,5jrtEBNIVER% <«513DNVS01^ ^lOSANCEUj*^ %a3AiNn3Wv* *C u3 ^itfOJIlVOJO^ ^<»OJI1VOJO ,^V\EUNIVERy/A <: =3 ^^lOSANCEUf^ o %- -I -5;^t-UBRARYQ< ^JTUONVSOl^ %a3AINI13WV^ %Qmyi^^ ^mmm^ ^ofcaiifori^ ^JO^ t^ ce AWEUNIVERy/A ^fJlJDNV-SOV^ ^lOSANCElfX^ o ^OFCAllFOff^ ^OFCAIIFOR^ ct =3 nil 1 cri i? Y< ^^^Aavaani^ Jl?AHVJiaiH^ ^lllBRARYOc^ ^lOSANCElfj-A ^.aojnvDjo'^ ^aaAiNomv ^OFCAllFOflJi^ ^OFCAIIFOR^ ^5 ^^Aavaan-^^ ^««k^>« .A^ HERBERT JENKINS LIMITED ARUNDEL PLACE HAYMARKET LONDON S.W. ^ ^ MCMXIII THE ANCHOR PRESS. LTT>., TIPTRIVT, K8SF.X // " ■ TO C3 MY WIFE a* i£> FROM WHOM I HAVE LEARNT O Ui 62 THE BEST THINGS THAT I KNOW a88n;03 INTRODUCTION THIS book is placed in our hands at a singu- larly apt moment. Never before in the whole history of England has it been more urgent to reaffirm national principles, and to direct men's minds from the expedient and the transient to the vital and the eternal. To rearrange national thought, to rekindle the national consciousness, to become the champion of all that has made England great, must be the task of any pohtical party that seeks to be patriotic. And to be patriotic is to be successful. No Unionist will mimimize the splendid work of his party in Parhament. No student of contem- porary history will be found to deny that the intellect and the performance of the protagonists at West- minster stand as high as ever. But outside and beyond the House of Commons there are aspirations, conscious and sub-conscious, to which the Press and the Parhament make but httle response. Until these aspirations are satisfied by the presentment of a conquering ideal, there will be no real confidence in any political party, and no hope for England. One set of poUticians or another may be able to viii INTRODUCTION show by a process of arithmetic that they have a right to govern as long as they can keep their seats. But they will not be expressing the national char- acter. The unrest, whether of men or of women, will continue, and it will never be cured, though possibly palliated, by prescriptions called Acts of Parliament. But this treatment partakes of the old vice of heaUng the symptoms without striking at the root-cause of the malady. Let the Unionist Party, as the heir of the Tory or national tradition, provide a moral as well as a material environment into which nothing that is anti-national can ever be born. Let its leaders interpret the unsatisfied longings of their country- men into a message of hope that will appeal to the higher instincts. This is the secret of the whole trouble. Modern conditions are, after all, not so complex as many politicians would have us believe. We are only witnessing another acute phase in the eternal conflict between the Whig and the Tory. These two teiTns do not of necessity square with modern political parties. They express a frame of mind. There may be some Tory minds in the Radical Party. There are certainly a good many Whig minds in the Unionist Party. But what is certain is that the national mind is now, and always has been, predominantly Tory. The Tory is a Britisher and an Imperialist, and is never a little Englander or a cosmopolitan. He is patriotic in the sense that he INTRODUCTION ix loves his country, has a profound belief in the ideals that his country represents, and is prepared to work and fight for the carrying out of those ideals. To whatever rank of hfe he belongs, he begins the work of Empire by ungrudgingly giving his very best efforts to the performance of duty, and demands that the State shall safeguard his right to do his duty, and if he so chooses, to raise himself, free from tyranny and exploitation, to the highest point of moral and material efficiency of which he is capable. The author explains in his introduction that " duty must be the starting point of poHtical thought, for from it all human rights are derived." This is the whole difference in thought between the true Tory social reformer and any other school, be it Socialist, Radical, Webbian, Lloyd Georgian, or that sanguine band that hopes to outbid Lloyd George by offering something less of pubUc plunder than he is prepared to give. We are aiming, not at the vindi- cation of any abstract right, but at a higher con- ception of citizenship based upon mutual and com- bined efforts of all classes, that will place on a firmer foundation than ever the security and prestige of the British Empire, and of every one of its members. And why ? The British Empire is not a name or a fetish, though it is loved by every true-blue British heart. We beheve it to be the greatest agency for good that the world has ever seen, because it has X INTRODUCTION spread the influence of British character all over the habitable globe. The Tory test for any institution, or law, or proposal is quite simple, being informed by what Burke has named " that salutary prejudice called our country." " Will or will it not maintain and improve the best aspects of British character ? " is the question that will take the place of the present vulgar enquiries, such as : " How much money is there in it ? " or " How many votes will it bring ? " In this most valuable work the author has shewn, with a complete mastery in the field of thought, the form in which the appeal must be cast. He defends himself from the charge of reviving the thing called Tory Democracy. The phrase is a contradiction in terms. If democracy really means government by public opinion, there might be something to be said for it. If Democracy exists in England to-day, it is not government by public opinion. Rather is it the exploitation of the nation by the money- grubbing classes, who are in their turn exploited by a minority of shallow " intellectuals." National Toryism aims at the establishment of an aristocracy, not of birth, or of brains, but of instinct and of character. An aristocrat is not a man with a title and a black coat, though the possession of these appanages do not exclude. A real Tory aristocrat, be he prince or ploughman, is he who reaUzes that the privileges of British citizenship are derived from the performance of duty, and who INTRODUCTION xi throws his whole capacity of hand, heart, muscle, brain, character and soul into his daily task. Every- one has a right to an opportunity to do his duty. The State will afford protection to those who are physically and mentally incapable of self-develop- ment. The remainder should have a fair start, and the prizes should go to the competent, the able, the wilHng, the industrious, the truly patriotic. The national revival will follow on the great appeal to the national instinct. This appeal will have to come or England will have to go under. When it does come it will meet with a response that will surprise many who can now only deal in timid and hide-bound formulae. There is no reason why the great awakening should be delayed. If we are ashamed or afraid to appeal " to the subhme instincts of an ancient people " we are indeed of all men most miserable. The instinct is there, it is primitive and enduring. To quote again the phrase of the great man who devoted his brilliant talents to the exposure of the fallacies of Whiggery and the vindication of national principles, the Tory Party " still lives in the thought, and sentiment, and con- centrated memory of the English nation." WILLOUGHBY DE BROKE. AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION THE book to which these lines are intro- ductory can, I hope, speak for itself. Yet a few preliminary words may be useful, if only to indicate — what, without them, would be only gradually discovered — the author's point of view, and the trend and scope of his argument. The book is not an academic treatise on the theory of pontics. It contains, indeed, much theory, but every excursion towards the domain of philosophy is governed by a desire to find an answer to this purely practical question : "In the present crisis of Enghsh affairs, what should the Conservative Party do ? " That we have indeed reached a crisis the writer is convinced, and in the earher sections of his book he has tried to describe the character of it and to point out the significance of it. The course of poUtical events during the last three years shows — with a clearness almost alarming — that Conservatives whose preoccupations are chiefly parliamentary have not yet brought themselves face to face with the saUent facts of English life. They admit — what no one could deny — that the Fates have been adverse, but they seem to think that this mishap can be xiii xiv AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION remedied by tactics in Parliament, and by vigorously threshing the half-forgotten themes which the political necessities of the Government have called back, to a moment of dubious life, from a past we have outgrown. Ever since Mr. Balfour — to his own loss and ours — abandoned the task of construc- tive thought, the people of England have had enough of tactics. Moreover, their predominant interests — those interests which will govern the next General Election — are not in the topics which now make parhamentary hfe an unprofitable burden. The House of Commons is busy with survivals from the last century, but the nation is looking to the future. Everywhere men and women are seeking life : everywhere they are reaching out towards larger opportunities. This quest and this desire will be the deciding factors in the next General Election. Here we have one salient fact. Another — and one not less noteworthy — is the rise of " the New Democracy." The writer sees no certain indication that the significance of this has even yet been clearly discerned by the parhamentary representatives of Conservatism. It means more than the addition of a certain number of names to the register of voters : it means the emergence of a new political mind, of a mind which has grown towards political maturity outside the Conservative tradition. By this new mind the very foundations of English Isociety are now being shaken. AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION xv This revolutionary development was not inevitable, but, unfortunately, Conservatism did not under- stand itself, and it failed to discover, in the tradition it safeguarded, any principle which would reconcile it with the process of change, and give to it a con- troUing part therein. Consequently, England has reached a parting of the ways. Great changes are inevitable, and the only important question that remains unanswered is this: "Shall they come from above or from below ? " To this question the writer's answer is emphatic : " They can and should come from above." We dare not wait until discontent, become insurgent, reforms with its own hands, for reforms thus brought about would irreparably destroy many things that are invaluable. The writer is one of those who beheve that the paths which tradition has made honourable, change has left serviceable. He believes that the hardly-won and slowly-wrought achievements of the past are indispensable for our future, and he would have those who inherit those achievements largely use them helpfully and generously. He invites those who are the chief heirs of our splendid EngUsh tradition to make their inheritance a general strength. In other words, he invites those who are " above " to do their duty. Yet, if the crude postulates of contemporary policies be true, those who are " above " have no xvi AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION considerable duty save that of surrendering. The writer believes that those postulates are not true, and that a nobler duty remains open. In the third part of his book he has explored the foundation of rights, and has shown that the ultimate facts — they are divine ones — which give rights to those who are " below," give equal (because identical) rights to those who are " above." He returns from that exploration with a doctrine of social justice which (i) gives to Democratic movements their highest interpretation, and (2) provides the Conservative classes with a defence that will be impregnable, if they care to make it so. " Another attempt at Tory- Democracy," — the muttered comment comes contemptuously, but it falls haiTnlessly, for this work is a piece of pure Toryism and has nothing democratic about it. The writer of it beheves that the Democratic principle is essentially non-moral and practically demoralizing. The mechanical processes of the Democratic state are inadequate to the complexity of our English life : they presuppose an equality which, here at least, does not exist, and the presupposition obscures the real equahty constituted by man's universal duty. That duty must be the starting-point of pohtical thought, for from it all human rights are derived, and the writer deems it fortunate that we can at last embrace, within the large equity of a AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION xvii general moral purpose, those diverse tendencies and aims which seemed hurrying us towards a truceless conflict. It does not seems unreasonable to hope that the reconciliation which the conception of social justice has effected within the domain of Theory will be the precursor of another and better reconcilia- tion, one which will unite those who are " above " and those who are " below " in devotion to a common duty, in loyalty to a common right. The one purpose of National Toryism is to bring about such a reintegration of life. These thoughts of reconciHation have been reached by an adventure towards philosophy, and they could not have been reached otherwise. In order to give Conservatism safe standing-ground in the midst of the Democratic turmoil, it was necessary to discover the true theory of rights. Consequently, rights are prominent in this book, but only for a preliminary purpose, only for the purpose of restoring to the Conservative classes their self-confidence and their poHtical independence. It should not, however, be thought that the new campaign to which the writer summons his fellow- countrymen — a campaign against the forces of social and pohtical disruption — ^will be merely an assertion of rights. Exigencies of controversy make rights conspicuous, but our duties are greater than our rights, — they are fundamental and final- Man has rights because he has duties, and only xviii AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION because he has duties. Rights are safeguards of opportunity : the opportunity they safeguard is — in its ultimate and complete form — an opportunity to do one's duty. And what is one's duty ? Theologians tell of the Kingdom of God, and remind us of our daily prayer for the coming of it. Unlettered folk who have but touched the hem of the Master's robe — scarce knowing what they touch — say, in humbler speech, that we should leave the world better than we found it. Both conceptions are true. Undoubtedly we are to work for the coming of the Kingdom ; undoubtedly we are to make the world's hfe a larger and more helpful life. The Kingdom ? That is universal. The world ? That also is universal. Are we, then, to abjure the splendid devotion of patriotism ? By no means. The Holy City which descends out of Heaven from God is to be established " in England's green and pleasant land," — there, although not there alone — and Enghsh- men can best work for the world by working for England, Let us throw off, once and for all, "the craven fear of being great," and recognize that we have a unique vocation and a matchless opportunity. " For the heaUng of the nations " we have to show to the world, upon the broad theatre of our Empire's hfe, the meaning of free citizenship and serviceable manhood. Our work begins at home — in the dear land which has given AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION xix us our opportunity and our hope — but it may not stay at home. It has to make the England of our daily experience like unto " the England of our dreams," a kindly home for free men, — ^where a great tradition blossoms into abounding helpfulness, — and then it has to go forth, along far-reaching paths, towards the uttermost ends of the earth, and make, of our sundered but united peoples, a living vesture for the world's highest pohtical thought. " Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilisation, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilisation, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the result of both combined ; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion." — Burke. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION - - - - vii author's introduction - - - xiii I. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 1. THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY - - I 2. MODERN CONSERVATISM - - 4 3. THE MODERN REVOLUTION - - 6 4. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS - - II 5. THE REVIVAL OF CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT - - - - 14 II. THE CONCEPTION OF A NATIONAL POLICY 1. A NEW NATIONAL LIFE - - 16 2. PATRIOTISM - - - * IQ 3. THE NATION - - - - 29 4. NATIONAL UNITY - - - 31 5. A NATIONAL POLICY - - - 36 III. POLITICAL AUTHORITY 1. WHAT IS AUTHORITY ? - - 38 2. THE NATURE OF AUTHORITY - "39 3. THE NATURE OF POLITICAL AUTHORITY 42 4. THE GROUND OF POLITICAL AUTHORITY 47 5. THE AUTHORITATIVE STATE - "56 xxi XXll CONTENTS FAOS 6. FREEDOM - - - - 6l 7. REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT ' 66 8. DEMOCRACY - - - 68 g. AUTHORITATIVE INSTITUTIONS WITHIN THE STATE - - "75 IV. CONSERVATISM AND PROGRESS CONSERVATISM STATE-ACTION THE HELPFULNESS OF SOCIETY THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM SOCIAL REFORM CONCLUSION EPILOGUE NOTES 81 89 95 100 no 120 127 131 NATIONAL REVIVAL NATIONAL REVIVAL I PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS § I THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY POLITICAL prediction is notoriously uncer- tain, yet it does not seem rash to say that the next General Election can be won by a constructive thought. Indeed, I believe that only from such a thought can either the Government or the Opposition infer any reasonable hope of suc- cess. In every part of the country, men — and women too — are discontented with the opportunities which the existing social order affords them, and they will support whatever party is prepared to give them a larger life. Nor is there anything surprising in this. For some time past it has been obvious that England has outgrown its inherited clothes. Organi- zation is no longer adequate to life, and everywhere men are looking for a nev; construction ; on eveiy side we see life escaping from the control of institu- tions which are no longer adequate to its need and no longer interpret its hope. This uprising of life, and the failure of inherited institutions to express, that uprising of life, are the fundamental, the B 2 NATIONAL REVIVAL cardinal, facts of the present political situation. The men who understand these facts thoroughly, and are equal to the noblest opportunity which they create, will become the founders of a new nation, the heart and mind of the greatest move- ment in history. To many, that uprising life seems merely an insur- rection. Self-willed, turbid with low desires, indif- ferent to things that are rightly valued, scornful of claims that are still vahd, making imminent a knavish or mindless destruction, it seems to them like an anarchical irruption from depths that should always be straitly policed. Well, I know it is unlovely, I know it is dangerous. Yet, there — in that swirling flood — there is the mission and there the hope of modern Toryism. Does that seem paradoxical ? It can seem so only to those — be they friends or foes — who have not discovered the secret of Toryism. Does it seem over-bold ? The times are revolutionary, and in such times leader- ship should be Napoleonic, for then boldness is the only prudence. I have spoken of " an uprising life." Does anyone suggest that the adjective begs the question ? Circumspice — look around. There is unrest every- where. The very foundations of the pohtical, social, and industrial order which we have inherited are under adverse criticism. Men are no longer con- tented with the results of that order ; they no longer hold the conceptions it presupposes. Look in what direction you will — north, south, east, or west — and you see Enghsh life seeking new instruments NATIONAL REVIVAL 3 and new expressions, marking out for itself new paths, defining for itself new ends. "Organization is no longer adequate to life." Needs have emerged which the existing order cannot satisfy ; hopes have arisen which it cannot fulfil. Therefore, life is reaching out beyond it, and, on the whole, that " reaching-out " is a " reaching-up," I have no inclination to flatter " the Democracy," but it is merely sensible to recognize and honest to say that, within the last half-century, the working- classes of the country have discovered a larger life and a new manhood. Do you wish to know more of that discovery ? A few words will give you the essence of it, will make clear to you its hopefulness, will enable you to understand why men will never forego it. Within the last half-century the working classes have discovered themselves. Within a short lifetime they have discovered a truth into which others were born — the truth, namely, that man is never a mere instrument, but always an end. " An end " — what does this mean ? It means that human life everywhere has a certain spiritual character which makes every man the peer of all his fellows, equal to any of them in the ultimate nature of his claim upon society, and for ever incapable of being merely a means to another's enjoyment or gain. The working-classes have discovered this — scarcely knowing what they have discovered — and it is this that is moving as a spirit of unrest in our villages and mean streets, bringing light to sombre lives and hope to those who have had no hope. The discovery of this truth is one of the 4 NATIONAL REVIVAL greatest discoveries that a man or a class can make. When once made it is never forgotten, and the life inspired by it — however extravagant or mistaken — is essentially an uprising life. Therefore, we dare not meet the new and seemingly insurgent life around us with mere negation ; I, at least, dare not, for my own position and experience have given me a profound sympathy with it. §2 MODERN CONSERVATISM In England to-day alanned and unhelpful voices are warning us of a coming Revolution. Their warning is belated, for the Revolution is already accomphshed, and what is approaching is merely the final catastrophe. That accomplished Revolu- tion consists in the development of a new pohtical mind which owes practically nothing to the great Conservative tradition, and it has been made possible, or at least facilitated, by the long abstention of the Conservative Party from anything and everything that deserves the name of thought. Modern Conservatism has never developed a dis- tinctive pliilosophy of pohtics or defined a distinctive ideal. It has been a practical attitude rather than a reasoned creed or an articulate hope. The higher political thought of the nineteenth century owes much to English thinkers. John Stuart Mill and T. H. Green not only made a deep impression on English pohtical life, but they achieved for themselves a permanent place in philosophy. NATIONAL REVIVAL 5 Mill is receding into the background of history, but the more recent influence of Green has not ceased to be contemporary. The most fruitful con- ceptions in present-day politics — those dominant thoughts of the social organism, of poHtical right, of social service— are his, and he is a principal source of whatever moral enthusiasm makes politics to-day something more than a contemptible struggle between the " Ins " and the " Outs." That nineteenth-century development of political thought was, however, a development on the Liberal side of politics : Conservatism remained sterile. Although it soon recovered from the defeat brought about by the passing of the Great Reform Bill, it never made itself quite at home in the modern world, it never assimilated the constructive results of modern research, and for a hundred years it has been unrepresented in the highest ranks of poUtical thought. Not since Burke has it had a political thinker of the first rank ; not since his day has it made any important contribution to political theory. Lord Shaftesbury and Mr. Sadler brought to it philanthropic zeal ; Lord Beaconsfield gave impor- tant hints which most of his contemporaries rejected or ignored ; Mr. Chamberlain popularized the thought of our imperial vocation ; Mr. Balfour made valuable sug- gestions which he did not develop ; but modem Con- servatism has no names that can be set over against those of Mill and Green ; during the whole course of the nineteenth century no one did for Conservatism what Mill and Green did for Liberalism. During the second half of that century the world of thought 6 NATIONAL REVIVAL was radically transformed, — man's past, present, and future were reinterpreted. The intellectual sterility of Conservatism permitted that inevitable change to be wrought by Liberal hands. No attempt — no considerable and sustained attempt — was made to translate into the terms of modern thought our great Conservative tradition, or to provide, within the established order, a kindly home for the new life which the century had emancipated. The times imperatively called for a new synthesis — a new synthesis in thought, a new synthesis in life, — and Conservatism did not attempt to make one. For Conservatism those long years of fruitful change were years of intellectual sterility. Even if we temerariously suppose that the Conservative mind was watchfully brooding in the background, we must confess that it never broke into speech. There were, of course, Conservative policies, but there was no productive Conservative thought, certainly no systematized Conservative thought. The changes which created our modern pohtical world were governed by conceptions which were not Conserva- tive, and were brought about by forces which owed none of their strength to Conservative ideals. §3 THE MODERN REVOLUTION Because of this double failure — a failure in thought and a failure in policy — of those who stood by the established order, the lives emanci- pated by the political and social changes of the NATIONAL REVIVAL 7 last century grew to maturity outside the estab- lished order, without coming into any helpful contact with the great Conservative tradition of EngHsh life, and without making any discovery of Conservative principles. Naturally enough, they developed a new political mind, which was very largely a separate mind. That mind has received practically nothing — nothing that is vital to it — from the Conservative tradition, and it ignores or rejects the distinctive values enshrined in that tradition. The development of this new and separate poHtical mind is the cardinal fact, the most important fact, in our recent history. In that separate mind the apprehended Revolution is already an accom- plished fact. The Revolution now being accomplished by means of Parliament is merely a consequence of an unob- served revolution that has already taken, place — a revolution that has gradually developed in the lower and lower-middle classes a separate political mind which has no conscious debt to the established order, and discerns in that order merely a selfish contradiction of its own self-assertive claims. The Revolution towards which the Government is working or drifting has been angrily described as the misbegotten offspring of a discreditable parliamentary intrigue. The description is fatally superficial. Intrigue there has undoubtedly been, but the Revolution is more than an intrigue. It is the insurrection of a new poUtical force, the miUtant self-assertion of a new poUtical mind. It has become possible in ParUament only because it 8 NATIONAL REVIVAL has already been accomplished in the country, only because the most important poHtical classes have independently developed a distinctive mind which already affirms the prospective results of the Parha- mentary Revolution. That independent growth is the real Revolution, and it is already an accom- plished fact. Mr. Lloyd George knew this. He knew (i) that the traditional order of Enghsh life had failed to assimilate (to incorporate into itself) the classes which had been emancipated by the social and political changes of the nineteenth century ; (2) that those classes had grown into a distinctive life which was logically inconsistent with the traditional order ; (3) that its logical inconsistency could easily pass into pohtical antagonism. He knew all this, and knowledge of it gave him his opportunity. His Old-Age Pensions and his Land Taxes, and the speeches wherein he commended and defended these, were a direct appeal to the dis- tinctive poHtical mind of the " New Democracy." The extension of State provision was welcomed by all those w^ho — ignoring the difference between society and the State — had persuaded (or almost persuaded) themselves that the State should be the nation's general Providence ; the predominant con- cern for the wants and needs of the poor — of " the cottage " * — ^was hopefully acclaimed by all who • In words that seemed an echo from revolutionary France, Mr. Lloyd George more than once opposed "the cottage" to " the castle." He would benefit the former at the expense of the latter. NATIONAL REVIVAL 9 felt (rightly or wrongly) that the preference of the State had been against the poor ; the land taxes roused into enthusiasm — into predatory enthusiasm, if you will, — all who had been taught tha tlandlords are usurpers of a national right. Belief in a somewhat eleemosynary extension of State provision, a sense of social inequity, disbelief in " landlordism," — these are three characteristic notes of the mind of the " New Democracy," * and Mr, Lloyd George, using his opportunity, made himself the exponent and representative of that mind. Consequently, when the peers rejected the Budget, they found themselves face to face, not m.erely with an adverse affirmation of the privileges of the Lower House, but with a new political and social order, a new kind of life — ^what Germans would call " a new culture-type." This was Mr. Lloyd George's famous " trap," t and the peers — who did not understand the " New Democracy " — walked into it confidently and unsuspectingly. The Revolution which they sought to prevent was already accomphshed, but they knew it not. All this is obvious, but even yet it does not seem to be generally understood in the Unionist Party, Men speak as though the invited tragedy of August, 1911,1 were merely a result of accidental circumstances and tactical mistakes. They are fatally short-sighted. A new world has arisen in England and they have not discovered it. ' These are not its only notes. Conspicuously characteristic of it is a tendency towards a Democracy which affirms the pretended sovereignty of mere numbers. t See Note A at end of volume. \ The passing of the Parliament Bill in August, 191 1. 