 to a supreme Good. But, however described, it 
 is manifestly there. We seem to be clearly 
 conscious of it as the best thing in our own lives, 
 even when we are far from having lived up to it; 
 and we are confirmed in that estimate by the 
 knowledge of what it can be and do in the lives 
 of the men who have made and maintained the 
 moral traditions of our race. But perhaps we 
 need not labour this point. Few would have 
 the hardihood to deny that, if this be a true 
 transcript of human nature, if all men were such 
 as these, they would be worth all and more than 
 all the service that man can render to man.
 
 78 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 But, of course, the vast majority of our 
 " accursed race " can make small claim to stand 
 on this exalted level. Long and diversified is 
 the scale of moral value which descends from the 
 best to the worst. And the difficulty, of course, 
 is to justify the ascription of worth, not to those 
 who manifestly merit our help, but to those who 
 manifestly need it. Can the idealistic conception 
 of human nature justify this? Can it justify that 
 recognition of the claims and worth of all men, 
 even the waifs and failures? 
 
 Now we need not here commit ourselves to the 
 assertion that even the worst specimens of our 
 race have " worth " : it may be granted that the 
 pathology of morals can find, in the ranks of 
 the incurably vicious and desperately criminal, 
 individuals with reference to whom " worth " is 
 a word not so much as to be mentioned. Society, 
 it is true, and especially Christian societies, have 
 not despaired even of them. But even Christian 
 societies have long been convinced that some of 
 them are not fit to live. And yet these cases must 
 not be allowed to depress unduly our estimate 
 of human nature. For we need not despise the 
 consolation such as it is that many a life, 
 even when it fills us with disgust and despair 
 is the baleful result of the perversion of capacities 
 and desires which, under better influences, might 
 have had a vastly different history. Such 
 perversion is doubtless deplorable : vice, crime, 
 and insanity are among its products. But it is 
 not wholly discouraging. At very least it suggests
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 79 
 
 that human nature is modifiable. And with that 
 fact may come the hope that, if modifiable for 
 the worse, then peradventure modifiable for the 
 better, if only it can find direction, care, and 
 treatment. Lamentable though the tragedy of 
 moral lapse must necessarily be, it is not a 
 spectacle that fills one with blank despair, so 
 long as we can see in ft the misdirection and 
 waste of human powers which might have had a 
 better ending. One need not press this point 
 unduly : it remains too much of a paradox to 
 find grounds for hope in the hideous vices and 
 crimes of mankind. And yet these ghastly facts 
 are not altogether without their hopeful side. 
 
 It is more to the point that idealism can draw 
 encouragement from the belief in evolution. 
 For it is amongst the happy results of this belief 
 that it opens the eyes to the extent to which small 
 and even unpromising beginnings may lead on 
 to notable endings. By habituating our minds 
 to the idea of continuity of growth, it forbids us 
 to set up those dividing barriers between the 
 less-developed and the more-developed barriers 
 which parted the serf and even the artisan by a 
 great gulf from the citizen in the ancient world.* 
 On the contrary, it helps us to see the makings 
 of a law-abiding citizen in a savage, of a freeman 
 in a slave, of a civilised human being in a 
 barbarian. The process upwards may be slow; 
 and it would be blindness to overlook the fact 
 that there is such a thing as arrested development, 
 
 * See page 20.
 
 8o ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 not to say degeneration. Yet, despite all qualifi- 
 cations, the belief in evolution remains a cheerful 
 faith cheerful not only because of the results 
 to which it points forwards, but because of the 
 light it throws backwards upon all the earlier 
 stages from actually achieved advance. Even 
 glaring inferiorities of man to man wear a new 
 and more hopeful aspect in the scale of value 
 from the moment when they come to be regarded 
 as containing even the far-off promise of the 
 sterling qualities of character from which we 
 never dream of withholding our tribute of 
 respect when we meet them in their more highly- 
 developed forms. It is thus that the belief in 
 evolution enables us to use our estimates of the 
 higher in uplifting and humanising our valuations 
 of the lower through all the many degrees of 
 human inequality. 
 
 Nor do we fail to find in experience what the 
 belief in evolution thus suggests. We find it, 
 idealism at any rate claims to find it, as result 
 of ethical analysis. For one of the most certain 
 of all the results of an examination of human 
 faculty is the discovery that the natural desires 
 of man are in their very nature progressive. In 
 human experience the satisfaction of a desire is 
 not simply an event that happens, to be again and 
 again repeated as the days or years go round; 
 it becomes the occasion for discovering, or 
 inventing, some new end or object which may 
 satisfy some fresh desire. Well might the Greeks 
 call desire " insatiable," and Carlyle call it
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 81 
 
 " infinite." For nothing could be harder than to 
 set limits to the possible objects of satisfaction 
 which human eagerness can discover and human 
 resourcefulness invent, except to set limits to the 
 capacities of response which such objects evoke 
 as soon as they shape themselves before the 
 mind's eye of a lacing in whom the hunger for 
 satiety is forever shadowed by unrest, and who 
 can no more cease to crave, to hope, to seek than 
 he can cease to wish to live. So it is now, and 
 so will it remain in sazcula s&culorum, so long 
 as, by the very constitution of man, the sanguine 
 forward-struggling cravings of the human spirit 
 emerge in inseparable fusion with the dawnings 
 of imagination and forward-looking thoughts. 
 The veriest savage, serf, or drudge, unless by 
 prolonged degradation he be brutalised, has still 
 some power of picturing, and craving for, some 
 better future than the daily life of hand-to-mouth. 
 Nor is it by any means the men of affluence, of 
 station, or of ideas who are oftenest visited by 
 these longings for a better life than has fallen 
 to their lot. Grant that the ideal may be homely 
 and unambitious, though it need be neither. 
 Grant even that it may be mistaken and illusory 
 in many a case. The fact nevertheless remains 
 unshaken that human nature discloses the 
 presence of progressive capacities and powers 
 which, however they may be obstructed, can never 
 be quenched, not even by the long array of hostile 
 influences which frustrate in ten thousand ways 
 the inherent potencies and promise of life.
 
 82 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 It is these capacities and powers that lie before 
 the social worker as the material with which he 
 has to deal. Can he doubt that the material is 
 of value sufficient to justify ten times over the 
 best he can do for it? Can he doubt it when he 
 remembers what it can become in those shining 
 examples of moral achievement which compel 
 his admiration and reverence? And far short 
 of that, can he doubt it when he simply thinks 
 of the multitude of decent and self-respecting 
 lives who, though far enough from claiming to 
 be examples, have yet, in face of all obstructions, 
 borne their unobtrusive witness to the worth of 
 life by the lives they have lived. 
 
 Add to this the consciousness of available 
 resources, never nearly so many or so great as 
 now. The salutary pressure of social institutions 
 from the family onwards, the moralising and 
 enlightening influences of education in its 
 widest sense, the uplift of religion, the eager 
 effort of voluntary associations, the far-reaching 
 possibilities of democratic legislation and admini- 
 stration when we think of what these instruments 
 of civilisation are, and may become, what can 
 be more reasonable than the sober optimism 
 which ventures the hope that, in the long 
 path a nation has to travel, social effort will be 
 abundantly justified by its fruits, because it is 
 already justified by the value, actual and potential, 
 of those who are its objects. 
 
 Nor ought we to fall into the illusion all too 
 common in a philanthropic age like ours that
 
 JUSTIFICATION OF MOTIVES 83 
 
 social motive is mainly concerned with the 
 failures, laggards, and wastrels of our civilisation. 
 Social effort has an infinitely wider scope. Its 
 objects are none other than our fellow-workmen 
 in all classes of work, and our fellow-citizens in 
 all ranks, classes, and degrees. Not compassion, 
 but respect, is the fit word to describe our 
 right attitude to them and their right attitude to 
 us. For these motives to social work at their 
 best and highest are not the peculiar possession 
 of any class or section in a truly democratic state. 
 They are the common property of all good 
 citizens united in the pursuit of that public good 
 which finds its gradual realisation in the lives of 
 men of every rank and class.
 
 rv.-cmzENSHiP AND IDEAL 
 
 INTERESTS.* 
 
 The life of every citizen may be written in two 
 chapters. The one records what his city does for 
 him; the other what he does for his city. Many 
 and diverse as are the aspects in which we may 
 view our city's many-coloured life, these two 
 stand out : it is the place of preparation and 
 equipment for the serious work of life, and it is 
 the place where the serious work of life is done. 
 
 When we think of all that an average good 
 citizen gets from his city, it is manifest at a 
 glance that he by no means gets everything. In 
 these days of mobility, when citizenship comes 
 to so many by naturalisation and not by birth, the 
 springs of life may rise in other places, in other 
 cities, perhaps, or in quiet corners of the country 
 which may long continue to feed our lives through 
 memories which are the strength and solace of 
 solitary hours. Others again may, of course, bring 
 back from travel, or occasional residence in other 
 surroundings, impressions and ideas which vitally 
 
 An Address to the Liverpool and Krkenbead Raskin Society.
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 85 
 
 mould their characters and pursuits. Others, 
 still, may travel with their minds, and on these 
 far journeys of the spirit absorb influences from 
 Greece, Rome, Judaea which may penetrate their 
 lives to the core. So to be able to live, in fruitful 
 imaginative contact with what is distant or remote, 
 is, in fact, one of the marks of civilisation. It 
 was the dream of Aristotle that the city-state 
 which, following Plato, he idealised in his 
 " Politics," could be so organised as to be the 
 source and vehicle of all the influences which, 
 from cradle to grave, inspire and mould the 
 individual life. But we may grant at once that 
 no such conception is possible for us. To the 
 modern spirit there has come a consciousness of 
 wider personal relations to Nature and to God 
 which opens the way to influences which cannot 
 be said to need the city or even the nation 
 as indispensable intermediary. And there has 
 also come, in the broad wake of Stoicism and 
 Christianity, that larger outlook upon civilisation 
 and that knowledge of many other forms of social 
 life besides our own, which has begotten a 
 cosmopolitan attitude for which we search in 
 vain in the ideal State of Aristotle. This being 
 so, even the most civic of citizens, if he be not 
 blind, must acknowledge that he may find within 
 him experiences and incentives which cannot, 
 with substantial justice, be credited to even the 
 most paternal of modern nations, far less of 
 modern cities. 
 
 This, however, is not a line of thought we
 
 86 
 
 need at present further pursue. Broadly it 
 remains true that most which a man gets comes 
 to him through the city where his lot is cast. It 
 is the home of his own people, the place of his 
 schooling, the corner of the world's workshop in 
 which he by and by finds his vocation. It is there 
 his eyes are gradually opened to the larger life, 
 so overwhelming in its magnitude, so irresistible 
 in its force, which rushes on around him. Even 
 from early years he sees his seniors caught up 
 into the torrents of commercial and political and 
 religious life, and his own calling, even though 
 obscure and humble, begins to open out large 
 vistas. By and by he is caught up into these 
 currents himself. It is then he begins to realise 
 the mixed blessings of becoming ratepayer and 
 taxpayer; not, however, without the compensating 
 satisfactions of enjoying not only those civil 
 rights whereby his person, property, and reputa- 
 tion are safeguarded, but likewise those political 
 rights which are the peculiar heritage and pride 
 of the citizen of democracy. Institutions of many 
 kinds cease to be the mere names or notions 
 which is all they were to the unawakened con- 
 sciousness of his youth : in the form of the 
 religious organisation, the friendly or co-operative 
 society, the trades union, the political party (not 
 to mention many a lesser group) they become 
 realities which exist for serious, permanent, and 
 far-distant ends. Nor, if he be wide awake, can 
 he miss the fact that through these and other local 
 institutions the local press, for example, or the
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 87 
 
 local college or university many of the influences 
 of the outside world are focussed and brought to 
 bear upon his life with decisive effect. 
 
 Now in all these ways the citizen manifestly 
 gets much. He has not made these institutions 
 which so masterfully shape his destiny : he finds 
 them already made. They are the work of many 
 minds and many hands, through whose energies, 
 sometimes commemorated but for the most part 
 forgotten, they have been woven together into 
 the many-coloured fabric, or rather (one ought 
 to say) organised into the richly-integrated life 
 of the city. Into this as his inheritance, the 
 magnitude of which is hidden from most by its 
 familiarity, the citizen comes. 
 
 It will not, I imagine, be denied that it is a 
 goodly heritage. It binds the individual to the 
 city by many ties. It unites him to fellow- 
 citizens in the partnership of common interests. 
 It links on his personal lot, otherwise so fleeting 
 and insignificant, to that corporate life of the 
 community which is neither insignificant nor 
 fleeting. And it brings the assurance, which most 
 men need, that the causes in which they have been 
 enlisted will be carried forward long after they 
 are gone. All this and it would be easy to 
 enlarge upon it is certainly a substantial instal- 
 ment of what we mean by citizenship. 
 
 Yet it is only an instalment. For it is not what 
 a man takes from his city that makes him citizen : 
 it is rather what he gives. Nor will anyone ever 
 get what the city of his birth or adoption has in
 
 88 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 its gift unless, on his part, he gives it of his best. 
 We can see this conclusively if we glance at 
 what many seem most to value, and to regard as 
 especially distinctive of civic status, their rights. 
 Often enough we speak of our rights as if they 
 were gifts, boons, or privileges bestowed upon 
 us by the community. Not without reason. 
 Have we not just been calling them an 
 inheritance? But let it never be supposed that 
 the mere having or holding of rights makes the 
 citizen : it is the using of them. For that end 
 are rights given. This is, to be sure, a truism, 
 yet it is a truism which some reformers seem to 
 have to learn. For it is just the reformer who 
 has been passionately absorbed in the struggle 
 for rights who is apt at times to look no further 
 than the day when he could rest in the knowledge 
 that rights had been won. But the value of a 
 right is never proved by the winning of it, nor 
 yet by the arguments advanced in winning it. 
 It depends upon what it enables its possessor to 
 do and to be after he has won it. This holds 
 of every right. Good, of course, that a man's 
 property should be secure; but for appreciation 
 of the value of that fundamental right, we must 
 surely look to those who are able as well as willing 
 to earn and to keep property to secure ? So with 
 the right of free speech : we are not likely to 
 undervalue it, being (as of course it is) of the 
 essence of our liberties. But its value depends. 
 It depends upon whether it becomes in its 
 possessor the condition of words of truth and
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 89 
 
 soberness or words of falsehood and folly. 
 Similarly with political rights. Small indeed, and 
 it may be less than nothing, is the value of the 
 " gift " of the franchise, if the men or women who 
 have received it either never use it at all through 
 indifference, or use it with an irresponsible levity 
 infinitely worse than total abstention. 
 
 The same principle holds of everything the city 
 (or the nation) has in its gift. For it is a law of 
 life, and there is none more inexorable, that it is 
 those who give most who get most. It is so from 
 our early years. The home gives us much who 
 will deny it? but what is it more than a 
 convenient lodging-house, if there be in the 
 youthful heart no response to the family 
 affections ? The school gives us much : but what 
 schoolmaster has not felt the barrenness of his 
 work if the stirrings of intellectual life do not 
 come half-way to meet his efforts ? Similarly with 
 all that friends and advisers may do to plan our 
 lives and smooth the path to success. Little 
 that will profit in those who fail to rise to 
 their opportunities. So throughout. The most 
 admirable institutions, the best appliances the city 
 has to offer, will not suffice to make a single citizen 
 worthy of the name. For the truth is that citizen- 
 ship cannot be given : it has to be earned. The 
 citizen cannot be made, because he 'must be self- 
 made. For it is never by passive citizenship that 
 character and will are developed. "Activity is 
 the lord of life," as Aristotle told the world long 
 ago, and it is but an application of the dictum to
 
 90 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 add that no one need hope to bring into his life 
 the stuff and substance which the life of the city 
 has in its gift unless he is prepared to give 
 sympathy, money, energy, and patience to club, 
 friendly society, trades union, political party, 
 church, chapel, or what not. 
 
 There are writers in these days who discern and 
 lament the blight of civic indifference. They 
 lament that institutions lack support, that there 
 are all too many willing enough and eager to take 
 all the advantages of their position except their 
 share of public work. It is lamentably true. But 
 it is not the city that suffers most. The city can 
 and will go forward in spite of its laggards ; it can 
 carry a deal of dead weight. The real sufferers 
 are the laggards themselves, who miss their 
 opportunities. For the lukewarm citizen is by 
 that very fact a lesser man. He may have his 
 private virtues. One hopes he has them in 
 abundant measure, for he will need them all to 
 compensate for his fatal poverty of public 
 interests. 
 
 But in order that this active citizenship may 
 yield its fruits, it manifestly postulates conditions, 
 and indeed nothing less than a sufficiently rich and 
 varied environment. This lies on the threshold, 
 because it is only when this is forthcoming that 
 justice can be done, not only to the diverse 
 instincts and aptitudes of different men, but to the 
 varied capacities of many-sided men. The 
 community must, in short, gather up into its
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 91 
 
 organised life many, and, so far as possible, all the 
 great and valued ends by the pursuit of which 
 characters are enriched and wills invigorated and 
 developed. 
 
 Suppose the opposite. Imagine this city and 
 district were what some say all England is coming 
 to be, " the coalpit and workshop of the world." 
 How great a boon and what matter of rejoicing to 
 those whose aptitudes and interests lie to coalpits 
 and foundries ! Without doubt there would be 
 activity enough, and enterprise enough, the 
 prodigious enterprise and activity of the Black 
 Country or the Clyde Shipbuilding Yards. But 
 meanwhile, how would it fare with the men whose 
 instincts were political, or scientific, or literary, or 
 artistic, or religious? Would they not be 
 conscious of a spiritual starvation? Would they 
 not live in a perpetual spirit of revolt against the 
 bleakness and barrenness of their environment? 
 Would there be no risk that the artisans and 
 men of business would be dehumanised by the 
 intolerable monotony and limitation of their 
 sordidly specialised lives ? Not certainly because 
 coalpits, yards, and foundries are other than 
 desirable not to say indispensable things, but for 
 quite other reasons which in their cumulative force 
 are convincing. Because even a very ordinary 
 human being is sufficiently aware of the existence 
 of cravings and capacities in himself and in his 
 fellows to make it natural to long for 
 surroundings in which there are many other things 
 to live for beyond a coalpit and workshop
 
 2 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 millennium. Because students of human nature 
 have long been opening our eyes to the 
 amazing fertility, persistence, insatiability, and 
 progressiveness of man's desires and aspirations. 
 Because the history of civilisation is one long 
 record of the endless resourcefulness of the 
 human spirit in discovering or inventing new and 
 ever-new objects of desire and effort upon which 
 those desires and aspirations are fed. Because 
 it stands upon record how, when human faculty 
 has grasped the skirts of happy chance, as in the 
 glorious heyday of the Athenian State, the civic 
 spirit has responded to favouring environment in 
 a fashion which has ever since been the wonder 
 of the world. And, may we add, because even in 
 the less joyous and more obstructed cities of our 
 modern world, the latent capacities of the 
 community have been undeniably evoked by 
 every fresh advance in industrial or hygienic or 
 political or educational conditions. With these 
 facts in mind, who will say that it is unreasonable 
 to cherish the hope that the city of our birth or 
 adoption may gather up into a many-sided life, 
 in measure worthy of its greatness, all the main 
 ends and interests which make for the strength 
 and development of the lives of its sons ? 
 
 It is true that, from one point of view, this may 
 seem Utopian. For these modern cities, unlike 
 the self-centred, self-sufficing, self-complete little 
 city-states of the Greek world, are of course but 
 parts of a larger whole; and, as such, are, even 
 when highly organised, called each to its special
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 93 
 
 function and destiny in that larger organism, the 
 nation. Nor is it to be disputed that it is just by 
 this differentiation of city from city that the 
 massive life of the nation is broadened and 
 enriched. And this is certainly a good reason 
 why we should be content that every city should 
 develop along its own lines, and that we, here in 
 this haven of the world, should be not only 
 content but eager that Liverpool should be 
 pre-eminent amongst the cities of the world for 
 its commerce. But it is not a good reason, it is 
 not a reason at all, for acquiescing in this 
 specialised destiny to all lengths. The right 
 inference points in quite the opposite direction. 
 If our city be in the van in commerce, this is one 
 of the best of reasons for wishing, and working, 
 that it should not lag ingloriously in the rear in 
 these other not less precious things which give 
 substance and worth to human life. For this, 
 though not the dictate of industrial specialisation, 
 is the condition of individual development and 
 the path, the only path, to a satisfying citizenship. 
 This holds of all specialised forms of city life. 
 The dominant note may be manufacture or 
 commerce or politics or religion or war or art or 
 science or amusement. And each centre is bound 
 to fulfil its destiny in the national economy. Yet 
 never in such a way as to forget that there are 
 other ends and interests besides those which are 
 conspicuously its own, by neglect of which 
 the lives of its citizens will be irretrievably 
 impoverished. Therefore the entire reason-
 
 94 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 ableness of that ambition, which so happily 
 inspires not a few in our midst, to plant and water 
 in this city all the most valued products of 
 civilisation which lie within its reach. For this 
 is so far from being a mere " devout imagination " 
 that it is the plain dictate of the fundamental law 
 that all individual development is inevitably 
 relative to the quality of the environment, and 
 that it is by living interaction between the little 
 life of the individual and the larger life of the 
 city that the citizen is made. 
 
 But this it once creates a problem the difficult 
 problem of comparative values. It is easy to see 
 that the main elements of a full and complete life 
 have value, taken separately. For if some of 
 them do not sufficiently impress us by what we 
 see, or fail to see, in our own city, we can easily 
 supplement our experience by what we see 
 elsewhere. In this way Liverpool can learn from 
 Oxford, and Oxford from Liverpool ; Portsmouth 
 from Canterbury, and Canterbury from Ports- 
 mouth; Birmingham from Edinburgh, and 
 Edinburgh from Birmingham. What is not so 
 easy is to make up our minds as to the 
 comparative prominence we wish to assign to this 
 element or that to commerce, public health, 
 politics, religion, soldiering, art, learning, 
 beautiful surroundings, and so on within the 
 life of our own city. A really great city, a city 
 that aspires to vitalise and socialise and humanise 
 the lives of its inhabitants, must, I have been 
 suggesting, try to recognise them all. But, then,
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 95 
 
 as we have just admitted, no two cities need 
 expect to absorb them in the same proportions. 
 They cannot so long as city differs from city in 
 geographical position, in access to natural 
 products, in history and traditions, in actual work, 
 in destiny. This being so, there devolves upon 
 every active citizen the problem we have 
 mentioned the inevitable problem of making up 
 his mind what the comparative values ought to be 
 in the local civic ideal. And this problem is 
 accentuated because current popular estimates 
 seem so haphazard and conflicting; this valuator 
 insisting that a city without a University or an Art 
 Gallery is not worthy of the name, that valuator 
 declaring that a city has not so much as the right 
 to build a Cathedral till all its poor are decently 
 housed and fed. 
 
 Now, to help us to solve this problem of 
 comparative values, there is no lack of social 
 ideals. Men of genius have been delineating 
 ideal communities since the days of Plato; and 
 such ideals, under the dominating influence of 
 ideas of unity and proportion inseparable from 
 all true imaginative construction, necessarily 
 select the elements of human well-being and 
 exhibit them in perspective. And, when this 
 perspective is the result of careful valuations, it 
 would be rash and ungrateful to suggest that our 
 own valuations either can or ought to remain 
 unaffected thereby. For that reason a course 
 of reading about Utopias is certainly no bad 
 preparation for the social reformer. But of
 
 96 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 course these ideals can never solve for us our 
 own particular problem. For the most part they 
 are Utopias or " nowheres." However rich in 
 detail, they are abstract in the sense that they are 
 divorced from actual concrete situations; and 
 however the student 'may steep himself in their 
 valuations, the actual problem which concerns us 
 here is still unsolved when we pass from the mere 
 " pattern in the heavens " to the exceedingly 
 concrete situation of our own actual city. To the 
 citizen of Liverpool hesitating, let us say, between 
 the claims of Housing of the poor and a Cathedral, 
 or between the urgencies of Public Health and 
 the cause of Higher Education, or between 
 the regulation of the traffic in drink and the 
 purchase of Old Masters, it is not enough to point 
 him to an abstract " nowhere." Because of 
 course Liverpool is but one amongst a number 
 of actual cities whose practical comparative 
 valuations must be expected to diverge. And it 
 is precisely these concrete local valuations which 
 are so peculiarly puzzling. And yet few things 
 are more important. For, in the rush and 
 scramble of a city's life, the comparative 
 valuations are only too apt to be forgotten. This 
 one presses for Housing, that one for Education, 
 a third for Finance, a fourth for Art, and so on 
 they are all admirable because their ends are all 
 good. But under this municipal division of 
 labour, each one pursuing his own particular 
 concernment, each one striving with his neighbour 
 in this honourable rivalry of ends, the just
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 97 
 
 perspective, the sane and judicious balance of the 
 civic ideal is forgotten or ignored. Nor was this 
 risk ever so great as now, when so many civic ends 
 and schemes are clamouring for money and 
 service. Hence the peculiar need for well- 
 considered and firm comparative valuations, or, in 
 simpler words, the need of a clear notion of what 
 we wish our city to be. 
 
 Now there appear to be some quite simple 
 principles on which all such valuations should be 
 made, and amongst these the fundamental 
 principle that, in all our estimates of ends and 
 institutions, the scale of civic value is not to be 
 confused with the scale of civic urgency. Thus 
 nothing can well be more urgent than public 
 health : it involves the lives of men. Nor than 
 industrial and commercial prosperity, which, 
 needless to say, holds in its hands the happiness 
 and even the bare livelihood of thousands of 
 struggling families. Nor need it be disputed that 
 a city, however splendid its achievements in other 
 directions, is a disastrous failure if these great 
 material props of its life be rotten. Therefore 
 it is easy to understand why so many persons seem 
 to think that the only sound civic policy is to 
 make solid work (as they regard it) by beginning 
 from below and moving upwards ; in other words, 
 by concentrating sympathy, effort and expenditure 
 upon sanitation, law and order, elementary 
 education, industrial organisation, and such-like, 
 and by refusing to lift a finger to organise and 
 equip higher education or to found museums and
 
 98 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 art galleries, or to rear stately public buildings, 
 and so forth, till every honest citizen is well-fed, 
 well-housed, and decently clad. 
 
 Nor is this an ideal of which anyone need be 
 ashamed; for it is often motived by a depth 
 of sympathy with hardship and suffering, which 
 commands respect. But it is a mistaken ideal 
 none the less. It views the growth of a city 
 mechanically as if it were the building of a house, 
 of which the foundations must be complete before 
 any superstructure can be reared thereon. But 
 the fact stands otherwise. A city is an organism. 
 And this being so, its friends and administrators 
 can no more afford to neglect the less urgent, but 
 not less valuable, elements of civic life than the 
 father of a family can - postpone the moral and 
 intellectual education of his sons until their 
 bodies have reached maturity. Even as, in the 
 growing boy, the tiny shoots of intellectual 
 promise must, on penalty of the impoverishment 
 of a lifetime, be vigilantly fostered, so in the 
 larger organism, the less urgent, less immediately 
 necessary ends and interests, which may by and 
 by render it famous, must be recognised and 
 encouraged long before the city has become great 
 in industry and commerce. Indeed, if the 
 analogy may be pressed, it dips in favour of the 
 social organism. For in the life history of the 
 city there is little corresponding to precocity in 
 individual development. Seldom indeed, if ever, 
 is the culture of the more ideal products premature 
 in it. The besetting danger lies in the opposite
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 99 
 
 direction. It is so easy for the utilities which are 
 obvious, tangible, necessary, urgent, to be pushed 
 to the front, and for the spiritualities, the " goods 
 of the soul," as the Greeks used to call them, to 
 be ignored or thrust into the background. 
 
 Yet this is precisely the result which, in the 
 name of a sound ideal an ideal reflecting right 
 valuations must not be allowed to happen. 
 And for the following reasons. 
 
 In the first place if you will forgive the 
 repetition, however brief, of an overworn 
 educational commonplace the affairs of a great 
 city have become so complex that the conduct of 
 them demands the developed intelligence, the 
 well-informed mind, the disciplined will, the 
 sound judgment of the leaders of men in all walks 
 of life. This holds of the conduct of industry 
 and commerce in its vast and complicated 
 operations : it holds of municipal administration 
 which seems so steadfastly bent upon annexing^ 
 new provinces : it holds of the whole network of 
 private charities and voluntary associations. 
 Hence the exhortations, reiterated till we are 
 weary of them, to bestir ourselves in the Higher 
 and Technical Education. 
 
 We may safely, however, take all this as read, 
 and pass, as a second reason, from a platitude to- 
 a paradox. The paradox is that, in order to 
 value at their true worth the more urgent, 
 necessary, and material energies of civic life, it 
 is never enough that a man should know these 
 well : he must also have learnt to value the more
 
 ioo ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 ideal products. For it is a grievous error to think 
 that those who are most exclusively absorbed in 
 material pursuits appreciate them most highly. 
 The truth is that these pursuits will never be 
 estimated at their genuine worth, or invested with 
 their true significance and dignity, except by those 
 whose eyes have been opened to the extent to 
 which, in every highly-organised civilisation, the 
 less material elements of our lives are reared upon 
 industrial prosperity, commercial enterprise, and 
 adequate finance. What, one may well ask, 
 would become of our hospitals and charities with 
 their elaborate equipment, or of our schools, 
 universities, churches, with their endowments and 
 organisation, or of the costly treasures of 
 museums and art galleries, were it not for the 
 strenuous work of workshop and office? Hence 
 the folly, and ignorant ingratitude, of men of the 
 study or men of ideas when they belittle the 
 business life, or satirise it as vulgar, or denounce 
 it as materialistic. Surely their valuations are all 
 awry. For it is to them we might reasonably 
 look to magnify the value even of the hewing of 
 wood and drawing of water, because, presumably, 
 they live in the light of the knowledge that the 
 more ideal ends and interests for which they 
 stand would quickly shrink into an impoverished 
 insignificance were they not so firmly under- 
 propped by industrial and commercial enterprise. 
 The true message of the man of ideas to the 
 business world is not absurdly to exalt his own 
 vocation above that of men whose virtues and
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 101 
 
 abilities may possibly surpass his own, but to point 
 out that the full significance and value of the 
 material substratum of life can only be understood 
 in the light of the more spiritual superstructure 
 which may be reared on that secure and honour- 
 able foundation. It is a small and occasional part 
 of an idealist's task, if, indeed, it be part of it at 
 all, to vituperate material progress : his better 
 course is to try to spiritualise it by pointing out 
 that, by the very laws of social growth and 
 structure, it is organically bound up with other, 
 and, as we sometimes call them, higher things. 
 
 This however, I hasten to admit, must not be 
 taken for granted. It involves the large 
 assumption that the more ideal interests, the 
 " spiritual superstructure," not only have value 
 for few, I imagine, would deny them all value- 
 but that they have social value so great as to 
 justify those who believe in them as you in this 
 Ruskin Society do in setting them in the fore- 
 front of a civic ideal. 
 
 This, of course, is just what may be disputed. 
 For we must here face facts : and facts compel 
 the suspicion -one hopes it may not be true- 
 that in the eyes of the majority, some of the ideal 
 products at all events literature and learning, 
 art and science, stately buildings, dignified 
 streets,, beautiful parks, are still no more than 
 embellishments, decorations, " extras," and 
 therefore not for a moment to be put on 
 the same level of value in the scale of civic 
 enterprise as the more urgent ends and interests
 
 102 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 of civic life. Nor is it to be denied that there 
 is reason in this. We are bound to face the fact 
 that, in proportion as ends and interests are 
 ideal, they are not enjoyable, or at any rate not 
 -enjoyed in anything approaching to equal 
 measure, by all. Quite naturally, therefore, it 
 seems doubtful to not a few (and some of ihem 
 far from ignorant or uneducated) if collective 
 effort is justified in working for ends which only a 
 minority seem able to enjoy. Whence this 
 widespread conviction that (whatever private 
 enterprise may please to do) it is hardly in the 
 name of citizenship that public expenditure and 
 -effort upon these " extras " can ever be justified 
 at all. 
 
 I have put this point of view strongly though 
 not, I think, too strongly because it appears to 
 me that in the name of a civic ideal worthy of our 
 city it is quite untenable. 
 
 For, in the first place, it is to be borne in mind 
 that nothing could be more fatal to the future of 
 a great city than that civic effort should limit 
 itself to the provision of things which can be 
 enjoyed in equal measure by all its inhabitants. 
 For as a matter of fact there is nothing a city can 
 do for its inhabitants which is not unequally 
 enjoyed. Two heads of families become, shall 
 we say, tenants of a Corporation tenement : the 
 one finds in his couple of rooms a clean and 
 'decent family life : the other, with help of wife 
 and children, does his best to reduce his to the 
 level of the pig-sty from which he has emerged.
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 103 
 
 Two men send their children to the same spacious 
 Elementary School, splendidly equipped at the 
 ratepayers' expense : the one invests the remission 
 of fees in improving the family budget : the other 
 increases his budget of beer and tobacco. This 
 is so always, nor can it be evaded. So long as 
 men's instincts and capacities and characters, and 
 powers of appreciation and enjoyment, are 
 unequal, that city which limited its efforts 
 narrowly to what could be equally enjoyed would 
 find its occupation gone. This much one may 
 say, to prevent ourselves from being impressed 
 overmuch by abstract ideas of equality. 
 
 But of course these considerations take us but 
 a little way towards the solution of our problem. 
 Even the commonest things are unequally 
 shared true, but that does not dispose of the fact 
 that some things are substantially enjoyable by 
 multitudes (however diverse their degrees of 
 appreciation as individuals), and that other things 
 are directly and fully enjoyable only by a 
 comparative handful. No one is likely to 
 deny that sanitary homes, clean streets, cheap 
 locomotion, elementary education, good municipal 
 government, can be enjoyed by multitudes. But 
 what are we to say of the rare treasures of 
 a Museum, the costly walls of an Art Gallery, a 
 great public Library with many thousand volumes 
 that comparatively few ever read, a High School 
 that draws upon the rates, or a University 
 distinguished by municipal support. Directly, 
 these institutions are utilised only by a section of 

 
 io 4 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 our vast population : the harvest they offer is 
 reaped in anything like full measure only by a 
 minority. And if this be so, we are still face to 
 face with our problem : Is it justifiably a civic 
 obligation to provide for them? 
 
 It is a question we need not fear to face : it 
 admits of answers. 
 
 1. One of these answers is that the ends, objects, 
 or causes for which the institutions just mentioned 
 stand are recognised, and have long been 
 recognised, as having an immeasurable national, 
 not to say universal value in the valuations alike 
 of the great prophets and teachers of our race, 
 and of the multitudes who have called them 
 masters. Therefore it devolves upon the city, as 
 an organic part of the nation to which it rejoices 
 to belong, to take its share, to play its part, by 
 furthering them up to the limits of its powers and 
 resources. Never will the arts and sciences 
 flourish in a manner worthy of the mission of a 
 great nation to civilisation if they are left to look 
 for support only to great seats of learning or other 
 specialised centres of spiritual life. No : they 
 must enlist the immense favouring forces of local 
 civic patriotism. 
 
 2. A second answer is that in every great city 
 there arise from time to time minds of such 
 rare natural endowment that they repay a 
 thousand-fold the best that can be done for them. 
 Such minds and powers and they may emerge 
 from very humble homes have in them 
 incontrovertibly the seeds of greatness. Beyond
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 105 
 
 doubt they are amongst the greatest gifts and 
 boons which Nature gives to a nation. And 
 many of them still spiritually survive in full 
 career of influence even though the cities that 
 reared them have long ago been levelled with the 
 dust. Surely such are worth watching for, and 
 when they arise, worth caring for? Is public 
 money wasted, is civic effort misdirected, if it can 
 help in from time to time nurturing into the 
 plenitude of his marvellous powers even one 
 great scholar, artist, musician, architect, engineer, 
 surgeon, statesman? Cities are always proud of 
 their great men : they rejoice to catch the 
 reflection of their glory : they are quick to claim 
 a borrowed credit from their achievements. No 
 one would grudge them this. It is admirable. 
 But we should all concede it more readily to the 
 city that has done most to make its great men 
 possible. 
 
 3. But, then, the population of a city is happily 
 not divided into the geniuses who come but rarely 
 and an indistinguishable mob of nonentities. 
 There are gradations, and amongst these two 
 classes are distinguishable. The one consists of 
 the men, some rising to the level of distinction, 
 but most falling below it, whose is the congenial 
 task sometimes simply to work out in detail the 
 ideas and discoveries of the great originative 
 minds, and sometimes to make their own small 
 contributions to research, or artistic creation, or 
 literature, or reflective thought. Individually 
 their work may be insignificant, but it is by their
 
 106 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 collective contribution, which is immense, that the 
 world of literature, science, art, philosophy, is 
 won. The other class stands on another plane. 
 They have no pretensions to distinction : they 
 make no contributions to the things of the mind. 
 But in one point they may, if they will, challenge 
 comparison even with the man of genius : they 
 can enter, with a joy and appreciation as genuine 
 and sincere, though not so penetrating and 
 exalted, into the intellectual and spiritual wealth 
 of their country. There are the men and one 
 sometimes thinks their lot is the happiest of all 
 who, whatever be their avocation, can contentedly 
 and whole-heartedly enjoy a good book, an 
 interesting discovery, a great picture, a noble 
 building. In that respect they need be second 
 to none, not even to the genius. And in regard 
 to them there are two truths which must, I think, 
 be borne in upon the mind of everyone who has 
 spent his life in a great city like ours with his eyes 
 open : the one, that there already exists within 
 it a great multitude of such men, the other that, 
 given opportunities and encouragement, their 
 number can be vastly, and indeed indefinitely, 
 increased. 
 
 Do you say that these men these two classes 
 of men may well be left to take care of them- 
 selves? Yes, happily and up to a point they can. 
 They have books and friends, and teachers and 
 preachers, and societies like this, to which they 
 can go to feed their minds and keep their souls 
 alive. But it is just in doing this that they
 
 CITIZENSHIP & IDEAL INTERESTS 107 
 
 furnish evidence that they have claims on the city 
 of their birth or adoption. For these hungers 
 and thirsts of the human spirit far more truly 
 human than the homely appetite for meat and 
 drink cannot in these days be adequately 
 appeased on what the individual man can be left 
 to forage and find unaided. With every forward 
 step in national advance, they call for increased 
 facilities and equipment such as no private man, 
 or group of private men, can adequately procure. 
 They call for public libraries, laboratories, 
 museums, art galleries, high schools, universities, 
 buildings, gardens, parks : and, some would add, 
 for municipal theatres and orchestras. To what 
 extent is of course dependent on the demands of 
 other less ideal and more urgent interests upon 
 the city's resources. Hence the problem of 
 comparative values perpetually recurs, and each 
 generation must do its best to solve it by looking 
 broadly and fairly at the good of the city as a 
 whole. For this is of the essence of the civic 
 spirit. But whatever that solution may be, it is 
 not too much to say that all that has as yet been 
 done for the more ideal interests in great 
 commercial centres like our own, though 
 munificent when compared with the past, is after 
 all but a beginning, in proportion to the strength 
 and potentialities of the needs and cravings which 
 such provision is designed to satisfy. 
 