10 NATIONAL REVIVAL In our villages and mean streets, obscure men, who have but lately entered into freedom, have thought their own thoughts and fashioned their own hves evolving much, but borrowing little, even from those who helped them. Elementary conceptions and crude aims shaped themselves, and these gradu- ally formed a common and distinctive mind which, within the spacious fabric of English life, was and is largely a separate mind. These men know httle of our matchless pohtical inheritance, for they have grown to maturity outside the main channels of its tradition ; they care nothing (or next to nothing) for the prerogatives of the Crown, because they do not understand the Crown's pohtical potency and value ; they are not afraid of Single-Chamber government, for they think it certain that one will — their own — should rule. When we, v^hose hearts and minds have been formed and informed by England's treasured greatness, speak to these men of values which to us — as for our country — are vital, our words fall on inattentive ears and uncompre- hending minds ; we are speaking to one civihzation in terms of another. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the gravity of the situation. The fundamental facts of the exist- ing order are becoming central topics of debate. The conception of reform has become generalized, and points no longer to amendment but to radical reconstruction, — to a general reorganization of English life on a new basis. The hopes and ideals of men have widened into the thought of a new polity, a new kind of social hfe. Not merely the NATIONAL REVIVAL ii Conservative Party, but England itself has reached the cross-roads, and the choice before it is nothing less than this — a choice between two kinds of civiHzation, §4 THE PARTING OF THE WAYS During the years which have wrought these pro- found changes in English life, Conservatism neither developed a distinctive theory of politics nor defined a distinctive conception of social order and national life. It was and continues to be a practical attitude rather than a reasoned creed or an articulate hope, and its chief electoral victories have been revulsions from things disliked — not achieve- ments of a conquering ideal. There is an intellectual Pharisaism — conspicuous among Liberals— which finds nothing quite creditable except the first dawning of thought, and derides a practical attitude in political affairs as something essentially unworthy. In such derision we have merely a schoolboy's mistake, — the scornful laugher does not know or cannot appreciate the criticism which lifts wiser heads far above his complacent rest in copy-book formulae. A practical attitude is not of necessity an un- worthy one. It is not unworthy, for instance, when it implies a trust in fomis of organized fife which have given long-continued proof of their value. Now, such a trust has been the characteristic strength of the better Conservatism. In the deep alembic of English fife subtle and complex processes — subtle 12 NATIONAL REVIVAL beyond all discernment, complex beyond all des- cription — have fashioned usages and institutions which have been confirming expressions and service- able instruments of the best English manhood. Through their helpfulness these things have become valuable ; through the loyalties that have hallowed them, the hopes that have transfigured them, they have become priceless. Yet not always nor by everyone can history be wholly translated into thought, not always nor to everyone do its tumult- uous events disclose an ethical ground and a reason- able purpose. Must we then deem it ignoble that men trust ^^'hat they do not fully understand, and give to values which they have experienced a loyalty that is wider than their thought ? vSurely not ; even in the highest matters such a practical trust in life and the fruits of hfe is the soul's ultimate answer to doubts which it cannot resolve.* We confidently assert, then, that a practical attitude in political affairs is not of necessity an unworthy attitude. With equal confidence we may say that the stronger forms of practical trust can maintain themselves against theoretical criticism of the things that are trusted. This is conspicu- ously true in the religious life : it is true also in political life. Men have often maintained a private loyalty to some institution or usage which has been made unfashionable by a criticism they could not refute or an insurrection they could not subdue. History affords many examples of this. Those * Were I writing an essay in philosophy, I would connect this paragraph with Mr. Balfour's " Foundations of Belief," and with Mr. Schiller's Pragmatism; NATIONAL REVIVAL 13 examples, however, which demonstrate the private strength of man's practical trust, demonstrate also its political weakness. It is one thing to maintain a private loyalty, but quite another to win a General Election. More than one salient fact now suggests that English Conservatism has at length reached a parting of the ways, and that (unless it can translate its practical trust into a principle and an ideal) it will drift towards the wrong way, towards the way that leads to the political impotence of a private faith that has not become missionary through thought. Unfortunately, the trust which (as I have already said) has been the characteristic strength of the better Conservatism is now politically effective only within relatively small circles. Elsewhere it has been undermined by a doubt which is not primarily or exclusively a political doubt. There is a wide- spread unsettlement of thought and feeling which, in many minds, has destroyed or obscured the certainties of a healthier day. An effective practical faith in the value of institutions presupposes a certain robustness of moral life, but it is precisely this that the prevalent uncertainty makes impos- sible. In politics and in religion ahke, the grasp of men has become nerveless, and they give but a doubtful trust where their fathers were confident.* Now, a doubtful trust will never be resolutely * The classes at one time called " the governing classes " have lost confidence in themselves, partly because they have had behind them no constructive principles which could validate their historical position. 14 NATIONAL REVIVAL defensive, and most certainly it will never make converts. Outside certain relatively small circles, the moral foundations of that tacit faith which is nobly Conservative no longer exists. They can be re- estabhshed only by a constructive system of Con- servative thought, and, when thus re-established, they will be the foundations, not of a tacit faith, but of one made eloquent by a great ideal. §5 THE REVIVAL OF CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT By every conception of honour and duty the Conservative Party is summoned to resume the long-neglected task of thought. We have been brought to the present crisis by a one-sided develop- ment of thought, which has mis-directed the hopes and falsified the ideals of men. Only an immediate development of corrective thought — not merely critical, but constructive — can give us a reasonable assurance of passing safely through the crisis.* The Conservative mind is not naturally speculative, and it too often forgets that ideas are the most important factors in a nation's political develop- ment. Not only do they interpret unrest and define for it a policy and an aim, but — ahke by their dissolvent criticism and by the new ideals which they evoke — they broaden and deepen the tendency to change. Moreover, because pohtical theory is a doctrine of rights and duties, pohtical ideas become • See Note B. NATIONAL REVIVAL 15 sources of moral enthusiasm, and centres of a devo- tion which may almost be termed religious. They are at once unifying and energizing, and they con- fer upon even their humblest exponents a secular apostleship. A great political party inspired by new conceptions of human hfe is more than a party — it is almost a Church, a Church militant. To give the Conservative Party such an inspira- tion is the first duty, the most urgent duty, of a Conservative leader. Happily the sources of inspira- tion are close at hand. History has fashioned for us a matchless tradition, and the touch of genius could evoke therefrom the conquering energy of a new purpose, the burning message of a new hope — principles that need fear no criticism, and an ideal that need shrink from no comparison. The national revival for which we work must commence with a revival of Conservative thought. This, however, in and by itself, will not be suf- ficient. Thought must be translated into action. We have not merely to think, we have also to live, for Toryism is more than a system of constructive thought, it is and must be a way of life. Therefore, its constructive thoughts must become dynamic energies and effective ideals. II THE CONCEPTION OF A NATIONAL POLICY § I A NEW NATIONAL LIFE BY " National Revival " we mean, not merely a revival in the nation, but a revival of the nation, a reawakening of the sense of social solidarity, a reassertion and reconstruction of national unity. Does the word " reconstruction " seem extrava- gant ? 1 believe that it indicates our most urgent need. The most conspicuous fact in English politics to-day is the new self-assertion of the working- classes. " Labour " is no longer content to be the mere tool of " Capital." Sometimes through revolu- tionary projects, sometimes through the mistaken formulas of Socialism, sometimes through concep- tions of a living wage or co-partnership, it is claiming a human interest in the produce of its work, an interest such as no mere tool could ever possess. Consequently, the industrial machine is creaking in every part, and shows more than one sign of breaking down. Now, it were a disastrous mistake to suppose that " industrial unrest " is merely a result of " Labour's " cupidity, or the factitious work of a few hare- NATIONAL REVIVAL 17 brained incendiaries. On the whole, men would not incur the inevitable losses of a long-continued strike merely to gratify their cupidity, nor would they starve to please a mob-orator who did not starve. The Labour movement is essentially part of that still-continuing process of change which has brought a new consciousness to classes that were aforetime contentedly subordinate and tributary.* In that process the working-classes have discovered them- selves, and " labour unrest " is a result of that discovery. Those who attempt to reach the meaning of history through philosophy describe that discovery as a " discovery of personality," and rightly deem that it marks an advance. Nevertheless it is undeni- ably disruptive, for the forms of life that were adequate to the old subordination are inadequate to the new independence. Life has become larger than the institutions which at one time sufficed to express it, and everywhere these are being strained to or beyond breaking-point. The spiritual unity of the nation seems to be breaking-up. Men are becoming superficially, at least, conscious of differ- ence rather than of solidarity, and even the blindest can discern signs that the new consciousness of difference may at any time pass into active hostility. This almost universal tendency to disruption — which gives to the charlatan and demagogue their debasing opportunities — defines, for us of the new Toryism, an ennobling and characteristic work. • The strong movement in the lower grades of the Civil Service against what is called "caste" is part of the same general process. c i8 NATIONAL REVIVAL That work is essentially one of social reconstruc- tions, of moral reintegration. * We have to reconstruct the spiritual fabric of the nation's life upon a broader foundation and a larger, more generous plan. We have to lift " labour " out of a mere class-consciousness into the broader thoughts and loftier hopes of a life genuinely national. We have to create a new and higher national unity, to knit together all the sons of the Fatiierland — the eldest-born of Freedom and those whom the Democratic movement has but lately made free — in the magnanimous equity of a better justice, the transforming loyalty of a better patriotism. This new unity will indeed be new, — for the unity which gave stability to the past is irrecoverable, — and it will not be established unless we ourselves grow into it. We have, as these pages are intended to show, a great reconstructive ideal. Possession of that ideal and knowledge of its worth are the warrant for our endeavour to make it effectively normal in the lives of others, but our endeavour will not succeed unless we first realize that ideal in ourselves. We are called upon to bring about a change, a great change, but we may not com- placently suj^pose that the change is to be wrought only in others. For us, as for them, the new national consciousness towards which we work will indeed be new, and, before it can effectively become the ground of a new unity, we and they ahke will have to grow into it, — we and they alike will have to grow into new thoughts, new sympathies, new ways of life, new • See Note C. NATIONAL REVIVAL iq modes of work. Neither for us nor for them will such growth always be easy or costless. It will be a reintegrating process, and probably no great work of social reintegration has ever been achieved \\athout some sacrifice.* In times of revolution a new synthetic thought may become a turning-point of history. Such a thought we of the new Toryism possess in our con- ception of national unity. Confident in that thought we fearlessly face the insurgent restlessness of our disordered world. We know that we are the guardians of indispensable values. We know that we are spokesmen for a truth which will even yet reorganize our country's troubled life in a higher synthesis, and lay broad and deep, in a nobler patriotism, the imperishable foundations of that matchless England which one day shall be. t The opportunities which invite the demagogue to his unscrupulous campaign of disruption summon us to the work of national reintegration. § 2 PATRIOTISM The thought of our national vocation can be best approached through the conception of patriotism. * The one valid principle of reintegration is to be found in our Tory tradition. Unfortunately, a century's abstention from thought has given to that tradition limitations which have made that principle inert. The removal of those limitations, by development from within, will be one of the earliest signs of the national revival . t Even if we have no other claim to the respect of men, we certainly have this one — we have the courage of our convictions. 30 NATIONAL REVIVAL What do we mean by " patriotism " ?* A few years ago tliis question would have seemed entirely academic, without any immediate relevance to the nation's practical needs. Men were content to be patriotic, as they were content to be truthful and honest, without definitions or reasons. Patriotism was part of their traditional morality, and the occasional denial of it did not rise above an inconsiderable whisper. It was not, indeed, a rational conviction, if by that be meant a conviction brought about by thought of an argumen ■ tative kind, but it was none the less a genuine con- viction, and men acted upon it sincerely. It was not a reasoned creed, but a practical attitude and an inbred disposition, — what all the great moralities of life always are, what all the moralities of life ought to be. Nevertheless, it was not a prejudice. In times of popular enlightenment, those whom the progressive movement has half-educated are often misled, by the temptations of political freedom, into a pathetic trust in that public playing with words which they call " discussion." Minds thus misled naturally tend to the mistake of thinking that no opinion can be quite sound which is not a result of reasoning, of argumentative or discursive thought. M'^ere that mistake not a mistake, our instinctive judgments, which are always earlier than our discursive thinking, would undoubtedly • The author is gratefully indebted to Mr. Haklnyt Egerton for a valued opportunity of adapting certain paragraphs of Mr. Egerton 's "Patriotism: an Essay towards a Constructive Theory of Politics." NATIONAL REVIVAL 21 be prejudices. But, in fact, none of our primary judgments — none of those judgments which ulti- mately determine the course of our lives, and turn the balance of probabilities — depend upon argu- mentation or derive their validity from it. Only in the minor things of Ufe can we even pretend to be rationaUsts. The greater things depend upon tacit judgments which are implicit in character and in life, judgments that are (in fact and for thought) prior to our discursive thinking, and possess a certainty which no syllogism can set forth. " Welt geschichte est Weltgerichte "—World- history is world-judgment, not merely a judgment upon the world, upon the facts wliich are established or brought to nought by history, but also a judg- ment by the world, by the universal essentials of human nature, and by that larger nature which (in some real way) includes within its purposeful unity the nature and the life of man. A sentiment confirmed by a judgment such as this cannot be a prejudice. Is patriotism thus confirmed ? Those who know it best have the least doubt . ' ' Time turns the old days to derision." Yes, sometimes it does, and what in those old days seemed good then becomes untenable. But patriotism has come down to us along the paths of ancient right unblemished and unimpaired, linking old sanctities to new hopes, drawing from enlarging life an increasing and more generous purpose. No, whatever it be, patriotism is not a prejudice. There are those who tell us that patriotism is but another egoism, having (it is true) a wider range of 22 NATIONAL REVIVAL interest and sympathy than the narrow egoism we ordinarily call " selfishness," and than the narrow pride which corresponds to this, but belonging to the same ethical class as these, and distinguished from these only by characteristics which have no great ethical importance. There are those who tell us this, and sometimes — through a delusive pre- tension to science — they tell it so persuasively that the ill-informed and those untrained in thought are led astray into demoralizing negations which are the more harmful because apparently enhghtened. Patriotism a form of selfishness ? Whatever it be, patriotism is not that. It is not something by which the individual claims his country for him- self, in order to further his selfish interests or to gratify his selfish pride. Rather is it something by which his country claims him, claims him rightly, even when most adverse to whatever selfishness would cherish or pride dictate. Those who devaluate human life by an abuse of science — by " science falsely so called " — tell us that patriotism is condemned by its origin. They believe that it arose long ago out of instincts which were undoubtedly selfish and barbarous, and they cannot believe that its years of growth have been years of purgation. Well, suppose the alleged derivation true, what then ? A thing is what it is, not something else, not something that has ceased to be. Suppose patriotism to be a development ; it is what it is, and not what something else was in that far-off beginning when as yet patriotism did not exist. An evolutionary history can tell us from NATIONAL REVIVAL 23 what beginnings a thing has grown — perhaps how and why it has grown — but, because genuinely a history of becoming, it characteristically sets forth the existing fact as something other than its genetic original. Why, then, should we not take the present fact — the thing that now exists — for what it is now worth ? Suppose it true that its lirst beginnings were unlike its present state : what then ? Derivation determines neither meaning nor value. It shows from what origin and along what road a thing has come to be what it is, but what it is can be discovered only from the thing itself : genealogy is irrelevant, if not misleading. What, then, is patriotism ? A familiar defini- tion tells us that it is love of country. In that definition, does the word " love " bear its ordinary meaning ? Are we to understand that a patriot loves his country as a husband loves his wife or a mother her children ? If so, what is it that makes a country lovable ? And why one's own country rather than some other ? The first and second of these questions should be answered affirmatively. When we say that patriot- ism is love of country we mean the word " love " to be understood in its ordinary sense, we mean that the patriot's love for his Fatherland is comparable, strictly comparable, with the love that hallows marriage and our family life. No other word can adequately characterize that deep and sovereign devotion — often strongest when most clear-sighted — which moves the patriot to lay upon the altar of his Fatherland all that he is and has, which compels 24 NATIONAL REVIVAL him to deem secondary — when compared with his country's weal — all that men ordinarily seek most earnestly and prize most highly. What is it, then, that makes one's own country thus lovable ? Not the mere fact that it is one's own. Let us take a simpler case. What is it that makes a man love the small coimtry town in which he was bred and born, in which he has spent his life ? Beyond all question, he loves every inch of it, the broad cornfields black from the plough or golden with their harvest, the whitewashed cottages with their casement windows and mossy thatch, the old-world houses with their walled gardens and weathered tiles, the broad High Street which twice a year becomes a horse-market, the sturdy labourers and playing children, the nan-ow path by the river, and the brown patched sails of the slow barges. Why does he love all this ? Not because he owns the place, — perchance he has not the freehold of even the smallest corner, — but because of far more intimate ties, because it is veritably part of his hfe. He does not love it simply because he lives there, — one may work all day in Whitehall and reside in a London suburb, and yet love neither, — but because it lives in him. In and through the life of that httle town, in its various fellowships, through its opportunities and its duties, by its chastening and strengthening discipline, by its multiform sacramental experience, he has grown into whatever manhood he has achieved. There has he found whatever he knows of strength, refresh- NATIONAL REVIVAL 25 ment, and peace, whatever he knows of earnest work and saving hope, of tender memory and hallowing sorrow, whatever glimpses of divine reahty have ennobled his hfe, whatever makes the present sacred and the future home-Hke. Of course he loves it, for in it he most truly finds his hfe, his deepest life and his highest life. Now, all that such a man finds in his native town the patriot finds in his country. That is not merely a geographical expanse around him : it is his home. It is not merely the bulwark of his home, the shelter which protects his household hearth and the dear sanctities there enshrined ; it is itself his home, the home of his best and largest life. And the men of it, his fellow-countrymen — to him they are not merely servants, or co-operators in life's lower industry, but fellow-citizens, sharers with him in one hfe, one work, one hope ; comrades, it may be, in high en- endeavour, or resolute endurance. His country is his home, and although one spot in it be pre-eminently that, yet the sanctity there most clearly seen and most intimately known is not there locaHzed. In that one spot is the Ark of its especial presence, but not there alone does he know its nearness, nor there alone find the refreshment of its informing power. His household hearth is to him hfe's holiest place, but, although uniquely, it is not solitarily sacred, for his whole country is holy, — hallowed by the same Presence, ministrant of the same grace. Not out of phantasy of thought or from cunning mastery of words does he call his country his Fatherland, for truly his country has begotten him, it has made him 26 NATIONAL REVIVAL what he is, and in and by its present life he lives out his own. His country has made him what he is. The manhood of the bygone years — its courage, its self-sacrifice, its patient resolution — has not lapsed fruitlessl}' into the void. It has built up a living tradition of manhood upon which patriotic citizen- ship has been bred and nurtured, a tradition which has silently and unobtrusively moulded character and inspired purpose, and is now around us like our native air ; like it, richly potential unto life ; like it, strengthening, refreshing, exliilarating. Into this living tradition all the manhood of the past has entered. It has come down to us, not only from our country's illustrious dead, whose names are held in perpetual remembrance for the saving and the making of a people, and who, from their several resting-places — from within the sacred walls of Westminster, from that rock-hewn grave on the far- away iNIatoppo Hills, and from the lonely ice-fields* round the Southern Pole, — yet speak to us the words of civic life ; it has come down to us not only from these, our foremost and our worthiest, but also from all the Empire's nameless and unrecorded dead, who, in peace and in war, in doing and endur- ing, have spent and been spent for this our Father- land. It is this helpfulness to hfe that is the very ground and occasion of love, for love is the soul's responsgjx) life, — a response in which.without any of the niggard- liness that seeks an equal measure of exchange, life and whatever life can be or do is given in return for NATIONAL REVIVAL 27 life. When we think of love between individuals, we speak, half-mythologically, of " spiritual affinity " and " complementary natures," but these words are only a disguise for the ultimate truth that, wherever love is, there life, or something that makes for life, is given and returned. The " spiritual affinity " and the " complementary nature " bring into the kindred life something of vital worth that it aforetime lacked — quickening it to new achieve- ment, to new hope, to new reverence, and to new trust. And, to this gift of life, love — which con- secrates the quickened life to reciprocal service — is the soul's natural response. The spirit of man was not made for sohtary self-sufficiency. It lives, even as his body does, by what it receives, by good that comes to it, as in a sacrament, from a life other than its own. And no one can receive such good quite selfishly. The human heart naturally clings to that by which it lives, and out of this dependence there springs an affection which cannot be selfish, but must be responsive, — an affection which cannot rest until it also has made its gift of life. Such an affectionate response we call love, and, because patriotism is a response of that kind, we say that patriotism is love, love of the Fatherland from and through whose life the quickening gifts of fife have come. / Patriotism, then, is the correlate of all that binds a man, in sympathy and interest, to the past and present history of his country, the correlate of all that makes him participant for his good in his country's environing life. He may not understand 28 NATIONAL REVIVAL this connection, he may not even recognize it, but it exists, and it becomes silently determinant of responsive feeling, even when it does not result in an articulate faith. Any kind and degree of partici- pation may evoke the response of patriotic feeling, provided only it be helpful ; but, other things being equal, the fuller the participation the fuller the response. Patriotism is not an unconditioned virtue, given arbitrarily, or by some unintelligible wisdom of Providence, to a chosen few. It is conditioned by the helpfulness of a nation's life : where there is no helpfulness we cannot expect to discover patriotism. This fact is primary for those of us who believe that patriotism is the salt of a nation's life, and the principal factor in national strength. We find in it the surest immediate ground for a generous humanism in education and in social reform. English patriotism must have its most abounding source in the homes and daily life of the English people. Because we are patriots, we may not and cannot be content until the commonwealth of England be genuinely a commonwealth, ministering the treasured greatness of its hfe with an equal charity * to all that bear the English name. Patriotism can live in the midst of untoward surroundings. It can live, despite ignorance and long denial of right, in the unkindly isolation of the dormant country-side, and amid the grey monotony of an industry that seeks unhallowed gains through waste of life, and even there it is an ennobling • Here and elsewhere the word "charity " is used in its Pauline NATIONAL REVIVAL 29 inspiration ; but it will live best where life is fullest and manhood noblest, where a generous freedom gives full opportunity, where civic fellowship is a magnanimous brotherhood, cathohc and impartial in its helpfulness, and where the common devotion of an equally reciprocal charity makes the common tradition a common benediction, and enriches that tradition with the informing power of a yet higher manhness, that it may yet more nobly and more effectually serve the Fatherland. Patriotism is love of country, and love is the response of life to quickening and informing hfe. The life of patriotism, therefore, is a communicant life, — the patriot lives by the grace that comes to him from the life that environs him and informs him, and he receives that grace precisely in pro- portion to his participation in that life, precisely in proportion as his own life becomes part of that helpfully besetting life. * § 3 THE NATION The facts that evoke patriotism create national unity. That helpful hfe to which patriotism re- sponds is an integrating life, a hfe which knits man together in common interests and common sympathies, and gradually builds them up into a common loyalty and a common purpose. Thus are nations made. It is wholly a mistake to suppose that they are ever constituted by facts which are merely geographical. Men do not become a nation • See Note D. 30 NATIONAL REVIVAL by mere juxtaposition, by merely sharing a common territory, not even if that territory be Ireland. What is it that makes us English folk truly one people ? Not the bare fact that, for a thousand years and more, we have lived together between the Cheviots and the Channel, but because, between the Cheviots and the Channel, we have found a common work, and wrought out a common life ; because the wasteful discipline of war and fruitful co-operation in peace, and long fellowship in suffer- ing and endeavour, and comradeship in many a fight for freedom, have overcome the differences which first armed Northumbria against Mercia, and Wessex against West Wales, Saxon against Dane, and both against Norman, and those also which later, within the one polity of the mediaeval kingdom, made the country-side half-servile, the Church half-alien, and the baronage an armed oppression. It is because of these past victories of developing brotherliness over the particularism of class and province — not merely because our forefathers were neighbours — that we who to-day live upon Enghsh ground are all fellow-citizens in one free commonwealth, partners in a common industry, inheritors of a common tradition, sharers of a common hope. We are a nation because, in some sufficing measure, we have grown together into unity of life ; because, within our borders, hostility has given place to brotherhood — as yet, indeed, far from perfect, but even now effectively real ; because the mutual helpfulness of man to man has made this EngUsh land of ours truly our home. NATIONAL REVIVAL 31 and because, within that home, we, as members of one family, have become knit together by common purposes and by common hopes, by common sanctities and bj^ common ideals.