 Nor is there the slightest violation of a true 
 democratic equality in the expenditure of effort 
 and resources on these ideal ends, though those
 
 io8 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 who can reap the full harvest remain a minority. 
 The real contradiction of social equality is 
 monopoly the enjoyment of anything by a class 
 to the exclusion of another class. And with 
 monopoly the democratic spirit can make no 
 terms. But it is not monopoly that one citizen 
 should make more use of a public library than his 
 neighbour, if the opportunities are alike for both ; 
 or that an art gallery should be as it must for 
 ever remain the peculiar delight and privilege 
 of the lover of pictures, provided the like 
 opportunity is open to all ; or that a university 
 should do more for the capable and clever than 
 for the less gifted brethren, so long as the path to 
 degrees and distinctions lies open, by free student- 
 ships and scholarships, to the scholars who may 
 come from the humblest of homes. In such 
 things as these there is nothing at variance with 
 the democratic spirit. On the contrary there is 
 only a realisation, which does one good to think 
 of, of the democratic watchword, " Tools to the 
 man who can use them." 
 
 Nor ought it ever to be forgotten that the great 
 ideal interests of life cannot, under any 
 circumstances, become the exclusive concern of 
 the few. For it is the glory of literature, science, 
 and art that, in our modern world, they can never 
 be monopolised by a class. Self-absorbed and 
 self-centred in his subject the scholar, or the man 
 of science, may be. It is right that he should; 
 for it is the condition of work and achievement. 
 But that is no proof that he monopolises his
 
 LOCAL PATRIOTISM & EDUCATION. 109 
 
 subject; it is only proof that his subject has 
 monopolised him. For all these ideal interests 
 have this much in common with religion they 
 are too profoundly human to suffer themselves to 
 be appropriated by any learned or other caste. 
 Let them once have taken firm root in a city, and 
 nothing can stop them from diffusing, through 
 many channels, their permeative and proselytising 
 influence. And most of all, of course, where the 
 members of the community are knit together in 
 the bonds of genuine fellow-citizenship. 
 
 One need but think of the inexhaustible 
 applications of the arts and sciences to Health, 
 Industry, Commerce, Invention, Medicine, Law, 
 War, Politics. And then, these ideal interests 
 can subserve other ends than these practicalities. 
 They become, and ever-increasingly as education 
 does its work, the meeting-points of many minds, 
 thereby drawing men together in cheerful and 
 fruitful comradeship such as you in this Society 
 enjoy. They may become the basis of enduring 
 friendships which kindred spirits often form when 
 associated in the love and study of great books, 
 great men, great causes. And far beyond the 
 limits of lesser groups like this, they may become 
 a rallying point, and a source of mutual respect 
 and sympathy, between all these like-minded 
 dwellers in our city, to whatsoever class they may 
 belong, who stand, as you in this Ruskin Society 
 do, for " the goods of the soul."
 
 V.-LOGAL PATRIOTISM AND 
 EDUCATION.* 
 
 There are undoubtedly certain aspects in 
 which education is no friend, but rather the 
 foe, of local patriotism. Education, we may 
 assume, brings an enlarged horizon. Does 
 it not put into the hands of the schoolboy, be he in 
 Cornwall or in Caithness, the same cosmopolitan 
 primers, the same far-circulating story books? 
 Is it not its peculiar privilege, through the daily 
 newspapers, to drop the same ideas, the same 
 items of news, at the same moment, into the minds 
 of east and west, of north and south? And of 
 course it fails of its purpose altogether if it does 
 not introduce the reading and studious world to 
 that common heritage of educated men the great 
 books that are classical, the great ideas that are 
 universal. What, then, can seem more evident 
 than that, in so far as the tide of education sets in 
 this direction, it must sweep away that type of 
 man, sometimes so attractive, whose little world is 
 bounded by his country town or natal village, and 
 
 * An Address to the Arts Students' Association in 1901.
 
 LOCAL PATRIOTISM & EDUCATION in 
 
 whose public affections narrow, intense, satisfy- 
 ing have never learned to stray beyond the local 
 traditions, the local society, the local gossip, the 
 local industries, the local politics? 
 
 I do not forget that, in these latter days, 
 Philology and Folk-lore, Anthropology, History, 
 Fiction, have come to find in dialects, customs, 
 place-names, antiquities, costumes, and indeed in 
 most things local, a fresh significance. These 
 ardent and admirable developments do, however, 
 but reinforce our contention. For, in the first 
 place, they seldom discover the value of these 
 survivals of local life till they are just on the 
 point of disappearing for ever, and in the second, 
 discovery does but little towards their perpetua- 
 tion. On the contrary, when the philologist or 
 lover of folk-lore, or novelist in search of local 
 colouring, enters at the door, local characteristics 
 seem to fly out at the window. Not unnaturally. 
 For what is the entrance of these admirable men 
 but one of many signs that local language, 
 customs, ideas, feelings, and so forth, are open 
 at last to the dissolving influences of the outside 
 world ? 
 
 Let us, therefore, admit that this kind of 
 patriotism of locality is going, and let us, if we 
 will, deplore it. For is it not " the ending of an 
 " auld sang " ? Yet when we find ourselves in 
 the presence of any great idea that lays its grasp 
 upon the human soul, the decay or dissolution of 
 the forms it has assumed may be anything rather 
 than a reason for lament. For it may be but a
 
 ii2 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 sign that the idea, in its unexhausted vitality, is 
 passing on to new, it may be to higher phases. 
 It is emphatically so with the idea of local 
 patriotism. You will not require me here, in 
 Liverpool, to prove that local patriotism still 
 exists. The men of Liverpool have settled that 
 by their lives. I refuse to argue the point, and 
 pass on at once to assert that this spirit of local 
 patriotism, so fully alive in our midst, may find 
 in education one of its surest and strongest props 
 and preservatives. 
 
 For, in the first place, education enriches the 
 ideal of local life. This is true of all local life. 
 When a good school is for the first time opened 
 in a village, or when a library or a learned society 
 is founded in a country town, an element comes 
 into the life of that place which makes it more 
 worth a man's while to live in that corner of the 
 world, and to work for it. But it is true most of 
 all of a city. There are, of course, many ways in 
 which men regard the city in which they live. It 
 may be as the place where their fathers before 
 them worked and found their rest, or as their own 
 birthplace and well-remembered home, or as the 
 scene of cherished friendships and social 
 intercourse, or as workshop and place of 
 business, or as arena of local politics, or as the 
 accepted sphere for social or spiritual work. But 
 not only is the city far more than any of these 
 things singly, it is more than all of them added 
 together; being, indeed, nothing less than a 
 marvellously evolved organism, instinct with a
 
 LOCAL PATRIOTISM & EDUCATION 113 
 
 victorious life, which persists while generations 
 come and go, in which, and through which, its 
 citizens can redeem the span men call life by 
 living for ends that are great and enduring. So 
 regarded, our city need fear comparison with 
 none. Other cities may be richer in tradition, or 
 they may have been more fruitful of men of 
 genius and renown, or they may be more favoured 
 in the charm of natural surroundings. One 
 thinks of Scott's invocation to his own romantic 
 town, or of the lines in which Arnold pays his 
 tribute to beautiful and storied Oxford. And 
 though it is far from me to suggest that there is 
 not that in Liverpool which may find its 
 poet (Glasgow has found her poet,* why not 
 Liverpool?), our city, of course, has had to work 
 out a very different destiny from Oxford or 
 Edinburgh. Yet with the result, the great and 
 satisfying result, that she can to-day offer her 
 sons, as few cities can, intensity and fulness of 
 local life. 
 
 This will not be doubted in respect of industry 
 and commerce, or of law and medicine, or of 
 politics and religion, or of social intercourse and 
 social work in many modes. Nor, up to a certain 
 point, is it doubtful in respect of education. In 
 all the history of Liverpool there is nothing more 
 honourable than the place that has come to be 
 assigned to elementary education in our civic 
 ideal during the past thirty years. It can never 
 now become a subordinate end. Its claims have 
 
 * Alexander Smith.
 
 ii 4 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 been sealed and for all the future accredited by 
 the devotion of the lives that have been given to 
 it. We are, perhaps, too apt to estimate the 
 value of our boards and committees of school 
 management or our training colleges simply by 
 what they do for the schools and the children. 
 But, when we think of lives like those of S. G. 
 Rathbone, of the Bushells, father and sons, and 
 of many another I need not name, nothing can be 
 more evident than that these lives were enriched 
 by finding in education a thing worth living for. 
 They did much for education. Yes, and 
 education did much for them; and for us, in 
 enriching through them our traditions of civic 
 patriotism. 
 
 But, it is not by elementary education alone, 
 even if this were perfect, that our civic ideal can 
 be adequately enriched. To that end education 
 in all its stages must enter into the very tissue 
 of our local life. May I illustrate this by a 
 supposition. Suppose for a moment that, for all 
 education above the elementary school, it became 
 possible that the young people of this city could 
 be sent out of Liverpool to the best preparatory, 
 the best secondary schools, the best colleges or 
 universities to be found in the kingdom, or even 
 in the world. And suppose that as a result there 
 was no necessity to set up either a secondary 
 school or a university within our borders : would 
 this be a gain to Liverpool? 
 
 Now, I do not say that these boys and girls, or 
 young men and women, might not return with a
 
 LOCAL PATRIOTISM & EDUCATION 115 
 
 better education than they could hope to find at a 
 local school, or a local University; though I also 
 think they might easily find a worse. But we 
 must also bear in mind that when they came back 
 to settle down amongst us, they would, with their 
 education, bring back another thing and it 
 would never leave them all their lives a bitter 
 and a just sense of shame that their own city 
 the city with which they were about to cast 
 in their lot in life with all its enterprise, its 
 energy, its riches, its reputation, its destinies, its 
 men, was doing nothing within its own borders for 
 one of the greatest ends that can fill the minds 
 and hearts of the leaders of mankind. And, 
 indeed, I think that these school-boys, these 
 University students of our supposition, would 
 never rest they could not rest if they were really 
 educated men till they had reared and endowed 
 great local schools, and a great local University, 
 reared them and wrought them into the organic 
 life of the community. 
 
 Nor is this supposition merely. For such has 
 been the spirit that has inspired the founders and 
 the friends of this institution. They have founded 
 this University College, and, with the enterprise 
 of masters in industry and commerce, they have 
 decided to transform it into the University of 
 Liverpool.* But they have done this, be sure, 
 not merely to equip Liverpool with an institution 
 to which it may be convenient for our citizens to- 
 send their sons and daughters, when they cannot 
 
 * This Address was given in 1901.
 
 u6 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 afford to send them away to a better. No, they 
 have begun this work, and they will complete it, 
 in the conviction that when a city has become as 
 great, as rich, as famous, as manifestly called to 
 future destinies as ours, it is bound, in education 
 as in other things, to aim at nothing short of the 
 best. 
 
 There is an adjective that is sometimes applied 
 to our College, and to other similar Colleges. 
 ' The provincial Colleges," men say; not using 
 the epithet as a geographical expression simply, 
 but infusing into it that flavour of disparagement 
 which is commonly suggested by the people who 
 talk of provincial ideas, provincial manners, 
 provincial dialect, provincial society, provincial 
 politics, and so forth. The implication all along 
 the line is that we of the provinces may well be 
 content with what is second rate, and, indeed, that 
 perhaps we are not fit to appreciate anything 
 better. When a man is truly provincial this is 
 precisely what he is not. It is one of the 
 fortunate political characteristics of our country, 
 and one of its greatest blessings, that much of the 
 most energetic, enterprising, sane, and fruitful life 
 of the commonwealth goes on in the provinces. 
 Wiser words have not, in our time, fallen from the 
 lips of politician than those in which, some years 
 ago, Lord Rosebery dwelt upon the splendid 
 opportunities of local and municipal life. And, 
 indeed, the service of the city has that to offer 
 which the larger politics can never give. It has 
 the inspiration that comes of the nearness, the
 
 LOCAL PATRIOTISM & EDUCATION 117 
 
 urgency, the defmiteness of its problems : it has 
 the comradeship of co-workers : it has the 
 prospect of comparatively quick and definite 
 results; and the worker has the advantage in 
 seeing, every day he lives, the fruits of his 
 labours, be it in public health, or improved 
 housing, or the embellishment of the city, or 
 education, or any of the great ends of civic life. 
 
 Therefore, I say, let us here be what men say 
 we are. Let us be provincial, provincial to the 
 core, being well assured that this means that in 
 our College that is, or in our University that is to 
 be, we are determined in teaching, in research, in 
 student life, in academic loyalty and comradeship, 
 to stand second to none. What we want here, as 
 I imagine and I think it may well content us 
 is a university which shall be, in its spiritual 
 fabric, as massive and well compacted as our 
 provincial dock-walls, and as hospitable in the 
 commerce of ideas as are our provincial harbours 
 to the flags of all nations. 
 
 But, if our civic ideal is to include all this, then 
 it devolves on us here to play our part. Our 
 paramount duty I am speaking not of our duty 
 to ourselves but of our duty to the city is, up to 
 the limits of our powers, to live the scholar's life. 
 For the supreme law of all healthy civic life is 
 none other than the Platonic TO TO, avrov irpdrrciv 
 each citizen to the work he is fit for. Therefore, 
 as the shipowner is first of all a shipowner, the 
 merchant a merchant, the clergyman a clergyman, 
 so is the student first of all a student. And, in
 
 n8 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 truth, if you will pardon the paradox, I would say 
 that, as students, we may be serving Liverpool 
 most when we are thinking of Liverpool least, 
 when our thoughts are, it may be, far away in 
 Athens or in Rome, or in mediae val Europe, or in 
 the England of Elizabeth, or in one or other 
 corner of that larger experience, into which it is 
 our prerogative as students to enter. What 
 Liverpool asks of you and me first is that we 
 should represent her, if we can, as worthily in the 
 world of letters, or science, or teaching, as did 
 an Ismay in the world of commerce; as a 
 Rathbone happily still does in the eventide of a 
 long and glorious day, in the large domain of 
 social service.* 
 
 It goes closely with this that we as students are 
 peculiarly bound, here in a great city, to stand 
 shoulder to shoulder for the things of the mind. 
 For it behoves us to remember that our net is not 
 cast like that of our brethren in the older 
 Universities of England in the sheltered waters 
 of an academic society. It is cast in the rushing 
 tideways of practical commercial, political, and 
 religious life; and we may be pardoned the fear 
 that, in face of these tremendous currents, our 
 comparatively small ship may be swept away 
 whither we would not. 
 
 Therefore the need for association; not only 
 for association which, like that of the Art students, 
 
 * Since these words were spoken Mr. William Rathbone has passed 
 away. It is not too much to say that simply to hare known him is 
 of itself a kind of civic education.
 
 LOCAL PATRIOTISM & EDUCATION 119 
 
 may strengthen the connection between past and 
 present students of Arts, nor yet only association, 
 strong and true, between all students of all 
 faculties, but also alliance with all friends of 
 ideas, all lovers of books, all votaries of science 
 or of art, whether these be within our own walls 
 or without. I remember the remark of a friend 
 who has had opportunities of knowing Liverpool 
 better than most.* He was convinced, he said, 
 that scattered up and down our city there were, 
 in far greater number than might be supposed, 
 men who were unostentatiously lovers of books, 
 or in one way or another believers in the things 
 of the mind. Be it ours to recognise all such and 
 to establish comradeship with them, and, by the 
 cultivation of friendly relations with the learned 
 societies of the city, or by any other means, to 
 uphold the ideal of the scholar. 
 
 Such fellowship of all true students is the more 
 important because the growth of local colleges 
 has led to a confusion between two things which 
 are entirely separable. One is the notion that a 
 local College, even a local University, must needs 
 take the complexion of its locality. Nothing is 
 more reasonable. All Universities cannot be 
 equally distinguished in all directions; and here, 
 in Liverpool, we may well lay stress on 
 such studies as Modern History and Modern 
 Languages, Economic and Political Philosophy, 
 Engineering, Architectures, Medicine, Public 
 Health. But there must be no confusion between 
 
 * Dr. John Watson.
 
 120 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 this and that other thing, that fatal fallacy that, 
 in our study of these or other subjects, we must 
 clip our wings, and limit ourselves to the meagre 
 utilitarianism that can never rise beyond quick 
 results and direct applications. For, if we yield 
 to that spirit, then is the scholar's life robbed for 
 us of its very charter of freedom freedom to 
 range unchecked that many-provinced land that 
 is ours by right freedom to seek unfettered 
 the truth that makes men free. There is a 
 passage in Darwin where, discoursing of certain 
 winged beetles which inhabit oceanic islands, he 
 points out that the loss of wings may be of 
 much advantage. For (so runs the explanation) 
 the individuals with imperfectly developed or 
 atrophied wings, are, just by reason of this 
 deprivation, no longer liable to be carried out to 
 sea by the wandering winds. May the students of 
 the University of Liverpool be delivered from 
 similar advantages ! When the winds of the spirit, 
 that are the breath of God, arise, may we still have 
 wings to spread to their benign constraining 
 influences, and therewith to voyage, with Homer 
 and Plato, with Shakespeare and Newton, over 
 the strange, and not shoreless, seas of phantasy 
 and thought. For this is what, as Liverpool 
 students, we owe to Liverpool. 
 
 You will not, however, suppose that in thus 
 magnifying our vocation and we can never 
 magnify it enough I am suggesting that we in 
 University College sit loose, or ought to sit loose, 
 to the life of the city. Far otherwise. Among
 
 LOCAL PATRIOTISM & EDUCATION 121 
 
 the hopes that group themselves round the project 
 of a University for Liverpool, none is more 
 reasonable than the confident anticipation that the 
 students of a local University would, as the years 
 go on, become bound to the community by ties 
 that are increasingly strong, intimate, and 
 enduring. 
 
 This will come, in one way, through attachment 
 to the University itself. Everyone who has had 
 a genuine experience of it, knows that a man 
 looks back upon his University with feelings that 
 are unique. It is the place, perhaps, where he 
 was first caught up into the great currents of the 
 world's intellectual life the place of that day- 
 break of ideas that knows no night, and of the 
 glad confident morning of the spirit the place of 
 frank comradeships and varied acquaintance 
 where we form the friendship that last with life 
 the place, too, of debates (those unending debates 
 that need start from no premises and end in no 
 conclusion) the place of keen, generous rivalries, 
 of dawning ambitions, of academic vicissitudes, 
 of honourable successes. Memorable days ! that 
 were so good that we could not know how good 
 they were till they were past ! To most these 
 memories stand out as a thing apart. They are 
 not, I mean, associated with the scenes of home 
 and boyhood, or with the place where our work 
 in life comes to lie. Nor is this wholly a 
 disadvantage; it is, perhaps, the reason why this 
 oasis rises so distinctly before the eye of memory 
 in the dusty days of after-life. But, be this as
 
 122 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 it may, it will certainly enrich a man's local 
 patriotism, enrich it by a whole province, when 
 the city of his hearth and altar, of his honourable 
 toil, of his friendships, of his political enthusiasms 
 and his social work, is likewise the city that gives 
 to him these glorious crowded hours of memorable 
 student life. 
 
 I think, too, that we may claim that our studies 
 here will give us an enhanced respect for our 
 city. We are fond of saying, here on the Arts 
 side of the College, that the proper object of our 
 study is Man. This is our privilege and pride. 
 And of course, in the prosecution of this study, 
 we must expect as I have already said to 
 wander far enough from Liverpool and all its 
 ways. What then is likely to be the result of 
 this upon our habitual estimates of Liverpool 
 pursuits and Liverpool men? It will depend. 
 If our studies do not take us beyond the outsides 
 of things if we dwell simply on the material 
 glories of the cities that have risen and crumbled, 
 and the civilisations that have had their day and 
 ceased to be, when the Mersey was as yet but a 
 silent sea-swept estuary, then we may come to 
 think that Liverpool with all its noisy life is but a 
 little thing after all. Will it stand the contrast 
 with Athens or Rome, with Venice or Florence? 
 Hence the suspicion, deeply rooted in many 
 minds, and quite natural, that the student, and 
 especially the student of Arts subjects, must 
 needs have his estimates of value revolutionised, 
 and under the illusions of the past and the
 
 123 
 
 distant fail signally to appreciate the life that is 
 before his eyes. 
 
 I do not think that it can be denied that there 
 is truth in this. The genuine student, whose eyes 
 have been opened by History, or Literature, or 
 Art to see the past and the distant, cannot look 
 out upon the world about him with the same 
 perceptions as before. No. But it does not 
 follow that he will appreciate and value this the 
 less. Far from it. It is the glory of liberal 
 studies that they give a deeper interest in all that 
 lives. They fail of their purpose if they leave us 
 learned, clever, critical, fastidious. Their best 
 gifts are of quite another sort the imagination 
 that penetrates, the insight that discerns the life 
 under all its disguises, the human sympathy that 
 stretches out hands of recognition across the ages. 
 And when any man among us has these things, it 
 will, of a certainty, be his experience that the life 
 of this great city, however familiar, prosaic, 
 rough, unlovely, soiled with the dust of passing 
 circumstance, will wear in his eyes a new 
 significance, an enhanced interest and worth; 
 because it will be recognised as one in substance 
 with that larger unquenchable life of Man, whose 
 strange eventful history is the object of all our 
 studies. Is it not the fact that our interest in our 
 own familiar friends is never keener than when 
 we see them the men we know so well acting 
 under some new conjunction of circumstances? 
 So on in the larger scale. It is the man who has 
 really entered into the beautiful and versatile
 
 124 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 vitality of the men of Athens, or into the austere, 
 practical genius of the men of Rome, who will 
 best know how to do justice to the resourceful 
 enterprise of the men of Liverpool. There is no 
 perversion of the student's life more lamentable 
 than that which uses the knowledge of what is 
 great to belittle what is at our feet. And of him 
 whose " liberal studies " have ended thus, we can 
 but say with Wordsworth, that he 
 
 Hath faculties 
 
 Which he has never used; that thought with him 
 Is in its infancy. 
 
 Need I add that this appreciation of the life of 
 Liverpool ought to carry with it an increased 
 respect for Liverpool men. It is necessary to 
 say this because I am sure that practical men, 
 some practical men at all events, believe that the 
 student thinks himself superior. Even great 
 students have courted this suspicion. It was 
 Mill who said that a person of high intellect 
 should never go into unintellectual society unless 
 he could enter it as an apostle. And I fancy that 
 the average citizen, if he reads Culture and 
 Anarchy, will rise from its perusal with the 
 conviction that the apostle of culture believes 
 himself well qualified to try, condemn, and 
 castigate (in the interest of sweetness and light, 
 of course) the average man. 
 
 "Culture says:" (so runs one characteristic 
 sentence) " ' Consider these people, then, their 
 " ' way of life, their habits, their manners, the very
 
 LOCAL PATRIOTISM & EDUCATION 125 
 
 ' tones of their voice ; look at them attentively ; 
 
 ' observe the literature they read, the things 
 
 ' which give them pleasure, the words which 
 
 ' come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts 
 
 ' which make the furniture of their minds ; would 
 
 ' any amount of wealth be worth having with the 
 
 ' condition that one was to become just like these 
 
 ' people by having it ?' And thus culture begets 
 
 " a dissatisfaction which is of the highest possible 
 
 " value in stemming the common tide of men's 
 
 " thoughts in a wealthy and industrial community, 
 
 " and which save the future, as one may hope, 
 
 " from being vulgarised, even if it cannot save the 
 
 " present."* 
 
 It is easy to follow the advice of Culture. We 
 are admirably placed for following it. We can 
 " consider these people." Yes, we can consider 
 them in their public meetings, their committees, 
 their educational and charitable associations, their 
 counting-houses, their factories, their churches, 
 their homes, with all the hopes, the struggles, the 
 aspirations, the sorrows, the achievements that 
 these things carry with them. And when we have 
 done considering them, I hardly think we shall 
 feel disposed to put the question with which 
 " Culture " concludes the sentence I have quoted. 
 For when we seriously consider the sterling 
 qualities, and in many cases the supreme qualities, 
 which the ordinary good citizen possesses 
 industry, thrift, integrity, courage, self-reliance, 
 enterprise, kindliness, hospitality, generosity, 
 
 * " Culture and Anarchy," Popular Edition, p. 13.
 
 126 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 munificence, sound judgment, decision, public 
 spirit then we must see it is an idle, if not a 
 vulgar question to ask what amount of wealth we 
 would take to become just like these people by 
 having it; because the qualities of " these 
 people " are such as wealth can neither give nor 
 buy. Truth is, that in the diverse distribution of 
 human virtues, all fancied superiorities of class 
 over class or calling over calling are absurd. Or, 
 if there be one superiority which it is worth our 
 while as students to claim, it is that of knowing 
 how to value our fellow citizens not of the 
 University more highly than we may hope that 
 they may learn to value us. For of all the ties 
 that grapple citizen to citizen, there is none more 
 enduring, none more honourable, than the strong 
 bond of respect for one another's work and worth. 
 Need I, in conclusion, express the obvious and 
 confident hope, that our institution may, besides, 
 prove itself the nursery of active citizens. It can 
 do this in quite specific ways. It can impart the 
 needful knowledge. I have spoken of the tides 
 and currents of our city's life how can we best 
 control and make them tributary to the common 
 good ? And where they may be, as in many ways 
 they are, so vast as to be uncontrollable, how best 
 secure the needful adaptation of ourselves to 
 them? In either case the prime pre-requisite is 
 that these forces should be understood. This is 
 what a school of commerce, and perhaps still more 
 a school of political science, have to do. I do not 
 mean that these will turn out citizens ready made. 

 
 LOCAL PATRIOTISM & EDUCATION 127 
 
 Impossible. It is action alone that can make the 
 citizen, whether it be in commerce or politics. 
 But they can at least lay that foundation of sound 
 knowledge and trained faculty, without which 
 the most vigorous common-sense will be blind in 
 presence of that experience for which it rightly 
 professes so deep a respect. For local patriotism, 
 however ardent, loses more than half its value, it 
 is a stream severed from its source, the moment 
 it ceases to be intelligent. It is not enough to 
 love our city and work for it : it is necessary to 
 understand it. To live in memory through its 
 history; to grasp the economics of its commerce, 
 industry, and charity; to realise the significance 
 of its varied races, ranks, denominations, parties; 
 to comprehend the machinery of its government 
 and the meaning of its manifold institutions; to 
 do justice to its achievement and its destinies in 
 the larger life of the Empire these are some of 
 the things which a local University has in its gift 
 for the citizens of this city of strenuous politics. 
 
 Nor would I have our friends in the city who 
 give so much of their lives to the larger politics 
 forget that the students of this institution have a 
 politics of their own. One wonders sometimes if 
 they realise that, in the exercise of your own 
 self-government, you have your organisations, 
 your leaders, your parties, your constitutional 
 experiments, your debates, elections, policies. 
 These things have a value of their own. They 
 need no justification beyond the purposes for 
 which they are designed to transact your affairs,
 
 128 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 to vitalise and enrich academic life. But it 
 stands without saying that, just for these reasons, 
 they feed those political instincts which are the 
 strength of our race, and point onwards with a 
 sure promise to the later and larger loyalties of 
 local and imperial patriotism.
 
 VI.-PARTY AND POLITICAL 
 CONVICTION.* 
 
 There is a paradoxical passage in the Republic 
 of Plato in which he first declares that the State 
 in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is 
 best and most quietly governed, and the State in 
 which they are least reluctant, the worst ; and then 
 proceeds to add that the politician after his 
 heart " will take office as a stern necessity, and 
 " not like our present Ministers of State." 
 
 It is Plato's way of saying (and there was 
 nothing he more firmly believed) that the true 
 politician must feed his soul on something 
 beyond politics. If a man is to care for politics, 
 he must not care for politics only. For only then 
 will he attain two things which, to this great 
 thinker, seemed indispensable; the one, an 
 unworldly superiority to what Bentham used to 
 call " sinister," i.e., selfish or factious interests; 
 the other, that apprehension of enduring and 
 inspiring ends which it behoves the politician to 
 set himself to enact in the imperfect under-world 
 of human affairs. 
 
 *An Address to the New Century Society at the Liverpool Reform Club. 

 
 i3o ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 Thus backed by Plato, might we not venture to 
 suggest that the same thing holds on the narrower 
 scale, and declare that no one will ever be in heart 
 and mind a party politician unless he is convinced 
 that party politics are not everything ; that no one, 
 in short, will care for his party enough till he has 
 learnt to put party in its right place as the 
 instrument for realising ends and ideas of which 
 no party can ever have the monopoly. :< No 
 " monopoly ! '' may the echoes of that great 
 Radical watchword never die ! but it would ill 
 befit the foe of monopoly to set up the 
 ancient idol on its base again in that least 
 of all tolerable shapes the monopoly of 
 political ends and political ideas. Great is 
 party, and large is its life, even to those who 
 can never see beyond it. But greater and larger 
 will it become for him who can realise the 
 magnitude of the ends the municipal ends, the 
 national ends, the imperial ends that are greater 
 and larger than it. This, at any rate, is the 
 burden of my song. 
 
 I suppose there is no one here who is so radical 
 that he wishes to get rid of Party. It is part of 
 our unwritten Constitution. It has become a 
 condition of our political life. It has so grown 
 not only into our constitutional organisation, but 
 into our political habits and sentiments, that we 
 could not shake it off even if we tried. If we 
 disbanded our parties to-day into the anarchy of 
 individualism pure and simple, they would begin 
 to group themselves afresh to-morrow around new
 
 PARTY & POLITCAL CONVICTION 131 
 
 sentiments, around fresh interests. They might 
 not group themselves to-morrow just as they are 
 grouped to-day. For, sometimes, the traditional 
 lines of cleavage are not the only possible lines of 
 cleavage, or even the most natural. But parties 
 there would be, as surely as the sun rises; and 
 however various the species, or sub-species, might 
 be, there would be the inevitable gravitation to 
 those two great parties which will always exist so 
 long as representative democratic government 
 remains instinct with life the party of the " ins,' r 
 and the party of the " outs." If it were an affair 
 of opinion only, or sentiment only, it might be 
 different; quot homines, tot sententice\ but with 
 political parties it is more ; it is an affair of power. 
 And so long as those who have power love it and 
 cling to it, and those who have it not, covet it, so 
 long will the political forces, at any rate of 
 democratic countries, tend to range themselves in 
 two opposing camps. 
 
 I do not suggest that this is to be deplored. 
 Even in our times of deepest disgust with the 
 diseases of the party system (one may read them 
 in Mr. Bryce's chapter in his American Common- 
 wealth on the Boss and all his works) there comes 
 the question, What would you have instead? 
 Not despotism surely? How could it be, when 
 even the most benevolent despotism (of the other 
 kind be perfect silence) would at best only kill us 
 with kindness, kill the political part of us, at any 
 rate ; which, I take it, none of us here assembled 
 are prepared to sacrifice, even by euthanasia.
 
 132 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 Nor could we seriously think of entrusting 
 ourselves to Bureaucracy, for that would only be 
 the old doctrine of Whig trusteeship over again, 
 with the substitution of the official for the Whig. 
 For what does Democracy mean if not that the 
 Democracy is minded, for better or for worse, to 
 manage its own affairs ? And we need not despair 
 of Democracy yet. 
 
 Or is it to be representative democracy without 
 parties'? (For there are some who cherish that 
 aspiration.) Nor need it be denied that there are 
 times when we might, at any rate, wish for that : 
 at those times, namely, when we contemplate the 
 promise and the performance, " the petty done, 
 " the undone vast " of some particularly eloquent 
 Parliamentary session ; or, shall we say, when we 
 consider the result of taking all politicians at the 
 valuation of their adversaries; or, when we see 
 some strong and safe Foreign Secretary 
 dislodged and compelled to go, because of the 
 muddling of some other Minister who is neither; 
 or, when in cool blood, we sit down and read the 
 unchastened rhetoric of a contested election; or, 
 simply, when in a quiet hour we ask ourselves if, 
 after all, it can be good economy that one-half of 
 the best men in our midst should be systematically 
 engaged in nullifying and sterilising the efforts of 
 the other half. And yet when all, even the very 
 worst, is said, there always remains the misgiving 
 that under representative democracy without the 
 party system could such a thing exist there 
 would probably be much more of Babel, and so
 
 PARTY & POLITICAL CONVICTION 133 
 
 much less of business in our Legislature that we 
 might soon find ourselves longing for the good 
 old days of Party Government. Nor need one 
 strike the note so low. When all is said, a great 
 party is a great instrument. It is of the 
 rudiments of politics that if men would act with 
 effect, they must act in alliance; and if alliance 
 is to yield its fruit, it must be more than an 
 ephemeral compact or a transitory understanding. 
 It must rest secure upon the trust of comrade in 
 comrade, and the loyality that is begotten of long 
 and tried fidelity. And when we have Party at its 
 best when to substantial agreement in opinion 
 we add a long and glorious tradition of common 
 work and common achievement, and to a 
 memorable tradition the sentiment of comrade- 
 ship, and to comradeship leadership, and to 
 leadership the organisation that utilises effective 
 strength to the uttermost, and finds a place for 
 every willing worker what is it but folly to reject 
 an instrument like this? Shall we cease to dig 
 the ground because people have fought with 
 picks and shovels? Therefore, we do well 
 in this country " in the way men call party 
 : ' to worship the constitution of our fathers." 
 In this we may all be proud to be deeply-dyed 
 Conservatives. Here in the home of Reform, I 
 venture to declare that there is one Reform Bill 
 that would never pass a Bill for the dissolution 
 of parties. 
 
 You will not, therefore, number me among the 
 assailants of Party. Not only does Party exist;
 
 in a democratic country it inevitably exists. And 
 not only does it inevitably exist, it is good that it 
 should exist. I assume this henceforth, and go 
 on to ask what is the right attitude of the citizen 
 towards it? 
 
 Now, there can be little doubt that Party does 
 much to broaden and to quicken the life of the 
 average citizen. A great Party links generations 
 together, and gathers within itself many 
 sentiments, interests, projects. It is the product 
 of many hands, and many minds. So far it is 
 larger, often far larger, than any or all of its 
 individual members. And if sometimes one 
 member eyes another askance, as if he had strayed 
 somehow into the wrong fold, he would usually 
 be better occupied if, instead of troubling himself 
 with his neighbour's orthodoxy, he gave thanks to 
 Heaven that his Party was so roomy. Who can 
 doubt that many a life, otherwise isolated, 
 narrow, ineffectual, has gained much, much in 
 seriousness, practicality, and breadth of out- 
 look, because it has been caught up into 
 that larger life of Party which persists whilst 
 individuals and even generations come and go? 
 Away, therefore, with the unsocial impotence of 
 the fanatics and faddists ! An end to the 
 sectarian dissidence of factions, coteries, and 
 caves ! What we want and need is. the many- 
 chambered mansion of a great and comprehensive 
 Party. " Make up your mind to be somebody," 
 said a venerable statesman to a youthful and 
 ambitious fellow countryman. Good advice !
 
 PARTY & POLITICAL CONVICTION 135 
 
 But, in politics at any rate, a man is not likely " to 
 " be somebody " he is fairly certain to be 
 nobody, or (in Burke's strong words) to " fall an 
 !< unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle " 
 unless he learns to act in concert with his fellows, 
 and to grapple himself to one or other of the 
 great parties in the State. 
 
 But then it is just because the citizen does well 
 to give himself to Party that another result 
 happens. The party absorbs him, and in 
 absorbing him it concentrates his mind over- 
 whelmingly upon the present, and is only too apt 
 to shut his eyes to the more distant ends. Mr. 
 Rhodes once said that it is the curse of our 
 politics that statesmen will not look ahead. But 
 the fault lies not wholly with the statesmen. It 
 lies at the door of Party, which by its very nature 
 runs a risk of making the present everything, and 
 the future, the more distant future, nothing. 
 
 There are many influences that make for this. 
 There is the fighting spirit, whose dominant 
 motive becomes the longing to see the enemy 
 routed at the polls, or in the House a most 
 human and natural sentiment. There is the 
 organising spirit to which it is enough to live for 
 to see the machine working working like a well- 
 oiled engine that is the heart's delight of 
 the officiating engineer. There is the spirit of 
 loyalty, which prompts the soldier of party to 
 march in unhesitating, and, at times, blind faith 
 behind the party leader. " Their's not to reason 
 why." There is the practical business spirit
 
 136 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 which claims to know just what is here and now 
 to be done, and to do it. There is the deeply 
 rooted deference to party oracles, whose pleasure 
 it is to represent every passing issue as an earth- 
 quake. There is the aversion, natural enough 
 to all who have to act in highly organised 
 association, to indulge ideas or schemes which 
 might develop inconvenient differences. Not 
 least there is the excitement, the bustle, the glow, 
 the urgency of current affairs, the oratory, the 
 strategy, the hopes and fears, not to add the 
 necessity of watching narrowly the tactics 
 of the enemy and of instantly rushing to his 
 discomfiture. One cannot say that Party gives 
 its members little to think about. It gives them 
 much. But it gives them this in such a way as 
 to limit their thoughts overwhelmingly to the 
 present, and so to bring them to lose sight of the 
 more distant ends. Parties, in short, by their 
 very nature as instruments for fighting and acting, 
 tend to bring their members to live more or less 
 from hand to mouth, and so to lose sight of the 
 large and permanent interests of national well- 
 being. This is the worst I have to say against 
 them, and I believe it to be incontrovertibly true. 
 In saying this, you are not to suppose that 
 wish to animadvert, or to be censorious. Far 
 from it. There are distinguished writers, Sir 
 Henry Maine for example, who have gone so far 
 as to depict party politics as a game, or as a pro- 
 longed cricket match between blue and yellow.* 
 
 * Sec Maine's "Popular Government."
 
 PARTY & POLITICAL CONVICTION 137 
 
 We need not follow them. Such analogies do 
 little justice to the fact that the stakes for which 
 the game is played are the happiness, it may be 
 the lives, of men and nations. Yet these 
 analogies, however frivolous, serve a purpose. 
 They point to the familiar fact that party politics 
 is an endless struggle, struggle in the House, 
 struggle in the constituencies, struggle in the 
 Press, struggle on the platform. And where 
 there is struggle, it is natural, it is human, that 
 the immediate result should be all-engrossing. 
 The Opposition thinks day and night of 
 dislodging the Government; the Government, 
 day and night, of demolishing the Opposition. 
 The constituencies compass heaven and earth to 
 carry their candidate ; and the candidate earth and 
 heaven to justify their support by a sweeping 
 majority. What they all wish for, and work for, 
 not cynically or recklessly, but very earnestly, is 
 Victory, and this dazzling hope and darling wish 
 for victory who can deny it ? are pre-eminently 
 calculated to withdraw the mind from the more 
 distant ends for which political, like other battles, 
 are fought or won. Party immerses us all in the 
 current politics of the hour. 
 