* Nationality, then, is essentially a spiritual growth in the hearts and minds of men. It arises out of common charities and enmities, common hopes and fears, common loyalties and aspirations, common sufferings and achievements. These common experiences are spiritual experi- ences ; these common activities are spiritual activities. § 4 NATIONAL UNITY The life which creates nationahty is a unifying life. In it men grow together. In it separate hves are, to some extent, made one by common senti- ments, common purposes, common attachments. Therefore, the nation is a unity. The beginnings of national sentiment are in those varied experiences that evoke patriotism. These experiences are, as we have already seen, experiences of help. Patriotism is man's natural response to the helpfulness of his country's life. The nation is a unity of helpfulness. Nationality, however, is more than a mere senti- ment — it is an attachment. The help that comes to a man through participation in his country's life is vital. By it his hfe is given a broader out- look, is enriched with new sympathies and new • See Note E. 32 NATIONAL REVIVAL thoughts, is. ennobled by a loftier purpose. It always makes his life better worth living. Man's characteristic response to help of this kind is not merely a sentiment of appreciation, but an attach- ment — an attachment to the things that help. The patriot does not merely value his Fatherland — he is devoted to it, and his devotion is expressed in unselfish work and in equally unselfish loyalty. The nation is a unity of loyalties. Through co-operation and intercourse with his fellows, man discovers rights.* We may say that society is a complex or group of human forces. These forces are constantly altering — direction changes, strength varies. In the everyday occupa- tions of life, man's desire is constantly finding new objects, his will is constantly receiving new pur- poses. Now, if these human forces — the wills and desires of men — were the sole factors in national life, everything would be at the mercy of power, and that which a man acquired one day might be reft from him the next. It would hardly be pos- sible to speak of a social order, for, in human hfe, power — mere power — is not a principle of order. Society becomes a social order only through the general recognition of rights. A right is always relatively permanent. Men always think of it as • If by "rights" we mean— as we should mean — something more than mere legal conventions, it is of essential importance to maintain unfalteringly that society does not create rights. At the most it recognizes them, defines them and gives them the force of law. To suppose that rights are created by society — and that, there- fore, "the will of the people" is rightfully supreme over all persons and things — is a characteristic mistake of modern Liberalism. That mistake has found classical expression in T. H. Green's " Principles of Political Obligation." NATIONAL REVIVAL 33 something which always should be — as something which ought to be, even though the balance of power be against it. Therefore, rights — recognized rights — give to society a stability which, without them, it would not have. Change is not prevented but it is regulated ; the forces that make for change are, as it were, confined within certain channels. Thus are the lives and works of men safeguarded. Now, the nation is a unity of rights. " The nation is a unity of rights." We may not, however, suppose that it is an unalterable unity. Human life is a process of change, and — on the broad theatre of national life — that process leads, again and again, to some new discovery of rights. The long conflicts for religious freedom took their start in such a discovery, and some such discovery has preceded every great movement for social reform or political emancipation. Whenever hfe grows larger than its inherited forms there is such a dis- covery. This is what is happening in England to-day, and is the most significant fact at the bottom of " labour unrest." A discovery of right always passes into a claim — a claim upon the established order, a claim against some obstructive institution or oppressive pohcy. Now, such a claim, even if urged by Ulstermen, is not anarchical. It is adverse to a particular order in human affairs, but it is not adverse to all order. Rather is it an assertion of a better order. We have reached the conception of a changing body of rights. What makes that changing body D 34 NATIONAL REVIVAL a unity ? The fact that all rights are forms of one right — of the right to opportunity. Every right safeguards some development of life, some kind of life. Every claim of right is, in essence, a claim to hfe — to opportunity for living in some pre- ferred way. In every case, we have life seeking to maintain itself in some position which it has already achieved, or reaching out to some new achievement. In every case, right safeguards some opportunity for living — either some opportunity to which men have already attained or one which they desire to reach. The nation is a living whole, constituted by the growing together of individual lives, and each of those lives has a right to opportunity. That universal right is the ultimate moral ground of national unity.* I have spoken of the discovery of rights, but, in truth, man has but one right — the right to opportunity. All his other rights — the rights of conscience, the rights of property, the right to justice — are derived from, are forms of, this fundamental and universal right. It is true to say that the age- long course of human affairs has been marked by successive discoveries of rights, but it is more sig- nificantly true to speak of the gradual discovery of that one primary right. Man's life upon earth has been not only a process of change, — it has been a development, a growth. On the whole, history is a record of progress. In England to-day some are tempted to doubt this. They see insolent ignorance * The argument in this paragraph is abbreviated and condensed. More will be said, however, in the Third Part of this book. NATIONAL REVIVAL 35 in high places, they see vulgar life and vulgar thought undermining everything higher than itself, they see the freedom which a world envied giving place to an ignoble servitude. Undoubtedly these things are obvious, but besides these things there is another (of more importance) which is not obvious, — a movement in the lower grades of the nation's life towards something larger than what the past has provided for them, " Organization is no longer adequate to life. Needs have emerged which the existing order cannot satisfy, hopes have arisen which it cannot fulfil. Therefore life is reaching out beyond it, and, on the whole, that ' reaching-out ' is a ' reaching-up.' " What is now taking place in England has been taking place — in various ways and under various forms — all through human history. From the beginning man's life has been gradually, circuit- ously, through many a blunder and aberration, growing ampler, — growing, we may say, towards its own completeness, — and, at each step in its doubtful advance, it has asserted, in a form peculiar to the moment of assertion, its inalienable right to grow. That right to grow is the right to opportunity. In the course of man's gradually broadening asser- tion of it every other right has been discovered, and all those other rights are forms of itself. Because every right is a form of the right to opportunity, there can be no discovery of a right which exceeds that right. Therefore, that right can give to nations a unity which can never be outgrown. 36 NATIONAL REVIVAL § 5 A NATIONAL POLICY These thoughts on unity enable us to define the conception of a national policy. A national policy is a policy that works towards unity by bringing about a more general recognition and a fuller realiza- tion of the right to opportunity. It endeavours to make the right to opportunity everywhere an effec- tive right, and, by thus making hfe ampler and better, to knit all classes and individuals together in a nobler patriotism. Does this conception seem too abstract ? Con- sider what it means to-day for us in England. It means that we turn our backs on Limehouse, — on Limehouse and Tower Hill, — that we leave the futiUties of party rhetoric to those who find satis- faction therein, and that we address ourselves, with indefatigable patience and clear-sighted sympathy, to the task of reconciUng men. Doubtless it is something to score points in parliamentary debate. Our first and most important work is, however, not to win and wear such trivial honours, but to create a new life in the nation. We who stand by ancient truth know that the Conservative order in English life has become inadequate ; we have to enlarge it, yet not so as to destroy its identity or to deprave the tradition it safeguards. Our earliest work must be wrought in ourselves. We must clear our vision and enlarge our sympathies. Above all, we must overcome that apathy, always unpatriotic, which is a form of NATIONAL REVIVAL 37 selfishness. Everything we value is at stake, — our religion, our tradition of manhood, our kind of civihzation, our country's safety, — and there is only one way to save these. We must fearlessly go out to the new life that is now insurgent around us, and make our faith — our political and social faith, no less than our rehgious faith — its light and its hope. We shall not be able to do this, however, unless that faith be a purging fire and glowing inspiration within ourselves. If it be not this, we must make it this, and, when we have thus prepared ourselves, we must turn to others, not as patrons, but as mission- aries of a new ideal, heralds of a new life. Looking beneath the extravagances of the moment, we shall discern the deep human needs which these crudely and aberrantly express, and to those needs we shall show a better satisfaction than the tarnished triumphs of a class war. Everywhere we will work for unity, and our distinctive effort will be to bring men together in common recognition of the rights and needs of their common humanity. And then ? Then, withholding nothing out of pride, nothing out of selfishness, we must give, within these English lands, large opportunity for every English life to become its best. That is what we mean by " mak- ing the right to opportunity everywhere effectively real " : nothing less than that can be the aim and hope of any policy deservedly named " national." In beginning and end alike, a national policy must be a " unionist " policy, a policy of integration, of knitting men together in the permanent unity of a common and unchangeable right. 388503 Ill POLITICAL AUTHORITY § I WHAT IS AUTHORITY ? THAT new integration of life which we term the National Revival can be brought about only by Constructive Toryism. " Constructive Toryism," — when one speaks of this many superior people smile incredulously. They do not believe that such a thing exists, or they do not believe it adequate to the task proposed for it. They tell us that Toryism, whether old or new, always stands for privilege, and they point out that the " New Democracy " is a militant contradiction of all privilege, of all that is not its own. How, they ask, can we of the new Toryism hope either to con- vert " the Democracy " or to subdue it ? Now, I have no objection to the word " privilege." I believe that in certain circumstances — for example, in those which now exist in England — pohtical privi- lege is almost indispensable, and can be completely justified. But privilege is an accident in Toryism, not an essential. The distinctive conception of Toryism is not privilege, but authority. We who are now reinterpreting the Tory faith, — reinter- preting it into a doctrine and policy of social justice, — stand, as our fathers stood, for the principle of NATIONAL REVIVAL 39 authority. Whether that principle be or be not expressed through pohtical privilege is an accident of history — important indeed, but not primarily important. Even if political privilege were swept clean out of English life to-morrow, the principle of authority would remain, and from it we of the new Toryism — the men of the National Revival — would continue to receive our vocation, our inspiration, our hope. We are not Democrats, and we do not pretend to be. §2 THE NATURE OF AUTHORITY WTiat do we mean by authority ? One thing must be made clear at the outset : authority is not power. A prophet who comes to men an- nouncing : " Thus and thus saith the Lord " has (if his tremendous words be true) an indubitable authority, but he may be merely an unheeded voice in the wilderness or a scorned voice in some proud metropolis. The heedlessness or scorn of men may make his message ineffectual, but, even if thus made powerless, its authority is unimpaired. In this case authority and power are easily distinguishable. An excited mob has a very effective power. It can lynch a negro, pillage a shop, hang an aristocrat on the nearest lanterne. Ordinarily, however, we do not say that it has authority to do any one of these things. Again, we all know that usurpation and tyranny are historical facts : every nation in Europe has had experience of one or the other. Now, the essence of each is in the divorce of power from 40 NATIONAL REVIVAL authority. Even in our own day we have heard that a minister had not authority to introduce a certain Bill, although it was obvious that he had power to do so. Clearly, authority is not power. What, then, is it ? A moment's reflection will show that authority is always imperative. Do this, avoid that, accept this, reject that — these are the characteristic forms of its utterance. Thus the State propounds a law and the Church a dogma. Thus the parent instructs his child and the teacher his pupil. Ordinarily, the imperative of authority can be enforced. The authority of the State is an armed authority, the Church can excommunicate, the parent and the teacher can punish. But suppose authority divorced from power — suppose a Government tem- porarily paralyzed, a Church unable to excom- municate, a parent or teacher not permitted to pimish. What remains on the side of authority ? A precept, doubtless ; but is an ineffective precept more than an empty breath ? In some cases it un- doubtedly is. We know that the voice of conscience is more than an empty breath even when our dis- regard of it makes it ineffectual. Let us examine that " more." Take once again the case of the prophet. " Thus and thus saith the Lord " — the awful message is unheeded, the words return void to Him who sent them. The prophet is powerless. Is he, therefore, without authority ? By no means, for his authority comes from his message, not from the results of it. His words are authoritative because, whether effectual or ineffec- tual, they are reveahng, they disclose a truth. NATIONAL REVIVAL 41 The case is typical. Wherever we have authority, real authority, there we have something — for instance, some person or institution — which makes known* a truth. That " something " is authorita- tive, and it is authoritative because, and only be- cause, it does make known that truth. Consider some illustrations. A propL-^t proclaims some Divine message : he is authoritative because that message is true. A specialist in some difficult branch of learning instructs a student : he is authori- tative because he does know, and is not a charlatan. Some Upper House makes effective, in a demo- cratic time, the idea of a balanced representation of interests : it is authoritative because that idea embodies a valuable political truth, one which Democratic Parties ordinarily obscure or ignore. Now, in each of these cases we have two things : (i) A fact which makes known — prophet, specialist. Upper House ; and (2) A truth made known. The former is the authoritative voice : the latter is that which makes it authoritative.! It will be noticed at once that authority depends • " Mediates " would be better than " makes known," but. un- fortunately, it is a technical word, and would not be generally understood. t Authority is given by truth. If that which is set forth be not true, it confers no authority. If authority be asserted in such a case, that authority is pretended, not real. Il lies beyond the scope of this book to discriminate between valid authority and invalid claims to authority. Adequately to explain the grounds and method of such discrimination would need an essay in Criteriology, in the Theory of Assent. 42 NATIONAL REVIVAL upon function. It does not matter in the least who the prophet is or how he came to be a prophet. He is authoritative in virtue of what he does, in virtue of the fact that he does proclaim a true message. Similarly, an Upper House which plainly embodies a valuable political truth has an authority which is entirely independent of its origin and constitution. It, like the prophet, is authoritative in virtue of what it does.* Authority depends upon function. § 3 THE NATURE OF POLITICAL AUTHORITY An authoritative institution is made authoritative by the truth which it mediates or makes known. What truth is thus operative within the domain of politics ? What makes political institutions authori- tative ? Political institutions are factors in government. They are part of the machinery through which the sovereign power of the State becomes effec- tive. Now, sovereignty is essentially a power. Usually, a consent well-nigh general makes ready the way before it, but sometimes it is dis- regarded or disobeyed, and then it acts coercively. The power to compel is essential, for without that power sovereignty would not be sovereignty. A Government which could not or dare not * No criticism of the origin or constitution of such a House would or could, in the least degree, detract from its authority, although, in some circumstances such criticism — by arousing the evil spirit of class-prejudice — might diminish the political effective- ness of that authority. NATIONAL REVIVAL 43 compel would be a Government only in name and pretence.* Sovereignty, then, is a power, a power which can act coercively. In heaven, indeed — where lives made perfect in love will spontaneously unify all interests — there will be no need for coercion. On earth, consent often prevents coercion, but we know that — except in the smallest groups — political un- animity is a rare thing, and that the minds of men are moved to consent largely by the prospective consequences of disobedience. In all government we have actual or possible compulsion. The theory of government — of sovereignty — is the theory of an effective power which can always become a coercive power. Now, what is the ultimate warrant for coercion ? Ordinarily, the State is authoritative in its coercion, but a highwa3nnan is not. How can this difference be explained ? Let us approach the question from another start- ing-point. The nation, we have seen, is a unity of rights — of rights which variously express the funda- mental right to opportunity. The right to oppor- tunity is a right to live, to grow, and it is possessed by man, not in virtue of any accidental circum- stances or secondary facts, but in virtue of his very humanity. Therefore it is universal, and it has no • Someone may ask : What then is meant by "a sovereign conception"? Well, it is true that conceptions employ no policemen and have no Naval Estimates, but are not some con- ceptions compelling? Church, Home, Fatherland— sometimes these thoughts move men as nothing else can. The compulsion of parliamentary law seems a poor thing and a feeble thing when compared with the heroic inspiration that comes from a great idea. A sovereign conception is sovereign, not because of logical priority or moral primacy, not even because of its truth, but because of its power. 44 NATIONAL REVIVAL degrees ; in no case is it greater or less than in another. Wherever man meets man, each is in presence of a right which is as good as his own. This essential equality,* however, is obscured by obvious inequalities which have a long history be- hind them, — a history which reaches back towards the beginnings of social life. To some extent these inequalities are what may be termed " natural," for they have arisen from the unpreventible and inevitable accidents of human life — from fundamental differences in character and capacity, from the varying kindliness of the earth. To a regrettable extent, however, they have arisen from abuse of advantages, from man's trespass upon man. Life is a power, and the ends which it proposes to itself are at first private. Man works primarily for himself, and for those immediately dependent upon him. Only gradually does he take into account the rights and claims of others. In so far as he does not do so, he uses men, unreflectingly or deliberately, as though they were merely his tools, f and he pauses not to consider that his gains are won by a denial of right. I This is not merely an idiosyncrasy of • It will be noticed that this equality is ethical, not social or political. It has its ground in a moral quality in human nature which is universal, and it does not constitute a claim either to equality of possessions or to equality of power. The one immediate inference from it is " equality of opportunity." f Obviously, an age in which "labour" is divorced from the means of production, and in which industry is competitive, gives wide opportunity for this, and abundant temptation to this. J That men are equal in the sight of God has become a platitude, but this theological truth has remained sterile. There has been much reluctance to infer from it an equality operative on earth. Yet the right to opportunity does make men equal in a very practical sense. NATIONAL REVIVAL 45 individuals : it becomes characteristic of classes. We have heard, again and again, that " privileged classes " are unjust : we know that the " unprivi- leged " have been predatory. If national life were merely a theatre for un- moralized power — for " the unruly wills and affec- tions of sinful men " — the outlook would be hopeless. Society would drift from inequity to inequity, through one tyranny to another. Happily, man is not always and altogether a wolf to man. " The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns," and not merely their thoughts, but also their interests and their sym- pathies. Man learns to take others into account ; he discerns in them a right like unto his own ; he discovers that he and they are " severally members one of another." Thus he grows towards what is called a " national consciousness " — a consciousness informed by the conception of the national system of rights. The word " informed " is a technical one. It covers both knowledge and motive. A patriot, we say, is informed by the thought of his Fatherland. The Fatherland is not merely something he knows — it is a source of feehng and sentiment, it creates motives. So is it when growth into a national con- sciousness discloses to a man the national system of rights. He does not merely know that system, but the thought of it enters into him in such a way that his life is changed by it. His outlook is widened, he is moved by new motives, he becomes aware of new sympathies. And, above all, he discovers a new duty — social justice. 46 NATIONAL REVIVAL In this broadening of life, in this discovery of a new moral unity — the unity of justice — we see the first " particularism," the first " individuahsm," of power corrected by a larger thought. Social justice cannot consist with inequity. If devotion to it were general and everywhere perfect,* inequities would soon disappear. The obvious fact that devotion to it is neither general nor perfect defines the province of law. Now, the law is some- times depraved by politicians, it is often clumsy, those who make and those who administer it are sometimes unintelligent, but — these things not- withstanding — it does aim at being something more than a mere exercise of coercive power, it does stand for a general conception of right, it does express a moral purpose. What purpose ? Surely this : a purpose to use the conception of right correctively. Law exits to correct, through a moral conception, the inequities created by abuse of power. It is a coercive instrument of social justice. The argument has been slow-paced, but at last it enables us to define the conception of poUtical authority. That authority is the authority of a moral conception — the conception of social justice. If and in so far as pohtical institutions embody that conception, make it articulate to the minds of men, they are authoritative institutions. * By "perfect" I mean, not merely "without reservation," but also "perfectly intelligent." NATIONAL REVIVAL 47 §4 THE GROUND OF POLITICAL AUTHORITY Social justice : is that the last word in the analysis of political authority ? Undoubtedly it is a great one. Few thoughts, indeed, stand higher than that of a nation entirely and perfectly just — a nation wherein an impartial right operates effec- tively through laws and institutions and the habitual ways of men. Yes, the thought is a great one ; but is it final, or does it point to something yet greater than itself ? I have spoken of " an impartial right." What do we mean by right ? Is it more than a claim asserted by successful or insurgent power ? For us, the men of the National Revival, this question is vital, for only if we answer it affirmatively can the revival for which we work be more than a dream. What, then, is the ground of human rights ? What gives men rights ? The question seems abstract, and many will deem it out of place in a book which is intended to be a practical contribution to pohtical life. To these I would reply in famous words: " Wait and see," Meanwhile, I frankly admit cer tain things, and, in order that there shall be no mis- take, I will set them down in numbered paragraphs. (i) I admit that John Bull is not a speculative creature. We have been told, on high authority, that he dislikes an abstract idea as much as he dis- Ukes the Pope. Tis dislike of the Pope is waning, but his other dislike is as strong as ever. I have a good deal of sympathy with him, for abstract ideas 48 NATIONAL REVIVAL become life-giving only in the hands of a master of thought, and it is not often that Honest John meets such a person. Nevertheless, it is as obvious as a November fog in London, that, unless John Bull consents to overcome this amiable prejudice of his, he will soon find himself in a very deep hole. The good fellow has an unfortunate habit of going to sleep while other men are working. Many voices, including the King's, have warned him to wake up and set his house in order, and at last he is clumsily showing some inclination to do so. But he will never get much order in his house unless he first gets his brains in order. The time for " muddling through " has passed. To-day John is face to face with very big problems. Never before, in the whole course of his long experience, has he come across anything quite like them. Unless he puts on his considering-cap for a few minutes they will give him a very bad fall. If he will not think for himself, some glib-tongued charlatan will offer to do the thinking for him, and, after enjoying an hour of ignoble triumph, will leave poor John in a terrible mess. Thought of some kind John must have, and his only choice is between good and bad thought. Really, he had better take the good. (2) That troublesome person " the man in the street " — who could smother everyone else in ballot-papers if he chose to do so — has not the least interest in the origin of his rights ; it is enough for him that he has them. Now, I will take the first opportunity of talking to " the man in the street " in his own language. NATIONAL REVIVAL 49 At the present moment, however, I am not writing especially for him, but for those who will be his leaders and helpers. Some of them are doubtful about him. He has been saying rude things, and applauding ruder, and some well-disposed people are beginning to think that his " rights " are their " wrongs." My harmless question is intended to make things clear, — to bring the top and the bottom together. When they have come together we can proceed pleasantly to crack a good many nuts. The right to opportunity will be the hinge of the nut- cracker. The nuts will be — well, among them will be several smug mediocrities and pretentious pieces of commonplace that have quite undeservedly be- come prominent. (3) I know many think that strong negations are more profitable than a thought which creates a new ideal and quickens men with a new hope. I beheve that they are quite mistaken, and I have already said so. These three things do I know. I know also a fourth thing. (4) In these troubled days, many men of Con- servative instincts have become irresolute. They feel that their traditional standing-ground has been undermined, and, as they see no other defensible position, they are inclined to fall back. To these men I would restore confidence by show- ing them the imperishable foundations of right. And I would do more than this, for the times call for more than mere defence. I would show them that the truth which makes right eternal furnishes £ 50 NATIONAL REVIVAL the inspiration and the plan for a swift advance. Then, from being doubtful fighters in a rear-guard, they will become stalwarts in a new crusade. These four things, then, do I know quite well, and, having placed them upon record, I now re- turn cheerfully and impenitently to my question " What is the ground of human rights ? What gives men rights ? I have said that rights are safeguards of life. In their first and most obvious aspect they are assertions or claims. A man who finds his property threatened by predatory legislation asserts a right to his pro- perty : some oppressed and tributary class claims larger opportunity. Now, a right that is merely asserted or claimed safeguards nothing. It becomes a safeguard only through recognition. Sometimes recognition is given formally by the law : sometimes informally — by an unconstrained consent in the hearts of men. When this or that man's right is recognized by another it becomes normal for that other, and restrains him from trespass. Thus, through recognition, a right becomes a safeguard. For instance, a labourer whom I employ comes to me and tells me that he ought to have something which he has not. In effect, he asserts a right, and, after investigation, I recognize his right. Henceforth, I may not treat him " like a dog " or use him as though he were merely a cheap tool. His right has become a right for me. Not only does it regulate my dealings with him, but I know that it rightfully regulates them. Henceforth, the conception of right which governs i NATIONAL REVIVAL 51 my conduct will include his right. Thus, through my recognition of it, his right — which had been in- effective had it remained an assertion — becomes a safeguard. An asserted right, then, becomes a safeguard 'through an expansion of the conception of right. Is that expansion merely an accident, due to some individual peculiarity in this man and in that, or is it a result of something fundamental and universal in human nature ? If merely an accident, then the highest forms of social progress — those wherein hfe is enlarged and made more worth the living — are parts of the chapter of accidents, and we can have no higher political hope than the doubtful one which that chapter furnishes. If, however, the expansion of right be more than an accident — above all, if the ultimate sanction of it come, not from the consen- tient wills of men, but from something more per- manent and august, — then we may reasonably work for it, and reasonably hope that it will take place. Accidental happening or — No, let us make an end of questionings. I confess at once that, for me, rights are more than dispositions of man's heart and persuasions in his mind. In the life of men and in the life of nations they progressively reveal the world's objective moral order. Up to this point we have followed a plain road whereon men of different creeds may be fellow- travellers. Beyond this point there is no longer one well-marked road, but many paths. " The world's objective moral order." Men construe that order in widely different ways. For- 52 NATIONAL REVIVAL tunately, however, the principle of authority is sufficiently established by the existence of that order, and we need not seek to make any one interpretation of it generally binding. The words by which I have described it are dehberately indefinite, — ^they can consist with any explanation of it which is not an " explaining away," — but they are sufficient to unite in a common policy all or most of those who believe that political authority is founded upon something more stable than democratic arithmetic, the counting of heads. Yet, at this moment of crisis, when everything is at stake, I would not invite my countrymen to follow me in a great adventure without first declaring to them my whole mind. Let us go back to the thought of sovereignty. As we have already seen, sovereignty is a power which may at any moment come a coercive power. Now, this power is exercised on human beings. If men were merely things, the only principle of government would be a prudential one. " Do not provoke unpleasant or unprofitable reactions " would be the Golden Rule of policy. Men, however, are not mere things, they are persons, and conse- quently each man has what no mere thing can ever have, — an intrinsic end, an end which can be reahzed only in himself. A thing, a mere thing, can (at the most) be an instrument ; a person is never merely an instrument, but is always an end, an end in and for himself. Human life is a perpetual becoming : human nature is not so much a thing given as a thing achieved, and the achievement is not yet NATIONAL REVIVAL 53 complete. Man is never finally satisfied ; he is always reaching out beyond the present towards something which the present does not give, and by that outward-reaching effort capacity is developed and manhood built up. The end of that effort is always some desired state of the man himself — some desired experience, some desired kind of life. That end has received more than one general defini- tion. Aristotle spoke of " the good life," the school- men of " the highest good," Green (the Oxford Neo-Kantian) of " self-realization." For my present purpose, Green's definition — which includes the thought of development — is perhaps the best, but I will not use it, lest it should seem to imply a philosophy which I do not accept. I will venture to substitute for it the thought of completeness. The general end of human life is completeness of life. Progress, rightly understood, means nothing more nor less than approximation to that complete- ness. There is in human nature a principle of " Divine unrest " which will not be denied satisfac- tion, a principle of growth which will not be denied opportunity, and the history of human progress is the history of that principle in its secular develop- ment and achievement. By the very constitution of his nature, man claims opportunity to live a reasonable life, to achieve what philosophers have termed " the good." Thus far we have reached ends, but we have not yet reached rights. From the mere fact that you are psychologically — by the constitution of your nature — an end in and for yourself, I cannot infer 54 NATIONAL REVIVAL for my own conduct any principle of restraint that is not merely prudential. The psychological end makes each individual uniquely valuable to himself, but it does not make personality inviolate. It does not do so for the simple reason that psychology is not ethics, and does not give any sovereign infor- mation to the conscience. How, then, do we pass from ends to rights ? An end becomes completely a right — something which the conscience can maintain against all comers — only when connected with the ultimate ground of man's moral life, and transformed into a Divine purpose and a sacred vocation. God, whose will is normal for all our effort and achievement, has appointed unto man a general vocation and duty — a vocation and a duty to become the best that he can become. He has given us life, and the governing purpose of the gift is this — that the thing given may be completed. It is a talent which should earn many other talents, a rough stone which we have to cut and polish, a possibility of which we have to make the best. This vocation to " accomplish " * what God has begun is a general vocation, a vocation for all men everywhere. In virtue of that vocation, and within the range of that vocation, all men are equal. Moreover, that vocation makes personality inviolate — it defines, we • The word "accomplish" is used with an unusual meaning. A precedent may be found in the Prayer Book : " Almighty God who has given you this will to do all these things ; Grant also unto you strength and power to perform the same ; that he may accomplish his work which he hath begun in you ; through Jesus Christ our Lord." — The Form and Manner of Ordertng of Priests. NATIONAL REVIVAL 55 may say, for each individual life a certain sphere of action wherein the Divine purpose for that life is supreme, and it prohibits trespass.* Thus it gives to each man something which he can maintain against all others as a right. The universal vocation creates a universal right, and that right cannot be wittingly violated without rebellion like that of the angels who fell. How shall we define the universal right thus constituted ? Clearly, it is a right to opportunity — to opportunity for pursuing one's Divine voca- tion. From that right all other human rights are derived. The right to opportunity, then, is a transcendental right, for it is derived, not from society nor from the State, but from the transcendental ground of man's moral life. This transcendental character is indis- pensable, for the right to opportunity is completely a right only in virtue of its connection with that transcendental ground. The foundations of right and the foundations of freedom are not in the un- certain and fluctuating wills of men, but in montibus Sanctis, in the world's objective moral order. Men construe that order variously. For myself, I am content to believe that, by this universal right to opportunity, " The whole round world is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." Other men have other thoughts, but, however different our interpretations, this at least is clear : man's moral vocation discloses the most august * See Note F. 56 NATIONAL REVIVAL authority known to us, and his right to pursue that vocation imports that authority into poHtics. Does it seem an over-bold thing thus to conse- crate the bespattered topics of poUtical argument ? I am convinced that only thus can we morahze politics, only thus can we validate our freedom, only thus can we do justice to those patriotic and saintly heroisms which make human life obviously more than a turmoil of ants.* § 5 THE AUTHORITATIVE STATE I have described the nation as a " unity of rights." If we made the mistake of regarding rights as merely legal, the national unity of rights would, at any moment, be nothing but the body of rights then legally established, and Conservatives — who, what- ever else they do or do not do, must, in some sense, be guardians of the existing order — ^would justly incur Matthew Arnold's reproach of being merely " children of the status qtio." We have seen, how- ever, (i) that rights are prior to the legal recognition of them ; | (2) that, besides the unity of rights, there is a deeper unity — that of one fundamental and universal right (the right to opportunity) which no existing body of legal rights exhausts. • See Note G. t This follows from the fact that rights are not merely creations of society, but inhere primarily in the individual, and have their ground in the world's "objective moral order" — in the will of God. NATIONAL REVIVAL 57 These two facts — the priority of right and its extra-legal range — are of primary importance. They point beyond all the particular rights established by law to that primary and unexhausted right which pertains to each individual. The nation is a unity of rights. Undoubtedly, but of what rights ? Of individual rights to opportunity, and those rights have a range which is not circumscribed by the definitions of the law. Besides the system of law, there is a larger and prior system, — the ethical system of individual rights to opportunity. In this larger system we have the final truth of the concep- tion that the nation is a unity of rights. Now, concerning this larger system, there are two things to be said : (i) Because it is a system of individual rights to opportunity, it possesses the distinctive authority of the right to opportunity; it is an authoritative system; (2) Because it is a system of real rights — of rights which are not merely legal — it is a system which ought to be, something which should be recognized by the law and realized in the usages and institutions of society. Further, the right to opportunity is original and complete in every individual. It has no degrees, and without it man would not be man. Therefore, it is a universal right, and is the ground and evidence of a fundamental equality between men. " Where- ever man meets man, each is in presence of a right which is as good as his own," and equal to his own. The national system of rights is a system of equal rights. 58 NATIONAL REVIVAL Thus far I have spoken of the nation. Let us now turn to the State. The State is the organ of sovereignity. It is not the nation : rather is it an aspect or part of the nation.* With approximate truth we may describe it as " the nation organized for self -maintenance through poHtical power." Now, that which has to be maintained is — what- ever else it be — a system of equal rights. The State exists to maintain that system. As we have seen, the rights which constitute the national system are so many individual forms of the right to opportunity. That right is universal, and all the several forms of it are essentially equal. The guardianship of the State, therefore, should be equal and general. The State does not exist to safeguard the rights of these rather than the rights of those, the life of this class rather than the life of that. Within the social organism it has an universal function. Its duty is general : its care should be impartial. This universality is prescribed for the State by the universality of the right which it exists to safe- guard. That right is universal because it is complete in each and every individual. The State, therefore, has a duty towards every individual, and an equal duty towards each individual. Again : the nation is a living whole — it is a unity of rights — and the State exists to safeguard that " whole." Therefore the State should always have a general aim and a general point of view. Whether, then, we regard the duty of the State ♦ See Note H. NATIONAL REVIVAL 59 as an impartial duty towards each of many individuals or as a general duty towards a vital unity — a system of rights, — we are led certainly and quickly to a conception of government which pro- hibits the exclusive and selfish predominance of any one party or class. Normal government is always national. Even in a democratic country the State does not exist to make " the will of the people " supreme. Rather does it exist to express that will in and through the equities of freedom. It stands before the comitry as the representative, not of this or that sectional interest, but of the national interest. It mediates, within the sphere of political action, the great idea of social justice — the conception of a national unity which is not identified with any class interest, but embraces and reconciles all interests. The State exists to correct inequities. If it adopt policies which are merely and selfishly sectional, — if it become, for example, the instrument of a " consciousness " which is merely a " class con- sciousness," not a " national consciousness," — it creates new inequities, it ceases to discharge its characteristic function, and it thereby loses its primary claim to a general allegiance. A Govern- ment which consents to be merely sectional or partizan degrades itself. The State, then, is or should be an impartial guardian of a universal right — the right to oppor- tunity. It has to make that right everywhere an effective right. Wherever that right has been to some extent realized, — in laws, customs, and institu- 6o NATIONAL REVIVAL tions which estabUsh Hberties and protect property, — the State has to secure it against invasion. Wher- ever the unequal development of society maintains inequities which hinder or obstruct the lives of men, the State has to correct these inequities, has to give the opportunity which they refuse to give. The State, then, ha^s two duties : Protection and Emancipation, Conservation and Reform. We com- bine these in the thought of Social Justice, and reach the conclusion that the State is the instrument of Social Justice. Because the right to opportunity is a right — and not merely a more or less effective claim — it is an assertion of what ought to be. The characteristic duty of the State is to make that right effective against the contradictory inequities of the social order which actually exists. Therefore, the State also, the normal State — is an assertion of what ought to be. At any given moment the State exists to correct, through a moral conception, the inequities created by the actual distribution of power.* We have seen that man's right to opportunity has its foundation in the world's objective moral order, in montibus sandis, and is a completely authoritative right. Because the State exists to assert that right, it possesses the distinctive authority of that right. The State is an authoritative institu- tion, and the conception which it mediates is that of • Instead of "by the actual distribuiion of power," one might say " by the abuse of power." Abuse, however is possible only because "the actual distribuiion of power " within the social organism makes this or that man strong for aggression and this or that man impotent to resist. NATIONAL REVIVAL 6i social justice, — the only conception through which right can be safeguarded,* This pohtical authority of the State should be clearly distinguished from its political power. The power of the State is a power of the social organism ; in a democratic country it is derived from " the people." The authority of t^e State pertains pri- marily to the purpose or function of the State, and is derived immediately from the conception which it sets forth, — the conception of social justice, — and ultimately from that general Divine vocation, that objective moral order, which is the validating ground of that conception. In fact, the State is authorita- tive because and in so far as it is the pohtical expres- sion of that vocation and that order. An authori- tative State, — the conception is fast becoming unfamiliar, and, when men hear of it, they will immediately ask : " Then what of free institu- tions ? What of representative government ? What of democracy ? " I win answer these questions one by one.f §6 FREEDOM Free institutions. To ask " What of these ? " is hke asking " What of freedom ? " And what of freedom ? No one who has felt the glamour of our English story, the inflowing and • Human rights — be they those of a majority or a minority — do not depend upon numbers, but upon the transcendental ground of man's moral vocation. A demand for political recognition of those rights is a demand for justice. t See Note I. 62 NATIONAL REVIVAL uplifting tide of our peerless English tradition, can have a moment's doubt. Freedom is the innermost strength of life and its daily refreshment. Love is her nursling, and Wisdom is her firstborn. From her hands come whatever sweetness and strength ennoble our common life, and those rarer gifts which crown the life of genius. By her, and by her alone, are men made truly men : through her, and through her alone, can they become com- pletely men. Remote at first and obscurely seen, in the fulness of the days she visited the homes of men, and made for herself here and there a dwelling- place and a shrine. And, as time went on, her shelters and her altars multiplied. She went to and fro among the works of men ; thousands who had worshipped her from afar beheld her unveiled face, and wherever she passed there sprang up a trans- forming hope and a deathless purpose. In her presence old enmities died down, and the thoughts of men grew larger ; her common benediction throbbed in their hearts as the first pulse of a new brotherliness. And now ? Now her increasing light is everywhere the dawn or the promise of a better day. " Mother of man's time travelling generations, Breath of his nostrils, life-blood of his heart, God above all gods worshipped by the nations. Light above light, law above law thou art ! " Does it seem extravagant to quote these lines ? It is — but hardly. What of free institutions ? This : they are in- struments and homes of freedom. In them and through them, amid all the perverseness of our NATIONAL REVIVAL 63 ignorance, the oppositions of our selfishness, the defilements of our passion, in them and through them does freedom effectually work. Therefore do we EngHsh folk rightly deem them invaluable. Among the great nations of the world, England is pre-eminently the home of freedom. Our political history has been a long adventure to realize the idea of freedom, and it has not been unsuccessful, for, by a thousand years of endeavour and achievement, we have built up the greatest tradition of freedom that the world has known. Scarcely more than sixty years have passed since " the first free word " was spoken in Vienna, but we of the English name have always been free, and for centuries our history has been a record not only of free words, but also of free deeds. Freedom is not merely an attribute of our State : it is a birthright of each one of us. It is the deathless spirit of our Constitution, the breath of our English hfe, the groundwork of our EngHsh character. For a long time we thought of freedom negatively. We conceived it to be the absence of constraint, and we were content with merely practical distinc- tions between it and hcence. Afterwards, when we attempted to define those distinctions theoretically, we reached the conception of an equal freedom, and found a resting-place in the well-known formula : " The freedom of each, conditioned by the equal freedom of all." This formula, however, was merely regulative. It marked out certain limits but it did not tell us what freedom is ; still less did it teU us what gives man a right to it. 64 NATIONAL REVIVAL What is freedom ? In an unspeculative moment " the man in the street " would probably say that it is the power and the right to do what one likes. Well, there are obvious physical facts which set insuperable limits to the power of man, and, even if we agree that the plain man's answer is intended to be an answer within those limits, there remains the scarcely less obvious fact that a variety of obliga- tions impose other but equally effective limits. If I have to earn my living and provide for my family, I cannot devote myself to some unremunerative study, however much I wish to do so. As to right — it is certain that not even the most privileged of men has any right that can be precisely described as " a right to what he likes." We have seen that certain ultimate facts mark off (as it were) round each man's life a certain sphere of action whereon no other may trespass. That sphere is the sphere of personality : it is also the sphere of freedom. The Divine facts which give man a right to an " inviolate personality " make him free. His right to freedom is, indeed, but another name for his right to an "inviolate personality" — for his right to himself. It has been shown, however, that man has this right in order that he may carry out a Divine pur- pose, in order that he may grow, and thereby com- plete the work which God has begun in him. His right to freedom, then, is a right to live in a certain way. It is not a right to do whatever he likes. It is not a right to seek that somewhat unworthy pleasantness ordinarily called " a good time." It NATIONAL REVIVAL 65 is a right to grow into serviceable manhood. It is, in fact, the right to opportunity — and it is nothing else. The political inference from this is obvious. Political freedom does not mean that men can do what they like, provided only they be strong enough to win elections ; it gives no support to the vulgar doctrine of " the sovereignty of the people." It does mean opportunity to grow, through the forms and usages of self-government, into the duties and responsibiUties of patriotic citizenship. As in the State, so in the individual. In each case, power is subordinate to a moral conception — in one case to the thought of social justice, in the other to that of a certain kind of life. Only by this subordination is the State kept from tyranny, and the individual from licence.* Freedom is never " unchartered." It exists, by Divine appointment, for a certain Divine purpose — in order that, through it, men may grown into a larger, nobler, more helpful life. The right to opportunity is universal, and all men possess it equally. That right is the right to freedom. Because all men possess it equally, this ultimate right creates a certain equity between man and man, an equity which forbids this man or that to trespass on a fellow's right. It is precisely this equity — under the name of social justice — that the State exists to safeguard, and in virtue of this function the State is authoritative. Therefore, there is no opposition between authority and freedom. In the thought of social justice, these * See Note J. F 66 NATIONAL REVIVAL two conceptions — which seem at first to be mutually exclusive — are completely reconciled. §7 REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT But what of Representative Government ? If there be in government an authority which is not derived from the people, why give the people representation ? — what is the function and what the value of Representative Institutions ? Well, it must be frankly admitted that we who are now working for National Revival are not Demo- crats — no one would believe us if we professed to be. We have no use for the servility that infers a man- date from the largest crowd or for the hypocrisy that pretends to, but we are thoroughly loyal to that stately tradition of Representative Government which safeguards our Enghsh freedom. We cannot, however, suppose that Representative Government exists merely to make " the will of the people " supreme. We attribute to it a higher function. We believe that Representative Government exists to express " the will of the people " in and through the equities of the civic freedom — to inform the mind of " the people " with the sovereign ideal of social justice. " What is the function and what the value of Representative Institutions ? " Our answer is a short and simple one : Representative Institutions exist to " moralize " the State and to " nationahze " citizenship. NATIONAL REVIVAL 67 (i) Representative Institutions give peaceful expression to the needs of the represented, and place in the hands of the represented more or less of power to satisfy their needs. In other words. Representative Institutions are a means of bringing the State (the Government) into contact with the nation's needs, and of determining State-action by and to those needs. They are one way of enabling the State to discharge its characteristic function as the guardian of rights, the instrument of social justice. They are one way of making the duty of the State the deliberate purpose of the State. There- fore, they are one way of " moralizing " the State. (2) Man's ultimate right is a right to oppor- tunity, and his demand for opportunity is defined by his circumstances and his interests. Ordinarily, our interests have at first a narrowly personal form. They are not then always selfish, but they are defined without reference to the interests of others, without reference to the national ideal of an equitable system of rights. For instance, a working-man is interested in his wages, and is easily moved to define them without reference to the rightful interests of those who (in ways other than his own) are co-partners with him in the work which he helps to carry on. Another man's primary interest is in the life of culture, and the importance which he rightly at- taches to well-endowed leisure tempts him towards assertions which would imply that the workers are not co-ordinate but subordinate, — not (as are he and those hke-minded) ends in and for themselves, but tributaries to his private pleasure. 68 NATIONAL REVIVAL The free political life which is the basis of Repre- sentative Government tends to correct the first particularism* — the first extravagance — of our claims. It brings us into the presence of rights which are as good as our own ; it teaches us that each individual life is " socially conditioned," that individual achievement, whether in the improve- ment of wages or in the pursuit of culture, pre- supposes a certain " social preparation." Moreover, active participation in political affairs gives new points of contact with life. The man of culture, for instance, is brought face to face with the pathetic problem of the poor ; the working-man discovers the Empire. By such happenings our thoughts are enlarged. We recognize a national end, and — by the broadening of our interest and sympathy, through an increasing sense of solidarity — we grow into an effective national consciousness. Thus our citizenship becomes " nationalized." It is a primary function of Representative Institu- tions to bring about such results, f §8 DEMOCRACY And, now, what of Democracy ? The word " Democracy " denotes an ideal and a method. The ideal seems to be one of brotherhood based upon a general political equality. The method is compendiously described by the well-known words " one man, one vote " — in other words, * See Note K. t See Note L. NATIONAL REVIVAL 69 it is the method of equalization, of equaHzing the distribution of poHtical power throughout the social organism. Concerning the ideal little need now be said but this : brotherhood is undoubtedly the ideal goal of human progress, but brotherhood has its proximate ground in moral (spiritual) equahty, not in pohtical equaUty. The relationship between man and man which it implies is essentially a spiritual relationship, not a political relationship. Pohtical equahty is one thing, and brotherhood quite another. There may be a complete and completely effective brotherliness where there is no political equality. We all know that there can be pohtical equahty without the least inference of brother- Hness. Concerning the method, however, there is more to be said. To equalize the distribution of political power is to place government in the hands of the largest body of electors. It tends directly to " gov- ernment by numbers," to government by " count- ing heads." Unfortunately, the characteristic duty of the State cannot be properly fulfilled by any process so simple as that of " counting heads." Government (the State) exists to safeguard a social system of equal rights. Now, an equahzed distri- bution of political power throughout the social organism would inevitably make one class — the working-class — predominant. If that predominant class were completely informed by a genuine social consciousness — if its private interests were com- pletely controlled and transfigured by a national 70 NATIONAL REVIVAL interest and by a true conception of social unity — its predominance would not be immediately harmful.