 Now, I fully recognise that in all this there is 
 much that is altogether manly, honest, and 
 invigorating. It keeps politics and parties alive. 
 Is a community ever more alive than when a 
 general election is upon us? But there is a fact 
 in the presence of which it goes on, and it is a 
 fact of the first magnitude. I mean the fact that
 
 138 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 party politics, as we have it in this country, is, 
 almost more than any other department of human 
 life more even than religion or commerce 
 saturated with the casuistry of compromise. 
 
 There is a passage in which Lecky declares 
 crede experto that, to a new member of the 
 House, what goes on in that Mother of 
 Parliaments is at first very painful, especially if 
 the new member be one who has been accustomed 
 to treat the formation and expression of opinion 
 as a matter of serious duty. 
 
 ;< He finds that he is required again and again 
 " to give an effective voice in the great council of 
 " the nation, on questions of grave importance, 
 " with a levity of conviction upon which he would 
 " not act in the most trivial affairs of private life. 
 " No doctor would prescribe for the slightest 
 " malady; no lawyer would advise in the easiest 
 " case; no wise man would act in the simplest 
 " transactions of private business or would even 
 " give an opinion to his neighbour at a dinner 
 ' party, without more knowledge of the subject 
 " than that on which a Member of Parliament is 
 " often obliged to vote. But he soon finds that 
 " for good or evil this system is absolutely 
 " indispensable to the working of the machine. 
 " If no one voted except on matters he really 
 " understood and cared for, four-fifths of the 
 " questions that are determined by the House of 
 " Commons would be determined by mere 
 " fractions of its members, and in that case
 
 PARTY & POLITICAL CONVICTION 139 
 
 ' Parliamentary Government under the Party 
 " system would be impossible."* 
 
 Thus it is that the chosen champion of freedom, 
 the democratic Member of Parliament, finds 
 himself constrained, by this categorical imperative 
 of Party, to support measures he detests, and to 
 oppose measures he desires, to vote when he does 
 not want to, and to refrain from voting when he 
 does want to, to give a vote sorely against the 
 grain here in order that he may be conciliated by 
 his party there, to be silent when he fain would 
 speak, and possibly have to speak when he had 
 rather be dumb. He may salve his conscience, 
 no doubt, by abstention, truancy, or even by 
 rebellion, if the Ark be not in danger. But for 
 the rest, except on occasions of very extraordinary 
 gravity, he must often those who have been 
 through it alone know, I fancy, how often 
 swallow his pride, his judgment, and even some 
 of his conscience, and obey the Whip. 
 
 And what shall we say of the self-suppressions, 
 to call them by the mildest name, that are 
 supposed to go on within a Cabinet? It is 
 wrapped in obscurity. It is a Cabinet secret. 
 Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, what goes on in 
 this secret Council of a free nation. But tales 
 transpire, significant of much. Here is one. A 
 Cabinet meeting had agreed to propose a fixed 
 duty on corn. As the Ministers were rising to 
 go, the Premier (Lord Melbourne, one should 
 perhaps hasten to say) put his back to the door. 
 
 "The Map of Life," p. 124.
 
 140 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 " Now," he said, " is it to lower the price of corn, 
 
 " or is it not? It doesn't much matter which we 
 
 " say, but, mind ! we must all say the same."* 
 
 ' This is a hard case, an indefensible case," once 
 
 said an experienced Secretary of the Treasury. 
 
 ' We must apply our majority to this question."! 
 
 This might suggest that Parliamentary, not to 
 say Cabinet Government needs reforming. No ! 
 not at all, if we accept the sum of the whole 
 matter according to Lecky (surely one of the most 
 conscientious politicians of his day). ' Those 
 " who refuse to accept the conditions of 
 " Parliamentary life should abstain from entering 
 " into it." 
 
 The same thing reappears, though in less acute 
 degree, in the relation of member to constituency. 
 The party or the caucus that stands behind 
 member or candidate is for the most part 
 composed of too extensive a colluvies of opinions 
 and interests to render it at all possible for him 
 to see eye to eye with them all. The same sort 
 of thing recurs. There is silence here, and there 
 the evasion that brings down the meeting by its 
 dexterity; a little more emphasis on this point, a 
 diminished emphasis on that; the soft answer that 
 turneth away wrath, or the wrathful answer that is 
 not to be trifled with, and so on, and all so 
 necessary that the party may " go solid " for their 
 man. Even the humble elector is not exempt. 
 And, indeed, many of us may have had to cast 
 
 * Bagehot, " English Constitution," p. 14, note 
 t Bagehot, ibid., p. 141.
 
 PARTY & POLITICAL CONVICTION 141 
 
 our votes for candidates whom on some points we 
 consent with difficulty to leave unmuzzled only 
 because there are others on which we more desire 
 to muzzle their opponents. The casuistries of 
 politics are not limited to candidates. 
 
 Now, much of this is inevitable. Compromise, 
 casuistical compromise must come. Collective 
 action is on no other condition possible. The 
 serious matter is, not that these compromises 
 exist, but that they exist side by side with 
 the hand-to-mouth politics which (as I have 
 contended) the party system so indubitably 
 fosters. Here lies the danger. Here comes the 
 crux. 
 
 For of all persons the hand-to-mouth politician, 
 the man whose eyes are fixed on current politics 
 alone, is least fitted to deal satisfactorily with the 
 casuistries of compromise. I do not suggest that 
 he will be paralyised. This is not his weakness. 
 He will vote, he will act, he will speak, he will 
 decide with energetic confidence. He may do 
 this on more grounds than one. Because his 
 party bids him ; because his interests prompt him ; 
 because the other side opposes him; because he 
 follows his leader; because he trusts comrades 
 who are expert where he is ignorant; because he 
 must implement his pledges ; because he must do 
 something; because he dare not do nothing. It 
 is not for me to try to enumerate his motives, or 
 to deny that some of them may do him credit. 
 The point is that these ways are not the best ways ; 
 not the most effective and most hopeful ways;
 
 142 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 not the ways in which a man may best hold fast 
 both to his party (which is much) and to his 
 integrity (which is more). 
 
 For when a politician is face to face with one of 
 these cases of compromise, not one of the paltry 
 issues not worth stickling about, but one of the 
 serious issues that make him uncomfortable, what 
 is it that we ought most earnestly to wish for him ? 
 A conscience? Undoubtedly. Nothing can cut 
 casuistical knots like a conscience. It is the 
 supreme instrument. We need it. But a 
 conscience, a mere conscience, is not enough. 
 Oh, conscience ! what things have been done in 
 thy name ! What is needed is a conscience 
 enlightened by an ideal of the public good. And 
 by an " ideal," I mean nothing pretentious or up 
 in the clouds, but simply a firmly-grasped, well- 
 grouped, strongly-held body of convictions about 
 the political ends which really matter for our 
 country, and (if we are able to rise to that larger 
 outlook) for the world. 
 
 For it is thus, by convictions about our ends, 
 that casuistical difficulties can alone be effectually 
 disposed of in any domain of life; and politics is 
 no exception. So long as politics lasts, these 
 casuistical questions will come in crowds. None 
 of us can escape them. And none of us will be 
 armed against them, none of us will be fit to meet 
 them, till he has made up his mind what are the 
 essentials of the public good for which he means 
 to take his stand. Nothing less will suffice. 
 Without it the most vigorous of hand-to-mouth
 
 PARTY & POLITICAL CONVICTION 143 
 
 politicians will drift into the lamentable 
 tortuosities of opportunism. With it the man 
 who does not wish to leave his conscience on the 
 shore when he goes to sea on the troubled ocean 
 of politics, will have a criterion which, though 
 neither infallible nor easy of application, will help 
 him mightily to decide when to put down his foot, 
 even if need be, in defiance of his Party; and 
 when, on the other hand, to make those 
 concessions and compromises from which no 
 politician can escape any more than he can jump 
 off his own shadow. For to the man with an 
 ideal these compromises, concessions, abatements, 
 that are painfully wrung from him in public life, 
 and that are even abhorrent at first sight to the 
 inexperienced, are not really the surrender of his 
 ends, but the means whereby, in the difficult 
 medium of party struggle, the realisation of these 
 ends alone becomes possible. 
 
 People sometimes speak and write as if the 
 reign of compromise and casuistry in politics 
 justified a despair of all fidelity to political ideals. 
 It is precisely the other way. It is the necessity 
 for compromise in politics; it is the reality of 
 casuistry in politics which compels us if we do 
 not wish to see our judgment overwhelmed, our 
 integrity sapped, and our consciences frittered 
 away to do our best to cling to our ideal as 
 the sheet-anchor of straightforwardness and 
 consistency. 
 
 This being so, it is not too much, is it? to 
 expect of our politicians, especially, of course, of
 
 i 4 4 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 all who aspire to lead, that they should come to 
 their work with convictions with coherent 
 convictions. What meaning do we put on those 
 basal principles of Liberty and Equality that run 
 from end to end of all our politics? Do we 
 believe in the expansion and unification of the 
 British Empire? Do we wish the Colonies to go, 
 or to be drawn closer to the Mother of Nations? 
 Are we, with Cobden, non-interventionists in 
 foreign policy, or are we, with Mazzini, believers 
 in the international mission of nations? Do we 
 lean to State-action, not to say socialistic State- 
 action, in home affairs, or are we disciples of 
 laissez-faire and voluntary effort? Are we Free 
 Traders or not ? Do we revere or do we reprobate 
 Church Establishments? Do we wish to see 
 religious teaching in our schools, or do we wish 
 them secularised to the uttermost? Have we 
 definite opinions upon the just incidence of 
 Taxation ? In short, what are we really working 
 for what are the ends in regard to the social 
 betterment of the whole People ? These are the 
 things that matter. These are some of the ends 
 which must enter, not in desultory juxtaposition, 
 but in well-compacted unity, into a citizen's ideal 
 of the public good. 
 
 I am far from suggesting that convictions on 
 such weighty matters come easy ; and still further 
 from supposing it easy when the ends are so 
 multifarious to determine which take priority. 
 Let no one say that Politics are easy. Nor am I 
 arguing not for a moment that even our leaders
 
 PARTY & POLITICAL CONVICTION 145 
 
 should be expected to have come to a cut-and- 
 dried finality about any of them. But is it 
 extravagant to expect is it asking too much of 
 them that they should, at any rate, definitely 
 know where they are in such problems, and still 
 more, that they should know whither they are 
 going, and inviting us to follow them? I have 
 no desire to invite politicians to formulate 
 dogmatic Creeds. We do not want a Thirty-nine 
 Articles in politics, or a political Westminster 
 Confession. All we ask of them is intelligent 
 and coherent conviction as to the ends upon which 
 they are moving. If you say : " They have this 
 " already," I stand corrected, I have been crying 
 Fire ! in Noah's Flood. If you say : " It is too 
 " much to expect," then must they flounder 
 on in the great Serbonian bog of casuistical 
 compromise, world without end. 
 
 Of this, however, we may be certain that the 
 plan or ideal in question is not one that any single 
 party can be expected to furnish. 
 
 It is not the function of Party to impart 
 ultimate political convictions. It can, of course, 
 help; especially if our lot should fall in days 
 when party leaders, or party organs, or party 
 pamphleteers have a comprehensive and far- 
 reaching grasp of policy. Party is often the way 
 of approach to political convictions. Men do not 
 perfect their convictions first and then join their 
 party. They sometimes join their party first and 
 find their convictions afterwards. Nor can 
 anyone reasonably blame us if, in the faith of our
 
 i 4 6 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 fidelity, we attach something more than its value 
 to the party tradition, the party manifesto, 
 the party organ, the party policy, the party 
 programme. But Party can never here suffice. It 
 is essentially an instrument of action and combat, 
 not of thought and conviction. It is devised, 
 organised, and worked to enact our convictions, 
 not to form them. If we read history and study 
 economics if we even take a larger view of 
 current events if we dip into the political writers 
 of all parties if we even respectfully regard 
 the utterances of the other side above all, if we 
 give just heed to experience of life and what it 
 has to tell us of hardships, abuses, grievances, 
 struggles, aspirations we must know that our 
 convictions are fed, nay, it is shameful if they are 
 not fed, from many a source that lies beyond our 
 party. It is no real tribute to our party to 
 prostrate our minds before it least of all if we 
 aspire to be the champions of freedom. The 
 signal for fight, the watchword, the plan of 
 campaign, the strategy, the tactics, the immediate 
 programme yes, our Party may dictate these. 
 But our convictions, our ideal of what we would 
 have our country become and of what we would 
 have the lives of our fellow citizens be when it 
 comes to these, we are getting into the region of 
 what I would call the spiritual power. And no 
 party can be suffered to usurp the spiritual power. 
 And if it tries to do so, by constituting itself sole 
 source and repository of our political convictions, 
 we must flatly deny its competence.
 
 PARTY & POLITICAL CONVICTION 147 
 
 It is the policy of both great parties in the State 
 to catch their followers young. I do not quarrel 
 with them for that. By all means let every 
 citizen begin betimes to learn the long lesson 
 of discipline, organisation, and co-operation. 
 Politics needs apprenticeship. Yes, but therein 
 lies the very reason why the partisan should keep 
 his eyes wide open to the fact that a party, just 
 because it is a party, and not least when it is a 
 strong party, is no sufficient school for any man's 
 political convictions. I do not think so lightly 
 of political convictions as to be able to think it is. 
 For political convictions send their roots deep 
 and far. They grow on a wider and a deeper soil 
 than the Party seed-plot. They are built on 
 that rock of all freedom freedom to think. 
 ; ' Depend upon it," once said Burke, " the lovers 
 " of freedom will be free." He said it of 
 Parliamentary representatives in his vehement 
 protest against the servility of a delegative 
 democracy. We say it of party loyalty. For a 
 party is not only an association of politicans. 
 Whatever else it be, and most of all when it is a 
 party of Reform, it must be a league of freemen. 
 I may seem to be waxing over-emphatic. If so- 
 il is because I not only honour convictions, but 
 because I believe in Party. But I follow Plato. 
 I hold that it is the man who has risen above 
 Party, gone beyond Party, in the formation of his 
 convictions, who will alone do justice to Party 
 as an instrument of action. Not only will he 
 have larger and more enduring ends on which to-
 
 148 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 feed his political passions and energies; not only 
 will he have a clue the only clue worth having 
 to lead him out of that tortuous and maddening 
 labyrinth of political casuistry; not only will he 
 gain that influence unknown to the waverers, 
 trimmers, and opportunists which surely waits 
 upon coherent convictions; he will turn to Party 
 with an eagerness all his own because he will 
 regard it in the light of the ends it can achieve. 
 
 Nor is this experience peculiar to politics. It 
 is what we find all through life in all the arts. 
 Think of the manufacturer, the master in 
 commerce, the engineer, the soldier well they 
 know the value of the instruments with which they 
 work. They know it because they realise the 
 magnitude and worth of the ends which these 
 instruments subserve. So in the art of Politics. 
 Your true political craftsmen will welcome party 
 organisation because he can see, beyond all the 
 mere machinery of party, the ends the concrete 
 realities of human betterment and happiness for 
 the achievement of which nations have been 
 gathered together by the " Divine tactic." Nay, 
 even a single great end of national well-being 
 Public Health, Education, Commercial Policy, 
 Defence carefully thought out and laid to heart, 
 will suffice to make a man, conscious of the 
 impotence of isolated effort, greedy of the 
 strength and effectiveness which a compact party 
 with convictions can never fail to give. 
 
 Nor need those who are zealous for the Party 
 system fear lest party loyalty might be impaired
 
 PARTY & POLITICAL CONVICTION 149 
 
 by thus relegating Party to its proper place as an 
 instrument for the enactment of convictions drawn 
 from sources far beyond those that lie within our 
 party's boundaries. It is true, no doubt there is 
 no need to disguise the fact that there come 
 times when a citizen, just in proportion as he 
 has personal convictions, must face a parting 
 of the ways, and, if need be, change sides. 
 It was so when Burke broke from Fox and 
 the Whigs when Peel gave up the Conservative 
 Protectionists when Robert Lowe fought against 
 extension of the franchise when Harrington 
 parted from Gladstone and the Liberals on Home 
 Rule when, in these latter days, Fiscal Policy 
 seems to be pregnant of leavetakings on both 
 sides. Such things are not to be deplored. They 
 are to be welcomed as a sign of political health, 
 being, as they are, a proof that there exists a 
 loyalty to convictions about ends that is stronger 
 than the loyalty to Party, the instrument for the 
 realisation of ends. And though one cannot but 
 sympathise with the loyal spirit that clings to a 
 party, even when it has been borne in upon a 
 man's mind that his party has ceased to 
 be the most effective organ for expressing his 
 convictions, our respect is infinitely more due to 
 him who has nerve to face the rupture of old ties 
 and the bitter severance from old comrades for 
 conviction's sake. Both are, at any rate, 
 preferable beyond comparison to the type who is 
 never tempted to leave his party because he has 
 never seen beyond it. It is well to remember
 
 150 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 especially in this land where Party is of the very 
 fibre and tissue of our political system that 
 strong political parties are apt to produce limited 
 political creeds. Leave-takings that may serve 
 as a reminder that a political creed ought always 
 to be wider than a political party are not unwhole- 
 some. 
 
 Yet, happily, these ruptures are not our daily 
 diet. And it would be a depressing error to 
 suppose that honest convictions need be at all 
 incompatible with entire and lifelong devotion to 
 a party. Except at times when parties seem to 
 have outlived their programmes, and when the 
 lines of party cleavage have become blurred, our 
 two great parties in the State divide with such 
 decisiveness, that it is not difficult for the citizen 
 to decide which of them puts the best instrument 
 into his hands. And as both parties having 
 each its traditions and its settled trend of policy 
 move on more or less consistent lines, the citizen 
 who wears the Liberal or Conservative colours 
 may probably enough march loyally for a life- 
 time with the army he has chosen. 
 
 The vital matter is that he should (sooner or 
 later) choose and march with his eyes open. Not 
 merely because such choice is the right nay, it is 
 the very breath of life of free citizenship, but 
 also because, if there be any truth in my 
 contention, it is in this way that a man can best 
 bring to his party that ardour of loyal service that 
 sees in association with tried comrades under 
 trusted leaders the supreme instrument for the
 
 PARTY & POLITICAL CONVICTION 151 
 
 realisation of convictions, for which, if need be, 
 he would go to the stake. 
 
 I have no wish, however, to see such persons 
 going to the stake. I would prefer to see them 
 going, in increasing numbers, to the House of 
 Commons.
 
 VIL-THE TEACHING OF 
 
 RELIGION AND THE ART 
 
 OF EDUCATION.* 
 
 When those of us who are senior look back 
 across our lives, there is one educational principle 
 of the first importance which we can single out, 
 with unerring vision, from the tangle of hopes and 
 struggles, advances and rebuffs, successes and 
 failures, which make up the complex web of life. 
 It is the principle that it is what we have truly 
 cared for that has made our characters what they 
 are. It may be for better or for worse. This one 
 may thankfully see how his whole career has been 
 shaped and inspired by strengthening and 
 uplifting pursuits, interests, ends, or it may be 
 persons, all of which he has come to value the 
 more the longer he lives. They have become the 
 very stuff and substance of his life. That one, 
 on the other hand, may bitterly discern that the 
 promise of his youth has been squandered on 
 paltry ambitions and delusive passions and poor 
 trivialities, all so tenaciously clung to that they 
 
 * An Address to Sunday School Teachers in training, delivered in 
 the Arts Theatre of the University of Liverpool.
 