* At the present moment, however, no class is thus perfect. Large numbers of our workers can hardly be said to have risen effectively above a class con- sciousness, and numbers of them have not even a tradition or helpful thought of economic independ- ence. The predominance of such a class would inevitably subordinate the State to sectional interests. Such subordination would destroy the ethical char- acter of the State, would negative its primary duty, and would be inconsistent with the true idea, the primary functions, of Representative Govern- ment. The State exists to be the impartial guardian of all rights, but this it cannot be if it become the biassed instrument of a class. Representative Insti- tutions exist to make the nation's needs effectively articulate, but, if one stentorian voice drown all others, they cease to give effective expression to the nation's Hfe, and thereby they lose their national * I say "immediately," and it seems necessary to emphasize that limitation, for the long-continued predominance of any one class, if it provoke not hopeful opposition, ordinarily tends to throw the other classes "out of politics," and such exclusion is always harmful. Excluded classes tend to harden into an un- sympathetic and sterile particularism, and, whatever the original virtues of the predominant class, that class, when deprived of enlightening contact with other forms of life, of corrective contact with rights as good as its own, will almost inevitably decline into particularism, into a self-assertion which goes beyond its right When such things happen, a nation's life, instead of rising by a progressive integration into a higher unity which generously in- cludes all classes, falls apart into divergent streams, each shallower and poorer than it might be and should be. NATIONAL REVIVAL 71 character.* Again, representative institutions exist to correct the first particularism of class interests. If they be of such a character that they permit some one class to control the Government by its first uncorrected will, they establish particularism, and are degraded by the most complete failure into which institutions can lapse. In the modern world, poHtical Democracy has only one meaning. It means the general and equal distribution of political power throughout the body pohtic. Modern Democracy is Aristotelian, and always tends to government by mere numbers, to the contemptible inference of a mandate by counting heads. Government, according to the particularist mind, the sectional mind, of the largest crowd would, however, demoralize the State, — would remove poh- tics from its moral foundations. How can this degradation be prevented ? The question does not seem unanswerable. On the one hand we have the authority of the State— an authority which exists only to safeguard a system of equal rights. On the other hand we have the democratic power of the State — a power prone to a particularism which negatives or ignores • The same result is reached when any one class, although not numerically preponderant in Parliament, is sufficiently strong to set the standard of policy. As we all know, the English working-class vote is not " solid." Nevertheless, it has an unsalutary predominance, for all parties depend upon it. Consequently, all policies are adjusted to it, and Government is unmistakably tending to become sectional rather than national. The only corrective is to be found in our Tory policy — the policy of safeguarding the universal right to opportunity, and of informing the hearts and minds of all classes with the ideals of social justice, national unity and patriotic citizenship. 72 NATIONAL REVIVAL the conception of equal rights. Clearly, if the Democratic State is to do its duty, its democratic power must become informed by the purpose of its authority, — in other words, the unimpaired ideal of social justice must become a political ideal of and for " the Democracy." As the indispensable com- pletion of the democratic equalisation of power, we must have a process of education and character- building, — of assisted growth out of particularism into a genuinely national citizenship. I say " as- sisted growth," for we may not trust to that " Bible of fools " — the chapter of accidents. We dare not wait until unenlightened power blunders through tyranny and ruin into the right way. The citizen- ship of the predominant " people " must be nation- ahzed, and it can hardly become nationaHzed — except through intolerable loss — unless those of us who know what " the nationalization of citizenship " means work, and work strenuously, to realize that meaning. This defines for us the primary duty of the poHtician, and the normal function of poHtical Ufe, in a Democratic State. That duty is to be the un- resting missionary of a moral idea, the idea of social justice. That function is to make that idea the controlling principle in the nation's life. We may say, indeed, that the Democratic equahzation of power creates a vocation and an opportunity, a vocation and an opportunity scarcely less than the noblest. To dechne v^ilhngly to anything lower is to make the Great Refusal. We of the New Toryism know this, and we dare NATIONAL REVIVAL 73 not disregard our vocation, we dare not neglect our opportunity. National Toryism represents in a policy and an ideal the great equities of human life, the moral factors in human progress — those great conceptions which link human society to the world's eternal order, and human history to a supreme purpose. After the equalization of power, then, we must have the nationalization of citizenship. I have said that a primary function of Representative Institutions is to bring this about. Such institu- tions, however, have educational efficacy chiefly through the effective assertion of complementary interests, through the effective disclosure of com- plementary aspects of life. When one class is largely and for a long time predominant, when it hears in Parliament no considerable opinion which does not defer to its own, when the established organs of political life effectively express no life but its own, that very predominance makes Repre- sentative Institutions relatively or quite ineffectual for the political education of the predominant class. Democratic institutions cannot nationalize " the Democracy." PoUtical education, however, is not exclusively a function of any one set of institutions. It is a func- tion of the social organism, and is variously carried on by every form of organized life within that organism. The lives of men develope through help- ful and informing contact with other lives, and not only nor chiefly by means of political institutions do they come into such contact. Far more varied, 74 NATIONAL REVIVAL far more helpful are the contacts of every-day life. There, in the daily intercourse and association of man with man, is the most effective school of citizen- ship. In a Democratic State the most important pohtical work lies outside ParUament, outside Representative Institutions, outside the affairs which we ordinarily term " pohtical." If we are to edu- cate "the Democracy" into a citizenship genuinely national, we must meet it helpfully in the midst of its every-day concerns, we must make the variously organized life of the social organism an enlarging life, a hfe which gives men a wider outlook, a broader sympathy and intelhgence, which hfts them out of particularism towards a general interest and a national consciousness. The duty to do this is an individual one, and every man must determine for himself the particular words and works by which it should be fulfilled within the sphere of his own individual hfe. One thing, however, should be borne in mind by us all. Out duty is to live, even more than to instruct. Enlightening and helpful words will do much, but enhghtening and helpful lives will do more. The moral idea which we desire to make generally effec- tive — the idea of social justice — must be expressed, not merely in our words, but in every activity and through every relationship of our lives. If we wdsh to make the nation's predominant will an equitable will, we must ourselves hve equitably. For us, the men of the National Revival, Toryism is more than a reasoned creed :* it is and must be a way of hfe. * See Note M. NATIONAL REVIVAL 75 §9 ^ AUTHORITATIVE INSTITUTIONS WITHIN THE STATE The State exists to inform refractory lives with the ideal of social justice. In the midst of the social organism it is or should be the authoritative expres- sion of that ideal. But the State itself is a human institution, and (in most cases) the men who exercise its powers are " the ordinary of Nature's workman- ship," who drift into (even if they do not choose) the path of least resistance. Therefore, if the con- stitution of the State express merely the political power — be it that of " the few " or of " the many " — which the accidents of history have made pre- dominant in the nation, the State is foredoomed to failure and degradation, for that predominant power — inevitably a " particularist " power — will impose upon it sectional poHcies which separate Government from its moral foundation in the thought of social justice, and contradict or disregard the moral voca- tion of Government to be the instrument of social justice. The proneness of man to " particularism " — his proneness to trespass upon his neighbour's life — makes necessary an authoritative State, The same facts make necessary also certain authoritative elements in the constitution of the State. To assist men in their slow growth towards the magnanimous equities of civic freedom, those equities must be safe- guarded and represented by authoritative institutions, — by institutions which express, not a predominant will, but a moral conception. Only through a 76 NATIONAL REVIVAL balanced representation of interests and aims can civic freedom become real. In a Democratic country the authoritative insti- tutions in the State must necessarily be forms of " minority representation." We may not, however, suppose that any authority pertains to a minority as such. A minority which is merely a minority is nothing but a feebler power, and such a power, in its nakedness, has no claim to maintain itself against a predominant will. If it clothe itself in the gar- ments of right, the case is altered. And this is what a minority must always do if it is to be genuinely authoritative. It must set forth its particular interest, not as a particular interest, but as a form of that social justice, that general equity, which is the moral foundation of national order. In its own way an authoritative minority should mediate, within the State itself, that concep- tion of social justice, of general equity, of civic freedom, which the State should mediate to the nation. It is a commonplace of present-day poUtics that the classes which were at one time rightly called " the governing classes " have lost confidence in themselves. They have done so because they have not discerned their opportunity and their vocation. They have asserted an interest rather than demon- strated an equity. Their position constitutes a privilege, but they have forgotten that a poUtical privilege can never be vaHd unless it has national utiUty, — unless it safeguards the idea of social justice, and helps men to a better understanding and NATIONAL REVIVAL yy a better use of it.* If, however, those classes would make themselves, even now, the representatives and exponents of that thought, — if they would transform their interests into equities, and would seek for safety, not in sterile negations, but in the large possibilities of a new constructive purpose, — if they would do this they would gain more than they have lost, and our country's disordered life would find new health in a higher synthesis, new strength in a nobler patriotism. This would not be an easy thing to do, but I am persuaded that it could be done if only there were a leader, — someone with courage enough not to be afraid of his fellow-men (even when they are in crowds), with mind enough to make our great Eng- lish tradition of service and freedom the light of our darkened path, with heart enough to make it the hope of all who are poor and out of the way, — of all who are weary and heavy laden. Authoritative institutions variously represent the idea of social justice. Their authority is in their function, — neither their constitution nor their origin is of primary importance. But how should an authoritative institution commend itself ? Bare authority is mere assertion, and the particularist mind of " the people " cannot be moved by the mere * This, then, is our Tory conception of authority. The authority which we affirm is that of a moral ideal. For us, the State is authoritative because and in so far as it mediates the conception of social justice, of that general equity which is established as right by the nature of man's moral vocation. For us, classes and institutions are authoritative, not because of the particular in- terests which they represent, but only because and in so far as, through the representation of those interests, they make the idea of social justice better understood and more effectively operative. 78 NATIONAL REVIVAL assertion of a thought which is not its own. As a matter of fact, however, authority is never bare, unless the institution through which it speaks is moribund. Parental authority becomes effective through love. The Church commends its message by that varied helpfulness which we generically term " grace." How does political authority com- mend itself ? Undoubtedly in the same way, — through the helpfulness of the classes and institu- tions which embody it. " Toryism is more than a reasoned creed : it is and must be a way of life." The characteristic function of authority is to make known or to make effective something which without it would be unknown or ineffective. The prophet makes known some word of God : the State makes effective the ideal of social justice. Let us take the case of something made known, for that is typical. Obviously, that which is made known by authority is neither given immediately in experience as (according to our ordinary thought) are the particular things of the external world — this tree, that house, — nor reached by demonstration as the conclusions of Euclid are reached. If it were accessible in either of these ways — either in ex- perience or by demonstration — there would be no need for the voice of authority. But how does authority evoke assent ? In what way does it move men to make the adventure of faith — to con- fide themselves, as it were, to something which they can neither see nor prove ? The answer to this question has already been given, — through helpfulness. NATIONAL REVIVAL 79 In an authoritative institution, however, we must distinguish between two kinds of helpfulness: the helpfulness of whatever is mediated by the institu- tion and the helpfulness which is peculiar to the institution itself. Parental authority is effective through the helpfulness of parental love ; that help- fulness is clearly distinguishable from the helpfulness of the idea which that love authoritatively mediates. Similarly, authoritative government is one thing, and the truth mediated by it is another, — each has its own helpfulness. A given institution — some Upper House, we will say — mediates the thought of social justice. That thought has an attractiveness of its own. It gives men some vision of a larger life, it inspires hope, it lightens the burden of inequity, — in other words, it has its own helpfulness. When, however, that House confronts the aberrant turbulence of some insurgent life which demands ampler opportunity, and says to it : " This, and not the thing you demand, is just," how does it make its voice effective ? Chiefly through its own helpfulness. Anything taken on authority is taken on trust ; it is accepted chiefly because the authority — person or institution — which propounds it seems to be trustworthy. Now, we are apt to believe a man trustworthy if we have found him unselfishly helpful. Those who are appointed to be bearers of political authority must live so as to invite trust. They must commend their mission by their works, by their own helpfulness. After fidelity to their appointed function, this is their primary duty. 8o NATIONAL REVIVAL In our modern world — incredulous of authority and impatient of restraint — the duty thus defined cannot be a Hght one. But Noblesse oblige— ivom these thoughts that old-world motto takes a larger and a loftier meaning — a meaning which creates a new chivalry of patriotic devotion, which imposes, indeed, a burden, but gives an inspiring vocation, and may well evoke the patient zeal of a great unselfishness. " For us, the men of the National Revival, Toryism is more than a reasoned creed : it is and must be a way of life." A governing class must be more than a mouthpiece of authority. Outside the range of its purely poUtical function it must touch the nation's Hfe at many points, and at each point it must touch it helpfully. To do this, according to his capacity and opportunity, is " the bounden duty and service " of each member of the class. Once more. Noblesse oblige* • See Note N. IV CONSERVATISM AND PROGRESS § I CONSERVATISM OUR opponents in the House of Commons, who falsely boast that they represent " the progressive forces " of the nation, con- stantly fling at us the taunt that we face the varied and urgent problems of English Hfe with nothing in our hands but " a few negations and Tariff Reform." Well, negations are necessary, and Tariff Re- formers are unfaltering in their faith. This, how- ever, is not our only answer. The taunt — like almost every other taunt — is an incomplete statement of fact, and it is made forcible only by its partizan omission. We have more in our hands than " a few negations and Tariff Reform " — we have that to which Tariff Reform is intended to lead up. For us, Tariff Reform is not an end,but a means, — a means to imperial unity, to industrial stabihty, to social reform. These three things make no inconsiderable sup- plement to " a few negations," but the mere mention of them moves men to interrogation. For instance, Tariff Reform is a means to social reform. To what kind of social reform ? We know that members of our parHamentary party are busy with social G 82 NATIONAL REVIVAL questions. We know also that their efforts do not evoke much enthusiasm among the steady-going Conservative classes in the country. Conservative apathy ? I think I would prefer the word " stoli- dity," — the EngUsh temperament, unlike the Celtic, does not easily effervesce. But, even when thus corrected, the explanation is incomplete. Beneath the passionless surface of English life there are strong purposes, deep convictions, warm attachments, but our parhamentary fragments of social reform make little or no appeal to this hidden hfe. And the reason for this is not obscure. The average English- man of a conservative temperament is not unsym- pathetic, and he is not unwilling to help, but he has learnt to distrust " social reform." He sees that all parhamentary thoughts of social reform — whether Unionist or Liberal — are controlled by a traditional method of State-action which has become the common heritage of both parties, and, after fifty years of experience, he has but small confidence in that method. In the depth of his silent heart he is convinced that it is demoralising. He has not a large vocabulary, and is probably content to say that " the country is going to the dogs." This comprehensive commentary covers many things. Behind it are terse opinions on our military and naval weakness, on the degradation of parliamentary institutions, on the Government's occasional obse- quiousness to mob law. And there is another thing behind it, — an unwavering belief that reforms governed by that common tradition of State-action which I have mentioned tend strongly towards NATIONAL REVIVAL 83 undesirable changes in the manhood of the nation, — tend to make men less capable, less self-reliant, less provident. Now, the reformatory projects of those who imperfectly represent him in Parliament seem to him to continue that distrusted tradition. Of course he is unmoved by them. I confess to having much sympathy with him, yet I venture to give him a word of warning, — a word which is also one of warning to his parliamentary representatives. I commence by pointing out two things which seem quite clear: (i) If Toryism be what I have said it is, — the expression of a distinctive life, the spirit of a dis- tinctive; civilization, — it must have its own dis- tinctive way of dealing with social problems ; (2) Until we can define that way, and develope our definition into a policy, we shall not be able — within the broad field of social reform — to establish any independent claim to the confidence of the country. Another thing also is quite clear. Great changes will take place in England. The choice before us is not a choice between " change " and " no change." If not with our help then in spite of us; great changes will soon be brought about. The choice that remains open to us is this : — Shall they come as parts of a " Georgian Revolution " or as parts of the National Revival ? There cannot be the least doubt what the Unionist answer should be, but the time of choice is fast slipping away, and, unless we bestir ourselves, we shall be driven by the masses we have neglected into paths we would not follow. 84 NATIONAL REVIVAL This is not the place for propounding the details of a social policy. Indeed, no private thinker can prescribe the policy of a great party. Something, however, can be done, and should be done here and now. We can and should answer clearly this fundamental question : For what does Conser- vatism stand ? One answer to that question may be gathered from the subjoined Confession of Faith which I wrote last year for a perplexed Unionist who was in search of a creed. A CONFESSION OF FAITH. UNITY — JUSTICE — FREEDOM 1. I beUeve in equal and fraternal freedom, in the right to opportunity, and in social reform through the assisted development of character, capacity, and racial fitness. 2. I beUeve in self-reUance, in immediate indi- vidual responsibility, in progress through individual effort and the developement of a national conscious- ness. 3. I believe in private property, in " the rights and duties " of property, in production and distri- bution by private enterprise, in the conciliatory co-operation of Capital and Labour, in equitably enlarging the worker's interest in his work and in the produce of his work. 4. I believe that the State is the instrument of social justice, that it exists to make social life and work equitable, that it should impartially safeguard every right, and make every right an effective right. NATIONAL REVIVAL 85 5. I believe in the equitable distribution of public burdens. 6. I believe in the constitutional liberties of the nation, and in justly-balanced representation by two co-ordinate Representative Chambers. 7. I beheve in loyalty to the Crown, and in patriotism based upon a healthy industrial system, and a helpful national life. 8. I believe that everyone should work gratuit- ously for the common good. 9. I beheve in securing to the working-classes larger opportunity, a better economic position, a more hopeful participation in our national and imperial Hfe. 10. I believe in developing the British industries, in safeguarding " the standard of hfe," and in firmly supporting British interests. 11. I believe in unaggressive armaments based upon a universal duty. 12. I believe that the British Empire exists to reahze the social ideal of freedom, and that the unity of the Empire should be developed through the development of common moral and material interests. I do not know what will be thought of this Con- fession, but probably most who read it will agree that no man who has it inwardly in his heart as well as outwardly on his lips can confine his patriot- ism within the small and infrequent opportunities of a General Election. Anyone who sincerely holds the articles of this creed must not only vote for 86 NATIONAL REVIVAL them, he must work for them — nay, he must Hve for them. That " must " is not an external neces- sity, but an inner compulsion, for the beliefs which that Confession affirms imply certain fundamental convictions and loyalties which can hardly exist in a man without becoming purposes, without domin- ating and consecrating the man himself. The Toryism for which I speak is and must be more than a political creed : " it is and must be a way of life." Many years ago, when the name " Conservative " was new, the author of " Sybil " asked : " What do you mean to conserve ? " The question which Benjamin Disraeli then propounded still confronts us. Clearly, when we call ourselves Conservatives, we intend to indicate a conserving purpose — but what do we mean to conserve ? It is sometimes said that we mean to conserve the institutions of our country. This answer, whatever its value, cannot be final, for we know that institutions change, and we all admit that reform is sometimes necessary. Neither can it be final to say that we intend to conserve the social organism, for conservation of the social organism is the general end of politics,* and therefore it cannot serve to distinguish one kind of political theory from another. Neither of these answers, then, is final. Each, however, approximates to the truth, and helps us towards the final answer. Attachment to certain relatively permanent elements in the existing order * It is a partial if not a complete description of political power to say that it is the power whereby a social organism exercises the right of self-conservation. NATIONAL REVIVAL 87 of things, an inclination to make the new organically continuous with the old, a consciousness which seems to itself national rather than sectional, — these may fairly be said to be characteristic of Conservatism. Stability that does not prevent change, reform by amendment rather than by supersession, the nation rather than the class or group, — these seem to be the characteristically Conservative preferences. Is there, in the nature of society — of the social organism — anything that explains those preferences and makes them reasonable ? I venture to think that there is, — the fact, namely, that society is an organism or complex of individuals who have severally been given a Divine vocation, and conse- quently a right, to grow. Society is a system of rights, and each individual right in that system is a right to opportunity. That right is something which ought to be realized in the Hfe of society. If not the end of society, it is an end, for — so we may say — society exists in order to realize it. This moral subordination* to a universal right which is everywhere equal is the one permanent element in human society. Even when not apparent it is latent. Man's needs and interests change, the social forms and usages which they create also change, but behind all needs and interests, behind all forms and usages, there is an abiding purpose and a changeless right. In the subordina- tion of the social organism to these perduring things we have its characteristic and essential note, and it * " Determination " would be a better word, but — once again — that word is technical, and is not generally understood. 88 NATIONAL REVIVAL is this that Conservatism seeks to conserve. Con- servative attachment to the permanent elements in the history is essentially attachment to these things, and because they are of universal value, and make social organism the instrument of a general hfe, the Conservative consciousness is characteristically national, not sectional.* The question asked seventy years ago in the pages of " Sybil " has at length been answered, — and answered finally. To make that great word " national " our own may seem a bold assumption, yet that assumption — if assumption it be — is one from which Conservatives have never shrunk. Certainly, we who speak for modern Toryism do not shrink from it. We name our creed " National Toryism," our object " National Revival." We do not stand for any selfish interest or for any selfish privilege : we stand for the nation. Our first thought is of that national system of rights which expresses the universal right to opportunity. For us,the State has a national duty, — never a merely sectional one. The Representative Government which we seek to re-establish upon firm foundations is pre-eminently national. Our work — the National Revival — is an attempt to build up a new national unity — one which safeguards all rights and recon- ciles all interests through the ideal of national * The ground of Conservatism is in those "objective" moral facts which make history a moral process, and politics a moral activity ; its theory is the development of those facts into a reasoned doctrine ; its policy is the application of its theory to the practical problems of a nation's life. In other words, Con- servatism is the political expression of the world's " objective moral order." NATIONAL REVIVAL 89 equity. And we are trying to do this — how ? By Hfting men into a national consciousness, wherein " particularism " is overcome by a national purpose, and problems are envisaged from a national point of view. Such is our thought and such our policy. We are genuinely, distinctively, pre-eminently, the National Party. §2 STATE-ACTION "These," it will be said, " are general conceptions. What do you propose to do ? " This question can- not be completely answered without propounding a detailed pohcy, and, for the moment, the inevitable disabihties of a private station make it impossible for me to do this. Something, however, may be done to define objects and methods, — to show the general conceptions which are normal for the " social pohcy " of a Conservative Party. We will begin with a few comments on State- action. The State is the guardian of rights. Some scornfully tell us that this conception would restrict the State to the role of a mere policeman, and they begin to talk grandiloquently of a moral function. Their scorn would be intelligible if the rights we had in mind were merely rights of property. But the rights which the State exists to safeguard are so many forms of the right to opportunity, and that is none other than the right to life, — to life, with its potential aptitudes and out-reaching energies. The State is the guardian of rights because it is the go NATIONAL REVIVAL guardian of personality, of that ever-unsatisfied spirit within each one of us which can become com- plete only in and through love and the self-sacrifice of love. From this point of view the " policeman " theory of the State is not visible. We no longer hear the clamour of menaced selfishness : we see a great spiritual life growing up towards the magnanimous helpfulness of a true brotherhood, and moulding the fabric of the social order to an increasingly unselfish and ever-widening purpose. Of that ascending life — of its indispensable freedom, of its right to oppor- tunity, — the State is the appointed guardian. The right to opportunity is a right to opportunity within the social organism. It is a right against obstructions and hindrances created by the inequit- able development of society. The State is the guardian of that right. If society afford not sufficing opportunity, it is the duty of the State to see that the defect is remedied. The defect is to be remedied where it exists, — within the social organism. Be- cause, however, the State is not identical with the social organism, we may not immediately infer that the defect should be remedied by some State-provision of opportunity. The individual right is a right to opportunity : the State-duty is a duty to see that opportunity is given. Neither from the right nor from the duty can we infer that the provision of a needed opportunity should always be a State-pro- vision. State-action, indeed, there must be, for the State has to discharge a duty, — a duty which cannot be discharged by sitting still; but nothing NATIONAL REVIVAL 91 in the general conception of the individual right, nothing in the nature of the State itself, warrants the opinion that the necessary action of the State must always take the form of direct provision by the State. In some cases, a properly-adjusted reform of some usage or institution would so change the life of society that the needed opportunity would be spontaneously afforded by that altered life.* In other cases, opportunity would be satisfactorily provided were the State to assist, and facilitate the establishment of, institutions and associations out- side its own machinery. To-day, State-intervention is in the air, and (more and more frequently) the intervention of the State is an intervention to provide. Of those who advocate the increase of State-provision, some are men of good will who know not what else to do, and some are merely swimming with a poUtical current. Others of them, however, are working with a clear-sighted purpose. They wish to " socialize " the nation's life, and — failing to discern the differ- ence between the social organism and the State, — they hope to succeed by gradually widening the area of State-provision. They are working — some confessedly, others Fabian-wise, — to make the pro- vidence of the State practically universal. Their aim is a radically mistaken one. The term of polit- • The alleged " right to work," although extravagant, undoubt- edly expresses a real right, but that real right does not require us to think that the State should provide work. If it be true that Tariff Reform would expand our industries, and thus increase the demand for labour, Tariff Reform would be— within the range of its efficacy— a complete discharge of the duty of the State towards those who are employable but unemployed. 92 NATIONAL REVIVAL ical thought is in the conception of a social organism which affords to each of its members full oppor- tunity for growth, — for normal development. The political ideal is an ideal of and for the social organism, and the social organism can grow into the completeness of that ideal only through the per- fecting of those facts and processes which make it an organism, — only through co-operation and sym- pathy, through common interests and a common life, only through a widening of local and class fellow- ships into the wider fellowship of the nation. The social consciousness arises out of the common life, out of the complex knitting together of indi- viduals by the sympathies and interests developed in and through the various activities of their asso- ciated lives. Where it exists, it is pervading conscious- ness and not a thing apart. Suppose it fully devel- oped, — it has no activity exclusively its own, but it pervades every activity and gives to each a new control. If, for the sake of illustration, we mentally divide the individual consciousness into compart- ments, and apportion to one compartment the con- sciousness characteristic of man as a father, to another the consciousness characteristic of him as a worker, and so on, we shall have no separate com- partment for the social consciousness. That con- sciousness will be a pervading and inseparable element in the apportioned parts. The social consciousness, indeed, is like self-consciousness. That has no separate activity exclusively its own, but it pervades every activity. So is it with the social consciousness : just as self-consciousness makes a NATIONAL REVIVAL 93 man aware that in all his various activities he is himself, so the social consciousness makes him aware that he is part of a " social whole," and gives to each activity that it informs a social character, if not always a social purpose. The social conscious- ness, in fact, is the consciousness which gives to man a social interest. By it he is hfted to a general point of view and an altruistic purpose. In the social consciousness, society itself, as an ideal con- ception or an ideahzed figure, becomes a controlUng agent in the particular activities of man's every-day Hfe, and only thus — only by transforming our every- day life by a pervading social interest — can hfe become genuinely " socialized." A mechanical read- justment of the social order can give us but a pre- tence of " socialization," or, at most, a distant and uncertain possibility thereof. The State, I have said, is the guardian of an ascending life, and that life has a right — original and complete in each individual — to full oppor- tunity for achievement. Now, human hfe grows by its own essential energy. The opportunity which it seeks and demands is an opportunity for that energy to be creatively and productively active. This enables us to set a negative limit to remedial legis- lation. The State may not impair the energy of hfe, — that energy which is life itself. At any given moment, it is difficult to define positively and in detail the limits of State-action. We may say, in general terms, that the duty of the State is to remove those established inequities which hinder and obstruct the lives of men, and 94 NATIONAL REVIVAL cannot be removed by the voluntary action of individuals. It may not, however, be supposed that our poUcy is merely one of emancipation. Men need more than freedom : they need also capacity to make use of freedom. The opportunity we give them must be a real opportunity, and not like a provision of books for a man who cannot read. Unfortunately, numbers have not the manhood apt for the exer- cises and possibihties of freedom. We must help them to achieve it. We have not only to give them opportunity : we must fit them to make use of opportunity. In other words, we must make their right to opportunity an effective right. One thing, however, we must constantly bear in mind : the State is the instrument of social justice, — and therefore, it should make the right to oppor- tunity everywhere an effective right, — but it is not a " Universal Provider." It should help those who need help, but it should not make them dependents on its bounty. Freedom, self-reliance, responsibility, — these are the primary conditions of real progress, of healthy national life, of an ennobling citizenship. Depend- ence upon State-provision destroys these : our pohcy of social justice and State-help fosters them. A general policy of State-provision would give us State-Socialism. Our Tory pohcy of State-help is the one reasonable and reasoned alternative to State-Socialism. NATIONAL REVIVAL 95 §3 THE HELPFULNESS OF SOCIETY In the course of these discussions two thoughts have become prominent : (i) The thought of man's general vocation to grow; (2) The thought that the State is the guardian of an ascending hfe. Each points us to the progressive achievement of manhood, the gradual developement of character and capacity. Such achievement is possible only in and through society, — that is a commonplace of ethics. Life becomes progress only through the opportunities, the invitations, the moulding and informing life — in a word, through the helpfulness, — of society. By that helpfulness society becomes valuable to man : in that helpfulness — or more accurately, in the experience of it, — we have the ground of patriotism. Just as love is the soul's response to some gift of life, so patriotism is man's natural response to the felt value of the national organism wherein he lives. The beneficence of a Government or political party evokes loyalty, but unless — in the minds thus made loyal — that Government or party is in some way identified with the nation, such loyalty is clearly distinguishable from patriotism. No one doubts that party-loyalty is one thing and patriotism quite another. Patriotism is always national, for its ground is in the helpfulness of 96 NATIONAL REVIVAL national life, and it is essentially a love which con- secrates the individual life to a national purpose.* The helpfulness of society reaches men variously through their various interests, and the character of its helpfulness determines the character of the respondent patriotism. That helpfulness reaches one man through the virihty of a sturdy common hfe, another through economic advantage, another through some great political tradition, another through a valued culture, and in each of the men thus variously helped it evokes a distinctive kind of patriotism. In its highest form it is effective as a moral ideal of individual and national hfe. When society is thus helpful, — when its perduring tradition and established forms are organic to some great moral conception which is an inspiring strength and an unfading hght, — patriotism is a worshipful devotion and a fervent love. Again, the helpfulness of society reaches men through their every-day interests, and in the fellow- ships and associations of every-day life. We rightly think of society, of the nation, as a unity, but we do not always recognize that it is a highly complex one. The universal relation of citizenship is not the only hnk between man and man. The factory, the local rehgious community, the University, the family, the Trades Union — these are minor societies constituted by the interests and activities of men, and no man is so isolated that he does not belong to some such group, to some fellow- * It follows from this that we cannot reasonably expect to find the nobler strength of patriotism in depressed or servile classes, in those to whom society is niggardly. NATIONAL REVIVAL 97 ship. The nation, in fact, is consociatio consocia- iionum — a complexus of groups rather than of individuals. Each of these groups or minor societies is the natural expression, the instrument, the foster- ing home of some human interest. Moreover, membership therein creates a common sympathy and a social purpose. We may say, indeed, that these minor societies are the natural means by which man grows out of thoughts that are merely and narrowly self-regarding towards a consciousness that is genuinely social. The great primary activities of human life are not isolated activities : they associate men together in more or less clearly defined groups, and each group becomes the home — the fostering shelter — ■ of sympathies and interests which lift men out of a narrow particularism to a higher point of view and a larger purpose. The distinctive consciousness of each group is, indeed, a group-consciousness and not a national consciousness, but it is chiefly in and through these primary forms of association that man comes into contact with the national life, and realizes his membership in the social whole. Society — the social organism — subsists only in the several individuals who constitute it. They arc the social organism. Therefore, society reaches man only in and through his fellows, his neighbours, his associates. These are not an unorganized aggregate, but are variously knit together into what I have called " groups." Therefore, society reaches man in and through organized forms of hfe. Its common life is the common life of individuals Virha H 98 NATIONAL REVIVAL are variously associated, and only in the various groups thus formed does its complex tradition live. The religious tradition of a nation lives in its rehgi- ous communities, and is effective in their influence. Similarly, a tradition of culture lives in the Univer- sities and other forms of organized life, and it is effective in the influence of that variously organized life. Take a seemingly much simpler case, that sense of personal freedom which is, or once was, an invaluable part of our English inheritance. How does that freedom come to man ? It does not drop down out of the sky, nor is it discovered in solitude. It reaches man through his daily inter- course with those around him, through his varied fellowship with those around him, and the sense of it is quickened and sustained by that intercourse and fellowship. The national inheritance reaches him through the organized life which immediately surrounds him. In that organized life it lives, and by fellowship in that life he partakes of it. I have said that the minor societies within the social organism are the natural means by which man is lifted into a larger life. They are thus instrumental partly because they embody the interests whereby character is built up and capacity developed, partly because they surround the indivi- dual with a social life that gradually informs his own. The family, for instance, shelters and fosters some of our strongest human attachments, and, when family life is approximately what it should be, it has a stronger formative and developing influence than anything else. On the other hand, NATIONAL REVIVAL 99 the Church and the Trades Union are morally effective chiefly, or largely, through the common life which they nourish and impart. Man grows through social experience, through experience within variously organized forms of social life.* Unfortunately, the modern pohtical mind — obsessed by the dangerous fiction of the absolute! ^^d omnicompetent State, — tends to ignore the minor forms of human association, | and modern pohtical policy tends, now to disintegrate, § now to fetter, and now to supersede them. It may be said that these tendencies arise from some statesmanlike desire to bring the nation's life more largely under the control of a national purpose, to make the conception of "the common good" more effectively operative. But can we, by thus exalting the State, make the lives of men more national ? Some account has already been given of the social consciousness and of the way in which national life reaches the individual. If that account be true, certain important conclusions become obvious. (i) The " common good " is operative only in and through some " common life " intimately known in the every-day experience and work of men. * Sec Note O. t See Note P. X Democracy shows a characteristic tendency to reduce men to a common denommator, and to deal with them in amorphous crowds. § For instance, the modern transfer of parental and filial duties to the State undoubtedly tends to disintegrate the family, for it weakens that nexus of reciprocal obligation which binds together the members of a family in mutual help and comfort. loo NATIONAL REVIVAL (2) A national purpose can become more nearly general only through fuller and more wide-spread participation by individuals in the nation's life. (3) Such increased participation takes place by growth into more varied and more intimate con- nection with that variously organized life wherein the national tradition variously subsists.* In dependence upon the State there is nothing to overcome the first particularism of individual and class interests, t We cannot enlarge the lives of men merely by making them parts of a State machine. If we take them as they are, and do nothing to give them broader thoughts and loftier hopes, the strongest particularism will capture the machine, and the experiment will end in tyranny. § 4 THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM I have said that man grows through social ex- perience. In other words, character is formed and capacity is developed b}/ the actual process of living, of living in society, of living within variously organized forms of life. That process is never un- motived or uninterested. Our life is characteristically purposeful, and seeks this and that ; in other words, it reaches out towards ends. Those ends — because they are sought, because they are centres of desire — are so many centres of interest. Now, interests arise out of the needs of life and by • See Note Q. t See Note K. NATIONAL REVIVAL loi invitation of our surroundings. New needs and new circumstances — either and both — will create new interests. These general observations are not sterile. Because human life follows the direction marked out for it by human interests, growth is governed by interests. Using a bold metaphor, we may say that a man will grow into the likeness of the things that interest him, will grow into the likeness of the interests that practically control his life. A man whose life is entirely circumscribed by some industrial or official routine, or by the cares of money-making, will inevitably decline to the low level of his work, what is fine within him turning coarse " to sympathize with clay." The changes brought about by social experience conform in character to the environing life which gives that experience. If the spiritual quality of the social environment be low, the resultant growth will be poor. We cannot expect men to grow nobly unless there be ennobling opportimities and invita- tions in the life around them. Do we summon men to a loftier citizenship ? Our words will be fugitive sounds on the winds of history unless the things that make citizenship a lofty inspiration are made a besetting help in their daily lives. I have spoken of opportunities and invitations. We all know what is meant by opportunity, but what does " invitations " mean ? What is it that invites ? In every case, I think, it is some desirable kind of life. Except in the extremes of pessimism, human desire is always a desire for life, for life itself, or for some better, some more satisfy- 102 NATIONAL REVIVAL ing, kind of life. Society invites man through the life which it unfolds to him. The motor-springs of progress are within the soul of man, but these become active only when moved from without. Progress depends upon environment. If the environment of life be sterile, — if it put forth no invitation, if it quicken no hope, — there cannot be progress. From these general thoughts, let us turn to the common lot of working humanity, — of those who in office, workshop, and factory obscurely keep the wheels of English industry moving. We have heard much of the dignity of labour. That dignity, where it exists, ordinarily arises out of moral con- ceptions which are neither evoked nor supported by the labour itself. There is no dignity in feeding a machine, in serving things over a counter, in the routine work of a clerk. There is no dignity, no in- terest, but much to make life paltry and men bitterly resentful. Yet into such things our children are thronging : amid such things the future masters of our State are growing up. Is it surprising that the results of school-life are evanescent ? Would it be surprising if one day our greatest political hope — our quickening forecast of magnanimous freedom — were shattered by mindless revolt or died beneath a tyranny of degraded and unstable crowds ? At one time, the accepted subordination of class to class, reinforced b}^ certain religious conceptions, created a sense of duty which imparted somewhat of dignity to even menial and trivial work. That subordination, however, has disappeared. It has been destroyed by those crudely-emancipating NATIONAL REVIVAL 103 movements which we describe collectively as "a discovery of personality," and in its old form it will never reappear. What, then, should be done ? We have to create, or recreate, the dignity of labour, the moral value of uninteresting work. We have to keep the interests awakened during early years from perishing in the Polar night of a routine which fosters no interest. We have, in some way, to moralize that routine, so that the effect of it shall be quickening and not deadening, strengthening and not weakening. Effect of some kind it will inevitably have. Unless, directly or indirectly, it touch the springs of healthy interest, it will be a depressing burden, and will impoverish and degrade. Unless it become fertilizing it will be sterihzing. The problem before us is to make it fertilizing, and, in some way or other, that problem must be solved. No one who cares for men, no one who cares for this our Fatherland, no one who believes that b}^ man's bounden labour (no less than by his free pursuits) an eternal purpose is either helped or thwarted, can willingly accept as final the soullessness of modern work, can willingly decline, without an effort, to the hopeless conclusion that the occupations which, of necessity, fill so large a part of so many lives are irreformably destructive and deadening. Yet what is to be done ? One thing, and one thing only, holds out a reasonable hope. A general moral interest, — in other words, devotion to some inspiring ideal of what life should be and might be, a governing determination of life by and to " objective moral values," — this and this alone can change the 104 NATIONAL REVIVAL settled dulness of our wintry day into the prevailing hopefulness of changeful spring, this and this alone can clothe the dry bones in the valley of toil with some vesture of helpfulness, can make our routine work a strengthening and enlarging discipline, an in- vitation to effort which passes out beyond the routine towards values which are vital and imperishable. Unless we can thus moralize man's bounden work, our school education will be largely wasted, and the future of our English " Democracy " will be dark with inappeasable unrest, or the deeper darkness of a stagnant, weary, and hopeless life. Turn now to education. I have already mentioned one matter : the ' ' educational waste ' ' which occurs after children have left school. They leave school at thirteen or fourteen, and vvithin a few years they are almost as though they had never been to school. I do not say, and I do not suggest, that this waste is universal, but it is sufficiently widespread to constitute a grave problem. The significance of it is unmistakable. It points plainly to the spiritual poverty of English hfe. Children become illiterate chiefly because they leave school without any interests that can permanently maintain the life of thought, and because the occupa- tions upon which they enter do not develope such interests. The results of education can be per- manently secured only by permanent interests, for education is not a mere imparting, it is an appropria- tion constantly renewed, and, if there be no stimulus to appropriation, the best education that is a mere imparting will be evanescent. NATIONAL REVIVAL 105 I am unable to persuade myself that we can com- pletely solve the problem of " waste " merely by elaborating and extending our school machinery. During early life we depend upon a provision made for us. We have not then to satisfy our primary needs by our own efforts, to earn our bread and butter, for instance. In school we come into some preliminary and mediated contact with the world through books, through our lessons. That contact undoubtedly brings with it an invitation, but what sort of invitation ? In later years, closer contact with the world discloses things which are ends in themselves, which invite us because they severally are, (or seem to be), in themselves, an immediate satisfaction of some felt need. The hungry man is invited by food, the scholar by opportunity for acquiring scholarship. During school-da3's most of us have no felt needs which our lessons could directly satisfy. The lesson is not ordinarily an end in itself, as food is to the hungry man and scholarship to the scholar. Rather is it a means to an end beyond itself, e.g., to outstripping our fellows, to pleasing our teachers or parents. Our highest and most potent interest in our lesson arises out of a moral interest which originates outside our school, in our home. If the school is to be quite effectual it must be supported by the home. If the home be ineffectual, the school also will be ineffectual. That moral interest which the home can and should create, the school cannot — or can but imperfectly — create, for the moral and psychological relations between the members of a io6 NATIONAL REVIVAL school are not and cannot be the same as those which subsist in a good home. Few changes would have greater educational results than one which would reconstitute the English home, would revive, in a more generous form, the moral efficacy of the family, I have spoken of a moral interest. The adjective is essential. The interests which sustain the life of thought are chiefly intellectual only in quite excep- tional cases, and those cases are, I think, abnormal. Ordinarily, men do not care for knowledge for its own sake, and I know of no general reason why they should. Neither is their interest in the world mainly speculative curiosity, and I know strong reasons why it should not be. Normally, man's interest in hfe — and this is the supreme factor in continuous education — is a moral or spiritual interest, an interest shaped and motived by some general conception of human nature and human destiny, by some general appreciation of those ultimate values which are essentially moral values. Education which is to be productive in adult years must be based on such a conception and such an appreciation. In other words, the foundation of education must be rehgious. A religious foundation alone is perduring rock, — all else is uncertain sand. I would not have that word " religious " mis- understood. As for myself, I am a churchman, and I beheve that the churchman's reHgion is unique, not primus inter pares, but standing by itself. Yet in English Ufa it is one organized reHgion among NATIONAL REVIVAL 107 many, and the many share with it this distinguish- ing character, — they purport to " objectify " moral values, to lift moral judgments above the sphere of mere opinion (of " subjective preference "), and to establish them in juontibtis Sanctis, in the world's objective order. To do this is the characteristic work of religion ; everything else is subordinate (because instrumental) to it. In normal cases, intellectual interests can be permanently sustained only by a permanent moral interest. Religion is the one source from which life can derive such an interest. Therefore, education must always have a religious foundation. That foundation, however, must be more than a mere imparting of doctrine. Religion is a much greater thing than the multipHcation table, and rehgious education is more than an imparting of facts. It is essentially a determination of affection and will to the things that are true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. Here, once again, we see that we cannot isolate education from the general life of society. The school should be religious, but the primary centres of religious education — of that education which forms the religious character — are in the home and the religious community. The most important of the interests through which men are educated — through which character is built up and capacity developed — arise outside the school, and, of those chief interests, many are not largely or powerfully operative until adult life has been reached. Consequently we may not regard io8 NATIONAL REVIVAL the school as the sole means of education ; we may not suppose that the school can dispense with a formative life outside of it, or (if that formative life be weak) can completely make good its defects ; we may not suppose that we can anticipate in school the distinctive results of interests which are exclu- sively or chiefly adult interests.