 THE TEACHING OF RELIGION 153 
 
 have left him a moral bankrupt. But both alike, if 
 they be honest with themselves, will acknowledge 
 the same principle. In that confessional of the 
 soul, in which there are no reserves, because in it 
 a man meets himself face to face, both will be 
 constrained to own that it is what they have really 
 cared for that has made them what they are. 
 
 This is only what we might expect to find from 
 what we know of human nature. For it follows 
 from two facts about human nature which you, 
 will, I imagine, be hardly inclined to dispute. 
 
 The one is that every human soul, from the 
 very dawn of existence, struggles forward towards 
 increasing fullness of life. As a great thinker 
 put it, it persists, or perseveres, in its own being. 
 And it strives ever onwards with a pertinacity so 
 indomitable that it still values life, it still clings 
 to life, or at very least shrinks from death, even 
 long after life has, as sometimes happens, lost its 
 charms or its hopes of happiness. So deeply 
 rooted in man is the will to live. Thus struggling 
 forwards, the soul feeds itself on the thousand 
 varied interests and satisfactions which the world 
 has to offer; and if the world as it is cannot yield 
 enough to satisfy it, it is not daunted. It calls 
 the constructive* imagination, and a marvellous 
 fertility of invention to its aid, and devises new, 
 and ever again new forms of satisfaction. It 
 does this with a resourcefulness to which the 
 whole course of civilisation is a witness a 
 resourcefulness to which it is quite impossible to 
 set a limit. It goes further. It projects its
 
 154 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 aspirations beyond the span of mortality, and 
 from the far-off days of the fabled transmigration 
 of souls to the personal immortality of the 
 Christian creeds, forecasts the fuller realisation 
 of the will to live in a further phase of existence. 
 This then the strength and vitality of the will 
 to live is the one fact to which I invite assent. 
 
 The second is that in this hungry and indeed 
 insatiable quest of satisfactions, in this eager 
 pursuit of what men think worth living for, a 
 human being can only gain much by rejecting 
 much. We sometimes, to be sure, fall into the 
 way of saying of the favourites of fortune that 
 they were able to satisfy every desire of their 
 hearts. It is not true. The thing is impossible. 
 Life is not built on that plan. No man can 
 enjoy everything he wants. On the contrary, 
 for every considerable end he attains, and 
 especially if the end be of pre-eminent value, he 
 has to pay a price. If he aspires to be a public 
 man, he must sacrifice the leisure of private life. 
 If he means to be a scholar, he must forego many 
 an amusement and many a recreation. If he 
 intends to be a business man, he must see that 
 the office or the workshop have the first charge 
 upon his time, and let go many a rival attraction. 
 For, in this sense, there comes to all ordinary 
 mortals an inevitable parting and choice of the 
 ways. It is not that choice of the ways, famous 
 in fable, that is supposed to be made once for all 
 and done with. How easy were life if that were 
 all ! No, the real choice of the ways is an ever-
 
 THE TEACHING OF RELIGION 155 
 
 recurrent choice of the ways. It has to be made 
 again and again all through life. Nor is it a 
 choice that can ever be evaded. It cannot, 
 because it is of the very rudiments of a true 
 economy of life that to set one's heart or mind 
 upon one range of satisfaction, is perforce to 
 turn one's back, in greater or lesser degree, upon 
 other satisfactions. 
 
 Perhaps these statements may seem truisms. 
 It may sound a truism to say that, all our lives 
 through, we are craving and seeking for food to 
 feed our souls just as certainly as for food to 
 feed our bodies. It may also sound a truism to 
 say that, seeing we cannot have everything we 
 want, we must choose choose for ourselves, or 
 find other persons to choose for us. If you think 
 these are truisms, I shall rejoice, because that, I 
 suppose, is a sign that they are true. And this 
 being so, what I now go on to ask is, supposing 
 them true, what follows ? 
 
 It follows that what we ought most earnestly 
 to wish for everyone whose interests we have at 
 heart is that, with this inevitable choice of the 
 ways before him, he should be so guided as to 
 come to care most for those things in life that are 
 most worth caring for, and to care least for those 
 that are least worth caring for, or (it may be) not 
 worth caring for at all. That is the most 
 fundamental principle in education I can think 
 of. For to repeat what I said at the outset it 
 is what a man really cares for that shapes his 
 life and makes its character. Let me now add
 
 156 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 that it makes his character in two ways : It feeds 
 it, and it disciplines it. It feeds the character 
 because it enriches a man's life with ends or 
 interests that are worth living for sometimes 
 worth dying for. These ends and interests may 
 of course be of many kinds the love of home, 
 the ties of affection to friends, the respect of our 
 neighbours, the helping of our fellow-citizens, 
 the public service in many modes, the mastery of 
 books, the knowledge of nature, the love of God. 
 They all feed the character, because they all 
 furnish, in inexhaustible profusion, ends and 
 interests to think about, to feel about, and to 
 strive for. They are the nutriment of the soul. 
 And they discipline the character, because, though 
 this word " discipline " often enough, and up to 
 a certain point rightly enough, suggests repression 
 and chastening, that is not the only kind of 
 discipline. There is another kind, and it comes 
 in a very different guise. It comes of implanting 
 in man or boy in his heart, mind, conscience- 
 positive interests, that love of the things worth 
 caring for of which I have spoken, in the sure 
 hope that the discipline by repression will then 
 largely take care of itself. For the one sure way 
 to make man or boy incapable of evil is to make 
 him capable of good. Give him persons or 
 causes worth living for, enlist his thoughts and 
 his passions in the service of these, and you have 
 the strongest of all securities a stronger security 
 far than the too often impotent " Thou shalt not " 
 of direct repression against idleness, folly,
 
 THE TEACHING OF RELIGION 157 
 
 triviality, and vice in all its insidious forms. 
 For no truth is truer than that all genuine 
 development of character is likewise discipline of 
 character. And it is for that reason I venture to 
 lay it down as fundamental that it is the things 
 we care for the persons, the causes, the ends, 
 the interests we care for that both nurture and 
 discipline the character. 
 
 Now, as the world is fashioned, there are things 
 enough to care for. If there be cynics who imply, 
 and pessimists who say, that life is not worth 
 living, the responsibility for their cynicism and 
 pessimism rests not with the world. It rests with 
 themselves. Having eyes they see not; having 
 ears they hear not. Does not great Nature 
 spread before us, as the revolving year goes 
 round, her inexhaustible apocalypse ? 
 
 To make this earth, our heritage, 
 A cheerful and a changing page, 
 God's bright and intricate device 
 Of day and season doth suffice. 
 
 Does not Literature speak with her thousand 
 voices ? 
 
 Heard are the voices, 
 Heard are the sages, 
 The world and the ages. 
 
 Has not Science revelations of its own- 
 revelations not only of wonders seen and heard 
 (for that of course is only a part of Science), but 
 of that impalpable material world which eye has 
 not seen nor ear heard, because it lies beyond 
 sight or hearing, conjured into being by the
 
 158 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 constructive scientific imagination? And, then, 
 there are the arts the great arts which in music 
 sweep the secret strings of emotion, and in 
 painting, sculpture, architecture, give form and a 
 body to mystic meanings and messages which, 
 without their interpretation, had remained for 
 ever hidden and unknown. They are things 
 which have all their own intrinsic and undying 
 charm. And (it is this concerns us now) they are 
 also, all of them, things which may have, must 
 have their penetrating and decisive influence on 
 character. Many of us must have known men 
 who were lovers of nature, or books, or research, 
 or votaries of one or other of the arts not 
 necessarily poets, or artists, or men of science, 
 but much less distinguished folk, who had simply 
 a heart-felt, life-long delight in their ruling 
 passion. Do you think that such people have 
 reaped nothing more from it, whatever it might 
 be, than an intellectual or aesthetic harvest? 
 Did the influence stop there? On the contrary, 
 it is matter of common observation that pursuits 
 of that kind can decisively influence a man's 
 whole life. Why, even a hobby or a sport, trivial 
 though they are, may actually become the centre 
 of gravity round which a grown man's whole life 
 may revolve, and upon which his thoughts, 
 desires, ambitions, time, expenditure, may 
 converge. It is not otherwise with those greater 
 things of which I have spoken. Never yet did 
 man or boy come seriously under the influence of 
 any one of them without becoming a quite
 
 THE TEACHING OF RELIGION 159 
 
 different creature from what otherwise he would 
 have been. 
 
 But there are still some other things which 
 more especially concern us here. They have 
 brought us together in this meeting. They are 
 the basis of our partnership in this educational 
 adventure,* and I am not sure but that they lie 
 still closer to character than even those other 
 influences of which I have spoken. I mean, of 
 course, those sacred things, those things in a 
 peculiar sense of the spirit, which are distinctively 
 the province of the Sunday School. It is your 
 high prerogative, as it is your grave responsibility, 
 as Sunday School teachers, to claim these things 
 as peculiarly your own. You aspire to become 
 the ambassadors of sacred things to young, 
 receptive, plastic minds. And upon your 
 handling of these things, in the spirit of it and in 
 the methods of it, it depends whether religion is 
 to become as real and decisive an influence in the 
 lives entrusted to your care as nature and 
 literature and science and art already are in the 
 hands of their avowed and highly-trained 
 representatives and exponents. I am not rash, 
 I imagine, in assuming that you believe religion 
 to be the greatest influence in life. You believe 
 it is to be the source of aspiration, energy, 
 endurance, consolation. You recognise it as the 
 fountain-head of all our being. You stand for 
 it as the most powerful and penetrating of all 
 
 * The occasion of this Address was the inauguration of courses of 
 instruction on theory and art of education. The audience consisted 
 of Sunday School teachers.
 
 160 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 the influences which transform and transfigure 
 human nature. And it is for that reason it makes 
 such demands upon teachers, and expects so 
 much at their hands. Those of us whose business 
 it is to teach literature, or science, or philosophy, 
 know well how hard a task that is. We know how 
 much we have to go through before we learn how 
 to do it, and how not to do it. And our greatest 
 difficulty is and every teacher will bear me out 
 in this to discover, not only how to teach about 
 literature and about science and about philosophy, 
 but to teach about them in such a way as to bring 
 our pupils genuinely to love literature and to love 
 science and to love philosophy. Till we have 
 done that, we know we have not succeeded. 
 Hence there has come into existence that great 
 science (as some call it, but which I should 
 prefer to call that great art) of education. 
 It counts among its craftsmen some of the 
 great names of the world Plato, Aristotle, 
 Quintilian, Comenius, Erasmus, Locke, 
 Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Herbart, Arnold, 
 and many others. It has produced a vast 
 literature. It has had innumerable practitioners 
 of all sorts and descriptions, planning, executing, 
 experimenting, in an infinite variety of ways. 
 And yet all alike be it the head of a great public 
 school, be it the obscure " dominie " of a country 
 village striving after the one thing, the discovery 
 of the secret, which some seem to have wonder- 
 fully found, how to bring the youthful mind not 
 only to learn the allotted task, not only to
 
 THE TEACHING OF RELIGION 161 
 
 " get up " so much history, or literature, or 
 mathematics, or whatever may be the matter in 
 hand, not only (as I have said) to acquire 
 knowledge about these or other things, but to do 
 this in such a fashion as whole-heartedly to care 
 for them. So that when school is past, and the 
 days of leading-strings are ended, the young life 
 may go out into the world with substantial 
 acquisitions, with definite likings, with settled 
 interests, with habitual proclivities, possibly 
 (though alas ! it is all too infrequent) with a 
 genuine passion for the things of the mind. 
 
 It is for you, as Sunday School teachers, to 
 become craftsmen in this great art. It is for 
 you to fit yourselves to teach the Bible not less 
 effectively than the teacher of the week-day school 
 equips himself to teach Virgil or Shakespeare or 
 mathematics or chemistry. And it is for you 
 a more difficult task still to train the boys and 
 girls who sit on the benches of the Sunday School, 
 to care for, to love sacred things, even as it is the 
 ambition of the so-called " secular " teacher to 
 train them to love the things of the mind. 
 Only, I am bound to add, yours is the greater 
 responsibility. A man may come through his 
 schooling it is only too possible and care 
 little for the things of the mind. It is lamentable 
 enough. He will remain a mutilated specimen at 
 best. He will be poor in his soul. Yet the 
 misfortune is not fatal. But if a man, through 
 lack of early training, goes out into the world 
 apathetic to sacred things, it is different. His
 
 deprivation is more lamentable. For we must 
 not fall into the habit it is perhaps a tendency 
 of our times to look upon religion as if it were 
 only one subject among other subjects, an item in 
 a curriculum. That might perhaps be said of 
 Biblical instruction, for which, of course, just as 
 for other subjects, there are times and seasons. 
 But religion, the actual valuing of sacred things, 
 the caring for them, is a different thing. It 
 is of its very essence to be permeative and 
 pervasive. If a man have it, it will be with him 
 in all he thinks and does. Its influence will not 
 be limited to times and seasons, to places and 
 occasions. It will determine his whole outlook 
 on life. It will decisively affect all his valuations 
 of persons and things. It will quicken his 
 conscience. It will vitalise his conduct. And 
 he who has it not will be irretrievably 
 impoverished. 
 
 Not that we need strain this contrast between 
 religion and other things over much. I have 
 said that every serious pursuit moulds the 
 character, and there are some though I daresay 
 they are not common to whom nature or 
 literature or research is such a life-long passion 
 that one or other of these has even become a kind 
 of religion. People, at any rate, sometimes say 
 that. But there is something about what we more 
 usually call religion which distinguishes it from 
 these other things; and part of the distinction is 
 that, when it comes to the actual conduct of life, 
 whether it be in the great crises of life that try
 
 THE TEACHING OF RELIGION 163 
 
 our fortitude, or in the daily round that perhaps 
 proves our mettle no less effectually, it certainly 
 matters more that a man be religious than that 
 he be a lover of nature or books or research, how- 
 ever enthusiastic. It is this that makes religious 
 education so responsible a task, for we can say 
 of it not only what can be said of education in 
 general (and that is not a little), but something- 
 more. It is a part of education with claims 
 claims on our thought, our study, our service- 
 that are nothing short of paramount. 
 
 But if this be so, the inference is obvious. 
 When any man believes with heart and soul in 
 the importance of an end, he cannot stop there. 
 Instantly the thought comes up : How is this end 
 to be won ? Nor is there any plight more miserable 
 than to believe whole-heartedly in some end, and 
 to feel oneself impotent, through lack of 
 knowledge, lack of skill, lack of training, to 
 attain it. It is this thought that creates the sense 
 of the value of method, and the deeper the 
 conviction of the value of the end, the more 
 urgent and eager the search for the means. 
 Every parent, teacher, minister of religion, states- 
 man, every practical man knows this to be the 
 fact. He knows it in the confidence and satis- 
 faction and success of having found the right 
 methods; he knows it too in the perplexity, the 
 ineffectually, the misspent time and service vain, 
 the deplorable defeat of having failed to find 
 them. 
 
 It is, however, not my purpose to speak in
 
 164 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 detail of the methods of religious education. I 
 have not the claim to do so, because I have not 
 the experience. I leave that in the capable 
 hands of the expert. I will, therefore, under 
 this head of method, confine myself to a few 
 generalities; because there are some generalities 
 on the subject which are within the knowledge 
 of all of us. 
 
 Thus it is manifest enough that people differ, 
 and differ widely, as to the avenues, the modes 
 of approach, by which the young may best be led 
 into the presence of sacred things. 
 
 There are, for example, some who lay the 
 stress on the dogmatic teaching of catechisms and 
 creeds, so much so that, like our friend Sir Oliver 
 Lodge, in whom scientific genius and religious 
 sympathies have so conspicuously joined hands, 
 they essay the formidable task of supplementing 
 the older catechisms by writing new ones. It is a 
 method, one may say, which at any rate no 
 Scotsman is likely to forget. I am old enough 
 to remember how, on the passing of the Scottish 
 Education Act, the whole country, in every 
 school-board and every city, was in a ferment 
 over the burning question as to whether the 
 Shorter Catechism was to be taught in the 
 schools, and how the all but unanimous 
 pronouncement was that it should. Partly it was, 
 no doubt, that that masterly and venerable 
 document had become a religious symbol, rich in 
 associations with the old days when children had 
 learned their " Questions " (as we used to call
 
 THE TEACHING OF RELIGION 165 
 
 them) from parents and teachers to whom they 
 looked up with affection not unmixed with awe. 
 But partly also, and I dare say mainly, it was 
 because the Scottish people has always had a 
 suspicion of a merely emotional religion. It was 
 not enough for them to arouse the feelings. The 
 feelings were, in their somewhat hard-headed 
 estimates, too apt to be vague, fitful, evanescent, 
 untrustworthy. And so they set themselves, by 
 their Catechism with its clear-cut definitions, to 
 set before the youthful mind great and august 
 theological conceptions upon which the feelings, 
 otherwise vague and amorphous, might take hold. 
 They did this, one may add, so strenuously that 
 it sometimes happened that the intellectual 
 element altogether swamped the emotional, and 
 that the definitions, so admirably compact and 
 condensed, gave so much for the head to do that 
 the heart, and even the conscience, had hard work 
 to keep up with it. That is one method. You 
 will be able from your own experience of other 
 catechisms to find analogous instances. I have 
 given you that one because it is with it that my 
 own upbringing made me memorably familiar. 
 
 There is a second method which goes to an 
 opposite extreme. The idea which underlies it 
 is that, by the very laws of mental growth as 
 psychologists from the days of Plato and Aristotle 
 till the twentieth century have seen the youthful 
 heart lies open to emotional influences long before 
 the youthful mind has risen to the level at which 
 it can grasp formulae or handle definitions.
 
 166 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 Hence it is only natural that those who are of this 
 way of thinking should cast about to find, and to 
 magnify, those influences which seem to make 
 their appeal to the feelings feelings of awe, of 
 reverence, of mystery, of aspiration, of hope, of 
 love. Not that such people believe that to be 
 enough. Not necessarily at any rate. For they 
 may be of opinion that though we ought to begin 
 with appeal to the feelings, we need not end there. 
 Yet their distinctive characteristic remains. 
 Whatever we may do, we must (such is their 
 conviction) do justice, in our scheme of education, 
 to the religious emotions. We must do it even 
 in the later education of men and women, but we 
 must do it most of all in the education of the 
 young while their hearts are still tender and their 
 spirits responsive to all the heavenly and all the 
 earthly influences. This is the idei which seems 
 to work in the minds of those who lay especial 
 stress upon devotional services and religious 
 ceremonial. They may be thinking of widely 
 different things. To this one it may be the 
 "Cottar's Saturday Night," to that one the homely 
 ritual of some puritanical mountain chapel, to a 
 third the simple hymn and prayer of an 
 elementary school, to a fourth the habitual 
 services of a school or college chapel, to still 
 another the majesty and glory of a Cathedral 
 service to which all the arts have been made 
 tributary. But amidst diversities of form there 
 is one spirit. What they have all alike at heart 
 is to enkindle, to uplift, to sustain those religious
 
 THE TEACHING OF RELIGION 167 
 
 emotions to which the human soul is as surely 
 responsive as the whispering pines to the music of 
 the winds, as the sounding seashore to the voices 
 of the ocean. 
 
 There is a third method, and the keynote of it 
 is neither appeal to the intellect nor to the 
 emotions though it is very far from dispensing 
 with either but rather to the imagination and the 
 conscience. And it is this which perhaps most of 
 all concerns you here, because there lies ready to 
 your hand, if you only can learn to use it, so 
 powerful and so well tried an instrument in the 
 teaching of the Bible. 
 
 It is not for me to say how the Bible should 
 be taught. I cannot answer that question. I 
 content myself with saying that the difficulty in 
 answering it is due to the same cause which makes 
 it important to find its answer. The difficulty 
 comes of the fact that the Bible is not a book or a 
 subject, but (as has a thousand times been said) a 
 literature. It is history, biography, story, poetry, 
 prophecy, sermon, theology. Yes, and just for 
 that reason it becomes possible to find in it so 
 many varied ways in which its spiritual message 
 can be simply and rationally and convincingly 
 conveyed to all sorts of minds, and not least to 
 minds at a stage when the love of a story is strong, 
 and the imagination hungry and eager, and the 
 conscience plastic, and the instinct to find a 
 picture or a type far in excess of the appetite for 
 a definition or a formula. And it is for that 
 reason that so many feel such confidence in what
 
 i68 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 can be done by the great eventful story of Jewish 
 history, by the heroic individualities and winged 
 words of the Prophets, by the gladdening and 
 strengthening and consolatory music of the 
 Psalms, by the memorable utterances, the familiar 
 parables, the shining examples of Old and New 
 Testament. There is no teacher of any subject 
 who has such opportunities as the teacher of the 
 Bible, none certainly whose matter is more varied 
 and naturally interesting, and none who is better 
 placed to instil that spiritual message which lies 
 so very close to the thoughts and intents of the 
 heart, and to the vitalisation of the character. 
 One hears in these days often enough the alarm 
 that the Bible is being crushed out of the schools 
 of the nation, and it is I suppose true that some 
 people seem to wish to minimise it or even to get 
 rid of it altogether. But there are at any rate two 
 considerations -per contra. One is that it is not 
 credible that those who care for education (and 
 it is from the educational aspect I am speaking) 
 would be content to live on under the soul- 
 denying ordinanace of leaving to rust upon the 
 shelf one of the most effective of all educational 
 instruments. The other is that, if such a thing 
 were credible, it would force upon the Sunday 
 School the high distinction of preserving, I do not 
 say for churches or creeds, but for the education 
 of the human race, a book of which it may, in all 
 sobriety, be said that more than any other ever 
 printed it has both been found inexhaustible by 
 scholars, and been welcomed, through all the
 
 THE TEACHING OF RELIGION 169 
 
 centuries, by unlearned and even unlettered 
 millions an an unfailing source of spiritual 
 strength and consolation. 
 
 Such are the three great educational avenues 
 to sacred things the way of catechism and creed ; 
 the way of devotion and ceremonial; the way of 
 study of the Bible. They are not exclusive of 
 each other, though doubtless some will prefer one 
 and some another. Nor do I presume to sit in 
 judgment on their comparative value. I had 
 rather learn to do justice to them all. For, 
 diverse though they be, they all unite in one 
 purpose, they all converge upon one end none 
 other than that of leading the human spirit into 
 the presence of realities upon which the eye that 
 is once opened will never close. 
 
 But there is still another method, or rather 
 another aspect of all methods, and I am not sure 
 but that, in the guidance of young lives, it is the 
 most effectual of them all. 
 
 I do not know how many of you may be familiar 
 with Carlyle's " Sartor Resartus." Those who 
 are will remember how Carlyle describes the first 
 introduction of the hero of that strange spiritual 
 biography to spiritual things. It comes when this 
 hero of the story, looking back on his childhood, 
 tells how, as a little lad, he was taken to church 
 by his foster-parents. 
 
 " The highest whom I knew on earth," so runs 
 the reminiscence, " I here saw bowed down with 
 " awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven : 
 " such things, especially in infancy, reach inwards
 
 1 70 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 " to the very core of your being : mysteriously 
 " does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibility 
 " in the mysterious deeps, and reverence, the 
 " divinest in man, springs forth undying from its 
 " mean envelopment of fear." 
 
 And Carlyle adds a sentence to suggest, I 
 suppose, how experiences like this may 
 profoundly influence a man's valuations of 
 persons and things all through his life : 
 1 Would'st thou rather be a peasant's son that 
 ;< knew, were it never so rudely, there was a God 
 " in Heaven and in Man ; or a duke's son that 
 " only knew there were two and thirty quarterings 
 " on the family coach? " 
 
 Nor is this other than a quite common 
 experience. It holds, indeed, of many other 
 things besides religion. It holds, one may say, 
 of all the less tangible influences that operate in 
 life. Is there not many an one who can trace the 
 dawn of an interest in literature back to the far-off 
 day when he first realised how profound was the 
 veneration of those he loved and looked-up to 
 a father, a friend, a teacher for one or other of 
 the great books or great writers of the world? 
 Are there not others who can remember how they 
 first formed some dim notion of the seriousness 
 of social or political movements, on the day 
 when they saw a father, or an elder brother, 
 or simply some acquaintance absorbed and 
 excited by some political crisis, or some burning 
 social question? This was their first lesson in 
 citizenship. Are there not others still, to whom
 
 the heretofore somewhat mysterious words 
 " business " and " the office " begin to gain a 
 new significance from occasions in which even 
 very young eyes have not failed to mark the 
 pre-occupied and care-worn face of the bread- 
 winner of the household? It is so that most of 
 us come to have our first lessons in the reality of 
 things. It is not telling that does it. It is not 
 teaching about literature, or about politics, or 
 about business life, that does it. It is personal 
 experience, and actual daily observation by young 
 eyes of those we most look up to, when they are 
 deeply moved by the realities of life. For it is 
 in this way that those we love and respect become 
 to us, in our receptive and open-hearted youth, 
 the missionaries of that greater unexplored world 
 that lies beyond our childish horizon. 
 
 It is not otherwise when the experiences are 
 religious. You will not suppose that I under- 
 estimate the value of catechisms and creeds, or of 
 the thoughts that breathe and the words that burn 
 on the sacred page, or of the penetrating 
 influences of devotional services. I have done 
 my best at any rate, in some imperfect fashion, 
 to do them justice. They are all so important 
 that one cannot wonder if controversies rage, in 
 the educational as well as the religious world, as 
 to their comparative value. But behind the noise 
 of the controversies there keeps sounding in one's 
 ears that notable saying of one of our wisest :* 
 " If you would teach religion, the first thing is 
 
 * Thomas Carlyle.
 
 i;2 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 " to find a man who has religion." It is a 
 principle that is the bed-rock of all education. 
 If you wish to make a boy a scholar well, it is 
 not easy but the first thing is to place him in the 
 hands of a scholar in whom he may see scholar- 
 ship incarnate. If you would make a lad a man 
 of business, send him into a great commercial 
 house in which he can see, daily and hourly, a 
 man of enterprise, and integrity, and practical 
 wisdom at work. If you would make a good 
 citizen, then bring the citizen-that-is-to-be under 
 the habitual influence of men and women to whom 
 civic patriotism is a serious and sacrificing 
 passion. Nothing is more certain than that, for 
 all effective and permanent influence, a man must 
 be the thing he wishes to impart. That is the 
 root of the matter. 
 
 The application to our subject is obvious. You 
 aspire, in your Sunday Schools, to teach and to 
 train boys and girls to be Christian men and 
 women. I congratulate you on your high calling. 
 There is none higher. It demands knowledge, 
 reverence, skill, sympathy, devotion, patience. 
 Yes, and it also demands most of all that you 
 yourself should have drank of spiritual life at 
 those same unfailing sources to which you aspire 
 to lead the lives entrusted to your care. For it 
 is only then you can hope truly to feed and to 
 discipline their character by bringing them to 
 care, above all things else, for those things that 
 are most worth caring for in life.
 
 VIIL-ETHICAL THEORY AND 
 PRACTICE.* 
 
 It is no wonder that the gulf between ethical 
 theory and practice yawns so wide. It is 
 seemingly so hard to bridge it from either side. 
 For, on the one hand, it is quite certain that the 
 practical world cares little for theories. It does 
 not seem so much as to miss their absence. 
 Driven on by the relentless urgencies of life 
 urgencies of livelihood, of ambition, of passion, 
 of impatience it has not the time, even if it had 
 the appetite or the faculty for theorising. It has 
 so much to do to make itself more moral that it is 
 not minded to think about morality. Nor are 
 many things more remarkable than the easy 
 consciences with which even the salt of the earth, 
 though they would wince under the faintest 
 aspersion of moral backsliding, can sit supine 
 under the imputation that they will not think. In 
 truth they are too seldom encouraged to try. All 
 too seldom do their teachers and preachers, their 
 priests and pastors espouse the neglected cause of 
 
 * A Paper read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of 
 Liverpool.
 
 174 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 theory unless, indeed, it be the cause of the 
 comprehensive theory that theory is a superfluity. 
 For their very prophets are at times /iwrdXoyoi, to 
 whom the theorist, especially the ethical theorist, 
 is a perversion, and theory a sacrilege : 
 
 The moral sense, thank God ! is a thing you will never 
 account for. By no greatest Happiness principle, greatest Noble- 
 ness principle, or any principle whatever, will you make that 
 the least clearer than it already is : forbear, I say, or you may 
 darken it away from you altogether. 
 
 Strong words ! But do we really need them in a 
 world in which, too manifestly, as Plato puts it, 
 philosophers are useless because mankind will not 
 use them? 
 
 When, on the other hand, we turn to the 
 theorists, it would be rash to say that they 
 reciprocate this indifference. Let the truth be 
 told at once. The philosopher the ethical 
 philosopher at any rate has a weakness. It is 
 a secret longing to preach. And though when 
 caught ftagrante delicto, especially by other 
 philosophers, he is ashamed of himself, and 
 almost over prompt to admit that it is not the 
 philosopher's business to preach (which indeed is 
 true), his human sympathies are too much for him, 
 and in his own despite his thoughts begin to 
 breathe and his words to burn. It has happened 
 before now that moral philosophers have been 
 likewise moral reformers. It happened in Greece. 
 From Socrates right on to the Stoics, and some- 
 times, as in Plato, with passionate aspiration, the 
 thoughts of the thinkers, even when deeply
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE 175 
 
 plunged in analysis and definition, have been 
 eager to turn to the betterment of men's lives. 
 So likewise in the modern world. Theory and 
 practice may have sundered. But the battles of 
 rival ethical schools of ascetics and hedonists, 
 of Kantians and utilitarians have not been 
 fought solely for the calm empire of thought, but 
 also for the sway of the human soul and human 
 destiny. There are invocations to Duty even in 
 the cold analytic page of Kant. Nor can all the 
 formal rigour of demonstration, and all the 
 repudiation of tears and laughter that freeze the 
 sentences of Spinoza, quench the surmise that the 
 writer of the Ethics sustained his vast and solitary 
 labours by the conviction that he was revealing 
 to passion-tossed man the peace that cometh of 
 understanding. 
 
 Such aspirations are happily far from illusory, 
 as perhaps tne sequel may prove. Yet they do 
 not justify the expectation that the philosopher 
 can do much to leaven the world by his own direct 
 influence upon it. The philosopher has his 
 mission, and his mission is, of course, to be a 
 philosopher. His chief end is not to alter the 
 world, but to understand it. It is not the 
 physiologist's chief end to be a doctor; n9r the 
 economist's to be a Chancellor of the Exchequer; 
 nor the logician's to be a master of argumentation. 
 No more is it the moral philosopher's calling to 
 make men moral. Not better men, but better 
 theories, this is his main concern. Therefore is 
 he sometimes misunderstood. " There is nothing
 
 " harder," once said Burke in his usual vein, 
 " than the heart of a thorough-bred meta- 
 14 physician " (i.e., abstract thinker). But it is not 
 that the heart of the theorist is harder than those 
 of his neighbours. He may be pitiful of men like 
 the philosopher of the New Atlantis. He may 
 play his part as citizen, as Fichte did in the hour 
 of his country's need, or as Green of Oxford did 
 when, in unobtrusive devotion, he led the life of 
 the honest citizen and good neighbour, to which 
 in his writings he never failed to do honour. And 
 many a thinker besides Mill has found incentive 
 in the thought that the best work done for the 
 world is often that of those who have lived 
 remote. The point is that even the most 
 sympathetic of theorists can make but little way 
 by himself directly leavening the world with 
 theories. It is not his vocation, and probably 
 enough he has neither the gifts nor the time nor 
 the rhetoric the glowing ideal, the telling 
 metaphor, the vivid instance, the impassioned 
 appeal without which theory will knock long 
 and in vain for entrance into the popular mind. 
 " Philosophy," says Mark Pattison, '" perishes 
 " the moment you would teach it." It perishes 
 at any rate the moment you would preach it- 
 perishes to live in other forms which must needs 
 sacrifice the rigour of philosophical statement if 
 they are ever to gain the ear of the world, and 
 mould its life. 
 
 The inference is obvious. If theory can power- 
 fully influence the world, it will be because the
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE 177 
 
 philosopher finds those better qualified in this 
 respect than himself to whom he can entrust his 
 message. 
 
 For such allies he need not look in vain. 
 There is a figure well known to us in this great 
 centre of commerce. He produces nothing, and 
 though we may not say he consumes nothing, yet 
 what he consumes is but a fraction of what passes 
 through his hands. For is it not through him, as 
 middleman, that the produce passes which feeds 
 the factories of our myriad-handed industrial life ? 
 There are middlemen, too, of the spiritual world, 
 all them preachers, teachers, moralists, essayists, 
 orators, poets. By gifts, by vocation, by 
 sympathy, they belong not strictly to the world 
 of theory, nor yet definitely to the world of 
 practice. Yet they are, or may be, in intimate 
 relation to both; and the hope is that, at their 
 hands, theory will receive that interpretation and 
 expression which it cannot receive from the 
 theorist himself and which yet it must receive if 
 it is really to pass into the mind and life of a 
 people. 
 
 No one can doubt that, in one aspect at least, 
 these " middlemen " are fitted for this task. 
 They gain the ear of the world. For the world 
 needs, and it knows it needs them. It needs them 
 as satirists to lash its vices, cynics to probe its 
 weaknesses, moralists to uplift its standard of 
 valuation, preachers to steady its fluctuating 
 faiths, prophets to feed its aspirations, spiritual 
 leaders of all kinds to quicken and to strengthen
 
 i;8 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 its soul. Nor will it be otherwise so long as the 
 world, with all its conventionalities, sensualities, 
 apathies, is haunted by the sense of shortcoming, 
 and visited, however fitfully, by the cloud-skirted 
 dreams of a better life. Therefore the world 
 gives heed to the penetrating earnestness of 
 Robertson, to the high discourse of Ruskin, to 
 the aggressive honesty of Huxley, to the ethical 
 reasonableness of Arnold, to the prophecies of 
 Carlyle, the music of Tennyson, the optimism of 
 Browning, and to the whole many-coloured host 
 who follow in their train. They are not men of 
 action, these middlemen : a long road lies between 
 their words, however moving, and men's deeds. 
 Yet they have their allies Church, School, 
 Home, Press, Platform. Nor is there one of 
 these that is not leavened to its core by the great 
 rhetoricians who never fail to arise as generation 
 follows generation. 
 
 This, in a word, is not our difficulty. The 
 world listens to ideas, if clothed in rhetoric. 
 The world acts on ideas, when ideas fire the 
 imagination. The difficulty comes when we ask 
 if these men who give the world its ideas these 
 middlemen of the spiritual world will them- 
 selves in turn listen to the theorist. This is the 
 central point. 
 
 Now, once this question is raised, it becomes 
 evident in a moment that theory has rivals rivals 
 so powerful that against them theory has to 
 struggle for its life. One of these is authority, 
 and the other is intuition.
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE 179 
 
 We do not here discuss the influence of 
 authority and intuition upon the ordinary life. 
 Our concern is with " the middlemen " with 
 those who aspire to be, by pen or tongue, the 
 moral leaders of their generation : and what in 
 particular we wish to discover is the claim which 
 ethical theory may reasonably have upon them. 
 
 No one can doubt that many of these teachers 
 of the world may become the servants, and some 
 the slaves of authority. As little can one doubt 
 that many others rest content with intuitions whose 
 subjective strength is taken all too readily as 
 warrant for their objective truth. Church and 
 world manifestly teem, therefore, with men who 
 accept the role of moral leadership, and yet 
 ignore, or even (like Carlyle) flout the claims of 
 ethical theory. There is no call to quarrel with 
 either authority or intuition on that account. 
 Authority is so vast a principle, and the forms 
 through which it speaks are often so august and 
 so venerable, that minds may still remain remark- 
 able, if not great, even when they have accepted 
 the attitude of credo quia impossibile. And 
 insight, however incoherent its intuitions may be, 
 is sometimes so penetrating that it may put to 
 shame the work of lesser minds who " love to 
 " spin the ostentatious continuity." There need, 
 therefore, be no quarrel with either except when 
 the grateful admission that they can do much, is 
 perverted into the obscurantist claim that between 
 them they can do everything. For then it 
 becomes the task of those who believe in theory
 
 i8o ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 to insist that there are certain definite services 
 which theory can render to our middlemen of the 
 intellectual world, for which they will look in vain 
 to authority, however consecrated, or to intuition, 
 however piercing. 
 
 i. In the first place, it is theory, and theory 
 alone, that can enable our moral prophets to meet 
 theory by theory. 
 
 It would be too much to say that every leader of 
 thought is bound to meet theory by theory. He 
 may prefer to meet it by rhetorical projectiles, 
 and, in Johnsonian fashion, when his pistol misses 
 fire to knock down his adversary with the butt 
 end. Or he may prefer to meet it by a dogma, to 
 dispute which involves an indictment of a sacred 
 book, a " universal " church, or of one or other 
 of the traditions of the elders. Or he may prefer 
 to meet it by appeal, couched in burning words, 
 to conscience. They are all effective methods, 
 and we need not, in this so combative world, 
 disparage even the first. Only be it well under- 
 stood that he who limits himself to one or all of 
 the three, even though he should speak with the 
 tongue of men and of angels, must be prepared 
 to run a risk the grave risk of losing hold of 
 the more rational minds of his generation. 
 
 As a matter of fact it is the perception of the 
 gravity of the risk that has prompted some of the 
 greatest efforts of ethical speculation that the 
 world has seen. One may not say perhaps that 
 had the Sophists never arisen in Greece, Socrates 
 would have lived and died unknown. But it is
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE i8r 
 
 beyond doubting that neither Socrates nor Plato 
 nor Aristotle would be numbered among the 
 conscript fathers of philosophy had they not 
 dedicated their lives to deliver the better minds 
 of their generation from the sophistic theories that 
 Might is Right, and individual hedonistic self- 
 interest the measure of morality. They felt the 
 need in the public interest of meeting theory by 
 theory. 
 
 The situation repeats itself. In every 
 community such as ours there are men born and 
 bred with the rationalising instinct. Dogma, even 
 when it takes the hybrid form of dogmatic theory, 
 cannot satisfy their craving, nor intuitions, how- 
 ever glowing and prophetic, appease their 
 appetite to understand. They hunger still for 
 something more coherent, more intelligible, more 
 rational. Followers afar off of Hume, they will 
 not envy even the angels who hide their eyes with 
 their wings. No; they will enquire, question, 
 discuss, and doubt; and especially will they 
 discuss and doubt the foundations of morality. 
 And if the preachers and teachers of their 
 generation these " middlemen " to whom they 
 look for light have no reasons to give, then we 
 shall have the spectacle of minds drifting rudder- 
 less from creeds in which they can find no rest, 
 and from gospels in which they can find no- 
 coherence. 
 