* Education depends, for its permanent efficacy, upon a helpful life outside the school system, f Our most difficult problems within the field of educa- tion arise out of the fact that, to-day, large areas of English hfe are unhelpful. We have to make them helpful, to give them " a moral productiveness " which at present they have not or have but inade- quately. | To do this will need more than those institutional changes which, for most minds exhaust the idea of Social Reform : it will need the broad humanism, the generous life, the transforming hopes of the National Revival. I have spoken of the working-classes and of problems created by their life. We should not, however, make the disastrous blunder of supposing that the message of National Revival is for them • For instance, we may not suppose that by teaching Civics we can anticipate the results, in character and manhood, of adult participation in civic life ; we may not suppose that we can thereby create (in anything like effective completeness) a civic consciousness. By teaching Civics we can impart certain useful particulars of knowledge, and perhaps give a slight preliminary training, but the chief training in citizenship is given through those adult interests which lead men to talse an active part in public life. f Education is a function of the social organism as a whole, and not exclusively of that part of it which is controlled by the Board of Education. I Until something like this be done, our schools will stagger under a burden which no school should bear. NATIONAL REVIVAL 109 alone. That message is a message for all classes — not only for men who live in mean streets, but also for those who live in streets that are not mean and travel in first-class carriages, if not in motor-cars. No class in England has done its duty to the Father- land : I dare not suggest that the working-classes show us the worst failure. What are " the better classes " now doing for the great cause of national unity and social justice ? They have influence, opportunity, education, money ; what are they doing to reintegrate their country's disordered life, what are they doing to make English citizenship valuable ? Within certain small circles, much : outside those circles, nothing, or next to nothing. In the larger opportunities of prosperity, thousands of unhelpful men and women find — what ? Tinsel for a trivial hour, or distraction for an idle one, — nothing more. The great name of England suggests no duty : the needs of England may, indeed, move to sentimental pity, but they rouse to no effort, they exalt to no sacrifice. Yet these poor souls have received much from England. Here and there has England helped them, with no niggardly hand. How have they helped England ? The answer may be read in gathering clouds, and heard in the scorn of men. Our English life enshrines a matchless tradition. Disliked by those who advance the new pretensions of money, misunderstood by those who embark their fortunes on a vulgar phrase, known scarcely at all by the millions whom it will even yet redeem into manhood, it is, for us who have received it, a no NATIONAL REVIVAL treasure which has no price, a strength which has no substitute, an ideal which translates into civic duty the One Supreme Ideal. We have to make it the light of England's every-day life, so that its helpfulness shall meet obscure men in their homes and in their work, broadening the paths of oppor- tunity, inviting (with persuasion that interprets each private'conscience) to the duties, the responsibi- lities, the sacrifices of the world's noblest citizenship. To do this is our primary duty : how to do it is our fundamental problem. § 5 SOCIAL REFORM How can the helpfulness of our English tradition be made an uplifting strength in the remote bye- ways and crowded centres of English life ? The question is a hard one, but we of the National Revival face it hopefully. We expect much from the unselfishness of men, much from a nobler patriotism, much also from industrial Reform. I have spoken of EngUsh industry, and the spiritual poverty of the environment which it creates. That poverty seems to be largely a result of an unattrac- tive and ill-fated, but perhaps inevitable phase of industrial development, — the phase, namely, in wliich Labour has become separated from owner- ship, and has been treated as though it were merely a commodity. We find " Capital " misleadingly contrasted with " Labour," ownership ordinarily enjoyed exclusively by the former, and the latter NATIONAL REVIVAL iii treated as though it were some dead thing with a merely residuary right. It is no wonder that we are approaching an industrial deadlock. We are surrounded by difficulties and threatenings : I am persuaded that the true way of escape is the most adventurous one. We ought boldly to face the generous possibilities of industrial reconstruction. It were, however, useless to face those possibilities without some preparation by deliberate thought. I venture to set forth, very briefly, the thoughts which seem to me fundamental, (i) Historical circumstances have made Labour a subordinate factor in the process of production, and that subordination has been enforced by the superficial doctrines of the predominant (and pre- dominantly Liberal) political economy. This sub- ordination Labour is mistakenly trying to rectify, through Trades Unions, by a tyrannical use of its collective power. " Class war," however, belongs to a stage of industrial evolution which we are fast leaving behind, (2) The only efficiency in the productive process is that of work. Labour is obviously work ; Capital — its golden dress notwithstanding — is a mode of work, and its efficiency is the efficiency of work. As agents in production, Labour and Capital are gencrically identical, they are co-ordinate and co-efficient. (3) Commodities are things : they exist merely for consumption and use, merely as instruments or means. Labour, however, is a form of human Hfe, and human hfe is never a mere instrument, but is 112 NATIONAL REVIVAL always and primarily an end, an end in and for itself. We can rightly describe Labour as a com- modity only if we make it a useless abstraction, only by abstracting it from the human lives by which it is carried on. Thought can do this, but the resultant abstraction has no industrial efficiency.* Accepting these thoughts, we have to reach an industrial construction that shall give to them something hke full expression. We can reach it only through the idea of partnership or co-ordination, y Such a reconstruction of industry would have many important consequences. (i) It would give to Labour a helpful environ- ment and a new dignity, and, through this gift, Labour would grow towards a loftier patriotism. (2) The industrial efficiency of the nation would be considerably increased. Not only would this widen the home market, but it would be an im- portant step towards a solution of the perplexing problems that now gather round the Poor Law. A general reconstruction of this kind cannot be brought about suddenly, not even by the pretended omnipotence of Parliament. Indeed, it seems prob- able that large parts of the industrial system are not ready for such a reconstruction. I am, how- * These propositions go a long way towards making "a minimum wage " a general principle. I The words " partnership or co-ordination " are used in their widest sense, and may not be identified exclusively with any one of the plans — e.g., co-partnership and proQt-sharing — which men are now discussing. They are intended to cover everything which aims at making Xabour more than a hired tool, which aims at securing to Labour , that right of ownership which is conferred by productive work and is practically nullified by the " wages-system." NATIONAL REVIVAL 113 ever, convinced that a hopeful and helpful com- mencement might be made if only we were prepared to think sincerely and act boldly. Industrial Reform is part of Social Reform. We who have shown ourselves fearless in the smaller field will not be timorous in the larger. We believe in Social Reform, moved thereunto, not merely by human pity for the lives now crippled and wasted, but also by our love for England, for that Great Mother of us all, which asks of us to-day the full manhood of all her sons. More than this : Social Reform is not merely a response (which we cannot withhold) to the cry of human suffering, and to the mute appeal of those stunted and impoverished lives which do not yet know what they have missed, — it is not merely a statesmanlike device for increasing national efhci- ency — it is the practical recognition of a fundamental right. Social Reform is an attempt to help those who cannot help themselves. The helpless have a right to be helped. Their need is their right. That right is not merely a moral or religious right, — ^it is a civic right, a right which pertains to them in virtue of their citizenship, or (more accurately) in virtue of their membership in the nation. It is a right which the State cannot ignore without losing its highest moral character and disowning its highest function. " Then, after all," some uneasy Conservative will say, " you are inviting us to a new competition with Mr. Lloyd George ? " No, I am not. Our I 114 NATIONAL REVIVAL country needs higher service than that of a poUtical cheap-jack. If any man finds pleasure in commend- ing crude nostrums by sentimental rhetoric spiced with class-antagonism, we will contentedly leave him to his discreditable amusement. We have other things to do, and, first of all, we have to reconsider thoroughly the whole conception of Social Reform. We do not intend to be imitators of Mr. Lloyd George or inept and dilatory pupils of Mr. Sidney Webb. The political and social emancipations of the nine- teenth century changed subject masses into co- ordinate personalities, and these could find no home within the established order of things. A new synthesis, a new integration of the nation's life, became necessary, — some expansion of thought which would helpfully enlarge our English home and make it the shrine of a larger hope, the shelter and support of a better unity. This was not forthcoming, perhaps one could not reasonably expect it to be immediately forthcoming, and now the long-estab- lished fabric of English life is dissolving before our eyes. The signs of dissolution are everywhere, in every part of our political and social life, and each of them is a dumb appeal for help, for some new thought that shall reintegrate the separating members of our one English body and lift them into the new unity of a loftier purpose and larger fellowship. The Conservative Party has not been untouched by such appeals, but it has not effectively responded. Rather has it permitted the aim and policies of Social Reform to be defined by thinkers and workers radically opposed to it. NATIONAL REVIVAL 115 To-day, the Radical-Socialist conception of Social Reform holds the field. It is commended and sup- ported by considerable names, it has delusively assumed the certainty of science, it has created a traditional method which has become (or is becoming) common to all parties. Men of Conservative temperament have distrusted that method, but they have not found an alternative. What has not yet been done we have now to do. The task is one for a leader of thought, but, happily, it will not be difficult. For many a long day Liberals have scornfully asserted for themselves an intellectual primacy. The tyranny of that pre- tension has at last been broken, for, in the world of thought we are now masters. We have achieved independence, and the first result of our success will be a new criticism and a new construction. For the future we shall have a policy of our own. Return now to the thought of Hfe upgrowing into its own completeness. The term or end of the process — in other words, the ideal — is in life itself, not in the conditions of life. Conditions, indeed^ are not unimportant, but they are opportunities and instruments, not ends. At the present time there is an unmistakable tendency to make them ends. The Labour Movement seems to have lost much of its early idealism Rightly concerned with the conditions of life, it has mistakenly made them primary, and has gone far towards debasing its political ideal into an ideal of mere well-being. That ideal seems to be the characteristic ideal of modern Democracy, and to-day it controls the policy of every party. ii6 NATIONAL REVIVAL No one cause can entirely explain this unwelcome supremacy. Political parties dislike the Wilderness of Opposition, and, in their not overscrupulous hurry to reach the Promised Land of Office, they have ignobly sought help from the materialism of demo- cratic politics. In this voluntary degradation, — a degradation to what might have been and should have been corrected, — we have one cause of the new supremacy. We have another in those general changes which have more or less demoralized all classes, and have left our young people with no thought higher than hope for "a. good time." Now, the concept " well-being " can receive almost any desired content. For instance, men might say that by " well-being " they mean " spiritual health," and that definition could be successfully defended in academic disputation. A great pohtical movement however, makes its own definitions, it impresses its own character upon the words it uses. In modern politics " well-being " means, exclusively or almost exclusively, material well-being. As the goal of democratic policy, it is one expression of the wide- spread degradation of modern life towards the lower moral categories. Its ablest advocates tell us that, in the lower depths of poverty, the " moral self " has no power of self-assertion, that, until a certain minimum of material well-being has been secured, there is neither opportunity nor strength for the exercise of those creative personal forces which build up character and develope manhood. There is truth in what they say, but, happily, it is a truth that has no general bearing on English problems, NATIONAL REVIVAL 117 for most of our people already have that required minimum of well-being.* Because the ideal of well-being points to the con- ditions of life, not to hfe itself, — to " state of life " rather than to " kind of hfe," — it cannot be made normal for the new poHcy of Toryism. Our message is a message of life, and not merely of improved conditions. In its democratic significance, the ideal of well- being points to material well-being. When this controls the practical activities of life it inevitably narrows them. In the passionless seclusion of our libraries it may be possible to form the conception of a material well-being which is not limited by the self-regarding aims of any individual or class, but is normal for the entire community. Outside, however, — in the open fields of democratic life, amid the tumult of men's unsatisfied desires — such a conception would be attractive only in so far as it became identified with this and that man's individual craving. When thus narrowed, it could not lift men to a general point of view and into a consciousness genuinely social : at the most it would enable some com- munity of desire to become articulate in policies of class-aggrandizement. We all know that, when men seek wealth selfishly, they verify the words of Hobbes, for every man's hand is against his neighbour, — man is a wolf to man. And to the chaos that private cupidity induces • In this argument from " the moral self," well-being is a con- dition preliminary to progress. In democratic politics, however, it is the term or goal of progress. ii8 NATIONAL REVIVAL does the political life of nations tend whenever political opportunities are narrowed by selfish thoughts. Because the ideal of well-being becomes an effective democratic power chiefly through such a narrowing, we of the new Toryism have no use for it. We work with nobler instruments. Because the conception of well-being points to the conditions of life, it naturally developes into policies of institutional change. Similarly, men who think chiefly of those conditions, not of life itself, tend (wittingly or unwittingly) to identify Social Reform with pohtical readjustment of life's machinery. In their hands, Social Reform tends to become merely a matter of machinery. Some of them confessedly hold that "materialistic theory of history " which — flung far on the ocean of dis- content by the powerful pen of Karl Marx — has impoverished the thought of half Europe, and even those who have never heard of Karl Marx act as though, in this matter, they were his disciples. We who now bring to our countrymen a new ideal are far from thinking that readjustment of machinery is unnecessary. Yet we define our hopes modestly. We expect much from the remedial intervention of the State, but we have not been able to persuade ourselves that the Holy City of God can be established upon everlasting foundations merely by inspecting men every other day and giving them — in dole or wages, through some State machinery — another shilling or two a week. We do not believe that the Kingdom of Heaven can thus easily be estabUshed upon earth. NATIONAL REVIVAL 119 The object of Social Reform is to make good citi- zens, to lift men into a national consciousness. At the most, changes in machinery will give opportunity for such a consciousness to develope : they cannot, by themselves, produce it. Besides new machinery there must be new life. Writing in a convenient shorthand, men often say that institutions and social structure are organic to moral ideas. Those who do not understand the script are easily misled to a belief that, in order to evoke in the minds of men a given thought, it is not necessary to do more than give them the institution which, elsewhere or in times past, has been the home of that thought.* That belief is dangerously mistaken, and makes every reform which it controls a superficial one. Reflect for a moment upon two statements : (i) Institutions create thoughts : (2) Thoughts make institutions what they are. Which is the more nearly and the more signifi- cantly true ? Undoubtedly the latter, f The ideas to which (as men say) institutions are organic do not arise out of anything external or mechanical, but out of the human lives which use those institu- tions. If life be without a moral purpose and an * Our free constitution — now only a memory and a hope — gave a kindly home to patriotic ideals. But such ideals could not be created among a people ignorant of them by merely copying the forms of English freedom. t For instance, in structure the House of Commons is what it has been, if not for centuries, at least since 1832. It is now conspicuously degraded, but only because the men who now abuse rather than use it are themselves degraded. Their degraded thoughts and policies make the House— once our glory — the degraded thing it is now. " Thoughts make institutions what they are." 120 NATIONAL REVIVAL ideal, institutions and social structure will set forth no moral conception — will have no moral creativeness.* Our conception of Social Reform, then, must be enlarged. It must denote primarily a reform in life, and not chiefly (or exclusively) a reform in hfe's machinery. When thus enlarged it will cover many things that Parhament cannot touch, it will point to changes that no State machinery can bring about, — in other words, it will become another name for the new growths, the profound syntheses, the large transformations, of the National Revival. §6 CONCLUSION We who now speak for National Revival invite our fellow-countrymen to a new life, a hfe inspired by a new hope and directed by a new purpose. We propound to them a new synthesis : we offer to them a new principle and a new ideal. The right to opportunity is our first word : social justice is our last. These are the sovereign thoughts of our Tory poUcy, and no other policy has nobler. One greater thought, indeed, remains — the thought of unity — but that also is distinctively our own. We are working, not for disruption, but for integration, for a new national unity that shall knit together, in a loftier patriotism, the classes and interests which others would make hostile. • Institutions and social structure are organic to the ideas and the ideals which we put into them, and to no other. NATIONAL REVIVAL 121 Social justice — patriotism — unity : has any party watchwords more arousing or ideals more inspiring ? In their compelling sanity Social Reform has a surer ground than in " The wild hysterics of the Celt." Happily they are not academic. They have, in- deed, been reached by an adventure into philosophy, but they are fashioned out of the daily aspirations of plain men, and in them throbs the pulse of our common English life. Take them into our villages and workshops, make them the glowing light of every argument, translate them into sympathetic help, and into plans that will give obscure workers a new hope. Do this — I know that it can be done — and you will not find men unresponsive. You will not convert them in a moment, but presently — first here and then there — " The thought that breathes, the word that burns " will become a transforming and a quickening life, and in simple hearts and plain minds you will see the new beginnings of that matchless England which one day shall be. We appeal confidently to our fellow-citizens, and first of all to the classes that were at one time the governing classes ; first of all to these, for theirs is still the larger opportunity, theirs the prior duty. The laborious manhood of England has need of them : its pathetic, serious life is eloquent with dumb appeal. They can help it as no others can, for they can bring to it the helpfulness of England's greatness. For the sake of England, will they / 122 NATIONAL REVIVAL consent to be the servants of England ? " Con- sent " — the word is precise, for the act must be voluntary. Yet cold consent were insufficient ; there must be the willingness that waits not to be sought out. Men must come forward. Not by occasional half-heartedness should England be served to-day, but by the constant mind, the courage that does not falter, the patience that does not tire, by the strength of magnanimous tenderness, the love that measures not its gifts of time and life. In this way — not in some poorer way — will those who are the heirs of England's matchless past now serve England ? I am persuaded that they will, if only the path of service be made plainly apparent. Speak to them as a leader should speak. Speak to them, with perfect mastery of thought, in lucid words of creative life. Speak to them, with pro- phetic insight, of their country and its nobler possi- bilities ; with compelling sympathy, of the burdened and impoverished lives which need their help. Do this — I know that it can be done — and you will find that those who have inherited the best tradition of English life are faithful to their trust. With no less confidence do we appeal to the working-men of England. We confessedly repre- sent a tradition, and many will say, with much rhetoric, that we speak for no one but " the classes." We speak for " the classes " only in so far as they embody a principle and create a hope. But the tradition we represent is not a class tradition. It has been created by that virile English character NATIONAL REVIVAL 123 which is common to all classes. It is the work, not only of " the classes," but also of " the masses." A few of its founders live for ever in the calendar of history, but, besides those thus commemorated, there is " a multitude which no man can number " who, in every land and on every sea, have worked strenuously and died bravely for this, their Father- land and ours ; and, although their names have passed from their country's memory, they, by their example, have shaped in countless lives a voiceless tradition of manhood which, in every generation, has sent plain men forth to every quarter of the world, where- ever duty or opportunity called, — sent them forth, scarce knowing why they went, but obedient to the manhood quickened within them by that which they had seen and heard, and which their fathers had declared unto them, — sent them forth that they in their turn might labour and die for this, their Father- land and ours, leaving (it may be) their names to oblivion, but their example to be an eternal strength. And besides those who have fared forth to distant fields, there is the yet greater number who, in the quiet places and busy towns of this our English homeland, have lived helpful lives of manly industry or gracious charity. Undistinguished when living, uncommemorated when dead, these have yet been our country's most effectual strength. To them we owe the sweetness of our home life, the purity of our public life, the helpfulness which unifies more effectually than law, the self-respecting manhness, independent yet brotherly, which is the ultimate foundation of true character and serviceable citizen- 124 NATIONAL REVIVAL ship. All these achievements of unremembered hves have become integral in the tradition whereby Englishmen live, and upon these, even more than upon the conspicuous heroism of distant adventure, the helpfulness of our national pohty, the greatness of our national hfe, directly depend. Therefore, when we speak to the working-classes of our great English tradition, we are not speaking of something alien to them. Their best life has gone to the making of that tradition : we believe that their best hfe will continue and enlarge it. Many changes have passed over England, but the foundations of the English character are what they have always been, and on that character we are content to rest our hope. We do not believe that the working-men of England are by nature revolu- tionary. Still less do we believe that they wish to be supported by State doles or to become cogs in some State-machine. We know that they are capable of splendid efforts and great sacrifice. More than one demagogue would degrade their manhood to the base conflicts of a class war : we ask them to bring their strength of mind and heart to the great work of making England what it should be. We do not offer them bribes out of the National Exchequer : we offer them social justice and the large opportunities of patriotism — the invitation of great duties, the inspiration of high responsibilities. In other words, we offer them the only thing that can satisfy manhood, we offer them life, life that is worthy the name. We ask them to help us make NATIONAL REVIVAL 125 English citizenship vakiable to them, and their part in it vahiable to us. More than this. Here, in these Enghsh lands, we have made for ourselves a stately home, but the life which that home enshrines is greater than the walls magnifical which protect it. Unresting through the long centuries, freedom has been at work in the hearts and minds of Englishmen, and has built up for us a peerless tradition of free and serviceable manhood, of free manhood in a free State. Passing beyond the seas in the train of various undertakings, it established itself in many lands, and to-day it links together widely-sundered peoples by common memories and a common hope. Because of this, our Empire is more than a far-flung sovereignty, though this it is ; more than a successful business, though this it must be : it is the embattled home of an ethical idea, of history's greatest achievement, of the future's greatest possibility. By this imperial adventure our tradition has been enlarged, and now it lives in every quarter of the world as the thought and formative principle, not merely of free manhood in a free State, but of such a manhood in a free union of free States. To-day it is face to face with its greatest work and noblest opportunity. The future of the Empire is in the hands of England, in our hands to-day. The " Imperial idea " will not be a lasting bond unless it becomes the light of an ennobling life in the pre- dominant classes at home. The moral (the essential) unity of the Empire ultimately depends upon the healthiness and helpfulness of our English life. We 126 NATIONAL REVIVAL have to make our great English tradition of helpful freedom the magnanimous and inspiring strength of the " New Democracy." Hitherto that tradition has been sustained and continued along narrow lines of succession. It has now to go forth into mean streets and simple homes, and to lift into its own greatness — earning for itself a yet loftier greatness while it does so — the countless lives recently made free. Will it fail ? Then English history ends in disillusion. But it will not fail unless we who have received it be disloyal to our inheritance, unfaithful to our trust ; and, if it succeed, it will be, in these English lands, the life of a matchless future, and — far off across the seas — it will be to subject peoples an unsetting sun, to sister nations an enduring strength. To no other people has so great an opportunity come. We confidently invite the working-men of England to join with us in making England's daily Hfe equal to it. EPILOGUE NOW my book is finished. Words have come easily, but the things of which I have spoken demand the entire conse- cration — no smaller word were adequate — of all that we have and are. Hegel has told us of a " diamond mesh work of thought " which knits together all the particulars of the world in a rational system. Our Tory faith discerns another network — even more precious and more durable — which knits together the wills and affections of men in the generous equities of Eternal Right. To realize that vision in human hearts and minds is the characteristic aim of our Tory policy. Because of that aim, our political life is a romantic adventure, our political success a spiritual achieve- ment. Our country is standing at the parting of the ways. There is yet time to prevent a wrong choice, but the interval of opportunity is short. Do you ask me what I would do ? As Lord Halsbury told us a year ago : " The object of a true statesman should be to bring not only great happiness to the people, but great thoughts and desires into their minds." Whatever else I did — whatever I did in the parlia- mentary conflict — this I would certainly do, or try to do. I would speak to all classes — to every man 128 NATIONAL REVIVAL in his own tongue — of Unity, Justice, Freedom. Round the fair vision of an England that might be— of the England that shall be— I would gather the highest hopes, the strongest creative forces in English life, and, as men came to me, I would set them to work, each one in his own place, with Nelson's imperishable words deep graven in their souls : " England expects every man to do his duty." Thus to rouse the manhood of England would be no small thing to undertake, but I am convinced that it could be done. NOTES Note A (page 9). MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S " TRAP " We have heard much of Mr. Lloyd George's " trap." It has proved successful, but I doubt whether it is even yet fully understood. I doubt whether Mr. Lloyd George himself fully understood it when he set it. Most people thought that behind those provoking land-taxes there were only the privileges of the House of Commons. Undoubtedly these were there, but had they been alone the trap would probably have been ineffective. Behind those taxes, however, there was not only a debatable privilege, but a new political mind — alert, eager, aggres- sive — and that mind was the spring of the trap. Wit- tingly or unwittingly, Mr. Lloyd George changed bicker- ings between two Houses of Parliament into a conflict between two conceptions of social order, two kinds of life, two "culture-types." But he could not have done this successfully if the Revolution of which we hear so much had not already been accomplished in the country, if the new political mind which constituted the effective part of this trap had not already become an established and predominant fact. Note B (page 14). It seems desirable to exclude, formally and expressly, certain alternatives. (i) We may not bribe, squandering (imder pretext of Social Reform) eleemosynary millions obtained by the legalized plunder of classes and institutions, (2) We may not seek ignoble gains by stealing the 132 NATIONAL REVIVAL enemy's policy. We shall do little good— no perman- ent good— by adulterating Radical-Socialism and label- ling the result " Conservative Social Reform." I cannot discover any reason why a Conservative who is not a place-hunter should vote for such a thing. Neither can I persuade myself that the workers would prefer it to the unadulterated article. Unless we dare to be original we shall have no independent ground of