 Every teacher of his generation must face the 
 fact that he has minds like this to reckon with. 
 The ethical insight in Robertson's sermons, the
 
 182 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 subtle persuasiveness of Newman's argument, the 
 heart-moving music of In Memoriam, the wild 
 prophetic fire of Sartor Resartus even these will 
 not win them. Nothing will win them but to give 
 them more of what they want, to appease this so 
 reasonable longing for more light, to lead them on 
 by every resource of rhetorical exposition to the 
 pages of the masters who know because they 
 think. 
 
 Hence the pity and the disaster of it, when our 
 men of genius become /uo-dAoyoi. They betray their 
 trust. Does the officer of health refuse the light 
 of the pathologist? or the doctor of the 
 physiologist? or the engineer of the mathe- 
 matician? or the statesman of the economist? 
 Even our manufacturers in days when practice 
 is turning with a feverish anxiety to science 
 believe that the chemist or the electrician has 
 something to tell them. Why then should our 
 leaders of the world's thought flatter themselves 
 that they can afford to ignore the systematised 
 reflection of the great philosophers upon man's 
 life and destiny? It is no sufficient answer to say 
 that philosophers are at variance. They are at 
 variance, they have ever been at variance among 
 themselves, and this would be in point if we asked 
 our prophets and teachers to go to them for 
 dogmas. But it is not for dogmas that we ask to 
 go. It is for the rationalising spirit, the methods 
 of analysis, above all it is for that passion 
 and effort after coherency and consistency of 
 conviction, in absence of which the thoughtful
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE 183 
 
 minds of any generation will turn away even from 
 the genius with abiding dissatisfaction. 
 
 2. Akin to this is the further service that 
 ethical theory may do much to sustain belief in the 
 essential reality of the moral ideal in days of 
 transition and doubt. 
 
 For there is a weakness to which, at such times, 
 the non-theorising person, however gifted, is 
 prone; and it is never greater than when his 
 unreasoned convictions are blindly strong. He 
 is too apt to think that morality itself is staked 
 upon the finality of the precise form in which the 
 moral ideal has shaped itself in his imagination. 
 The time comes when this this version of the 
 ideal is subjected to an inevitable criticism. It 
 may be simply the criticism to which all ideals 
 are subjected by life, or it may be the subtle sap 
 of the casuist, or it may be the direct assault of 
 the sceptic. The result is that, in proportion as 
 this combined attack begins to prevail, he is apt 
 to be panic-stricken, and to think that his moral 
 world is tottering to its fall. 
 
 He has more ways than one of reassuring him- 
 self. Have we not said that he can find shelter 
 and retreat under some authority which may 
 silence, though it cannot solve, his doubts? 
 Have we not said that he may trust to his 
 intuitions, or perhaps follow in the train of some 
 great ethical prophet? For, of course, it is the 
 glory of the ethical prophet that he has an eye 
 that can divide asunder form and substance, and 
 intuitively discern the eternally true behind, or
 
 1 84 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 through, its perishable embodiments. But there 
 is a third way the way of ethical theory. In its 
 results, this is not unlike the last. For it, too, 
 brings its message that the particular forms of 
 moral ideal to which man's allegiance is given are, 
 to the larger view, finite and transitory. It, too, 
 discerns behind this flux of forms one and the 
 same principle of never-dying moral life, 
 persistently striving to realise itself anew under 
 the endlessly varied and everchanging conditions 
 of actual and imagined experience. It, too, in a 
 word, discriminates between the forms that decay 
 and the function that never dies; between the 
 ideals which are but perishable textures of human 
 imagination, and that imperishable fore-felt and 
 in part foreseen moral end, for which from age to 
 age and from place to place, the human spirit has 
 been for ever labouring to weave a worthier 
 vesture. And, indeed, the results are so much 
 the same, that philosophy has been denounced for 
 vexing itself, and vexing its votaries, by trying 
 to do laboriously what prophetic insight can do 
 by the swifter, easier way of intuition. 
 
 Away, haunt thou not me 
 Thou vain philosophy ! 
 Little hast thou bestead, 
 Save to perplex the head, 
 And leave the spirit dead. 
 * ****** 
 
 Why labour at the dull mechanic oar 
 When the fresh breeze is blowing, 
 And the strong current flowing, 
 Right onward to the Eternal Shore !
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE 185 
 
 The answer is that, though the results be the 
 same, the process is different. It is the ethical 
 thinker's task to analyse experience, not simply 
 his own (which may be a small thing), but also that 
 larger experience of mankind which is written in 
 the moral institutions of society, and not least in 
 the lives of the reformers, teachers, saints, heroes, 
 prophets of our race. From such analysis he 
 does not return empty-handed. He brings two 
 convictions. One is the knowledge that it is the 
 fate 'of all particular forms of the moral ideal 
 (from which nothing can save them) to yield to the 
 slow sap of the criticism of the morrow; and the 
 other the complementary conviction that the moral 
 life of w r hich man is capable, and which he knows 
 he is imperatively bound to realise, remains a far 
 richer and loftier thing than has ever yet found 
 its reflection in the imperfect mirror of human 
 heart and conscience. Only be it noted that 
 when we call these the convictions of an ethical 
 philosopher, we mean that they rest, not on the 
 fitful revelations of prophetic insight, which may 
 so easily mistake the light that leads astray for 
 light from Heaven, but on the firm ground of 
 observation, analysis, and proof. 
 
 It is for this reason that the genuine student 
 of philosophy will, even in days of disintegration 
 and doubt, look on without misgiving at the 
 contradictions of moral standards, the conflict of 
 duties, the dilemmas of casuistry, the whisperings 
 of the spirit of negation. For he will know, if he 
 knows anything, that such things needs must come.
 
 186 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 He will have discounted them by anticipation. 
 If he have the full courage of his convictions, he 
 will take a further step still. For in those very 
 contradictions and collisions, which are the 
 terror of the dogmatist, and the despair of the 
 unreasoning mind, and in the spectacle, always 
 tragical enough, of some cherished ideal 
 crumbling before mordant criticism, he will see 
 but one more proof of the exhaustless vitality of 
 that moral law which, for ever on the march, does 
 but " strike its tent in order to begin a new 
 ' journey." 
 
 It is here the moral philosopher can help the 
 moral prophet. Inspiration and utterance he 
 cannot give; these are the gifts of nature and of 
 art and of the spirit that bloweth where it listeth. 
 But he can give what even the greatest of 
 prophets and teachers may lack, the assurance 
 that the beliefs they offer to the world stand firm 
 because they are rooted in reason. Do they not 
 themselves know the need of this? How many, 
 one sometimes wonders, are the teachers of the 
 world who have had to give their message " in 
 " the light of yesterday's faith hoping it may 
 " come back to-morrow " ? How many have 
 striven, not disingeniously, but from motives far 
 from unworthy, to cover up even from themselves, 
 by confident words and impassioned appeal, the 
 secret misgivings which it would seem like treason 
 to reveal to the world ? This is the situation that 
 philosophy faces ; this is the need it tries to meet. 
 Not, be it granted, by any promise of finality (for
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE 187 
 
 none knows better than the philosopher that his 
 constructions may be incomplete), yet not without 
 an unwavering confidence that it is only when 
 reason has done the work that the structure of 
 conviction can stand coherent and secure. 
 
 3. Ethical theory, then, can sustain the belief 
 in the moral ideal. We may add now that it can 
 powerfully affect the form which the moral ideal 
 may from time to time assume. 
 
 There is a popular error here which needs 
 correcting. It comes of the illusion that it 
 devolves upon the philosopher to create his ideals, 
 so to say, out of his own head. It would be 
 truer (though not wholly true) to say that the 
 philosopher creates nothing. For the duties 
 and the virtues, which give substance, body, 
 " content " to the philosopher's ideal, are not the 
 creations of philosophy. They are the gradual 
 discoveries of human experience of the god- 
 fearing reverence of the Hebrew, of the self- 
 controlled confidence of the Greek, of the 
 domestic purity and civic devotion of the Roman, 
 of the pitifulness and aspiration of the Christian, 
 of the chivalry of the knight, of the integrity and 
 justice of the modern world of industry and 
 commerce. Not only do the virtues thus, by their 
 own exhaustless life, spring up in profusion long 
 before theory and theorists could be there to plant 
 them; the same holds true of ideals. What can 
 be more incontrovertible than that ideals existed 
 ages before theory had come upon the scene at 
 all?
 
 1 88 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 Yet, though philosophy cannot, in this sense, 
 create, it can remedy the grave imperfections in 
 what is otherwise created. For it is the bane of 
 non-philosophical morality that one-half of its 
 ideals are apt to be one-sided for lack of breadth ; 
 and the other-half, incoherent and fragmentary 
 for lack of unity. Nor are these imperfections 
 easily avoided. For, on the one hand, whenever 
 an ideal takes the form (as it so often does) of a 
 type a typical man, a typical society it is apt 
 to lose in breath. Just in proportion as the type 
 is vividly and faithfully imaged, it surrenders its 
 claim to comprehensiveness by becoming simply 
 one type among others. On the other hand, if we 
 begin to see that our moral ideal must be a wider 
 and more many-sided thing than any single type 
 can embody, we run an opposite risk. The unity 
 of the ideal of type breaks up, and falls asunder 
 before the recognition of many elements 
 aggregated without regard to unity and 
 proportion. Hence the multitude of ideals alike 
 of poet of prophet and of moralist that have unity 
 without breadth, and breadth without unity. 
 
 This is what philosophy can help to remedy. 
 For, on the one side, it takes that wider survey 
 of experience which brings home the conviction 
 that the rightly nurtured human soul is too rich 
 in possibilities to be everywhere moulded after 
 any single concrete type, even the greatest. And, 
 on the other hand, it has learnt by many an 
 instance how the inculcation of virtues, however 
 shining, will stiffen into a lifeless catalogue of
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE 189 
 
 qualities, if it be not saved from this by a 
 vitalising conception of the supreme end be it 
 greatest happiness, duty, perfection, or what you 
 will in the light of which all the cardinal human 
 virtues can be seen to cohere as diverse modes of 
 approach towards what man has it in him to 
 become. Such a conception is precisely what 
 philosophy can give. 
 
 Nor need philosophy be overmuch disquieted 
 by the obvious tu quoque that its own ideals have 
 often enough been limited and one-sided. This 
 is so true that it would be unanswerable were 
 moral philosophy identifiable with the mere 
 succession of ethical ideals which have seen the 
 light in the long history of ethical theory. But 
 philosophy is more than these. It lies deeper, 
 being in its essence a spirit of synthesis. As 
 such, it is as inherently intolerant, in the long run, 
 of unity without comprehensiveness as of compre- 
 hensiveness without unity. Grant that some of 
 the ideals of character it has held up to the world, 
 with the Cynic, Stoic, Epicurean in the ancient 
 world, as with Hobbes, Kant, and Bentham in 
 modern times, have been so one-sided as to have 
 mutilated human nature and repelled the world 
 by their contractedness. Little that matters, so 
 long as we bear in mind that philosophy invites no 
 man to accept these or any other ideals as a 
 gospel. It invites to nothing except to surrender 
 to that spirit of synthesis which if, in the passion 
 for unity and consistency, it has constructed ideals 
 that are narrow, has likewise, as the history of
 
 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 ethical thought testifies, been swift to subject them 
 to criticism and to go forward to new constructions 
 such as will better do justice to the facts of many- 
 sided experience. It is the same in the history of 
 the individual so long as he keeps mentally alive. 
 He may for a season be content with this ideal or 
 with that, and perhaps be jealous to defend it 
 against all comers with all the ardour of convinced 
 discipleship. But if the spirit of philosophy be 
 in him, he will not sit down satisfied till he has 
 striven to gather up into his ideal every element 
 of conspicuous value which experience has 
 disclosed. And it is precisely because, and so far 
 as, this spirit is in him that he can help to awaken 
 even great and inspired teachers if they would 
 but listen from that unconsciousness of the 
 limitations of their ideals which is itself one of 
 the greatest of limitations. 
 
 4. It is a still greater service that ethical 
 theory can bring its students one step nearer that 
 reasonable service that alone is perfect freedom. 
 It is this that enables us to meet what is perhaps 
 the most forcible of all the pleas for the 
 disparagement of theory. Theory, it is said, 
 does not really come to a man till his life is, in 
 large measure, already determined, for good or 
 for evil. He has chosen his vocation. He has 
 formed his habits and built them into the fabric of 
 character. He has wrought his moral ideal, what- 
 ever it be, into the texture of his life. As against 
 all this, what can the belated gospel of ethical 
 theory do? Are we to suppose it will work a
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE 191 
 
 miracle ? Slow is the process and long is the way 
 by which any bit of theory passes into the life. 
 Is it not likely to be slower still, and longer, for 
 those whose whole moral being has already taken 
 set and shape under the great twin-influences 
 of habituation and authority. ; ' Surely it is 
 " impossible, or at least the hardest of tasks," 
 and it is Aristotle who speaks, " to remove by 
 " argument (Adyw) what has been from of old 
 " engrained in the character." 
 
 The force of this must be acknowledged. It 
 is undeniably true that, if men are in character 
 good, ethical theory will not forthwith pervert 
 them to vice. It is no less true that if they be 
 bad, ethical theory will not forthwith convert them 
 to virtue. Character is too stable a structure to 
 rise, like the walls of Thebes, to the music of 
 theories however persuasive, or to fall like the 
 walls of Jericho to the blowing of all the trumpets 
 of theorists, however aggressive. Can one 
 wonder, therefore, if theory is ignored, if not 
 derided, not only by the disciples but by the 
 leaders, not only by the average man but by those 
 middlemen of the spiritual world, as we have 
 called them, to whom the disciples look for light. 
 
 But it is precisely here that the claims of theory- 
 are upon strong ground. It does not follow that 
 because ethical theory makes no pretension to 
 work sudden miracles upon character, it can do 
 nothing. On the contrary it is not too much to 
 say that it, and it alone, can carry to completeness 
 the moral emancipation of man.
 
 192 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 There is a morality that never asks the reason 
 why for the life of duty it nobly exemplifies. 
 And when we meet the men who live it we call 
 them, with Wordsworth, the ;< bondsmen " of 
 duty, not stumbling at the servile word because 
 the service is so high. The word is better chosen 
 than we may think. For bondsmen and no better 
 they still are, and bondsmen they will remain 
 (however glorious their service), so long as the 
 grounds upon which service is rendered are 
 unexamined and unintelligible. Even the 
 service of a god is but a loftier slavery, if it leaves 
 the reason of the servant darkened. 
 
 It is here that philosophy brings its message 
 of emancipation. All ethical schools (unless we 
 except intuitionism, which is a kind of despair of 
 explanation) attempt to explain the problem of 
 moral obligation. Their solutions are different : 
 their aim is one. Refusing to regard the duties of 
 life, however fundamental or cherished or sacred, 
 as facts that defy analysis, they ask the reason 
 Why for one and all of them. Up to their light 
 they give their answers, and even when their 
 answers fail to satisfy, be it never said that they 
 leave us no better than we were. For even then 
 they at least bring us nearer that reasonable 
 service, without which the bondsmen of duty still 
 wear the livery of moral servitude. 
 
 You will not suppose me to be saying that even 
 a perfect theory of moral obligation were such 
 attainable would of itself make its possessor 
 morally free. This would be absurd. Men have
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE 193 
 
 painfully to work out their moral freedom in their 
 lives. They must become freemen in habitual 
 thought, feeling, desire, deed. Many an un- 
 lettered man who has been far enough from 
 theories of any kind, has in this way wrought out r 
 in sweat of soul, a substantial freedom, even 
 under iron limitations, which he could neither alter 
 nor understand. '' Servitude," says Carlyle, " is 
 
 a blessing and a great liberty, the greatest that 
 " can be given a man. So the shrewd little de 
 
 Stael, on reconsidering and computing it, found 
 :c that the place of all places even known to her 
 " she had enjoyed the most freedom in was the 
 ' Bastille." Need it be said that, in default of 
 this this actual achievement of the moral life 
 a knowledge of all the theories of moral obligation 
 put together would profit us little. 
 
 The point is that, be this practical moral 
 achievement never so splendid, philosophy 
 has something to superadd. It can speak 
 the last word of emancipation; not the spurious 
 " emancipation " born of caprice, that would 
 shake allegiance to our habitual duties, but that 
 far other emancipation that rivets allegiance the 
 closer, because it makes it open-eyed, intelligent, 
 and reasonable. For this is the one service that, 
 for a rational being, is perfect freedom. 
 
 5. It remains to urge one further point. 
 Theory can enable moral teachers to meet theory 
 by theory ; it can sustain their belief in the reality 
 of the moral ideal ; it can help to give to that ideal 
 unity and breadth ; and it can crown the struggle
 
 194 ETHICS OF SOCIAL WORK 
 
 for moral freedom. Is it too much to claim that, 
 beyond all this, it can quicken the moral life ? 
 
 One suspects that philosophers are here too 
 modest. They claim too little. Realising 
 beyond all others how wide is the gulf between 
 Theory and Practice, and well aware that it is 
 not for philosophy to create, so much as to 
 systematise what is otherwise created, they come 
 to underrate the quickening influences of the 
 study of ethical fact. " It is not to be supposed," 
 says T. H. Green, " that .... anyone for 
 !< being a theoretic utilitarian has been a better 
 " man." When one studies the lives of the great 
 utilitarians of Bentham, the founder, of James 
 Mill, the propagandist, of John Mill, the apostle 
 it is difficult to believe it. These men lived for 
 the public good as few have done; and though 
 they might have done this without their 
 philosophy, as many other lesser men have 
 done, one is driven to think, if there be 
 truth in biography, that as the idea of human 
 happiness rose before their eyes in ever widening 
 comprehensiveness, in ever increasing detail, it 
 kindled within them a zeal for public good which 
 would not otherwise, in measure so abounding, 
 have entered into their lives. 
 
 So with ideals other than the utilitarian. 
 Readers of Green's Prolegomena to Ethics cannot 
 fail to feel the indomitable repressed fervour of 
 its pages ; and those who knew the man can never 
 forget the unobtrusive passion for righteousness 
 that shone through a character which shrank from
 
 ETHICAL THEORY & PRACTICE 195 
 
 expression of the deeper emotions. It was ethical 
 temperament. It was strength of character. It 
 was habitual moral aspiration. Doubtless. But 
 was it not likewise the fruit of a life-long 
 reasoning reflection upon the moral possibilities 
 of the soul, and of speculation resolute to the end 
 upon the problem of human destiny. For it is 
 false to say that the deeper ethical analysis, how- 
 ever scientific, blights the enthusiasm and freezes 
 the feelings. It seems to do so only because 
 feeling must be sternly held in check whilst 
 analysis proceeds, lest we fall under the 
 temptation of believing what we wish, not what 
 we know, to be true. As we labour at " the dull 
 mechanic oar," our backs must needs be to that 
 goodly land whither all the while we are voyaging. 
 Yet, be it never forgotten that ethical analysis 
 brings us, by its own path, into the presence of 
 august and enduring objects into the habitual 
 presence of moral law, of public good, of the far 
 off half-revealed and half-concealed possibilities 
 of the individual life. The man who has looked 
 upon these facts with what Plato called " the eye 
 " of the soul," will be other than that cold- 
 blooded analyst in whom the world too often 
 travesties the philosopher. For, after his own 
 fashion, he will have been led to see the vision, 
 and as he muses in his silent and solitary hours, 
 the fire will burn within him.
 
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