exist- ence, no independent claim to confidence, and our success will be merely an accident that confers no honour and establishes no principle. The English temperament is naturally Conservative, but to-day numbers are drift- ing away from Conservatism because they discern in it no potency of helpful reform, and numbers more are apathetic because they do not know what Conservatism stands for, and can find nothing attractive in uncritical appropriations from Radical-Socialism. These men can be recalled to the fighting-line, in our great struggle for liberty and justice, only by a new message, a message informed by new principles and inspired by a new ideal. I cannot believe that an adulterated Radical- Socialism is improved when it is labelled "Tory- Democracy." In Utopia there could probably be a valid Tory-Democracy, but the Tory-Democracy which is obscurely propounded here in England and in this present year of grace, as a means of reconciling Enghsh Toryism with the "New Democracy" of England, seems to me to be merely a political trick. (3) There are some who would have us content our- selves with strong negations. I am convinced tPiat the time for a policy of mere negation has passed irre- coverably away. Undoubtedly, Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George give us abundant opportunities for nega- tion, and I, for one, venture to beHeve that some- times the Unionist negations have been neither clear NATIONAL REVIVAL 133 enough nor strong enough. But negation cannot, by itself, be a ground of confidence or a principle of policj^ Besides negation there must be affirmation, — a construc- tive policy based upon distinctive principles and governed by a distinctive ideal. The nation is asking plainly — almost clamorously — for practical guidance and help. We dare not face it with nothing but a string of negations in our hands. Men want to know what we will do, not (or not merely) what we refuse to do. Our primary duty is to show them that Toryism is more than a negation — that it is an inspiring convic- tion, a reasonable creed, an ennobling life. Note C (page 18). It has been said, more than once, that Unionism rests upon a mere negation — negation of Home Rule. Rather does it rest upon the strongest affirmation of miity. We are Unionists, not merely because we defend the existing Legislative Union of Great Britain and Ire- land, but because we hold a faith which bids us work everywhere for the reintegration of life, for social and industrial unity no less than for political unity. Note D (page 29). It is perhaps not unnecessary to define the difference — often maliciously ignored — between Patriotism and " Jingoism." We may say that " Jingoism " is the patriotism of a vulgar mind and a coarse nature. This, however, is not sufficiently precise, for such a mind and such a nature may reproduce the sentiments of minds which are not vulgar, and natures which are not coarse. Probably the real difference is to be found in the 134 NATIONAL REVIVAL thought of self-sacrifice. That thought seems to be essential in the conception of patriotism, — for patriotism is a form of love, and it is the very nature of love to give itself, — but I do not think that it is ever found in any- thing that can properly be called "mere Jingoism." It is true that even the " Jingo " recognizes a duty of some kind — although a poor one — towards his country, but, in the case of the " mere Jingo " that duty does not rise to the point of sacrifice. It seems, however, permissible to doubt whether any man has ever been a " mere Jingo." Sir Thomas Browne, were he nowalive, would probably class "Jingo" and its derivatives among those " improperations and terms of scurrility " which "only difference " the affections of men andnot their cause. (" Religio Medici. ") Note E (page 31). IRELAND. I have described very briefly how the English people became a nation. Could similar words be WTitten con- cerning the people of Ireland ? If not, in what sense and to what extent is it true to say that " Ireland " is a nation ? That the people of Ireland have in them the makings of a nation I do not doubt. Neither can I doubt that their healthiest and most hopeful line of develop- ment towards national life would be economic, not political. From the fact of "nationality" we could not infer "Home Rule." Therefore no Unionist need be afraid to speak of Irish Nationality or even to work for Irish Nationality, — provided always that he know^ what he is doing, and does not degrade the conception of Irish NATIONAL REVIVAL 135 Nationality to make it fit the disloyalties and local tyrannies which are the subterranean strength of Mr. Redmond's party. If Ireland be once more saved from the disaster of Home Rule, the Unionist Party might do far worse than address itself to the development in Ireland of a genuine Nationalism which should replace the false Nationalism of the Nationalist Party. One can hardly suppose that Mr. Asquith accepts as authentic the false Nationalism of those who are certainly his unwelcome allies But he parades it before the English people as though it were authentic, and the Government in which he is chief deliberately fosters it. Note F (page 55). This prohibition is not arbitrary, for it defines the path of man's normal development. This can be shown in more than one way. We may say that human life can become complete only in and through love. Now, love undoubtedly excludes the thought of trespass. Again, we may say that progress is marked by a gradual broaden- ing of the " social consciousness " or by an expansion of the conception of Right. In and through that broadening and expansion the rights of the individual become (as we have seen) rights of others. This also excludes tlie thought of trespass. Note G (page 56). TORYISM AND PROGRESS. I have already said that the principle of authority is the distinctive note of Toryism. Our study of that principle has led us up to the consecrating connection of human life with a transcendental purpose. That 136 NATIONAL REVIVAL connection establishes in montibus Sanctis man's right to opportunity ; and the authority which we — the men of the National Revival — assert \\ithin the domain of politics is nothing but the authority of that right. For us, that authority is indispensable, that right fundamental. Now, the right to opportunity is a right to live, a right to grow. As such , it is not merely a ground of authority, it is the primary principle of progress. Indeed, we have discovered our authority in the very facts which make the right to opportunity a principle of progress. Con- sequently, Toryism is irrevocably pledged — by the very thing that makes it Tory — to a policy of social reform. Its distinctive conception of authority makes it a doc- trine of progress. For us, the men of the National Revival, a " social programme " is not a mere expedient : it is a natural expression of our primary and essential faith. It seems well worth while to have demonstrated this. (For the true conception of Social Reform, see Part IV., Section 5). Note H (page 58). Because the Nation and the State are not identical, an institution need not be provided by the State in order to be genuinely national. Our national provision for education is much larger than our State-provision, and it includes our State-provision, Note I (page 61). Certain political thinkers — some of whom are misled by a biological analogy — subordinate the individual to society in a way that makes all the rights of individuals derivative from, and dependent upon, society. Then, without reason given, they identify the State with society. NATIONAL REVIVAL 137 and by this identification they make the State the sole ground of rights. This doctrine of the State rests upOTi an inadequate conception of personahty, and tends to replace the idea of right by the idea of power. Society has no separatencss which could be an inde- pendent ground of right. It subsists in the wills, the affections, the sympathies of the men whom it knits together. It is constituted by comradeship in work, by fellowship in purpose and hope, by a general inheritance of thought, — in other words, by a common life and the social consciousness in which men become aware of that common life. Society — the social organism — is not sometliing separ- ate (or separable) from the individuals who constitute it. They are the organism. The knitting together of their lives does not create any new " existent," any- thing which adds to the number of really existing things. The " common life " does not exist apart from individual lives : the " social consciousness " is always a form of some individual consciousness — of Brown's or Smith's. Society subsists only in the individuals who constitute it, and if rights be not original in them, rights cannot exist anywhere. Only from the rights of individuals can we infer to society a moral character. If the ground of that inference be cut away, there remains to society (as its charac- teristic note) nothing but a collective power, a general will. Note J (page 65). The modern State is so strong that, if the State were merely a collective power or sovereign will, the individual would be as dust before it. Only if we control the power of the State by the duty — the authoritative function — of the State can we make freedom secure. 138 NATIONAL REVIVAL After all, power is (or should be) subordinate to function, and function is defined by duty. That moral conception which gives to the State a distinctive duty and supreme authority prescribes also limits to the power of the State, limits which cannot be transgressed without tyranny . Not the most powerful State has any right to " omnipotence." Note K (page 68). PARTICULARISM. Particularism is the characteristic note of minds which have not yet reached the national point of view, but still think exclusively of the " self-regarding interests " of this or that individual or this or that class. The word " particularism " has not emotional con- text. It is as passionless as an algebraic symbol — as V"2. It does not move one as much as does " that blessed word ' Mesopotamia. ' " Yet particularism is nothing but conscious or unconscious selfishness — an unmoralized self-assertion — and, wherever this becomes an effective power, there we inevitably have some denial of right. Once again the words are moderate, but they point us to the tragic and pathetic crowds that have inherited little more than the failure of our civilization, they point us to pitiable impoverishment and volcanic fires, to lives depressed below hope and hearts seared by suffering, to indignation that becomes destructive anger or a deliberate revolutionary purpose. Note L (page 68). OUR FREE CONSTITUTION. Wlien the tyranny which now degrades political life is over-past, it will undoubtedly become the bounden NATIONAL REVIVAL 139 duty of the Tory Party to restore to the country its free Constitution. \A^at is our ideal for the Constitution ? Briefly it is this : The central institutions of Representative Govern- ment should adequately and equitably represent the nation's life, not " the people," but the national system of rights. Why do Representative Institutions exist ? I have already given one answer to that question : permit me now to give another. Representative Institutions exist to represent the nation. They exist, not merely to make the will of the majority supreme, but rather to make that will a national will, to give it a national outlook and a national purpose. By Representative Institutions, if they be adequate, the representatives of a particular class or interest are brought into enlightening contact wnth other classes and other interests, each of which is co-ordinate in right with the class or interest the others represent. Thus men discover something which is greater than any class and all classes — they discover political justice, the conception of an equal freedom, the conception of a national unity whicli impartially embraces all classes and all interests. By this discovery they are lifted out of a class- consciousness towards a national consciousness, above merely sectional and selfish interests towards national aims which unify all interests — all lawful interests. This, then, is the highest function of Representative Institutions,— to realize freedom impartially, through the conception of a national unity based upon social justice, upon equal rights. Clearly, Representative Institutions cannot adequately discharge that function unless they adequately represent the nation. An unbalanced representation, whether it give the predominance to dukes or " dockers," will 140 NATIONAL REVIVAL almost inevitably end in class tyranny, in some denial of right. There must be a balanced representation of the several factors — all co-ordinate in right — which are integral in the nation's life. In our political history we have been gradually realizing the ideal of national self-government through Representative Institutions. We can realize that ideal through the House of Commons — through Single- Chamber Government — only if the House of Commons adequately represent the nation. There is a \ailgar belief that it does adequately represent the nation, or can easily be made to. That belief is merely the child of self-complacent ignorance. The very changes which have made the Estate of the Commons almost co-exten- sive with the nation prevent the House of Commons being representative of the nation. Democratic elec- tion makes the " democratic mind " and " democratic interests " predominant in that House. Important elements in the nation's life have no effective representa- tion therein, and, consequently, they have not the influ- ence which they should have in national policy. Govern- ment by the House of Commons must inevitably be class-government. The Parliament Act does not abolish class-government : it establishes class-government upon a stronger basis than ever. It is a revolutionary dis- tortion, not a development, of our political life. Probably the Commons of the United Kingdom have ceased to be a mediaeval Estate, but they have not become the nation. The House of Commons still represents only one aspect of the nation's life and mind, and the aspects not represented by it are co-ordinate in right and superior in worth. We are told to " trust the people." We do, but we may not abjure the very principle which has given " the people " poUtical power, — the principle of representation, NATIONAL REVIVAL 141 the principle that each lawful interest should have a free voice of its own in the Great Council of the Nation. The argument for a Second Representative Chamber, which supplements the representation in the House of Commons, is an overwhelming argument. Note M (page 74) In reply to not unreasonable fears that the political predominance of the working-classes would establish new forms of inequitable class-privilege, we are some- times told that — because those classes are the people, and the people cannot be privileged against itself, the " workers " are the only class which cannot be a privi- leged class. The statement comes to us with more than a dema- gogue's authority, yet it does not seem easily credible. "The working- classes are the people." What is the ground of this identification ? Sometimes that identity seems to be inferred from the numerical preponderance of the working-classes, sometimes it is inferred from the alleged universality of their interest. The first inference is clearly invalid. Even if the workers constitute — as Lassalle said — 96 per cent, of the population, the remaining 4 per cent, are not outlaws. "The State exists to be the impartial guardian of all rights," and it may not oppress or ignore even 4 per cent, of its subjects. Turn now to the second inference : What is that interest which is universal ? I will not attempt to answer this question, for I am not concerned either to affirm or to deny that the working-classes have an actual interest which is directly a general interest. We will suppose that they have such an interest. What then ? Besides that supposed general interest there are many 142 NATIONAL REVIVAL other interests. The landlord, the man of culture, the priest, — each of these has some interest which is peculiar to himself, and cannot be construed as a form of that supposed general interest. The life of a great modern nation is indescribably varied and complex, and its variety and complexity create many interests which are not general. What may conveniently be termed — without any theological implications — tlie " spiritual life " of such a nation is not a homogeneous life. It varies from group to group, from class to class, and each group or class which has a life distinctively its own has also interests peculiarly its own. Now, the uncontrolled predominance of the working-classes would do more than make the supposed general interest of those classes predominant : it would make the distinctive life of tliose classes regulative for the State, and this would entail the predominance of the peculiar interests developed by that life — interests which no one could pretend were general. The imcontrolled predominance of a class entails the predominance of all its interests, whether they be general or sectional. We can hardly suppose that human nature is more nearly perfect in the working-classes than elsewhere. Like their fellow-citizens, most of the workers are prone to that unmoralized self-assertion which I have named " particularism." Therefore, it does not seem in the least unlikely that a predominant working-class would make itself a privileged class, — an inequitably privileged class. Note N (page 80). THE PRINCIPLE OF "ESTABLISHMENT." The State exists to safeguard and make effective that general right to opportunity which we infer from man's NATIONAL REVIVAL 143 transcendental vocation. Obviously, then, the founda- tions of the State, of political right, are in moniibus Sanctis, in the world's objective moral order. There is the perduring ground of freedom, of justice, of all social reform that seeks first " the kingdom of God and His righteousness." To make that order sovereign in the hearts and minds of men is the characteristic function of religion. Therefore, religion is the safeguard of the State, the assurance of those hopes which ennoble our political controversies and make political life more than a paltry contest for place and power. Believing this, I find in the intimate connection of Church and State something more than the survival of an old-world dream. Religion can do well enough without the State, but (in the long run) the State cannot do without religion, — least of all can the modern democratic State, which rightly assumes a moral function, but dispenses with institutional safeguards of that function. As I have shown, the distinctive principle of Democracy is an "unmoralized " principle. Between that principle and the moral function of the State there is a contra- diction which only religion can permanently overcome. The Secular State — tliat chief but scarcely noticed product of the Age of the Renaissance — has reached the end of its distinctive usefulness. It was never tolerable, except as a means of reaching those deeper unities of national life which had not found adequate expression within the mediaeval dualism of Kaiser and Pope. To day the State has to choose between degrada- tion and the re-discovery of its religious implications. For me, what is vulgarly and misleadingly called " the establishment of religion " is more than an ambiguous fact of history : it expresses a primary principle and a fundamental belief. 144 NATIONAL REVIVAL Note (page 99). Were Christianity what it might be, it would be the most important factor in the enlargement of life towards a consciousness genuinely social, Christianity is the religion of the Divine Society. By sacraments which are corporate acts and social rites it engrafts men — without respect of persons — into a living fellowship wherein it prepares them for the sacrifices and the helpfulness of love. I do not think that a nation's life could have a better foundation. If that foundation be rejected, or crumble away through tlie infidelity of Christians, nothing will adequately take its place, and — to those who continue to believe that the one valuable reform and ultimate achievement are in character and manhood — forward- reaching thought will disclose only a prospect of infinite and doubtful toil. We have recently heard much of Working Colonies and Detention Colonies for the " remedial treatment " of " un employables." The burdensome defects of the workhouse have once more turned the thoughts of men to the unemployed poor, and increased sympathy has given to their thoughts a finer discrimination. We recognize that the unem- ployed are not a homogeneous class — that some are unem- ployed because they are not fit to be employed. For these we have created a new category, — " the unemploy- able," — and we are now pondering plans for removing their disability. The new category has a psychological definition, but I find it hard to beheve that our psychology has been thorough. We attribute unemployableness to " the defective will," and think to cure it by invigorating the wll. Rather should we refer it to " the abnormal will," NATIONAL REVIVAL 145 and we should then discriminate between abnormality which is tlie result of psychological defect, and abnor- mality which is not. We have neglected to make this discrimination, and consequently our new category is too large,— it is more extensive than the genuinely defec- tive will. Undoubtedly, however, " the defective will " is not infrequent, and whenever it is curable it should be cured. But how is it to be cured ? The answer seems obvious. To cure " the defective will " we must give it new sur- roundings and new invitations, we must give it (above all) a helpful human environment, an environment capable of imparting ideas and feelings that will lift it into a better psychological integration. That new environment of helpful life seems to be essential, and, unless our proposed Colonies provide such an environ- ment, they will accomplish very little. Consider for a moment the change of character some- times brought about by enlistment or by contact with some religious community. What makes the change ? Undoubtedly, the environing life. This gradually informs the ne'er-do-well with a new spirit, — gives him new thoughts, new values, new purposes, and finally reorganizes (reintegrates) his life around new interests. In the regiment, discipline counts for something, but the chief agent in reform is undoubtedly the regimental tradition of cleanliness, smartness, efficiency. That tradition lives in the ne'er-do-well's comrades, and by daily association with them he comes into contact with its formative and informing life. Will there be such an environing life in our Detention Colonies ? If there be, those Colonies will succeed ; if there be not, they will be little more than Segregation Camps, costly graves of unintelligent hope. In a Note which does not bear the sobering responsi- L 146 NATIONAL REVIVAL bilities of a main argument, one may venture to be Utopian. When we think over some individual case of unemployableness, it does not seem irreformable. There seems to be nothing in it that would not yield to the environing helpfulness, the penetrating therapeu- tics, of a large-minded love. To such love we Christians are severally called. Now, unemployables are counted by the thousand, English Christians by the million. Does not the mere existence of an " unemployable problem " convincingly suggest that there is, in our Christian life, some grave defect ? Is it quite hopeless to dream that some day each Christian congregation will be an informal Guild of Service which (by the personal efforts of each of its members, and not merely by subscriptions to this Society and that Committee) will earnestly address itself to the great work of sa\dng for God and Fatherland the human wreckage that now drifts helplessly ? Such an endeavour would be trouble- some, but (like Count Zinzendorf) " I have no sympathy with those comfortable people who sit warming them- selves before the fire of the future life." I venture to believe that ten years of St. Paul would solve the " unemployable problem " — and other prob- lems as well. Note P (page 99). THE ABSOLUTE STATE. As we have already seen, the State is the political organ of the nation. It is an aspect or part of the nation, and its powers and rights are all national. It cannot normally have any " separateness of existence " which could give it an independent right, — a right cap- able of being set over against the rights of the nation. The normal State is a " conditioned or relative State " — NATIONAL REVIVAL 147 strictly conditioned by and relative to the national life of which it is the organ. We cannot say that this doctrine of the State is our traditional English doctrine, for it rests upon concep- tions which are characteristic achievements of modem philosophy, and were not defined when our great political tradition was formed. But we may certainly say that it gives theoretical precision to our English practice, and to a thought which has been predominant in our history. The stream of our political life has, however, been polluted by another and alien thought — the thought of the " Absolute State." Roman law predisposed men to this heresy, but, in England at least, Roman law did not create it. We received it in Tudor times, as a practical conception of government, from those Italian despotisms which Machiavelli interpreted in an immortal book. It came to us again from Revolutionary France, and within the last few years our Socialists have given it domestic roots in a false doctrine of personality. In those Italian despotisms of the Renaissance, the State was a thing apart. Established by conquest or usurpation, it had no natural, no organic, connection with the society over which it ruled. It was not an aspect of the " social whole," but was rather something imposed upon it from without. Founded by force, it was always an " unmoralized will," a power to which no organic connection with national life gave any moral purpose. Whatever purpose it had was distinctively its own, and not the nation's. Thus the State had, then and there, a real and obvious separateness, and this separateness made it an independent ground of policy. Because in this way separate, it was " ab- solute." It was not an organ of society, conditioned by a system of rights and relative to a " social 148 NATIONAL REVIVAL purpose," but it stood (as we may say) " upon its own bottom." An absolute State might be philanthropic, but it would assume " a moral function " only by accident. For National Toryism, the moral function of the State — that of safeguarding social justice — is the one characteristic and essential thing in the State. Indeed, for us, the State is nothing but the organ of that function. Conse- quently, for us, the power of the State is always " mor- alized " by the nature of the State. The power of the absolute State, however, is never " moralized," by the nature of that State, for that State is essentially nothing more than an assertion of power, and it has no moral character wherewith to "morahze" anything. Acci- dentally, indeed, such a State may (as I have said) assume a moral function. Such an assumption, how- ever, would express, not the nature of the absolute State, but merely the good-will of the sovereign or minister who for the moment wielded its powers. It is, perhaps, not a work of supererogation to point out that the absolute State would not necessarily be " absolutist," i.e., despotic. Modern Liberalism has inclined more than once towards an " absolute " policy, notably in Mr. Birrell's Education Bill, A similar incli- nation towards the " immoralized power " of the abso- lute State may be observed in Democracy, but this is not surprising, for Democracy — whether we think of its imiversal and equal distribution of political power, or of its inference of a mandate — seems to be essentially an " immorahzed " affair. Note Q (page lOo). If a man be nothing more than a Trades Unionist or a landlord he will not rise above a class-consciousness. If, NATIONAL REVIVAL 149 however, such an one be brought into varied and inti- mate contact with the nation's complex tradition of religion, culture, and public service, he will grow into a larger consciousness wherein the national aim, the con- ception of " the common good," will become an effective power. He will not abandon his Trades Unionism or "landlordism," but what he retains — whether Trades Unionism or " landlordism " — will be transfigured and enlarged by his new consciousness. Note R (page 100). Dependence upon the State cannot by itself make men effectively aware that they are " severally members one of another," — cannot make the national unity of rights a controlling thought in their lives. We know that it can create the class-consciousness of a bureaucracy, but that is widely different from the consciousness we call " national." An American writer has pointed out that the transfer of industrial processes to the State may bring about " State-Capitalism " rather than " State-Socialism." THE ANNOUNCEMENTS OF HERBERT JENKINS LIMITED THE BOOK OF THE YEAR THE WINDHAM PAPERS With an Introduction by the Earl of Rosebery, K.G. With 34 Illustrations. 2 vols., 32s. net. CONTAINING LETTERS of state importance from Pitt and others marked " Most Private " and " Most Secret," also from George HI., the Dukes of York and Gloucester, Burke, Fox, Canning, Dr. Johnson, and a score of other notable men (and women) of the day, all hitherto unpublished papers. The Press is unanimous in pronouncing " The Windham Papers " an important contribution to the Social and Political History of the times. «' The finest English gentleman of his and perhaps of all time " is Lord Rosebery's verdict upon " the chivalrous high-souled Windham." 12 ARUNDEL PLACE HAYMARKET LONDON S.W. FIFTEEN YEARS OF A DANCER'S LIFE The Experiences of Loie Fuller, the Famous Serpentine Dancer. Anecdotes of Queen Alexandra, the Empress of China, Bernhardt, Rodin, Calve, Dumas, Sardou, etc. With an Introduction by ANATOLE FRANCE and i6 illustrations. 10/6 net. WILLIAM MORRIS : Poet— Craftsman— Social Reformer. A Study in Personality. By ARTHUR COMPTON-RICKETT. Illus- trations. Price 7/6 net THE ABBE EDGEWORTH And His Friends By VIOLETTE M. MONTAGU. With illus- trations. Price 12/6 net. A GREAT COQUETTE Madame R^camier and Her Salon By JOSEPH TURQUAN. With illustrations. Price 12/6 net. 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